[FRIAM] U.S. motto

[Steve Smith]

> 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.

EricS -

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?).

/Collective Phase Change  and Logistic-Function Lurches/:  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.

/Historical Revolutions/: The early industrial-/transportation/ 
revolution yielding locomotives and steamships, the /communication/ 
revolution still unfolding but accellerating with wireless comms, the 
/information/computing/ foreshadowed by the abacus and the difference 
engine and ignited by WWII code-breaking and Feynman-Calculator rooms 
for physics, and now introducing *formal* /self-organization/ to 
information processing (really igniting the last decade+).

/Individual vs Collective Aspirations/:  Levin's /Scale Free Cognition/ 
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 /holarchical/heterarchica/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.

/Accelleration of Scale/Temporal Compression/: 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 */attention span of a single human/* (hours, months) and 
geopolitically (nearly?) global?

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 "/tidal forces/" seeming to tear us apart 
(internally/externally)?

/Language and Distortion of the Intersubjective/:  Language, as you 
point out, has become the dominant medium of exchange and it's current 
/distortion/ and /slipperiness/ 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).

/Singularity Rhetoric/: 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.

/Multiscale Selfishness/: But this is (yet another) tangent methinks:  
the tangent-of-the-moment in my mind refers to the /individual/group 
selection question /we(y'all)'ve been maundering on here. Is Cancer a 
/selfish cell/, a /selfish gene/, or /collectivized selfishness/ 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?

I must quit now before I tangent again. /E Pluribus Unum/ (or not?)

- SteveS

>
> 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:
> — It reflected a country situating itself in a larger context (of history, of humanity, of governance)
> — 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’s concern about why the rationalist-public aspiration didn’t 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:
> — 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
> — 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’s 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’s very nice materials on AI now as the offboarding of attention.  These three, together with saturation-level submersion in “entertainment” 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 “blaming” 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 “arguments” 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
>
>
>
> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoomhttps://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribehttp://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIChttp://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru presenthttps://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>    1/2003 thru 6/2021http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20250817/109f1211/attachment.html>