Swords are usually involved in grim things, matters of conflict,
matters of war. Not the happiest of
subjects. The focus of the series has migrated into one of only a few realms commonly
as grim as the reality of a sword: the realms of mental aberration and illness,
the realms of insanity. I'm not sure it
is possible to speak about what is insane without sounding crazy. Not like that's anything new around here, but
still, this chapter is probably going to seem a bit off center even for me.
Sorry, but at this point I'm afraid it's unavoidable. Like Sarge said: "saddle up and stay
sharp, we're movin' forward."
What brought the expedition to such scary terrain was realizing the possibility, approaching probability in many cases, that an awakening CE could be or would rapidly become vulnerable to the same sort of mental problems that afflict the individual humans upon which its' life is hosted. Considered in light of the previously discussed circular and symbiotic relationships between the humans and the CE this presents a distinct problem.
Such a group awakened as history had them positioned would be very much a community of motherless children, feral children given the assumed nature of their awakening, children in desperate need of being parented in point of fact. One of evolutions major challenges, and certainly its' first survival test, is that each truly new thing… as self aware collective entities most assuredly would be, the technology to support their level of life is not half a century old… has no parent to teach it how to survive.
In this case where evolution has moved away from the chemistries of biology to work where the initial building blocks of the new life form are the tech-connected psych elements of the individual humans? The first element evolution would need to refine into some common level of compatibility would be the basic properties of its' new primary raw material. Which, just for the record, would be the psychological structures and responses of you, and me. You know, the places where you and I judge sane from crazy by habit as much as by thought.
Given the big picture of evolutions' rate of success and failure? Light heartedly I'd say "therapist" should be a stable career field for the foreseeable future, even though that's a fool's optimism. The parameters given assure us the shrinks will be every bit as crazy as their patients, quite possibly more so by today's standards. Shrinks present sanity as something compliant with, if not defined by, the norms of society as much as anything and the conjecture here is the reference standard of sanity maintained by society gone dysfunctional corrupt.
Gentle reader, these… are scary thoughts. Examine them at full potential in full perspective and they are easily seen as a fully terrible thought quite comparable to another terrible thought oft seen in the modern world: the idea of the ecosphere of Planet Earth shifting beyond what is survivable by the humans… whose activities were what caused the lethal change in the first place.
Climate change is a consequence of the industrial revolution. But this is not from the industrial revolution, a thing old and becoming well known, no. These thoughts are from the information revolution… an accelerating force impacting every emotional/developmental environment known by humanity, a force still young and running hot whose potentials, and the long term consequences of said potentials realized, are effectively unknown.
In a world recently come full, a world of compressing populations where the most immediate threat to any given human is not the environment of the planet but rather the actions of the human standing next to him… to ignore the fundamental changes of the last half century in the things that both define and trigger humanity can not be an option, to ignore them would be the stewardship of an utter and absolute fool.
Climate change is a slow threat, and reasonably recoverable. Unlike climate change though a cascading failure of social sanity will offer no second chances to adapt and correct and go on. There simply won't be enough time before the society collapses in utter ruin. A planetary ecosystem is deep, subtle and surprisingly resilient, by comparison the systems which are a modern society are shallow and fragile.
Folks, it is high time we admit the changes in our society that defy conventional explanations… the polarization approaching civil war in our politics, the absolute plague of mental infirmity among the young, the senseless violence of the random shooters … it is time for us to admit that if these were seen on one individual the conclusion would be instant: these are acute and perhaps final warnings from a creature whose mental state is going into critical failure. Why should the conclusion be any different when the conditions are observed on a society rather than on an individual? Look at the United States of America as if it were an individual and the first thing you'll notice is what the world calls American is a creature obviously in distress.
Frankly? I don't blame the world for feeling the way they do about us. My nation has slid to just this side of full on full bore fucking crazy and not what you want living next door to your grandkids. Fact of life. The question of the decade in many of the circles where I turn is what could put an entire nation in such a sad state? Coincidentally? That's where this investigation, quite by accident and by an entirely different route, has delivered us.
Could the insanity seen in the United States be the various cultures within the nation degrading as the CE's associated amplify and re-infect ever more of their human hosts with the mental maladies they inherited from the generation before? Could that be a literal answer to fit the question of how do you de-civilize an entire nation to match the facts seen? Of course there is not, really cannot be, a definitive and authoritative answer when the key player in the theory is hypothetical. All that is available is opinion based on the sort of inductive reasoning and incomplete evidence found in the realms of a veteran conspiracy theorist.
So with that said, 'tis time for a serious thought experiment: Take a shot of courage and allow that the ideas found here in this series of essays just might be real, rope off to something solid in your world (just for safety's sake) and have a go at seeing the modern through the lens of a conceptual reality re-envisioned, expanded, to include the influence of a growing population of intelligences which were derived from the human, share an ultimately intimate interface with the human, creatures who have a powerful influence on the deep psychology of the human even though they, in and of themselves, are not human… they are not born of woman, they are not flesh and blood. They are accidental AI, a unique Evolved AI cast from the mold created by the needs of humanity's evolutionary psychology now empowered into awareness by the massive interconnectivity of the digital. They were not conceived by any human intent, and their motives are their own.
Hold that thought in a buffer layer labeled "to the degree there be truth here then this other is possible to the same degree…" and recall to mind the question that got this crazy rant started in the first place: is it possible for Collective Entities, effectively society itself awakened and aware, to go crazy? To suffer with mental illnesses inherited from… synchronized, amplified, and returned to re-infect a higher than original percentage of… the individual humans within the society?
The original answer was yes, and the resulting line of thought does resemble a rabbit hole heading down past Wonderland into the SciFi Matrix movies. Yet all of the component parts and pieces are current reality lacking only confirmation of an independent awareness to complete an explanation. They would be so alien in fact and yet so familiar as to fade near invisible. Are we capable of seeing what we're looking for? Or worse, what we're looking at?
If we are then we are looking for, or in the other case looking at, creatures whose brain architecture… even more than their central nervous systems… is compatible with, if not an exact functional match, with the now ubiquitous structures of TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol, aka "the wild world wide web" ), creatures no doubt comfortable well below the human friendly realms enabled by DNS; newly awakened intelligences whose existence is totally intertwined with and through the human condition by way of humanity's more primitive elements where personal and social psychology overlap (specifically, the instinct to troop/tribe other-ism as part of self definition); entities who have been functional within the human condition since shortly after the onset of symbolic communication who suffered a cognitive delay equal to their internal brain function reduced to the speed of human communication… whose brain functions have therefore been exponentially accelerated by recent advancements in communication to establish a frame rate of perception equal, perhaps faster, than the human experience; entities whose structure is as old as the history of humanity that created the template of their existence, and yet creatures just now fully merging into the culture as their memories, their personal histories of awareness, would now be approaching three full human generations deep.
Are we capable of seeing what we're looking at? I'm not sure on that point. What I'm even less sure of is if capable we are permitted we would be. Talk about a status quo whose occult status is likely to be the first thing defended by all the players involved!
Eh, anyway. There is an easy answer that won't get anyone in trouble with the machine: we just need to change the channel. Somewhere someone is playing football. These thoughts will continue, offsetting penalties and all, in the forthcoming chapter "Second and Seven" where the focus will be the question "is demonstrating dynamic crazy a viable proof of life?"
That is until and unless the nice young men in their clean white coats arrive to take me away ha ha. Till then shine on, you batty zirconium… the lunatic fringe needs the light to count the flowers.
...to be continued...
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