Meanwhile, as you know gentle reader, I've lately worked up the meaning of mind; what mind means. That lovely, and possibly mostly false sense of 'understanding' when we match up conceptual with physical reality. (It's only false because we inhabit such a small sliver of, reality) Both conceptual and physical are real, I insist, and both are primordial. Meaning that mind is also primordial, but can't be real without the physical.
So I'd like to extend my set of metaphors, which aren't properly metaphors, since I do believe that I can bring my metaphorical tenor down to earth in words. We'll see. I'm very trying.
Many thinkers, including my old friend and whipping boy Benjamin Bratton, declare that we will know civilization, say elsewhere in our cosmos, by the distinction of its shapes from nature. We see circles and squares that are too mathematically consistent and we know we're in the presence of one-time intelligence, even though it might have passed.
The capitalist supposition is that this process of realization of conceptual reality involves invention and that the invented real thing becomes a kind of property. Well, not the thing, but the idea of the thing. Our politics are that convoluted. Economics is not just the dismal science, it's become a religion.
In actual reality, there is no invention. Only discovery, since the thing realized has always been there. There is no way to imagine the invention of an automobile without the prior realizations of all its historical and already conventional parts. But an actualized automobile was always "there" by the very possibility of its being, to paraphrase Picasso.
In the world as I imagine it, time is a dimension equivalent to the other three. It's not that the future already exists (since "already" puts thing in a directional temporal "space" but rather that a car already exists as a possibility, albeit one which may never be realized.
The supposition that humans invent elevates the process of the realizations of conceptual and mostly mathematical reality to be the apex quality of humans and human-like others. The intelligent ones. Implicitly, invention denigrates morality. It is not the job of the inventor to dictate where and how his invention gets used.
Our emotional responses are as primitive as the stuff our own archaeologists uncover. Quaint. Dead. But emotions are the actual primitives of intelligence. Without emotive impulse, nothing would get done. What we call invention is more like the chance process of discovery. Our trouble is that we don't have a coherent understanding of chance.
Our world now is littered with "forever chemicals", so-called because they exist outside of natural means to deal with them. One new one I read about today is called TFA, and ironically enough, its increase may be directly related to our very well-meaning efforts to heal the ozone layer. "We don't yet know" how harmful it might be to humans, though in any case knowing would come too late since, as the article says, "everybody's drinking it."
We are rather addicted to the notion that we can only fix these things by the same intelligent processes which generated them. The master's tools and all. Idiots. We are very clever idiots, but it's our supposition that human intelligence is all and only the application of logic and problem-solving, ideally stripped of emotion, guesswork, tossing of dice, and such-like.
We even suppose that our human intelligence can be aped by machines. Now I'm curious about Roger Penrose and his purported discovery of how microtubules might instantiate quantum effects in the brain (conspicuously not the mind), but I remain skeptical that such a mechanistic explanation is necessary. I also don't quite see how this might explain consciousness, unless one is simply positing that it is the quality of life - of nature, if you will - to be connected to all other life, which of course it is.
It is surely reassuring that machines will never be intelligent, since they are pure mechanical logic, and when the machines are computers they are cut off by definition of 0/1 yes/no logic, no matter how complex the neural networks might become.
I want to know what would moral intelligence look like to an outlander archaeologist, since clearly our sort of "intelligence" ends rather sooner than later. We have yet even to know, never mind to celebrate moral intelligence, religion being but creative fiction anymore. One measure may be our churches' own descent. We have actualized conceptualized reality now across virtually the entire planet, and the results are naturally both obvious and inevitable. The absence of moral intelligence will be obvious by civilization's end, no matter how elaborate or impressive the artifacts might be.
"I'm sorry, but life begins at conception" sayeth the dorked-out evangelical. What could that possibly even mean? Conception is a scientific notion based on conjugation of sperm with egg. Why place your magic God there? Science or religion, Martha, science or religion?
I trace these results to greed, plain and simple. Gluttony and likely every one of the other deadly sins. It's the economic arrangements which have lowered us to our lowest common moral denominator. The religion of capitalism's magic pricing computer, as Cory Doctorow sets out so beautifully here and elsewhere.
Sure technology seems to make life more comfortable, but there still must be some difference between the pattens of built wood and rock and maybe metal, which don't persist forever and those of more durable structures which do. We'll take our comforts in plastic, thank you very much, and damn the future, since it can't be mine.
Here's a typical puzzle: Cars are getting bigger and deadlier, while pedestrian deaths are soaring. For each life saved by being surrounded by a massive SUV, twelve lives are lost in the smaller cars that smaller lives can afford. In our world, with our economic religion, and our increasingly mob-like so-called democratic behaviors, we can't even imagine solving that problem.
Fossils or artifacts, which are more durable? We can't know since artifacts are so very recent. In either case life turned dead still resembles life, and we'll know it when we see it. But a nautilus shell, despite its near mathematical ideation still won't be mistaken for intelligent life's traces. Just another extinct species by the time we're done.
I've worried this issue to death by way of my absurd and rather silly obsession with sailboats. Once upon a time, I did purchase, which is to say got hold of, an old wooden sailboat which had been adulterated with a forever polypropylene sheath, embedded in forever epoxy. I wanted to sail and so I compromised my morals, and likely my liver, by reapplying the stuff over my extensive repairs to the wood.
We all still suppose that the plastic boat represents the more advanced civilization.
I fretted that red lead paint was in the process of being disallowed as a preservative belowdecks, and oil paints for places above. And what about the gasoline auxiliary? But boy oh boy that wooden boat did sail in most any condition despite my naive helmsmanship.
Now I've capitulated entirely to fiberglass, and gotten myself dirtied all over again in the process of my final repair of my final boat, as I must and do declare. Meanwhile reading about Shackleton's Endurance and The good ship Wager, wondering all the while about why these prototypes for Mars-bound (let us pray) Elon Musk are so celebrated for their questing. I understand Einstein's quest, ill-fated though it became for its unfinished nature. I don't understand climbing Everest at all.
Music is the loveliest instance of man's conceptualizing physical reality. Sailing is right up there. Powerboating tends more in the direction of first person shooter gaming, but that's just my taste. How ironic that we've polarized ourselves politically over matters of style rather than substance. My military-industrial complex is your deep state and so on.
Anyhow, one manifestation of technology, this digital stuff, is very directly related to the accelerating mess that we've engendered here on earth. What will outlandish archaeologists discover to explain our demise. What is our fault, and what would be these visitors' success from which we've descended. (of course, I have no expectation or even any way to conceptualize these outlandish physical visitations.) What visits me is always meaningful coincidence, which I still have no way to explain or to explain away. I mean, it's clear enough to me myself and I for sure. But I don't know how to make it so for you, dear reader.
Technology, as we deploy it, is mostly a pump upward for wealth. To be a beneficiary, you must be morally naive and irrationally attached to being rich. I call it irrational simply because that level of pleasure-seeking is about as vacant as what you might experience in an oxygen-depleted state of mind on the pinnacle of Everest. Death is still, however you arrive there. The smaller the boat, the greater the sailing pleasure if you ask me. Like music, there are peaks an valleys without the promise of proximate death.
What a grotesque misuse Trump made when he applied the 'super-predator' moniker to a bunch of hapless black kids. The term is properly meant for folks like Trump himself, or Bezos or Gates or all of the Paypal (Wars) Mafia. These people are predators against life itself, so in the thrall of secular materialism are they all. They don't even notice the digital divide, and I'm not talking about the social divide. I'm talking about on/off reality which divorces itself from felt reality.
Most of us remain blind to the ways that we exploit others. We are blind to lo the many ways that we could actually live in a peaceable kingdom. Well, not a kingdom, but you know what I mean. A peaceable democracy. We'd need a new way to understand economy for sure. Market economy is fine up to a certain scale. Beyond that we need government, in the same way that a steam engine does. Otherwise we fly apart.
Our artifacts should look more like spiders webs and seashells, right? Were we to stay alive. The music of nature evidenced by a lived beauty which transcends even those lovely physical embodiments of conceptual reality. Spiders' webs and seashells. Kindness to one another of a sort to lift literature from mindless cinema. The reality of Alice Munro rather than that of Tom Clancy. Stand down our imperial military. The bad guys are better than we are anymore.
We won't awaken in time, which makes me glad for my age. Death be not proud, but still . . . I've earned mine. Sort of. Too lazy to make a difference, right? I wish that I did know how to write. Too lazy to learn.
Well, I'm going sailing. There's little enough wind that my robotic autopilot would let me sleep. Given how little I sleep at night, I should worry about what the automatic worker might run me into as I doze off. To sleep perchance. The dreaming awakens me.
Lovely sail, thank you!
I return to advertisements for AI helpers while I try to become interested in watching the Olympics. Where are all those weird sports? I don't care anymore about gymnastics or soccer or swimming, even though that was once my sport when I looked like Mark Spitz.
These AI ads show hard working minority class workers, avidly calling on whatever Google calls it's AI bot helper. Their keyboard pounding is almost sweat inducing, and the look of victory sincere. The one I hate the most is where a young aspirant athlete's father wants AI to help her write a letter to her heroine. Really? That's how we're going to get attention? By writing what literally everyone will write?
And those vague assurances that we can level the human language-based class distinctions by granting universal access to what makes the hyper-wealthy even wealthier. Because this stuff - free to you and me - doesn't just violate what we once meant by anti-trust. It utterly erases the meaning of price. Gone even the religion of capitalism, though none should mourn that.
We celebrate predatory intelligence. What would you call it when a pile of Wall Street hedgerow clippings fills shelves with stuff to undercut local retail, all made-in-whatever-China-might-mean at the moment for less cost than any local craftsperson could possibly meet. That's how poverty-addicted WalMart got its start. We celebrate the machine intelligence of our young relatives when they succeed in digital disruption.
And we don't even realize that the various sorts of bitcoin are gigantic Ponzi schemes since the government has been bamboozled by the same hand-waving tech woo-woo which made Elon so wealthy. Call the banks ol' fashioned Paypal, and you'll find plenty of would-be regulators happy to shoo you in.
These mega-wealthy are all gamer predators on their fellow human beings. We know this stuff is world-ending, but we don't know what to do about any of it. Now we have this catchphrase 'global warming' so that we can imitate the sense of having a grip on what's wrong.
Guess what? We don't.
Well, listen to me. I have a theory. A cosmological theory of intelligence, if you will. But you won't. You're all what that goofy hate-mongering bishop somebodyorother calls secular materialists, or something like that. He's not wrong. Most of us are that. He thinks we know our enemy, like we're an army or something. He thinks whole gangs of secular materialists are out to destroy the church, as though the church has much of anything right lately. They seem not to need enemies, Pogo.
I know one Church whose condoning of kiddy-diddly has forced it to maximize the value of its earthy estate by hiring the world's most expensive mergers and acquisitions law firm to defend its earthly institutional form from going the way of all flesh along with its congregations which, of course, aren't identical to its lovely buildings.
I am an amateur cosmologist, of course. I'm right up there with theologians, except that I haven't sold out to the totalizing academy. I'd like to, but nobody's buying. Anyhow, I don't have the right kind of mind for academics, though it's not for lack of trying.
I like Bernardo Kastrup's theorizing OK, but his lazy usage of such terms as 'the screen of perception' which is identical to the bizarre notion of interiority for subatomic particles from Federico Faggin, whose thinking is in affine relation to Kastrup's, reveals almost everything that's flawed with analytical idealism.
In a way, my complaint is that they've replace one monism - that it's all material and discoverable - with another - that it's all mind. By disposition and a little training I'm more of a yin/yang cosmologist which is, by far, not the same thing as a mind/body dualist. Thank God, we've gotten beyond that particular silliness, apologies Descartes. Dualism is timeless, while yin/yang is always in motion.
Almost by definition those within the thrall of analytical idealism are also blind to the dangers of digital reality-replacement trends. They don't seem to mind or care that digital reality is, I'd say by definition, cut off from lived reality. Which means that they have a very flawed notion about what it is in which mind consists. Mind without body is as absurd as mind apart from body. Digital attempts this, and our totalized destruction entails. This is not as complicated as we make it.
I remember from before the days when Eric Schmidt became a total troll, and hated Bill Gates for his totalizing monopolizing super-predation against any and all potential rivals, including especially Novell which conveniently fell upon its self-forged sword. I too was enthralled. I am enthralled no longer.
I wish that I could live to see intelligence redistributed to local, along with the return of local newspapers (in whatever form) and the death of social media, and any media which elevates super-stars beyond the rest of us, even though they can't hold a candle to local coffee house performances.
We have to end superpredation first, and then global warming and all the rest will take care of itself. Just add water.
There are so many ways to accomplish this without political revolution. Tax it to death for starters, but an even simpler starting place would be to outlaw what gets laughably called creative destruction. Meaning that nobody gets to undercut local businesses by using money clout from afar.
Fix the price of healthcare, meaning consistency and transparency no matter who's paying, and you don't even need socialized medicine. The market will fix itself, keeping in mind that inelastic demand requires a different model than the capitalism of industrial production. Public utilities, including especially Internet, require governmental regulation, as does, certainly, healthcare.
We've managed, grotesquely, to create elastic consumer models for healthcare to the extent that the poor - the dispossessed - die while the wealthy can buy skinny. Most of us are stretched just to buy a roof over our head and food to eat. It is still alive in my memory when this just wasn't so.
It's funny. Bernardo Kastrup won't talk to anyone except publicly, which is perfectly understandable. I don't wish to expose myself either, though it would be trivial enough for anyone to follow the breadcrumbs back to me if direct personal contact were desired. It's not like I'm any kind of public personality. Heck, I'm not even sure that I'm a private personality.
I just happen to be cosmologically correct. I've tried my whole life to disprove my basic theory, and I can't. I'll keep trying, but what if I'm right? What if I die and nobody knows what I'm trying to tell?
Well, I trust that the world is lots bigger than I, and that the truth will out, as it always does. But we sure do act dumb at the moment.
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