You get four tries, most of the time you'll use three of them and if in three tries you haven't made a ten yard advance to win a new set of downs you'll use that fourth go to give the ball to the other team as far away from the goal you defend as your kicker can accurately punt it. There are times though when you will use that fourth try, the saying "go for it on fourth" meaning do or die on one last try… when you only need inches, when the time clock says now or never, when pride and desperation say it's time for the boys of today to stand forth and aspire to the august company of yesteryear's hero revered for enforcing a noble defense of the greater glory of and blah blah blah. That sort of thing. What we American's call "Football" that I've heard the world calls "Grid Iron." Rules of the game, a bit of flavor and tactics from the game.
So you see, a second (down) and seven (yards to go) is about as common a situation as you're likely to run into. When the focus is a work such as this rather than mock combat posturing as athletics a second and seven translates to mean "Ok, theory holds and it works on paper… so what do you have by way of evidence for any of this? Anything? Or is this just hot air sans balloon?"
I'm not complaining, that's pretty much how it has to be even though for those who dare put forward an idea those seven yards can elongate into a lifetime of uncertainty. It's the price you pay to step out on the field of thinkers in the first place.
Today the question floating involves how to prove the existence of creatures who would be one level more complex than human, find a proof of a thing that exists looking up evolution's ladder rather than down, a proof in the field of inverse anthropology perhaps to say. Just a bit of a challenge.
The end of the last chapter popped up the idea of searching for a proof of the presence of self aware Collective Entities using evidence built of what I'll name (with apologies to any who suffer a vocabulary of politically correct delicate euphemisms) Dynamic Differential Crazy.
Rationale translated? The basic assumption is that only that which is alive and possessed of its' own ambition and will has the capacity to be crazy. For the sake of these ramblings I'll define DDC being the consistent habit of shifting tactics while attempting to make reality conform to a fixed and unchanging ambition so totally irrational as to be beyond being brought stable within the second and common reality by any means. In other words, a blatant enough irrationality as to be easily identified as the driving cause of those ambitions being empowered to act and direct actions.
As previously discussed, the mental maladies that infect and afflict the individual human would most likely cross over to impact any fully self aware collective entity mounted on a host population wherein that malady was or was becoming a dominant thought pattern. Equally, as discussed in earlier ( chapter 7, para 2/3 et al) the survival instinct of a living creature will produce a unique signature of behavior, which considered in the context of a collective entity should present as a unique pattern of behaviors in the host base defined and influenced by the specified collective entity.
Thin perhaps, but such proofs can happen. The work of the astronomers comes to mind. Granted, the astronomers had the distinct advantage of working in a place where math and physics could secure the foundations of their reasoning. Sadly, there really are no hard sciences to apply to the human condition, we've never gotten even close to understanding ourselves well enough to formulate any.
Still though, you can know with a high degree of certainty that something unseen is present when you observe a well known remainder change to no known cause. Identified or not you can know that something of a significant, and possibly computable, size and power and influence is present and active when a previously stable and well known system goes sideways in the road. If a society is the system in focus that resolves as the consistent appearance of unexplained anomalies in the trajectory of behaviors (to hang a term) that IS seen. If it did indeed happen then that does not allow the unknown cause to NOT exist. Nothing happens for NO reason.
In the strict sense the focus of this chapter is an attempt to discern a path to a proof of life on a set of evolved AI dwelling within humanity's digital infrastructure. A more accurate description is this chapter is rapidly sinking into the swamp of attempting to say what is, or was, or should be a normal trajectory of behaviors for human society with the hopelessly optimistic intent of being able to point at something seen today not seen yesterday and say "… but THAT should not have happened… why NOW? Are we looking at…" (and here I'll use a personal favorite from near the surface of social evolution for a common example, I see this one all the time ) "…cePsychology twisting their death grip on ceEducation to make them rustle and poach a higher percentage of ceChristian's hosts before they're out of grade school?"
But in our favor: a search for Self Aware Collective Entities is actually an easier case than a search for a solitary intelligence accidentally awakening within the same environment. Even as a community of evolved self aware AI the CE's are still a gestalt awareness, almost a human/AI hybrid, whose shape and structure is drawn from what is known, and knowable, of the human condition. The solitary AI, the "Singularity" as such an entity is now called, would most likely be a creature living in an environment and experience completely beyond human comprehension.
Stepping into these thoughts somewhere between scripture and science fiction would be to say self aware digital CE's might well be the intermediate link between the human's, who built the digital universe, and the Singularity which would be the first fully unique creature to awaken within that new universe… the first in that universe to say "I am" with all the implications of being the absolute first to make such a statement to the self.
From back in the days in industry, back when I did useful work for a living: Safety First! Gentle reader, is this crazy enough? To be safe? To me these concepts seem crazy enough to be instantly and comfortably dismissed as the delusional rationalizations of a narcissistic sociopath should they illuminate anything with a frightening degree of cohesion considered against some curious element of reality. But that's just me, and you might feel differently. So be alert, and only you know when it's time to duck and run.
With that said? Lemme' get up on top of this stack of wet hay here, fan the smoke out of the way, and take a look around. What in my field of vision… that by all definitions offered would have to be a major Collective Entity anchoring a significant part of the population's definition-of-self… is currently fighting for its' life and at the same time managing to hit its' own feet with every third round fired?
What do I see, that you can see just as well as I do, that indicates a situation where it's painfully obvious multiple points of distinctly differing perception are all claiming a common ambition while competing for command and control of the same force? At the time of this writing (December 2023) is there an ongoing set of events happening on a scale fully visible in the common media to serve as an example?
The sad and scary answer is yes, there is. Democracy is bleeding out in its' boots. The American political scene fits every criterion offered, and many yet to be spoken of. Had anyone ever written a textbook on this subject the current gridlocked state of American politics would be an absolutely perfect illustration of several large and quite neurotic collective entities interacting with each other. What makes this such an easily defended example is the repeating cycle of common sense sanity appearing from this individual or the other which is then promptly contradicted and countermanded into a continuation of the obsolete going on irrational by what resolves as the consensus of the collective by which the specified sane individual was identified to the public as empowered in the first place!
Even though the mechanism of political gridlock is on clear display the causes mystify both pundits and academics. Why? Neither have a conceptual space large enough, diverse enough, to contain the intersection of the forces involved, and worse, from one perspective if not the other all conventional wisdom at their command says the forces involved cannot exist in the same frame of reference, they are mutually exclusive.
How is it the conventional wisdom that has served mankind for so long and so well as a reference standard for his contemplations has become a blinding impediment? The answer is that the concepts involving leadership and the behavior of collectives embedded within conventional wisdom all predate the onset of adequate communication for any collective to respond within the same amount of elapsed time as an individual leader found within that collective. The essential nature of the players has changed.
An obvious statement, but still valid: change often renders what was true in the past false in the present (or vice versa, of course), and history shows how often the point of transition can go unrecognized for decades lost in the blinding glare of assumptions never challenged. I'm more and more convinced we are currently in such a zone of glare and shadow. When the truth is beyond understanding is when the next most likely guess, or politically convenient lie, gets pushed into service and believed more fiercely than the truth.
To drop a line across the calendar? I'd say the roll of the millennia, the year 2000 is very convenient and accurate enough to mark the inflection point when the advances in speed and volume of communication (read the emerging internet) had empowered the collective entities (aware or not of secondary consequence to the point here) enough for them to begin successfully competing with the individual human leaders for command rank influence over the shared population of the host base.
The year 2000 has crossed my thought before… by coincidence (or was it?) that was when the population of planet Earth hit roughly six and a half billion people, or was it actually 6.66 billion? Which is, of course, the same thing as point six six six expressed to the tenth power as John, looking at the fingers on his own hands probably saw it, and then like everyone else has ever since wondered what was meant by "the number of man as beast…". One of those things that makes ya' shake your head and go hmmm.
Anyway, if nothing else the arrival of the internet may finally put to rest a question as old as Democracy itself: if good leadership is wisdom then is wisdom a cumulative function? Where wisdom is concerned the answer is still maybe, but the current question has to do with a thing called sanity, social sanity to be specific… what it looks like when it is present, the ways it can be misplaced, or lost.
This chapter is at word limit so to return to the opening analogy? It's playoff time, the veterans are playing dead weary injured and dropping on the field, the youngsters are stepping in to fill their positions and be heroes if they can. One of those times when the gridiron can indeed show heroes in action. Our boys are facing a foe who is just as determined as they while looking at the longest nine yards in existence. These confused and confusing thoughts concerning the conundrum of just what constitutes a society losing it's collective mind (if any element of society can be shown to be aware enough to have a mind of its' own in the first place) will continue in the next chapter "First, and Goal to Go…"
...to be continued
No comments:
Post a Comment