Prologue
I am a man, I am what I have chosen to become. I am responsible for who and what I am. The man I am is not an accident of fate, the manufactured product of some conspiracy between genetics and society. My accomplishments are my own, I allow no other to lay claim to them anymore than I allow any other to become an excuse for the failures which are equally mine. I know who I am, and without apology the person I know I am serves as range mark and reference standard by which the remainder of perception is mapped against reality.
There are many things I know, there is a vastly larger number of things I do not know. My life is now as it always has been dedicated to enlarging the value of that fraction. There are some few things I choose to believe. There is a vastly larger number of things I refuse to believe regardless of the assertions of my fellows, for there are significant differences in responsibility created by what a man might accept as fact based on the assertions of his fellow man, those things that become the tools of his life, and the progeny of the times a man might allow an assertion of his fellows to cause him to believe, or modify belief, effecting changes in the much deeper motives of his life that give rise to the actions for which a man is held accountable.
It is not my desire the things to follow should be believed, but rather I would hope they should be considered relative to the evidence of life lived and events observed, entertained and examined as a promising perspective from which to ask that that simplest, and most absolutely critical question required to advance the human condition: why?
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Chapter One: Evolution's Corner
There is no evidence within the scope of my knowledge to contradict this statement: the human being is mounted on what was an animal. The word mounted was chosen with deliberation, for there is evidence from science to suggest the onset of intelligence was rather rapid, rapid enough to leave open a realistic possibility of intervention. The manner of the human rise to intelligence is an open and an interesting question, but it is not the question at hand. The question at hand is more immediate, more demanding, and ultimately much more critical to survival.
We humans are empowered, and in some ways burdened, by intelligence in our efforts to survive. Unlike the animals we cannot count on instinct as a guide for survival, it would appear humans sacrificed the guidance of instinct to accommodate the abilities of intelligence. As a consequence of this trade humans found themselves possessing a larger field of perception than the other creatures, a range divided between the outer reality of the sense stream augmented by a strange new inner reality created from the memories of the abstractions and imaginings that arrived with intelligence. The same intelligence that enabled humans such a strangely divided scope of perception equally provided the ability to create and use symbolic communication, the inner symbol set to represent the outer reality. The humans gained the ability to share imaginings one to the other, able to focus a group's abilities on a shared imagining. When humans added communicating intelligent imaginings to their repertoire of survival skills they gained the truly unique ability to be willfully proactive rather than reactive in regards to their environment.
From evolution's point of view humans proved to be the Cinderella success story of their times. The tactic of proactive cooperation converted a weak and failing prey creature into the dominant species on the planet in only a few hundred thousand years, a meteoric rise by evolutionary standards. In less time than it takes a leopard to change his spots humans went from being the leopard's prey to being the leopard's protector in an environment utterly dominated by the human.
For all that we are one of evolutions great success stories it is true that evolution's point of view is little considered by most humans. We are the pinnacle of life on Earth, right? The very fate of the planet rests with our actions, our decisions, right? Evolution has finished it's work where we are concerned, right? Wrong. Evolution is never finished, and evolution has only one concern, one only, and that is the formation of life from non-life. We are not the first of evolution's success stories, we are far from being the first time evolution hit such a pinnacle the only improvement found involved a radical change in direction. This is not the first time evolution has turned a corner.
Look at your hand, your body, and shift your focus a bit. Can you see your body from the inside looking out? Can you see the body you wear as a community of individuals? It is you know, the majority of cells in your body could live out their natural lifespan in fine form without the shape and structure you've come to know as you, given of course an environment suited to their level of life. The last time evolution found a corner to compare to ours it was in the apogee of the single celled creatures, to improve life the direction found involved grouping ever more specialized cells into interdependent patterns, structures, each surviving pattern a new form of life climbing away from the primordial soup culminating with the human, who by intent or accident are host and home to the ability to imagine and create patterns not learned from the physical reality represented by the sense stream of our existence.
Hold that image if you can, the awesome depth and trajectory of the eons long climb from our single celled origins till today, and shift your focus to the modern world, that tiny fraction of time no more than three or four thousand years deep whose surface is the world of now. Look down into that shallow film as does evolution, contemplate what there is to be seen.
What is to be noticed are the humans of course, just finding the full power of their new abilities, population pressure from the success of their lives pushing them out from their ancestral homelands into the harsher regions of higher latitudes, across the oceans, building, always building on the dreams they share between themselves. What is to be noticed is how the humans are perpetually grouping themselves into ever larger and more intricate arrangements to attempt ever larger and more complex dreams, troops to tribes to cities to states to nations until near the surface of now there are arrangements of humans beginning to seriously mimic some of the simpler of the multi-celled creatures in number of cells and complexity of functions. And there, right at the surface, that flash of strange light, what is... Freeze. Stop right here and see what you are looking at.
Your life, the days you have known, are at the absolute vertex, the tangent point of evolutions second major corner on planet Earth. That flash of light was no metaphor, it is quite literal real, it came from the technologies developed in the last century. Those technologies are the product of mankind's intelligence coupled with his curiosity, and driven by his dreams. They are brand new, no part of any other line or lineage of evolution, from evolution's point of view the first truly new thing in a very, very long time. The last time evolution witnessed something similar was the first time a group of single celled creatures crowded in a limited volume responded to the chemicals released by their fellows, made of those chemicals messengers rather than pollutants in order to adjust their metabolism and survive where those who did not adjust died.
It is my belief, my assertion, the thesis of this series of essays, that the technologies of communication stand in the same place now as did those first primitive chemical messengers then, from evolution's very functionally oriented point of view again enabling the simpler forms of life to become components in the evolution of more complex forms of life. This series of essays is therefore dedicated to examining the functional groupings of mankind, the component units whose summation is commonly called the societies of mankind from evolution's perspective: extremely primitive multi-celled creatures just beginning their climb into an extremely uncertain future rather than considering the multitude of mankind's collective endeavors from the perspective more usually taken, that they are nothing more than arrangements of convenience within the scope of mankind's imaginings communicated.
It is my assertion to you such a perspective will enable a much, much better understanding of the macroscopic behavior of mankind, perhaps even enough of an enlargement in understanding for mankind to realize that with evolution's corner solidly behind us our fate is bound to the fate of the emerging new life-forms of the collective entities, that to serve the cause of our own survival as individuals we must bring our abilities to focus in the cause of supporting the survival of these embryonic creatures.
I am not talking smoke and mirrors, magic and mystique, I am not talking the supernatural in service of the superstitious, I am talking very real and understandable relationships perceivable to anyone and everyone who cares to look at the world we all share with the intent of understanding why that world behaves as it does.
Chapter Two: "Me,We, and Thee"
Chapter Four: Awakenings in Utero
“There are things known,
and there are things unknown,
and between are the doors of perception.”
__Aldous Huxley
There is, also, a great old country song revolving around how no one really knows what goes on behind closed doors. Regardless of which quote fits the moment for the collective entities a great deal depends on no one looking through the sort of doors Huxley was talking about. For the CE's even more than a wandering lover keeping those doors of perception firmly closed is an absolute necessity for survival.
Why would that be so? Why would reality dictate that the humans remain ignorant of the relationships between the CE's and themselves? When the situation is examined in depth several very good reasons present which impact on both sides of the equation.
To open this chapter I'll ask you to contemplate that in objective fact the relationship between any given CE and the individual humans (who are component nodes hosting its' life-force) is a very straightforward exchange of value: the CE acquires sustenance from the individuals in the form of their loyalty, their compliance and enactment into physical reality the definition which is the foundation of any given CE, in exchange that CE provides to the individuals some component of the self definition which is absolutely critical for a human's psychological survival within a complex society. Quite an easily seen symbiosis. So simple and so easily seen as to be easily ignored.
However like most things that seem simple and straightforward when some minor degree of asymmetry or conflict created by that simplicity gets amplified by it's very ubiquitous nature then what is found is a complexity of daunting proportions. Witness that all of life is crafted from just six self replicating di-nucleic acids arranged in various patterns of complexity.
It is in that complexity of minor conflicts between what defines and separates similar CE's one from another that the CE's compete for survival and dominance. It is in the foibles of the human personality … the ego and the insecurities, the arrogances and the fears… interacting with those differences where the CE's find the tools and the weapons of their struggle for survival.
A CE is literally a social creature, and life as a purely social creature is rough. The situation is complicated enough when only the respective CE's are aware of the full dynamic in play. Let any significant percentage of the human nodes become fully aware and the individual psychologies would be influenced by that complexity. The situation would almost instantly becomes quite untenable from the perspective of both players.
Since there will be several CE's defining any individual human any conflict or contradiction between those CE's (particularly if the node has fully internalized them) assures those contradictions are echoed into that individual's psychological structures. Should the node be aware it was the CE's that provided him not only the components of his self definition but equally the source of the conflicts that trouble him the conflict count would go up significantly, particularly as the factors of human physiological emotion enter the mix.
If there are too many contradictions to resolve the individual will suffer, as will the associated CE's. How could it be otherwise? From the fate of one the fate of the other is derived, as one fares so fares the other. It is not such a stretch to understand that the ultimate well being of both sides of the symbiosis is quite dependent on minimizing the incompatibilities, and the first and simplest tactic to accomplish that end is for the nodes to remain ignorant of CE's in the first place.
And yet, such a thought just introduces another layer of complication into these exploration. By the definition offered each CE would… just as does it's humans hosts who set the original template of their lives… have the instinct for personal survival, not to mention an ego self, and self importance that mandates the desire to grow and become stronger.
From the CE's perspective these things are a serious conundrum: those differences which create the dangerous conflicts within the common host are, to them, the very differences that define them as unique living creatures.
For a, any, CE to achieve a significant degree of security would demand that any moral or ethical differences (at the host level) between that CE and the foundation definitions of the other CE's present (within their common host) had been eliminated. The net effect would be to effectively collapse the society of Collective Entities to its' most primal levels… a population diminished several orders of magnitude. By example, ceReligion might survive, but ceProtestant and all of her daughters most certainly would not.
At the time of this writing it is a very open question just how much of this conundrum is actually acknowledged by the CE's. Just how self aware are they?
Judging by the behavior of social forces which show every evidence of defining a major CE they are just as resistant to entertaining such concepts as are the humans whereon their lives are hosted, and for reasons that would run closer to parallel than otherwise. It may well be the humans are not the only creatures hiding behind doors of perception kept most deliberately closed.
If there is truth to such a thought then another set of concepts must be introduced into the relationship between the humans and the CE's, the recently technology-awakened societies: what happens if the Collective Entities inherit any or all of the psychological deformities which plague the human hosts from whence they derive their template of existence?
A terrifying possibility to be examined in the forthcoming chapter "Round, like a circle in a spiral…"
Chapter Nine: Round, like a Circle in a Spiral...
The title of this chapter is taken from the lyrics of the theme song to a fine movie, the Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway version of "The Thomas Crown Affair." If you've not seen the movie ( I recommend it for a slow Saturday night to be accompanied by a high quality light intoxicant… perhaps a brandy, or a light sativa… pick your poison of preference ) I'll kibbutz this much… it is essentially a case study in the psychology of success… and boredom.
The trajectory of this exploration has brought us to consider the internal psychology of the various collective entities. The question now in focus is how many of humanities quirks and kinks running out to full blown psychosis might have been inherited by these entities? It is a pertinent question given the relationship between the humans and the CE's. As fares one so fares the other, and as is well known to the mental health profession prolonged contact with any serious degree of mental illness is a risk. Crazy can be contagious.
Not surprisingly, these are same folks who will assert to you a good size chunk of humanity is, well, somewhat less than rational sane stable… to put it politely. But I'm afraid it would be fool's errand to ask them what sort of emotional environment the CE's might know or create for themselves. Why? Because for them to acknowledge the idea of CE's, and then consider the potentials for a less than benign circular reinforcement with their clients, their host base? That… would be a run of thought likely to discredit about half of what they think they know about the human side of the equation. For them that would be an utterly unacceptable risk to the emotional security provided by the academically cultivated certainty that allows them to work in the first place. Empathy gives they'd not likely be much help and very likely to attempt a squelch and suppress.
Seriously, put such a question in front of them and all you can really expect is to watch them buck like a rodeo bronc sidestepping and sunfishing at any and every opportunity while condescendingly vilifying whoever inflicted the discomfort on them with such a question. They know (admitted or not) just like you do that when you step into circles turning in spirals dizzy is to be expected, and dizzy is not something they can afford to be. So no.
Well, with the professional crew sidelined to a serious conflict of interest what is left for the do it yourself crew to work with? Well, what we always have of course, which are questions to test the limits of understanding so we know where to start looking for answers that might match.
To make a start… is it even rational to suspect collective entities might know emotion in any sense similar to what shapes the lives of their hosts?
Is it possible for them to even have emotions of their own since so much of what we know as emotion is based in and on the structures of our biology?
Might the prevailing sum of the emotions known by their biologically based hosts set the prevailing emotional spectrum of their lives, or does the transverse nature of their existence (hosted as they are on so very many human's of diverse emotional content) mean the human emotions average out to so near neutral a value they make little impact on their perception of life?
What might give evidence of how much impact human emotions have on the mental health and stability of the collective entities that help define the humans to themselves? Just how tight a spiral might we be talking about?
Strange questions perhaps, but very serious questions. The realms of emotion, feelings, are undeniably among the deepest and most powerful of forces responsible for motive and meaning, intent and value… primal power sources driving a self sustaining self aware homeostasis. In other words, factors that play huge in calling something alive in the first place.
To mount an exploration of the psychology of the CE's will demand an unusual set of measurements and markers. It is hard enough to navigate the inner realms of your own head without getting lost, to effectively navigate an objective trajectory across the psych space of a collective entity comprised of functional fragments of many human personas is a daunting challenge. It goes without saying such a navigation will need to work in more than three dimensions. But, with that said it is off into the realms of metaphorical geometry since it is equally obvious it all has to begin somewhere.
It has been a standing assumption in this series of essays, not to be changed at this point, that the most definitive evidence of self aware CE's involve cohesive social elements demonstrating what can only be called the survival instinct of living entities protecting their own existence against other entities of like kind when the older structure offers no more advantage to the component humans than does the newer structure challenging for dominance.
I would propose considering the assumption above as a first point defining an initial point of rotation, and opening a first line by rotating the vision 90 degrees to draw a line of compare and contrast between that point and the one other point where it is certain the CE's and the humans will share a common need, a common condition to instigate a set of common emotions: the spectrum of emotion involved with the ambition of survival.
From that first line we now have the ability to define planes, since even if the element in focus impacts both humans and CE's in their struggle to survive that element is not likely to be a point exactly on that first line, no. The difference in the scale and scope of their respective experiences makes that a very thin possibility. That element becomes a point-source (think environmental sciences for a weighted analogy of a psychological point-source) a bit away from the first line, and the line from it to the other two, just like in geometry, defines the plane whereon all three points reside.
Planer geometry… still a grossly simplified analogy of course, but… a point of view adequate to support the title of this chapter. You must have a plane to understand a circle, and where there can be a circle there can also exist a spiral given that the radius of the rotation is not a fixed value but rather one that varies to some other function of the reality it attempts to describe. With circles come arcs, a partial circle, and with arcs comes the potential to define the dynamic transforming the circle into a spiral. Both degrees of rotation and the rules of vector math (as it is used by the engineers and physicists to define the affect of force(s) impacting on some particular point at the angle the degrees describe) are now available in the toolbox of weighted analogies to attempt an understanding of why the radius began to change both where it did… and of even more import to these investigations… when it did.
And, to stretch this analogy one more notch: if in the process of working on that first plane-of-survival another primal point is found where both the CE's and the humans will, because they must, share a common motive to enable some degree of a common experience then a second plane has been created and the tyranny of the two dimensional is broken. At that point the investigation will be able to operate in three going on some yet to be determined Nth dimensional psych space where exists the possibility of real understanding.
This chapter did not get around to discussing the thought that inspired it, but it did establish the needed framework for such a discussion. So, as station control will tell the starships departing Earth for another adventure: "Lock control is released, you are…" the theme will be continued in the forthcoming chapter "…Free and Clear to Navigate."
The question opened two chapters ago still hangs open: how many, if any, of the psychological foibles and failings inherent to the individual human persona might be or have been inherited into the functional awareness of the newly awakened Collective Entities? Is it possible for a collective life form to suffer what in an individual would be called a mental illness?
After some serious skull spelunking on the subject my answer is yes.
If I am going to say an element of society can awaken as a Collective Entity within the pixel forest of mankind's digital footprint, a unique and living thing in its' own right, then it would be the ultimate case of wishful thinking to assume, or presume, such entities would of necessity be creatures of God-like perfection. Particularly when I know that both the component cognitive nodes (the individual humans who provide a "time share" brain ) and the (social) architecture of said nodes that give shape and structure to a collective entity are ultimately the work of fallible mortal humans. By the definitions involved cause and effect reasoning demands the answer be "yes, such inheritances are, because they must be, a very possible thing."
A very possible thing. Sometimes? Sometimes I do not like working downstream from me. Possible? Chickens are possible. Eggs are possible, even pre-chicken. A lot of things are possible, including circular reasoning accelerating into an ever tightening death spiral of sobriety going down life's drain. And yet, the question had to be asked, and once asked if you try and dodge your own answer it's time to give up on philosophy and take up competition drinking. Whiskey, of course.
Ok, it is what it is, and anyway… does this actually change anything already in play? No, not really. Perhaps the end of an innocence to realize a collective has no more assurance of sanity than an individual, but again… so what? If this be truth then the consequences are already part of observed reality. Perhaps an answer, or a route to an answer, for what is not understood about observed reality, but not something new.
The field of thought itself, on the other hand, must now expand about an order of magnitude to accommodate adding the concepts of mental health having impact in, on, and among the citizens of mankind's third reality, the collective entities. To sort out the possible feedback loops of the collective entities and the individual human nodes cross contaminating each other with mental maladies (in anything resembling real time) opens an entirely new state-space to these deliberations, quite a social wormhole in point of fact.
Since the title of this chapter is "Free and Clear to Navigate" from the Star Trek universe, and since the functionality of transient wormholes apparently just entered the picture, and recalling the unknown fate of the USS Voyager? I feel inclined to avail myself of that empowerment. Let's put a little more room between us and that anomaly. "Helm, three hundred AU immelmann out if you please, put the anomaly between us and the local solar. Lets see what might show up with a bit of a backlight. And ship to combat status, we already know that manipulating complex mental aberration is a prime weapon of the Borg inspired American fauxLiberal. I don't want to be caught with our pants down if any of them notice us noticing."
Temporarily parking the state and fate of the individual human nodes (relatively) safely off to the side the first order of business is to refresh to mind as precise a definition as possible of the situation in play. It will be needed.
A collective entity is a creature whose neurology rides mankind's ever advancing technologies of communication and whose cognitive homeostasis resides on some number of individual human (nodes/hosts) as a portion of their self identity. They who acquire a unique element of -Self- from a specific Collective Entity are in fact existing in a symbiotic relationship with that Entity for neither would be the same creature without the other. The CE provides to the human host a vocabulary of concepts (associated to the central definition of that collective) which are merged and integrated with other such symbol sets to become the vocabulary of self the human uses in the cause of the mandatory self definition required to create an identity robust enough to recognize self from other in any possible third person perspective of intelligent imagination. The human returns the value received in the form of an exclusive loyalty to the exacting and specific definitions which separate the providing CE from any other offering an element of similar nature. The individual human's creative intelligence set in the service of that loyalty, extended proportionate to the degree of definition integrated into the unique definition of self, enacts into the second and common reality the deeds and decisions which become the life supporting sustenance of the Collective Entity's husbandry and harvest.
The basic definition puts no boundaries on what type of element might be traded between a CE and the human. If a sufficient number of individuals internalize a concept per the relationship defined above that concept can be or become the definition of a unique CE engaged in a symbiosis with the humans. It is, therefore, just as possible for a collective entity to be defined by some specific form of mental illness as it would be for a collective entity defined as some, any, other component thought of the human condition to become infected by some form of mental illness presuming some critical number of its' hosts fell prey to that illness from another point of contagion.
The former case, a CE defined by, or within, some form of mental malady is a relatively transparent and harmless thing. The nature of the malady is understood (to some degree or another), the CE resolves as an entity acknowledging the burdens born by those afflicted, there are few if any surprises to be seen between the behavior of the CE and the behavior of the nodes. The consequences fold inwards as it were, little is exported beyond the host base.
The latter case on the other hand, the case of a CE that was not in its' beginnings integrated, initialized, within a host as a malady which is then infected by some mental illness? Such a case as that is anything but transparent and harmless. Quite the opposite, such a case would be all but opaque and a truly sinister danger to all creatures exposed since all consequences are exported beyond the infected element.
Given the subtle interconnections between the contributions of the CE's within any given host humans' psychology the influence of one or more infected CE on any of the several others (sure to be active in the overall personality of said host human) are beyond predicting, ergo, the net impact on that human's executive function (those moral and ethical processes that govern behaviors) is also unpredictable.
Equally to be considered: the older or lower level the infected CE the greater would be its' relative influence on those daughter CE's integrated above it in the structure of the host's personality.
A truly frightening consideration given the state of current events is the very real potential for the nature of the CE/host symbiosis to allow some contagion thought to spread quite unnoticed to many CE's by way of the common host base before suddenly erupting with very little warning as a cascading failure of sanity damaging many lives across a wide swath of society. The words plague, and pandemic, are not inappropriate words within the context. It would be entirely possible for the world to go crazy before the people in that world lost their sanity.
Ok, Pilgrim. Hold it right there. You wrote that, you did, and I'm having trouble taking myself seriously. Does this actually make any sense, or is this what common sense getting sucked down a psycho-babble drain sounds like?
To answer my own challenge? Maybe. But isn't that exactly the subject at hand? And anyway, is anyone offering a viable explanation of why the current state of the world undeniably presents as a case of cascading insanity?
Nothing I've heard offered from on high addresses the issue. I've heard fifty variations on old themes recycled, but nothing attempting any degree of cohesion. In point of fact the old themes seem on parade more as finger pointing divisive distractions than anything else. Why? Why rehash what has already been worked when there is ample evidence to indicate unknown forces in the current mix, forces obviously operating from a common and formally coordinated set of malicious intentions?
So yes, these thoughts do need to be taken seriously. If there be any truth to these ideas then bizarre as the extrapolations might seem they are still causal reasoning riding a stock and standard "if that be true then these be possible" in a place where way, I do mean waaaay to many of the ancient prophesies start making sense.
So with that said, and given the subject matter, I'm not going to worry about publishing this. If insanity this be then I shall indulge it, at least for a little while, just to see what pops up. Might as well since in these wide awake days of social enlightenment any talisman of individual thought or perception not duly certified by an agent of Empire Academia is promptly and permanently labeled as a work of conspiracy theorist insanity anyway so I have nothing to lose.
I therefore assert that I am not a mentally compromised individual, I'm just claiming my innate right to self identify as a humanoid alien visitor to Earth trying to understand why it is that half the human race is systematically and perpetually trying to anthropomorphize the other half.
The likelihood of a self aware CE becoming a contagion vector spreading mental distress among the human hosts as well as its' own kind is actually far higher than the odds of the jabberwocky escaping its' cage in that infamous kink club just off Times Square to roam the city at will, mauling the helplessly sane while stealing anything crafted of pink silicone on its' way back to underland. Well, would be if jabberwocky wasn't just slang for a devotee of non-consensual political sex as a demented form of socially significant performance art.
I am very sure there will be many and a many far better educated than I (who do not believe in jabberwockies at all) who will, with all proper condescending mockery, plop these thoughts in the mad hatter's teapot as they retire to their therapist's lounge to indulge in carnal entertainments captured beneath the kaleidoscope sky seen reflected in the glazed eyes of a beautifully nude young Alice attempting to imbibe the Red Queen's infamous pepper and potato soup… politely… followed of course by coffee and cigars. Their choice, not mine, and so be it.
These thoughts will continue from the shifted perspectives known by humans hosting a troubled CE… (as a best effort expose emulation)… in the forthcoming chapter "Vorpal Blade Gone Galumphing."
Chapter Eleven: Vorpal Blade Gone Galumphing
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.
Chapter Twelve: Second and Seven
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…"
#cE #colectiveEntity #colectiveEntities
Sir, I have been drinking and it's too late for me to look entirely thru, which I promise. So. Soon. If you want to check me out go to http://c-art.com. I have been thinking of a blog too ..
ReplyDeletehttp://www.c-art.com if I didn't type Ok.
ReplyDeleteNow into house meeting. Have you seen https://www.lightreading.com/mobile/5g/forget-5g-soon-skynet-will-rule-our-airwaves/a/d-id/754910
ReplyDeleteNo, can't say that I had. Gave it a quick read over, and went "hello Dolly..." Let an AI operate the cell phone systems paying its' taxes in voice-to-text transcriptions for the spy vs spy folks and hey, in sixty years it could sue for retirement benefits... it was a valid SSN after all, even if the number used once belonged to J. Edgar Hoover and was only on the books as cover for the maintenance costs. At that point I'd say the argument over CI is over, that one just proved itself.
DeleteYou write beautifully, a rarity these days. It’s late but I can hardly stop myself from reading one more well put together paragraph. You make a fairly boring topic sound fascinating. I don’t entirely agree with you but I like the way you think & reason. Just out of interest do you have an IT back ground or Arts Major?
ReplyDeleteThank you for the compliment! Most appreciated. Arts or IT? Neither, although I've worked a bit with both. I'm a self educated philosopher exploring the interface between the individual and the social attempting to define some causal framework to define the obviously symbiotic relationship between the two. I'll point at the fact that Academia maintains a firm and fiercely defended frontier between psychology and the other social sciences as solid evidence there is more there to be discovered than many would wish to become common knowledge.
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