Culture – Nima Darabi

The Shift of Diversity From Life to Objects

Can we compare the classification of man-made objects to that of biological life? If so, what should a “screw” be compared to? A species, a genus, a family, or even a class in the domain of life? This question may not seem very meaningful, or falsifiable at first glance, however, a quantitative comparison between the two disparate “domains” could be worthwhile. From a data-driven perspective, we can for example draw an analogy between the taxonomy of Amazon products across all niches, and the existing systems of classification for living organisms. Both trees are well-documented and digitally accessible.

Vaslav Smil in “The Diversity and Unification of the Engineered World” draws a quick parallel between the taxonomy of the domain of life and the classification of man-made objects. He claims that in terms of “species” count, the diversity of man-made objects has already surpassed that of biological life. The former on the rise, the latter in decline – since the dawn of civilization. Now if these two domains and their inverse trends are not vis-à-vis mapped, they are for sure connected to one another:

Diversity is moving from the tree of life to objects.

Does it mean that in terms of innovation our technological species has surpassed “nature”? No, we are nature. And this trend is nature at play moving from a geological, to a biological, to a technological planet. And all of these are driven by a notion of evolution of the winner code against the selection pressures of an environment similar to, but beyond biology.

Evolutionary sciences outside biology sporadically exist, although not as formalized and well-established as the theories of biological evolution which have been elaborated since Charles Darwin. Nevertheless, from a more “Lovelockian” perspective, it is worthwhile to zoom out of the conventional borders of biology, and project the inferred rules of evolution beyond the 150-years-old tradition.

The competitive exclusion principle

According to the competitive exclusion principle (CEP) in ecology, two species competing over the same resource cannot coexist forever; One will eventually leave the scene to the other. We can see this in the economy with the establishment of a monopoly by the tech giants, taking up all the resources serving a specific aspect of human life. With a stretch, we can also generalize this principle in a different direction by classifying man-made objects into kingdoms and species just like plants and animals. In other words, we can look at both taxonomies, life and objects, as two terrestrial families competing over a single resource, our planet. It will appear that man-made objects are taking the playground from the organic life.

And with the transfer of resources, shifts also, diversity.

The modern explosion of manufactured objects whilst the decline of biodiversity should be viewed as the tale of a shift; Diversity has gradually moved from the tree of life to the product-space.

So far, this looks obvious. But there’s a catch! And it is about us, humans as the catalyst of this shift.

It appears that we humans can be seen as a domain which not only caused the forementioned shift but also hosted it for a short while. In short, we took it from life, had it to ourselves for a geological moment, and are now giving it to objects, in an emergent process that may not even be in our control.

Shift of diversity from life to objects, via humans?

As buildings seize more lands from trees and drones will take more of the sky away from the birds, we need to pay attention that in between these two, animals and artifacts, there was an intermediate domain for hosting diversity which rose and fell: human culture, as the carrier of novelty.

A one-step more detailed story could go like this: One species out of millions unexpectedly dominated the earth and while pushing the rest to die or adapt, diversified itself. It gave rise to an explosion of isolated cultures, languages, and lifestyles; A diversity unseen in any species beforehand. The cycle however did not stop there. Millennia later one or few of those many cultures – under the industrial civilization – eventually pushed all the rest aside and sucked the diversity into its own territory, producing physical artifacts. And this is where we are now.

Clearly, many of these cultures didn’t completely die but they were marginalized and can still, at least partially be found in some uncontacted tribes or in the corners of research institutes. But so are nearly extinct animals in zoos and labs. You get the point.

Now, why does keeping track of where novelty shifts matter? Well, because nature may as well repeat the cycle again. Let’s just extrapolate what would happen if evolution, in this era of novelty which is the age of man-made products, favors yet another front-runner and picks one or a few of these numerous by-products and eventually rules out the rest from the “mainland” to marginalized “islands”. This will be similar to what we humans did to other species, by placing a handful of wild and not-domesticated animals in our zoos while driving the rest to extinction. And also similar to what modern cultures did to the old ones, killing them off or putting fractions of them on academic shelves or in museums. Each winner code seems to set a new agenda and eventually dictate the next primary carrier of diversity.

“Regimes” of life, based on the notion of diversity

Geologic timescale is conventionally divided into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages. The consensus does not even yet allow concepts such as Anthropocene to have a formal place within this geologic timeline. It is, therefore, quite a stretch to redefine this timescale based on a single species. I suggest, as an alternative, we define a geological “regime” – for the lack of a better term – based on the domain of diversity. This will serve us more than just a descriptive model as it can hold some predictive power and can give some alternative understanding of the past and the future of life on earth. So let us try to retell the story of terrestrial life based upon the notion of diversity:

1. The regime of cell diversity: What we call life, is the explosion of life forms all based on very specific cell types. But it is suggested that prior to the Darwinian Threshold there must have been a diverse community of cells that evolved as biological units. The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), although an already complex organism with a DNA-based genome, is not thought to be the first life on earth, but only one of many early organisms, all of their progeny having become extinct. This means that during the transition of the prebiotic earth to the time of LUCA there had existed a diverse pool of biological entities, at some point perhaps many different cell architectures, from which only these main types survived and ended up colonizing the earth, up until now.

2. The regime of biodiversity (mono-cell): We could think of the whole Phanerozoic Eon as an era of biodiversity based on just eukaryote and prokaryote cells as robust building blocks survived out of all the other extinct cell types. This seems to began even earlier, towards the end of the previous eon, Proterozoic, with the abundance of soft-bodied multicellular organisms, but certainly during the Cambrian explosion, life gave the diversity to species. Diversification of animals, plants, and fungi during this period reached a level that resembles the variety of life today.

3. The regime cultural diversity (mono-species): The regime of biodiversity can span the whole current eon up until the Anthropocene. Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic eras with all their periods and epochs, can be commonly characterized as different eras of biodiversity. Throughout these times life has repeatedly witnessed attempts of a single species rising to colonize the earth and eventually falling. Until now, however, it seems that homo sapiens has reached a certain breakthrough unprecedented in previous species. Our ancestors and a handful of our domesticated species have now for some time taken the diversity from other species. During this period, humans have formed thousands of religions, languages, and isolated cultures.

4. The regime of product diversity (mono-culture): What we are experiencing now is the rise of a “monoculture” regime within the timeline of our civilization. This period can be defined with the dominance of the industrial civilization which has marginalized the rest of the survived cultures, while many more of them have long been extinct. In terms of diversity, we can view this phase of civilization as a regime of life on earth. This regime that all of a sudden is serving as a platform for the modern and diverse pool of man-made objects.

5. The regime of mono-artifact: And the point of all these re-classification is the horizons it can show us, with the virtue of extrapolation: What’s next? We can read the same old story once again.
Is it conceivable that one or a few objects, out of the current myriad of man-made artifacts and products, dominates the existing technological diversity? In this simplified narrative, after eukaryotic/prokaryotic cell types, human genome made of that particular cell type, the industrial civilization made by that particular genome, a certain greedy object made by that particular culture could indeed take the crown from the other objects and redefine the future of Earth’s ecosystems. What would that object be? My blind guess is that it is more likely to be in the category of AI codes run on silicon chips, than to be a hair-drier. But who knows?

And even if we find a handful of “winner object” that could colonize the earth, the next question is, with the rise of that new platform, what would be the next territory that shall win nature’s focus to experiment with its innovation and host the future diversity?

We are probably as unaware of those forms of inorganic future life, as the singular cells were about trilobites. But we can expect that something unimaginably crazy is plausible.

And non of these claims would mean that we, as the current front-runners of organic living organisms, are going to die and fully give up the playground to an exotic form of inorganic life. We, humans, need forests and wildlife to sustain our biological bodies. So in order to run their greedy codes of reproduction and dominance, the mysterious winner objects are also likely to depend on our flesh, which depends on Earth’s life support systems. If successful at this transformation, we will be brutally domesticated. If not, we will go extinct and this spark will die off. Nature’s tide sloshes back all the way to the regime of biodiversity, until maybe a new spark brings about the next geological explosion.

Printing a megacity in the desert?

Can you print a megacity in a desert and demand it to return your investment?

“Dimensionality” in complex networks is still an ignored concept in any other discipline which deals with those networks – but physics, the mother of them all.

In city planning for example, governments can aspire to make a metropole of 9 million and expect it to behave like NYC, once it matures. If not necessarily reproducing the same financial or political influence, but at least creating a similar “feel” internally shouldn’t be much to ask?

Not true.

It is essential to build megacities from smaller organic elements: minor towns already in each others’ neighbourhood.

Is such a simple observation in other, similar, networks something that the policymakers of some trillion-dollar future megacities are unaware of? And do they not need that knowledge when they expect the return for their investment?

* * *

Building new fresh sustainable megacities in uninhabitable fields sounds like a brilliant idea. The trend has many great promises:

For one it shall massively returns the investment through real estate. It will laso host the future waves of urbanizing population while built with the state-of-the-art and more sustainable infrastructure. Even better, if it is built in a desert where preserving the natural ecosystem is much less vital than say, a rainforest.

But sustaining a megacity logistically is not possible without sustaining it culturally. That is the foundation of the city life and for it is necessary to mimic the underlying dimensionality of organic metros – something that should match the metropolis’ magnitude – or else the megacity will never produce the effects of cities of even much smaller magnitude, no matter how much money is spent on central planning.

* * *

Even if the best engineers set up the physical infrastructures and plug in the vital resources and the structures are built with fresher and more sustainable technology with a smaller footprint, there are still fundamental problems in printing a city in the middle of nowhere with a “grid mindset”.

The good news is though, it could take just a little more investment but in the right direction to try to recreate a “dimensionality” that typically evolves over centuries when a megacity is organically seeded.

Only then one can attempt to create the equivalent of some several centuries old institutions in the course of years.

China has understood this and they are building their megacities around the existing smaller parts. Much smaller cities like Dubai or Doha have also grown their skyline organically – though on steroid – around an existing old town.

Electrified Bees

If you are an electrified bee amongst all other bees in the hive, how far can you go off-the-grid and still survive?

– What if you think electrified bees produce bad honey?
– What if you have a dream of making honey, but not from sugar fed to you under fluorescent light. But from wild flowers and in the sunlight?
– What if there is this rule dictated in the hive that going off-the-grid is a sin. So if you do it, most bees would think of you as a lazy bee who doesn’t want to make its fair share of honey?
– What if you come to believe that the honey you make is really not honey?
– What if you come to believe that the honey you make is really not yours?
– What if you think the hive has a systematic leakage? And most of what you all make goes wasted?
– What if you come to understand that no one is responsible in this situation more than you. That the queen bee is in it together with all the rest?
– What if you think the hive is in a free fall off a tree, or rolling down from a hill, and sooner or later will hit the river?

Should you, if you can, get a little far from the craze if not completely off-the-grid, and still survive?
Or would you starve on the way to the flower garden?

On Culture

Here are listed a few quick notes, reminders and personal opinions about “culture” in its widest definition in evolutionary terms:

1. Culture is the most “human” factor:
Every group of folks who gather around something (a figure, an object or a set of values) tend to create culture. It’s the most definitive single element that separate us from other animals. True that we are language-speaking animals, thinking mammals or tool-making apes, but you can view all of these as stemming from our cultural abilities.

2. Culture evolves randomly like anything else:
Cultural equilibrium is shaped when cultural memes are transmitted long enough, among the members of a rather closed population, through social interaction and cooperation. Much of these memes are either random “mutations” at origin, or randomly fluctuate while being faultily copied by other individuals.

3. Culture is a glue:
Culture is important to us humans because it – in any of its forms – has been the glue that helped us scale up from tribes of hundreds to populations of up to hundreds of millions today. These present-day groups of people can be identified by race or ethnicity, religion, geography, occupation or social class, political party, etc. but they are actually functional clusters that can cooperate in-group while surviving in their embedding ecology. All these “super-organisms” have their own type of cultural glue; codes and mechanisms that bound them together to cooperate with each other within the same system and sustain an equilibrium.

4. Culture has phase transitions:
According to history this equilibrium collapses eventually and gives rise to bigger and stronger networks, rather suddenly than slowly. There are leaps and usually they end up finding a way to include even bigger populations, than previously possible.

5. Culture is relative:
It’s made-up. It doesn’t matter what components have made this glue as long as it can act as a glue. And a culture gets old when the glue that could connect hundreds (a stone or a tree) fails to gather thousands efficiently; they need language and law. And a local set of rules can’t unite a population of a size of a country. They need technology. Our today’s religions, political divides and classes have played their important role to unite populations previously but have failed to scale-up to take us to the whole humanity just yet.

6. Culture has synergy:
Every culture has emergent properties beyond the mindset of its individuals and even beyond the original values that created it at the first place. People wrongfully assume their individual tendencies (inclusion, care, good intentions) is also acted out by them collectively. It is not correct. A group of nice and kind-hearted people can act as savages collectively. In fact that is what’s happening today.

7. Culture is greedy:
One of the emergent properties of culture is greed. Every culture seeks for dominance. It is inevitable as memes and genes – information in general – tend to copy and only those who manage to propagate and adapt the best will survive the process.

8. We need a global culture:
Would have been an ideal if a moon-size stone or a super massive tree could unite all ten billion in 2050, but a system of global governance approved by all humans is needed, something that can operate on our still physiologically tribal brains and yet makes the next big scale-up to a planetary-level. And this global culture needs to be minimally recognized by all humanity, and thus pragmatically needs to have empathy for all of us.

9. “Culture is not your friend”:
It’s just a glue! At the end of the day, being embedded in a tribe, country, a global monetary economy, or a trillion size AI society around a Dyson Sphere, we are individuals. We are as different as we are similar. I doubt if we will eventually be organized with enough freedom from our cultures but it is more pleasant and satisfying to be groups of one that operates safely within a bigger community.

Science is a Random Walk

“Science is a random walk of accumulated literature.”

What do I mean by this compact claim is that the scientific code and its instrumentation evolve organically within an ecosystem of ideas and objects.

By scientific code I mean its language, terminologies and formulations, as well as their results and interpretations. And by its instrumentation I refer to the science-making technologies; tools and instruments.

The scientific code in its evolving journey is profoundly sensitive to its initial states as well as randomness along the way. Random elements of all kinds such as mistakes and accidents, cultural bias, geographic self-reinforcement among the scientists, charisma, manipulation by power and even the order of discoveries. All of these factors have potential to deviate scientific claims to drastically different directions.

We are limited beings trapped in a narrow set of interpretations that we call reality and therefore we are not using our imagination as much as we can to realize how things could have been otherwise. More interesting, useful, truthful alternatives do not get the chance to be seen or discussed in the dictatorship of the scientific enterprise. And scientists are behaving very politely with a fear of being abandoned, excluded or fallen in the blacklist of pseudo-sciences determined by the dominant story. And things doesn’t have to be this way.

Now speaking of the chaotic self-organized nature of the scientific random-walk, we would like to believe that there is an objective truth out there that functions as an external field and leads the scientific endeavor to get closer and closer to an “attractor” of the ultimate truth, neutralizing the effect of its random fluctuations.

This is not obvious.

How do we know that we are dealing with a controlled random walk, that there is an attractor? There may be many attractors. There may be none. There may be infinitely many with a different cardinality even. If we are destined to one thing is that we belive in destinty. And we think of science as having a destiny too. This may be an unwritten assumption but widely accepted that there’s a naturally truthful science. It may be randomly deviating people admit, but it is moving towards the attractor of the holy truth. In my experience the common claim is that not only that truth exists, we are also approaching it rather effectively. And so how can you even dare to argue over this when you are wittnessing the fantastic discoveries and the ground breaking achievements of science?

I am not unfamiliar with this world-view and can comprehend their logic, but have a completely different idea. I am saying that the myth of a naturally truthful science should be debated because it undermines the profound chaotic nature of the evolution of the scientific code and its instrumentatlity. It should be questioned because it ignores how fundamentally trapped we are in our cognitive tunnel and left alone with a very narrow and specific set of wide-spread stories that we have made about the reality.

And let’s say that the attractor of reality does exist in a sense, and that we humans are getting there because we have launched an honest journey with a solid plan. Even if so, I think without bringing up discussions like this post, such a goal is unattainable and navigating towards such a truth is impossible. We can not be sure we are on the right path, let alone the only path, if we suppress any effort to overcome our blindspots, simply because we don’t see them.

So this is what I summarize in the compact claim that science is not about the truth. Science is about the instrumental growth of the human ape, developed and expanded collectively and in a deep sense accidentally. Science is developped with the help of the limited capacities of our brain and its selfish interaction with the environment, ultimately for the sake of survival. We are fundamentally trapped in this thinking organ and besides that we do not try to keep in focus what our hard-wired biases are, as much as we should. We don’t even ask simpler questions such as how our cultural biases shape the way we think often enough. The answers can be sometimes really surprising if we dare to digg into this.

While it is still a meaningful topic to question for example how science would look like for some alien intelligent life form, I will not go that far here. I am claiming that even with the very same structure of the human brain, in a parallel version of our – let’s say – post-agricultural civilization, branched out as late as five thousand years ago and formed with a different throws of dice, the scientific code could have looked very very differently. And at this point only imagination can speculate on this important question about “how else” things could have looked like in an alternative human society. Let’s just specualte a bit. This is pure contemplation:

I think we may not have come up with Newtonian mechanics and then two theories of relativity later on, very unlikely. Instead we could have had things in between or completely different models that would still work. For example with a whole new set of definitions angular momentum did not necessarily have to imply rotation and who knows may be not a single scientist of that parallel world would have even heard of the analogy that some particles rotate around others similar to our planetary system. Imagine the possibility that Einstein’s idea of spacetime was thrown earlier than anything like Newtonian mechanics, simply on a different food diet or given another set of conflicts, power shifts and revolutions.

Imagine Which parts of Algebra would look different beyond its symbolic representation. And then to explain our cosmos how would we expect more complex formulations – such as string theory – to have formed similarly out of a completely different context? The whole axiomatization of our mathematics and how it would state its open problems could look different. It stil can. My personal hope is that it could look more fractal, and more transcendental in a sense. Or not. But we may have not had the Euclidean dominance on our early geometries, the following Cartesian coordinates and thus the use of complex numbers in some form of electronics or any technologies that would give us functionalities similar to smartphones or chip implants. Instead remarkably different tools and languages would serve a similar purpose.

The most solid pillars of our sciences shake if we think in these terms. Even the idea of evolution itself which is the support story behind this post could be told differently. Darwinism and Lamarckism wouldn’t be exposed as distinct theories with a form of epigenetics as their compromise. Other good functioning legends could be told with a different order of discoveries and their marketing.

Well, and on the other hand some core ideas and theories could have been told similarly. And it is not quite impossible to contemplate and guess which of them. It’s very difficult to place a bet for me here but I think we would still have numbers in a sense, and mathematical constants. We would somehow know the families of π and e. We would have had telecommunication and eventually at some point we would sequence our genes and hack ourselves to the next level.

What would remain intact and what would change? This is an important question for all sciences and we do have the tools and resources to make a move towards some answers these days. It’s not necessarily expensive in terms of research fund nor environmental footprint to get on to this. Imagine we live in a world when a comprehensive digitized copy of our scholarly literature is publicly available with all sorts of accessible algorithms. We can now supervise machines to evaluate a whole body of the scientific literature in a matter of days if not shorter. Machines can now reveal contradictions and fallacies in proofs and arguments, detect and neutralize the marketing bias in scientific work to extract the quality, detect and promote ignored nobel ideas and bring up the missed gems, deconstruct existing notions to come up with new ideas, and simulate the future of the whole science itself in multiparallel versions.

None of rhis is any longer farfetched. For those of you who love brands and abbreviations, I came across SSK and SSI, one in many posssible projects of meta-science in this regard. They stand for sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and its complementory, sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI). The maturity of these projects were the dream of philosophers such as Fayerabend and Kuhn long before the age of Big Data. That idea didn’t take off and was suppressed by other dominant codes which could make more money and thus stood the selection pressures of the scientific enterprise better, to address its demends.

Fair! They were too vague and not regirous enough. And they were not affordable at the time. Our processing power is now millions of times bigger and the immediate availability of pretty much every important scientific idea that have been created is not a dream anymore. So we can get on to such a project again.

And those of you who love stories about AI take over, would agree that if we don’t do this, at some points machines will go ahead and do it for us; or for themselves. This one is not a new story anymore, since we have probably read a piece of fiction journalism on a similar idea lately. So, crazy ideas don’t seem that farfetched when they are repeated enough or endorsed by the public.

Science is an amazing achievement and the fact that its pioneers have constantly used it to transcend itself with new paradigms, ideas and breakthroughs is simply beautiful.

Science deserves to be better than an idiocracy. While, despite its core values of a truthful struggle, like other human achievements that have become old enough in a rigid framework, it seems attracted in to that direction now. People who rightfully claim that science is white or masculine are only scratching the surface.

If you love science, care about it. Try to see its fundamental limits and so transcend it. You may still call it science and I won’t argue over terms. I think it will still not be about finding the truth; however, it is a neater struggle to serve such a purpose.

P.S. I am not viewing this post as a truthful post, either. This is just a code. It’s a rather unconventional idea in the sphere of ideas out there. Your human brains recieve it; some relate to it and some object. The process of understanding something is a set of biochemical algorithms; Logic and reasoning have that shady characteristic in common with emotions and feelings. This is why there is so much disagreement out there in the world. It’s not that people are almost always wrong. It’s because folks are different and the evolution of their worldviews take totally different pathways and so different things make sense to them based on their previous experience and knowledge. From these many ideas out there some of them get lucky enough to survive, take over and dominate for a period but it is not necessarily an indicator of their truthful. Truth may be non-monotonic in a very deep sense. It is alarming when we realize that even if the external field of reality or the attractor of truth had not existed, we would still assume them. And what I have said here has been said before in different tones and terminologies. The scientific climate has not been so friendly to those ideas and they have not got enough exposure or resources. All instances of similar claims that I managed to find have faded out due to what I think as a form of early exposure. This post is not about the truth either. You can view it as a mutation that I would like to promote. This time around it may take off somewhere around here.

* * *

Science is not about the truth. It’s about our instrumental growth.

It’s a human specific language for the short-term dominance of this very species; a subjective and relative cultural viewpoint; a man-made phenomenon not only sensitive to geography and demography of its producers, but fundamentally relying on our specific physiological features.

Science is a random walk of accumulated literature largely indifferent to the reality; a set of self-reinforced terminologies that has hypnotized our collective mind.

Science is one in many possibilities that turned out to be the dominant widespread culture of our time due to a series of thrown dice with similar dynamics to rock pigeons colonizing the urban landscape worldwide.

So if you take all of it too seriously you may as well think of a pterodactyl as the superior form of a flying object; the shape of a moldy bread as the ultimate manifestation of “truth”, or the last check-mate snapshot of a mediocre chess game as the final capacity of a chess board.

Technology and the Substantiality of Experience

Melvin Sokolsky - from the bubble series — Melvin Sokolsky – from the bubble series

Technology is a great thing [for us humans], but it has a negative aspect not many talk about.

It deprives us from feeling the “real experience” in accordance to how we are biologically wired. Technology builds a protective bubble around the human body that however takes care of a lot of challenges for us, leaves us peculiarly unchallanged inside. And to elaborate a bit more on the “challange of unchallended”, it unemploys and unsues the sensorimotor circuitry in our pre-historic brains. And since we percieve happiness more directly inside our brains than on the surface of our skin or outside our bodies, this can be enough to spoil a good deal of fun for us.

In many cases technology offers the same functionality for our survival needs, but with less substance. Same outcome, less work for it. But what if “working for it” was a part of the satisfaction, that was planted in us by evolution to keep us motivated to persue tasks vital for our survival?

The main reason we have brains is sensorimotor circuitry. Some researchers claim it is the only reason. As organisms we need to act upon the world for our survival (the motor system) and in order to do that correctly we need to sense it by a sensory system. So the motor act is the primary goal and the sensory is secondary; it is needed only for the motor act to be decided correctly. Nature doesn’t care if you observe the details of the environment perfectly. Your gene code is passed on if you survive.

Now the technology sits in the way by enhancing the sensory channel and empowering the motor act. It eases the deeply emotional process of decision making, and by doing so leaves those circuitry unused and unemployed. But hasn this not made us unhappy? I used to think that technology enhances feelings and emotions since it assists and magnifies the sensory channel but at our core we are not passive sensors. We are active performers of our lives and spoiled in the comfort of our civilization we have truly lost our natural reference of comparison to our bodily similar ancestors. Lots of process that used to happen in our brains now takes place outside our bodies. Most of the signals that we used to constantly process and handle for survival does not reach the surface of our skins or don’t come even close to us. People go to the nature or gym, try extreme sports or play video games to experience those situations and trigger those condditions; It is a retro movement.

We have all heard modern-time complains about how people nowadays use digital messages instead of real ink on paper postcards, navigate the reality with GPS, and now get dates from apps without holding face-to-face conversations. The outcome is the same; conveying the message, mating or reprodution, or getting to a destination. But something is missing during the process.

Now, this familiar contemporary observations may be worrisome, but it is nothing new.

The technological dumb-down of mankind even if admitted is usually associated to the modern times. This seems to be a new trend in a couple of generations, if we take our own norms and typical lifestyles as the ultimate base for the real experience. Much of “the real experience” had already been taken away from us and before that from our ancestors for dozens of millenia:

* People express worry these days that driving skills, the real experience of navigating the roads is going to fade away with self-driving cars. But do we remember how horse riding felt before cars? Or did our horse-rider ancestors know what they were missing not to hunt an animal while running after it, barefoot?

* Spending too much time in the digital conversations and dealing with only letters and emojis makes us deaf to the intonations of the spoken language. The ability to grasp the meanings conveyed in the rise and fall of the pitch and loudness of the speech needs to be practiced. But was it not the verbal language itself that provided a parallel channel of communication and made us blind to the previous forms of communication, such as reading of emtions from facial expressions? How often do we even try to read each other’s eyes nowadays? In such intuitive social skills that were vital for tribal survival, our illiterate ancestors were more intelligent than us.

* Youth nowadays get dates for their digital profiles sometimes without composing a sentence, or having to make a face-to-face charm. An Irish man in Trondheim told me once “There was a time that people couldn’t hide behind dating profiles. You had to show up in person in real places and talk to real people and prove yourself”. As if a bar is a gladiator arena, or the spoken language itself, just like dating profiles, is not used for people to hide behind. This complain is sound but to me sounds like we would complain to our grand children: “There was a time that you couldn’t just telepathically go through a hundred thousand profiles with the chip in your brain to get a mutual date. You actually had to open an app, a real app! And had to go through profiles one by one. And you had to chat with them, for real. Like composing sentences word by word to make a connection. And then there was still a high chance that they wouldn’t match you because it was not pre-calculated!”

Much of our sensorimotor circuits are inactive since their function is outsourced to the technology. And I think that comes in an order. First the motor act, the outcome of the whole process gets outsourced and inactive, since the machinary around us does it on our behalf. Then there’s no longer need for the sensory part and so that part gets dull and dormant too.

Your worry may be right. The new generation gets spoiled by the new technology and loses the real feel of an experience. They are handed in something as functional but less sensational; less powerful, engaging, and real. Just like we were.

We know it, by comparison.
Our parents knew it, by comparison.
Their parents knew it, …

It’s been fifty thousand years folks!

Illuminati is us!

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. Quite the contrary, I believe in accident, in self-organization. If I sound like advocating any form of conscious conspiracy I have failed to communicate my message. So here is the disclaimer:

In the absence of enough evidence, I refuse to believe that a secret society made of few individuals have succeeded to gain control over the rest of mankind, and with a plot so seamless that no body could get any direct evidence of.

I am not however saying that the effect is not there. I just argue that tracing the cascade of causes and reducing the root cause of an effect to a bunch of folks around a table sounds a naive explanation to me. Though if we want to believe in something like that, sure we will manage to fish for enough false positives from the pool of complex world around us to support any theory. But indicators are not always proofs and imposing non-existing patterns upon the reality is a human talent. Just like designing a crosswords puzzle, search for pieces of evidence and put them together and create the pattern you are willing to see or believe in.

So if a conspiracy theory wants to pass the test of time it should be convincing that randomness is not the root cause of a spotted pattern, and thus some intelligent design, albeit of human nature must have caused the observed effect. In that sense many of popular conspiracy claims deem quite unlikely when considering the difficulty of not only doing the impossible, to execute, predict and control a chaotic system such as the modern human society, but to not leaving a single trace behind.

So the good news is that the all-powerful secret lizard people well-organized to harm us are for the most a product of our imagination, but sorry to be the bearer of the bad news:

Even the purest and most innocent intentions can collectively cause purposeful evil outcomes.

The Sandpile experiment

There is a simple physical experiment during which grains of sands are dropped one at a time on a conical pile of sands and as a result once in a while there is a sudden avalanche. It was a Danish experiment in the 80s and was replicated by Norwegians on piles of rice in the 90s. These are the first physical experiments to demonstrate a phenomenon called “self-organized criticality” which is an “emergent property” of a complex system:

“Emergence: The larger entities that arise through interactions among smaller entities can show properties the smaller entities do not exhibit.”

The occurrence of an avalanche is an emergent property for the sand pile. it is extremely unpredictable to the local sand grains and also to the experimenter. But metaphorically speaking, if you could ask the local sands somewhere in the pile, what they would make out of their experience of an avalanche or its cause, they could probably blame few sands somewhere on top of the hierarchy. In fact no single grain of sand has control over the behavior of the whole pile. Even the experimenter who is God-like to the grains by having the whole picture fails to predict when and how the next avalanche will take place.

We humans are the sands in a complex sand pile, our civilization. Based on our limited view of the local neighborhood we tend to believe that there must be a designer behind every human phenomenon around us. We tend to connect big events such as wars, revolutions, scientific discoveries and historical breakthroughs to certain leaders or public figures. Such good simplified stories makes sense to our little monkey brains, cause we can never get even close to comprehend the complexity or the nature of such phenomena. Our civilization is much more collective than it is portrayed in the narratives of history books or newspapers.

When an unpredictable social or political event of a large magnitude – and usually a negative one – takes place, sometimes even if it had a natural cause such as an earthquake, our tribal brains still tend to point the finger at other humans; If we didn’t see a war, epidemic or a revolution to come, somewhere out there has to be someone who knew about it.

But things don’t have to be explained that way. Political events are the collective behavior of our actions, but since we can’t comprehend the details, we tend to believe that there should be minds, and indeed minds of our own type, behind them all. There should be an intelligent designer with some form of team work behavior behind them, like a scrum master!

The conclusion is that secret organized societies with God-like predictive power and flawless control do not have to be the explanation for the political or societal evil that we face. Illuminati doesn’t exist in that naive sense.

Except that it actually does! And I tell you, it is in fact me, it’s you, and is all of us combined. Illuminati is our emergent property.

What made us different from other animals?

We are the building blocks of a complex partly hierarchical society and we have achieved the current state of our civilization due to two sets of factors that separated us from other animals: Individual and collective. Collectively the advent of language and the power of communications which helped us with preserving our knowledge and building up a system of advanced tools by simpler tools. And individually due to the power of our thinking organ; the human brain. None of these two had to be extraordinarily different from other animals, but combined they passed a critical treshhold that redefined our nature and turned us to something entirely different, in such a short time.

In the past fifty thousand years we have transformed our lives from an animal in a tribe to interconnected socioeconomic beings embedded in an advanced technological society. Respectively the size of a human network has grown from hundreds to the size of the global economy with some 6 degrees of magnitude scale up. Meanwhile, our brains has not changed much and we have arguably even become slightly dumber. Our brains, including the brains of our powerful decision makers, celebrities and politicians with a broad range of influence, is still tribal. This organ grew from 0.5 to 1.5 kg from three million years ago to some fifty thousand years ago, so two third of that brain, one kilogram is tribal stuff! Our bodies and brains have not changed much since then, but our collective environment has, drastically. We tend to think that we do things for truth and reason, though we only do what we do for one reason: survival.

The red button

Back in the tribal times the “red button” did not exist. Symbolically put, if Adam and Eve would push a button, at most a fruit would fall off a tree. Now there are buttons around us that if we push we could somewhat blow up things out of your sight; lives can be affected by a minor task of us. Now we can simply make changes by pushing a like button, ordering an item from a restaurant menu, buying a share from stock market, or deploying a code.

We do it all for the sake of our survival, indeed with our kindness and affection towards our local tribe. The people for which we naturally have capacity to care, are only a couple of hundred people who are around us, socially or geographically. We can never affectively reach out to seven billion people out there, and not in fact to zillions of animals and beings. Nature has simply not given us the empathic tools to do so. Despite that, in order to increase the power of our influence, we have redefined our environment and hacked the natural resources around us. Just like any other animal we do it for our survival with disregard to other beings. The difference is though we do it beyond our natural habit, systematically and technologically.

This already started from the first man who made a tool; the manifestation of grabbing and touching an object, using it, and leaving it NOT unchanged. Animals don’t do that. They either eat or kill the thing and destroy it permanently, or they let it be. We grabbed things around us with our hands and left them changed, still in our service. We made the first tools and then tools made more tools and that escalated. And well with an ultimate disregard to the nature and things that we touched, or things that we touched touched, we set up this advanced system. And now the complexity has reached a level that the mentioned disregard may come back to ourselves.

We tend to put our animalistic tribal behavior in a divine and holistic light. We are proud that we have made judiciary systems and rules, democracies and beurrocracies, technologies and computational systems to be soft and civilized and avoid the downsides of our wild tribal behavior. But are we still not let by apes like ourselves? Is the wild animalistic behavior limited to third world dictatorships and underdeveloped tyrannies, or to the ancient kings and emperors?

Now check this out. Apes and ravens are extremely social animals. As a group they sometimes team up to attack an isolated victim who did not play with the rules or to project a group failure onto that individual. When you see that for example 160 republicans (about the natural size of a human tribe) in a group act stop supporting Donald Trump, do you expect some of them to be brave enough and admit that this was not a calculated act independent from the truth of Donald Trump, and that was simply a tribal act of mimicking a group to conform? When you see such an animalistic behavior in such high levels or power hierarchy, do you really need to believe in conspiracy theories to explain evil? Let us not our problems on to the political parties or even broadly politicians. These are normal people like me and you. This is not about political parties or the individuals. It is about all of us and how rapidly and blindly we scaled up. This is what Hannah Arendt argues introducing the term “The Banality of Evil”.

Scaling up the human power to influence, without scaling its control mechanism (empathy) accordingly has been going on in waves since the prehistoric times and in each round the wave collapsed and taught us a new lesson on how to scale. Ever since we united in bigger groups than a tribe, an external force was required, after a collapse, to teach us how to scale in numbers while being in peace with each other. Depending on the size of the human populations we learned that we need to synchronize with music or stone idols, we need to invent language or religion, and that we need to set rules, judiciary systems and bureaucracies. The problem with our age is that we have never experienced the connectivity to this level, ever before. This is historically is not a good sign cause we don’t know what kind of collapse we will get after this and sadly it does not seem that predicting a collapse is enough to take measures to stop it. We need to see it with our eyes to reverse some of the aggressive and self-destructive aspects of our scaling.

Getting connected from a tribal to a global level, from a couple of hundreds to a few billions, is in fact a scale-up of a 7 to 8 orders of magnitude. Yet our amygdala has remained the same size as a hundred thousand years ago. What do we expect from such dynamics except for a catastrophic apocalypse? How can we theoretically see any other sustainable horizon in the near future when the scale-up is still going on and no one is trying to adjust it or advance it a bit more mindfully?

You see, you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or a fatalist to warn others that The Doomsday’s Clock might be ticking. You don’t need to spot and blame some conscious master minds or group for every disaster that comes along our way. The evil is not always one of us. It is bigger than us. It is our emergent property.

To put it intuitively, this video sums up the politics of our era. One doesn’t need to know more than this about politics: Scaling up the human power to influence, without scaling its control mechanism, empathy, accordingly.

We are not completely helpless though. There are solutions ahead of us. We can in fact take advantage of our destructive connectivity and design a data-driven system for functional empathy to avoid its collapse. This is not what we are doing. Nothing but a “technological self-consciousness” (interpret it in anyway you wish) can possibly save us from an exponential over-exhaustion of our limited resources and an apocalyptic breakdown.

Should we do something about that, or should we let the system collapse and wait for a new order to rise from its ashes? What’s right to do?

Revolution or Reform?

Imagine this hypothetical landscape: You live in 2300. Humanity is still around and somehow through calculated global programs, colonizing mars or deadly wars has reduced its earth population from ten down to three billion already. And has fixed it there. The earth is tolerably warm but sustained.

Politics:

Countries are provinces of the world federal government and they have different state rules to practice their local cultural differences.
Different races campaign politically to defend the continuation of their gene traits and complaining about the others reproducing more than regulated.
The word “freedom” has mixed meanings and is used with the word “from” not to be misunderstood.

Economy:

There is no centralized money and even digital currency is just a hidden layer of the world economy that some expert may still look at.
People use public services more than their private properties, however that’s a cultural thing; Everyone is given a minimum of private ownership by birth, and several times during their life span. People can lose their private stuff accidentally or choose to donate it at will, however the world welfare system may restore it for them.

There is a notion of money, but that is negative (like debt) which is calculated by an individual’s cost of living such as their footprint as long as it is calculably affected by their personal choices.
Therefore there is no money. There is fine.

Business:

Growth of companies are limited through regulating their shareholder’s wealth. New-capitalism is practiced safely.
Work is constitutional right but voluntary and companies act more like temporary social games shaped by entrepreneurs and closed and cashed out once they serve their purpose. Land and land resources, infrastructure, utilities, transport and media belong to the public and can not be bought by companies or other legal entities by the world constitution.

Every citizen is granted an equivalent of some work/office space and work equipment after a certain age. They can use the equivalent of their office space for individual business or they can exchange it with an equivalent of that when they get a job or build a company.
Education is too a constitutional right and voluntary. People get educated to fit the available work opportunities. Public education is accessible globally and private education is the service that educational companies serve.

Democracy:

Terms above are regulated by the world federal government, which is a distributed post-digital consensus system on the Internet. Democracy is not a hard-coded system and is a complicated structure for collective decision making by humans (and partly even by pets and rightful animals). It senses and collects data from different levels of humans’ lives and aggregate it organically to sense what people want (implicit voting) and thus regulates the society democratically. It’s optimisation will be focused on human’s psychological level and it’s well being. Feeling good is a constitutional right. Citizens get notified about the important updates of their local or federal rules depending on importance and relevance to their lives, and can always overwrite their predicted vote or temporarily exit the decision-making networks voluntarily. Politicians, lawyers and developers aid the machine. General assemblies are held by politicians who are themselves through the machine. Newer versions of democracies are be deployed. All citizens of the world have constitutional right to access the overall simulations and predictions that the system provide based upon the latest rules. Cultural differences will be shaped by local rules decided by the local people at the time. Climate, genetic differences and culture will self-organise the world to a peaceful multicultural equilibrium.

Legal system:

Over-scaling is a unified crime. Occupying other’s territories, violence, killing of rightful beings, exceeding the individual footprint limit, are all forms of over-scaling and will be fined by custody or private property depending on the degree of crime. People scale for sport in the virtual world.

Celebrities:

Plato, Darwin and Mandelbrot are more famous than Einstein. Few nerds know Obama. No body knows Kanye West. But there’s this terrible dancing monkey all over the fucking virtual world.

Other species:

People talk to pets through chips and devices. Eating animals (and humans!) is highly regulated and lab-grown meat (and a lot of other lab food) has taken off. People consume them according to their fashion, taste and lifestyle.

Animals or humans are not being slaughtered in the real world unless there is a legal warrant or a specific type of digital authorization signed for it. Of course people (and pets) still cheat when you don’t see them, but machines watch, warn and stop the cheaters who kill “rightful animals” illegally. There are debates around the definition of that term. Say there is a list including mammals and big land animals. There are debates and protests to include or exclude a certain species.

In Spain (or north Africa?) they still chase bulls in a safer and non-fatal form of bullfighting. And those who love fishing have to go to, let’s say china, because it’s still legal there.

Parenthood:

There are still families, although people are free to live in different social settings and move on to new groups. This will be reinforced by cultural differences in each region and the cultural differences will be maintained.

Psychology:

People take things for granted. They are civilized and they behave but they can easily get depressed and die a fragile life if they get isolated. It’s called “laziside”.
People have become even lazier than us in a sense that they have outsourced their surviving “actions” to the technology and thus they have also outsourced many of their “sensations” because keeping them is not crucial. Shortly, many sensorimotor functions of the brain are practically outsourced to the machines and that’s worrisome due to the depression and numbness that it creates.

Sport:

For the reason mentioned above, “nature gyms” are all around and somewhat mandatory to train people to practice their sensations in the absence of some practical technologies. Professional sports have become intellectual. People compete over their “nature gym” skills by using their physical, social and cognitive skills to show off that they are best. There are cognitive games in the “nature gyms” where people look into each other’s eyes to read feelings and stuff like that. Sex comes to sport with different forms of convertors.

Architecture:

Nature and civilization are mixed up technologically. Buildings breathe and cities are self-sustained. Rooms rotate and change size and adapt with the light conditions democratically by the wishes of people in them.

The list goes on.

A future landscape that is missing a lot of unimaginable technological advances or their cultural artefacts. Just one in a zillion possibilities. Just fantasize and expand it on your own vision.

Then, question:

Is it fun? Should we start talking about a scenery like this? If yes, should we discuss how we should act accordingly to move towards something like this? And not further away from it? Should we wait till machines do it for us?

Or should we – really painfully – go extinct?

Surreality

I fail to take any side in this. My heart feels every one involved in the picture. My mind criticises them all. Just zoom out and see for yourself that our value system has come to a halt.

So some males wrap females in fabric to gain control. From which some migrate to new places. In the new places, the females insist on wrapping themselves in a carpet. Say in 30 degrees, this time to make political statements. See, she is the only one not having a mat under. Cause she prefers it around. Armed cops rush in to the scene to address the “public concern”. But how can she untell a statement? By uncovering the fabric of course! Meanwhile bystanders are chilling by the beach and judging the scene in one way or another… And sitting on their own mats by the way, instead of wearing them! Everyone has their own strong opinion. No one knows what they are doing or why. Confused state.

Now add a truck that drives over the whole absurd scenery. Our world has already become surreal… #nice #france #world #wonderland

PS. Now Facebook wants me to tag 6 people in there. And I was on the exact same beach just two days ago, so I probably could!

Poverty

The way primitive tribes are living in poverty is the way human kind have been living for hundreds of thousands of years. If some kids have swollen bellies is not because you have a rich diet to make your belly muscles. If a considerable part of human kind is still left behind is due to being geographically located far from the heart of recent un-natural developments.

Let’s don’t forget that poverty is ugly, but natural. It’s not, unlike wealth, a product of civilization. Humans are born naked and poor, like other species. All other animals are poor by our very recent norms and standards. The extreme contrast is what civilization caused and made it visible by comparison. Not to justify the poverty, let’s just remember this to be able to reduce and eliminate poverty for our species.