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cite="mid:5AF34513-FB27-485C-8838-949F1B1BB25E@santafe.edu">
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre">On the heels of any number of threads in the past few months, I spent some of yesterday reflecting on what seems like another distillation.</pre>
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<p>EricS -</p>
<p>As usual, this is a very dense but eloquent summarization of
(yet) another aspect of our common di(multi)lemma as we
participate in/experience a collective phase change. This
dovetails with our arguments here about individual vs collective
(via mis-application of metonym/metaphor?). </p>
<p><i>Collective Phase Change and Logistic-Function Lurches</i>: I
contend (speculate) that a phase change in "humanity" began order
5k or 10k or 50k years ago and proceeded on it's exponential
change on multiple (pareto-esque) frontiers. We go through
logistic-function "lurches" in hard-material technology, language,
soft technology (politics, culture), over and over-again with each
one representing an enhanced "consolidation" and "reach" of
human-human engagement. </p>
<p><i>Historical Revolutions</i>: The early industrial-<i>transportation</i>
revolution yielding locomotives and steamships, the <i>communication</i>
revolution still unfolding but accellerating with wireless comms,
the <i>information/computing</i> foreshadowed by the abacus and
the difference engine and ignited by WWII code-breaking and
Feynman-Calculator rooms for physics, and now introducing *formal*
<i>self-organization</i> to information processing (really
igniting the last decade+).</p>
<p><i>Individual vs Collective Aspirations</i>: Levin's <i>Scale
Free Cognition</i> conceit/concept is a powerful framing (IMO)
as to what is afoot (underfoot in fact) today with the aspirations
of the individual human colliding with that of various collectives
of many stripes, sometimes nucleated around a "great man"
(guru/cult-figure/etc) or emergent across a substrate
(nationalism, religio-fervorism, capito-socio-communo-ism,
post-humanism, ...). Classical Fuedalism formalized this to
some degree, with a <i>holarchical/heterarchica</i>l alleigance
to the local/not-local lord, baron, duke, king whilst also local
priest/bishop.cardinal, pope, and also to language and cultural
style identity/cohesion. </p>
<p><i>Accelleration of Scale/Temporal Compression</i>: This churn
which once had a characteristic time/space scale of decades
(life-phase) and region (scandinavia, northern/southern/western
Med, E. EU, etc) is now scaled closer to the *<i>attention span of
a single human</i>* (hours, months) and geopolitically (nearly?)
global? </p>
<p>It is really hellish on many of us who are still coupled at the
traditional scales... to the habits and preferences of our
grandparents and to the village or automobile-accessible region we
came of age in. Metaphorize it as "<i>tidal forces</i>" seeming
to tear us apart (internally/externally)?</p>
<p><i>Language and Distortion of the Intersubjective</i>: Language,
as you point out, has become the dominant medium of exchange and
it's current <i>distortion</i> and <i>slipperiness</i> is both
disturbing and a "natural consequence" of this rapid sqew in our
fundament? And LLM's aren't "helping" or more to the point, they
ARE helping to speed up this sqew (to our chagrin). While this
may all map (recursively) down to the flow of energy through
dissipative structures (physics unto biological) it is happening
in the milieu of language (nod to AT's aspirations to model
language structures).</p>
<p><i>Singularity Rhetoric</i>: While the
Broderickian/Vingeian/Kurzweillian Singularity suggests/models
with an (hyper)exponential (for emotional effect), they do not
actually achieve the vertical asymptote they claim/imply. </p>
<p><i>Multiscale Selfishness</i>: But this is (yet another) tangent
methinks: the tangent-of-the-moment in my mind refers to the <i>individual/group
selection question </i>we(y'all)'ve been maundering on here.
Is Cancer a <i>selfish cell</i>, a <i>selfish gene</i>, or <i>collectivized
selfishness</i> at the tissue/organ level? Whether precisely
evolutionarily selected I think the answer is "yes" (all and more)
and we are seeing the same thing afoot as the cancers that are
MAGA or (perhaps?) "wokeism" (en-extrema) selfishing against the
"Western Civilization" and "Xtianity" and (hyper)"Capitalism" as
well as Libertarianism's "soveriegn selfism" and the MAGA-esque
"hyper-individualism" version?</p>
<p>I must quit now before I tangent again. <i>E Pluribus Unum</i>
(or not?)</p>
<p>- SteveS</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:5AF34513-FB27-485C-8838-949F1B1BB25E@santafe.edu">
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre">
In the early decades, the U.S. had a motto; never official, but one of the better reflections of the country: e pluribus unum.
It was good in two ways that can be itemized:
\u2014 It reflected a country situating itself in a larger context (of history, of humanity, of governance)
\u2014 It presumed as the starting point a populace capable of following such concepts and the existence of languages from other places and times
At some point (which I once looked up), the one good motto got replaced (officially?) with the recent-past motto: in god we trust. A motto that is by every measure worse, though one could say it has the virtue of still being English, and a little composed.
But the motto has been, I think, replaced again. Now it would be lolnothingmatters.
I have been thinking about other compressions, too, over some extended time, some of it driven by trying to read a little from historians, and wondering which features of the present are canonical and which are idiosyncratic to this place and time. If I had to list the two problems (this is, to some degree, to Nick\u2019s concern about why the rationalist-public aspiration didn\u2019t work out so well, though there are many dimensions in which to answer that) that we must deal with, I would say we need to correct these two widespread now-premises:
\u2014 that cruelty is entertainment (that one is canonical, and I raised it long ago in my characterization of fascism as using performances of cruelty to promise an identity to the masses, to keep them organized in the mob); and
\u2014 that entertainment is a substitute for living (or that one cannot be really distinguished from the other, so why do we bother with two words?)
The nihilist motto above is somehow closely tied to the second problem, and that one I think is somewhat idiosyncratic. The modern industrial era is so _big_ and so complex in its institutional and social order, that the connection of a person\u2019s moment-to-moment choices and acts, to their full suite of consequences is cryptic-to-impenetrable most of the time. Then there is the dimension-lowering of communication in the remote and electronic-network age. And Glen\u2019s very nice materials on AI now as the offboarding of attention. These three, together with saturation-level submersion in \u201centertainment\u201d as a whole field of social order, enable a level of disconnection and irresponsibility from _everything_ that probably was not available to any era of humanity before. People still have moral responsibility for having lost the ability to distinguish between entertainment and living, but I think I would stop short of \u201cblaming\u201d them for it, as the whole system structure is like a whirlpool that it is hard for most people to escape being sucked down into.
It is hard for me to see using \u201carguments\u201d or other fairly fragile and low-dimensional tools to deal with problems until we have found ways to address these previous two big context-aspects.
Eric
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