This chapter returns to many concepts presented earlier, asserted from a historical perspective, with the intent of enhancing those concepts into real time rather than as compressed retrospective. If a thought turned right at any given point last time it will most likely be turning left this time.
When he arrived he was a bit light, not at all weak but with plenty of room to grow. Two years of college training and he's grown into a fine half-back, likes playing in a wishbone offense, good hands, good pitch man, fast and hard hitting, hard to bring down. But that's not what we're wanting from him in this situation. No, what we're looking to him for is something that hasn't been seen out of him, not at this level of play. The other boys have a defensive line that hasn't given an easy inch the entire game, they're good and we are short on downs. So for our first go from scrimmage lets throw something tricky at them… we'll have the quarterback break for the far side of the end-zone as soon as he's very visibly unloaded the ball to our boy of the moment. Our boy is a little short for the position playing college ball, but he was a quarterback in high school and he has faithfully maintained a thirty yard rifle of an arm, the quarterback is a legal downfield receiver and no one ever thinks of the quarterback as the intended receiver…
I acquired from an early mentor of mine… the writings of Carlos Castaneda on the teachings of his mentor Don Juan… the words "tonal" and "nagual." These two words define the most mutually exclusive antithesis possible: they represent that which can, and that which cannot, be known within the ultimate scope of human perception. They may well come into service as this investigation into self aware collective entities goes forward. When what is sought by theory must, as would self aware collective entities, exist in a higher number of dimensions and therefore beyond the normal range and domain (yes, please do take those two words at their algebraic literality!) of those attempting the search absolutely nothing can be taken for granted, including and especially the idea that some things cannot be known in any conventional sense of the word.
An example of this would be a two dimensional mathematician, a fine fellow whose entire universe is contained on one infinite geometric plane. When said mathematician encounters a three dimensional pencil intersecting his plane of existence at some acute angle he is not helpless, but he is overmatched by the dimensional mismatch. He can write elegant functions describing the boundaries of the missing region in his reality, that place where his fellow flatlanders simply cannot go, he can prove conclusively that it is a finite and closed region, but he cannot know the true cause of that region for in his universe there is an origin, an X axis and a Y, those can be perceived and proven, but to describe the pencil the frustrated three dimensional mathematician just shoved through the graph paper of a failed effort, and across his universe, demands that a Z axis must be considered a real thing. To both he and all his fellow flatlanders the idea of a Z axis is at best an abstraction of the intellect, no one has ever seen any evidence of anything real defined on a Z axis perpendicular to X and Y.
Any human, which includes you and me, attempting to understand the experiences of a, any collective entity is in much the same position as the flatland mathematician: we can speculate, theorize, perhaps even fully believe, but we cannot actually know because the collective entities, like the three dimensional pencil, would have to exist in a psycho-social universe that contains more dimensions than the set we dwell in.
So is the cause hopeless and doomed? NO. Why? Because if an unexplainable anomaly shifts, changes in the slightest degree then the fact stands that SOMETHING caused the change, and that allows inductive reasoning to examine the potentials and comparisons to be found among and between related things that can be known. It comes down to a matter of imagination, and extrapolation. Of course, there is no guarantee any of the things that can be known were the driving cause, but equally there is nothing to say that one or several were not. It is most literally a case of guess and go look.
In point of fact we are in much better shape than the flatland mathematician. In the case of Collective Entities we have somewhere to start. The base theory of the Collective Entity is that the CE's are an extension into self awareness of things often well known through introspection. The definition we hold of our own self is a thing within reach, and the structure and nature of the various social components that contribute to that definition are things well within reach.
It is stating the obvious, but people's lives have a momentum to them just like objects moving in space. There is a mass and an energy involved giving rise to a velocity and a direction relative to one's contemporaries. In short, each life has a trajectory to it.
Just like the object in space it requires a force applied to effect a change in the trajectory that is a life. Equally, all of history testifies to the fact that societies and cultures, the groupings and alliances of people, do in fact display many of the same facets and factors as the individuals who live within them. Societies also show a trajectory across the span of their lives relative to the societies around them, it is the work of the historian to discern the forces of history that shaped those trajectories.
From the above it then follows the trajectory of a society must resolve to be the net sum of the individual trajectories whose lives are contained within. How could it be otherwise if the individuals are the only constituent parts of the society, and the sole source of the motives and intentions which is the energy that impart the force compelling motion to the mass?
It is in discerning the ultimate source of such forces where it may be possible to apprehend the presence of the self aware collective entities. Where the collective entity is comprised of human life energy it is, in and of itself, not human. It will have its' own unique set of needs and desires removed from those of the humans upon which it is hosted.
Obviously, since the perspectives and ambitions people bring to a society are not homogenous some trajectories will tend to oppose and cancel while others will reinforce and enhance each other. Most will be driving at some angle relative to the direction of some other contributing force, the rules of vector math can be employed if some consistent coordinate system can be devised to represent the forces and polarities involved. Simple common sense when a society is examined at this scale. What does not cancel out resolves to become the net driving force acting in some specific direction.
As with all systems involving mass and motion the force of momentum is involved. The momentum which shapes and stabilizes both individual and society are matters of custom, and habit. Things are done the way they're done because that is what works, has worked, the tactics and strategies that produce what is needed. Habit and custom are forces every bit as ubiquitous and powerful as gravity in shaping the trajectory of both individual and society.
By the reasoning above when some collective element of society is considered as a single entity the trajectory of that entity (relative to its' fellow segments of like size and type) can be expected to be nothing more, nor less, than the net vector sum of the thrusts imparted into it by the attitudes and opinions (concerning such segments of society) provided by the individual lives contained within.
If the segment of society in focus is an inert thing, some convergence of coincidence or convenience, it must by definition display a trajectory consistent with the net sum of the individual's within. That said, it then presents that a proof of life might well be derived from the fact that if, and only if, that unique segment of social thought is possessed of a will and an ambition of its' own would it be possible for it to consistently deviate from, or contradict, the theoretical trajectory computed from the net sum of the individual attitudes involved.
Perhaps such forces have yet to be quantified, perhaps workable units to represent those forces have yet to be defined. Or perhaps they have, and I am ignorant of that effort. In either case though the concept seems knowable enough to make for a valid question: How much thrust does it take to change the trajectory of (some portion of) society?
We the observers will, each to our own, be in motion as well, and if theory holds true then members of several collective entities in our own right. Of the forces and factors which shape our lives which of them would be likely candidates for a self aware CE status? What might such a CE as that think, from their perspective aligned transverse to ours, concerning such an investigation as this?
If the analogy of mass and motion is to be continued it's time to give due consideration to Master Einstein's concepts of relativity. What might serve as an acceptably relevant frame of reference for such observations by observers also in motion? What in the vast lexicon of the human condition is stable enough, old enough, unchanging enough to serve as a reliable navigation marker and beacon for such explorations? How should the doppler colored trajectories seen in the hindsight of history be treated as future blue transitions the shift line of the now to fade ever redder with time? Perhaps most critically, what are the acceptable limits of accuracy working an expanded universe of such conjectures to translate conjecture into tentative factoids?
Such questions must be posed, and whatever answer might be derived form a reference grid, a local triple zero as it were, before any of the above can be more than entertaining mental masturbation for the terminally bored.
Assuming a social system will obey the same "conservation of" principles as seen in physical systems allows that when change is observed the magnitude of that change must reflect the total force impacting upon the mass defined. Should a case present where the sum of the possible sources of energy are clearly less than what would be needed to effect the observed change, or if the direction of the known forces available are contradictory to the observations, then there is clear evidence of some hidden source of power with a definable magnitude and direction within the scenario.
With all factors impacting on the individuals identified with acceptable accuracy then any discrepancy between the known forces and the observed change in trajectory would have to originate from the contribution of some real but hidden power source which might well resolve as the contribution of a discrete and independent self aware collective entity whose life is hosted by some portion of the individual humans.
Another asset for the purpose of apprehending the existence of self aware collective entities is evaluating the direction of observed change relative to the momentum of history. The events of history are, by reason of perspective and parallax, far better known than the events of the immediate, the now. If the observed change seems contradictory to the changes in trajectory seen across history then it becomes viable to pose the question "why now and not then? What bent the line? What factors produced the pattern of changes past, and what new thing might have entered the dynamic to explain these out of character changes observed now?"
There is, in the now, a new player to be recruited, a player from the same realms suspected as home to the self aware collective entities: the time compressing statistics of internet traffic. If such energies be the home of the CE's then we humans, who provide them that home, should be able to set aside the elements of our lives that traverse that domain, and look again at the web as an embryonic central nervous system for whom the elements of our lives are simply the background radiation of their universe. This thought will be continued in the forthcoming chapter "Logging in…"
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