Orgel's Second Rule states, "Evolution is cleverer than you are." This explains much.
Leslie Orgel was speaking primarily (or maybe only) about genetic evolution, so I may be misapplying his rule. But it does elegantly explain why so few people can see the extent to which they are embedded in and influenced by the sea of memes. If more people could see that we'd be halfway to liberating ourselves from the past. But the memes are stealthy.
A familiar example is somebody who believes an incredibly stupid religion. That is to say, some viewpoint other than mine, which is sane and right and sensible (or so I'm led to believe). Why can't they see how stupid their viewpoint is? As it happens, though, a large part of the doctrine evolved to prevent or obfuscate such questioning.
What, did I think their world-view was so vulnerable I could poke holes in it with mere logic? If it hadn't evolved appropriate defenses it wouldn't have survived. Who do I think I am?
It's easy to see the stealth in somebody else's viewpoint but not so easy to see it in ourselves. Indeed, as I discovered when I tried to popularize the word "antiprocess", you can show a person precisely what they are doing and most of them will still see it only in others.
The memeplexes are clever. They've been at this a lot longer than I have.
2011-09-05
The Churn That Thought It Invented Butter
A couple of days ago somebody asked me what I learned during my Sabattical. Without thinking (really, the best way for me to answer such questions) I responded, "That I am not separate". I have since had second thoughts (of course), but in fact I have never been able to encapsulate in a sound bite the realization that concluded my Sabbatical and wrought great changes in my outlook. I can say, though, that separateness (or lack thereof) was an important factor in the realization.
It seems to be a side-effect of our physical nature that we perceive ourselves as more separate than we are. On the one hand we are made of the same matter-energy and information as everything else. On the other hand, our perspective is always skewed — if only because of the way our senses work. For example, if I hold up my thumb and look around it at the horizon, my mighty digit can obscure an entire skyscraper. This is an artifact of perspective, not an actual feature of my thumb. Nonetheless, I can see the gnat gnawing at my thumb but cannot see greater tragedies in the skyscraper.
Every which way I look, my perception is skewed. If I look downwards in scale towards atoms it seems that they are supporting me and serve me. If I look upwards at higher levels of organization ... I see nothing. Now that seems peculiar, but from my perspective I'm still bigger than, say, the country in which I live. The country is a far-off, nebulous concept. I don't disbelieve in it, but it hardly seems as real as, say, my thumb.
I find this viewpoint to be characteristic of the culture that created me — the higher level of organization that created me. In other words, I have never been trained to see myself in those terms. Nobody has, in fact. At no point in the past have humans or other animals had an urge to see themselves systemically. It seems clear that we need to do that now — what with ecological and other disasters looming — but the global perspective is only gradually seeping into the culture. Perhaps the generation that grew up with the Internet will be better able to see their lack of separation.
But what does that lack of separation denote? The ego-bashing answer is that we aren't anywhere near as individual as we tell ourselves we are. Or, to put it another way, we're not as individual as we've been told to tell ourselves we are. That's particularly true in North America, with its celebration of individuality. With comical paradoxicality, almost everybody believes it.
—————
It is an interesting exercise to review last night's dream and determine where the elements of that dream came from. In my case I can usually detrmine the disparate events of the previous day that are represented in mutated form in the dream. In a similar way, it is an interesting exercise for me to look at any action I take or opinion I hold and determine what outside me contributed to or created it.
It is, in fact, hard to find anything free of the influence. Every word I write here derives from a life path that was influenced by others, expressed in a language passed down by my ancestors.
Most people do not realize how hard it is to jump out of their cultural flow and truly be a separate individual. They might point to somebody like Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein and say, "See? He was ahead of his time!" Well, yes, they were ahead of their time, just as a school of fish will inevitably have a few fish near the front edge. But Leonardo did not invent quantum mechanics. And Einstein's discoveries were demonstrably derivable from contemporary subjects of discussion; if he hadn't come up with his theories, then somebody else (like Hilbert) would have within a few years.
If one wants to find examples of really strange thinkers it might be better to consider examples like Turing or Gödel or Cantor. But it's simply the case that in any random set of events we can expect some outliers. Toss ten dice a thousand times and there will probably be a few surprising rolls. I daresay, though, that those three gentlemen probably felt rather separate. Indeed, from what I know of their lives they really did feel like they were separate. But they were information-churners, the same as the rest of life. They merely chanced to be very good at some particular aspect of churning, just as a great athlete is good at churning the information that defines his or her physique.
Perhaps I am not making myself clear. Probably not. It may not matter, though, because upcoming generations will be better able to see the One-ness.
It seems to be a side-effect of our physical nature that we perceive ourselves as more separate than we are. On the one hand we are made of the same matter-energy and information as everything else. On the other hand, our perspective is always skewed — if only because of the way our senses work. For example, if I hold up my thumb and look around it at the horizon, my mighty digit can obscure an entire skyscraper. This is an artifact of perspective, not an actual feature of my thumb. Nonetheless, I can see the gnat gnawing at my thumb but cannot see greater tragedies in the skyscraper.
Every which way I look, my perception is skewed. If I look downwards in scale towards atoms it seems that they are supporting me and serve me. If I look upwards at higher levels of organization ... I see nothing. Now that seems peculiar, but from my perspective I'm still bigger than, say, the country in which I live. The country is a far-off, nebulous concept. I don't disbelieve in it, but it hardly seems as real as, say, my thumb.
I find this viewpoint to be characteristic of the culture that created me — the higher level of organization that created me. In other words, I have never been trained to see myself in those terms. Nobody has, in fact. At no point in the past have humans or other animals had an urge to see themselves systemically. It seems clear that we need to do that now — what with ecological and other disasters looming — but the global perspective is only gradually seeping into the culture. Perhaps the generation that grew up with the Internet will be better able to see their lack of separation.
But what does that lack of separation denote? The ego-bashing answer is that we aren't anywhere near as individual as we tell ourselves we are. Or, to put it another way, we're not as individual as we've been told to tell ourselves we are. That's particularly true in North America, with its celebration of individuality. With comical paradoxicality, almost everybody believes it.
—————
It is an interesting exercise to review last night's dream and determine where the elements of that dream came from. In my case I can usually detrmine the disparate events of the previous day that are represented in mutated form in the dream. In a similar way, it is an interesting exercise for me to look at any action I take or opinion I hold and determine what outside me contributed to or created it.
It is, in fact, hard to find anything free of the influence. Every word I write here derives from a life path that was influenced by others, expressed in a language passed down by my ancestors.
Most people do not realize how hard it is to jump out of their cultural flow and truly be a separate individual. They might point to somebody like Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein and say, "See? He was ahead of his time!" Well, yes, they were ahead of their time, just as a school of fish will inevitably have a few fish near the front edge. But Leonardo did not invent quantum mechanics. And Einstein's discoveries were demonstrably derivable from contemporary subjects of discussion; if he hadn't come up with his theories, then somebody else (like Hilbert) would have within a few years.
If one wants to find examples of really strange thinkers it might be better to consider examples like Turing or Gödel or Cantor. But it's simply the case that in any random set of events we can expect some outliers. Toss ten dice a thousand times and there will probably be a few surprising rolls. I daresay, though, that those three gentlemen probably felt rather separate. Indeed, from what I know of their lives they really did feel like they were separate. But they were information-churners, the same as the rest of life. They merely chanced to be very good at some particular aspect of churning, just as a great athlete is good at churning the information that defines his or her physique.
Perhaps I am not making myself clear. Probably not. It may not matter, though, because upcoming generations will be better able to see the One-ness.
2011-09-03
Scienterrific Mysticism
It is not obvious to me that humans can transcend the material universe; indeed my intuition is that this is not possible and indeed the very concept is meaningless. Let me illustrate.
A human individual is such because of the train of associated memories. Yet to create a memory one must perform a physical process that increases entropy. Entropy defines the arrow of time, and time (as Einstein showed us) is wrapped up with space. Space is wrapped up with (or defined by) matter. The illusion of our individuality is a material thing.
Any transcendence would have to take place apart from time, space and matter. But where can this take place? Awareness, pure and unsullied, has struck religious thinkers as a candidate. This is suspect, since awareness is typically about or of something. That is to say, something else.
Yet in the absence of "something else" there is no information. If there is utter unity there is no information because there is nothing to be relative to something else. Information cannot exist without some form of individuation or separation. Mystics of the past have seen this, though they used different terms to say so.
To the extent that we are mere instantiations — made of information — we cannot transcend our substrate. For example, if our universe is resident on a super-dimensional computer (which, some have "proven", is highly likely), then everything we know or can know is fundamentally wrong. The most we can do is guess at the nature of the level above. Indeed, we cannot know how many levels are above us.
Mystics have seen all this, though of course they did not use computers as an example. It seems to me that Kaballah's "Tree of Life" is an attempt to illustrate all this. Of course, like most such statements (including, in my opinion, those of Jesus) it was co-opted and twisted by those who came after.
So where does that leave us? If transcendence is impossible for the individual, what's next? Well, a dog does not know that she is a dog. She just is a dog. Perhaps we could unlearn something from that.
A human individual is such because of the train of associated memories. Yet to create a memory one must perform a physical process that increases entropy. Entropy defines the arrow of time, and time (as Einstein showed us) is wrapped up with space. Space is wrapped up with (or defined by) matter. The illusion of our individuality is a material thing.
Any transcendence would have to take place apart from time, space and matter. But where can this take place? Awareness, pure and unsullied, has struck religious thinkers as a candidate. This is suspect, since awareness is typically about or of something. That is to say, something else.
Yet in the absence of "something else" there is no information. If there is utter unity there is no information because there is nothing to be relative to something else. Information cannot exist without some form of individuation or separation. Mystics of the past have seen this, though they used different terms to say so.
To the extent that we are mere instantiations — made of information — we cannot transcend our substrate. For example, if our universe is resident on a super-dimensional computer (which, some have "proven", is highly likely), then everything we know or can know is fundamentally wrong. The most we can do is guess at the nature of the level above. Indeed, we cannot know how many levels are above us.
Mystics have seen all this, though of course they did not use computers as an example. It seems to me that Kaballah's "Tree of Life" is an attempt to illustrate all this. Of course, like most such statements (including, in my opinion, those of Jesus) it was co-opted and twisted by those who came after.
So where does that leave us? If transcendence is impossible for the individual, what's next? Well, a dog does not know that she is a dog. She just is a dog. Perhaps we could unlearn something from that.
In Man's Image
By the time I was 18 years old it was evident to me that groups of people behave in a unitary fashion. Every group I had been in — the province of Québec, Jehovah's Witnesses, my computer club — had an identity and a behaviour. Moreover, each group — each TSOTL, as I came to call it — protected its integrity like any other living being.
For they were indeed living entities. We no more see this than cells see that they are supporting a human. Here's a poem I wrote in 1999, entitled Cell Fish:
Consider the mitochondrion
Toiling away inside the cell
He comes to be, he does his job
He lives then dies, and all is well
The little beastie, working hard
Was happy in his way
Without delusions 'bout his place
He never thought to break away
Of course, his path was not a choice
From reasoning derived
Just as well! If he chose out
He wouldn't have survived.
So how do humans see the next level up? As gods, typically. What else could they be? And indeed, each such god had a spirit. Its pneuma moved through the lungs of every adherent to the cause.
All this was clear by the time I was 20. Yet it took me nearly 30 years to realize my place in this system — to see that I was just as much a product of it as anybody else. I was like a fish that didn't know it was wet (or "a fish"). I dove into the world of Skepticism, trying to find a scientific way out, but even science couldn't blind me to the truth that my individuality was a happenstantial construct.
And the battle goes on. Perhaps that's why I'm writing this.
For they were indeed living entities. We no more see this than cells see that they are supporting a human. Here's a poem I wrote in 1999, entitled Cell Fish:
Consider the mitochondrion
Toiling away inside the cell
He comes to be, he does his job
He lives then dies, and all is well
The little beastie, working hard
Was happy in his way
Without delusions 'bout his place
He never thought to break away
Of course, his path was not a choice
From reasoning derived
Just as well! If he chose out
He wouldn't have survived.
So how do humans see the next level up? As gods, typically. What else could they be? And indeed, each such god had a spirit. Its pneuma moved through the lungs of every adherent to the cause.
All this was clear by the time I was 20. Yet it took me nearly 30 years to realize my place in this system — to see that I was just as much a product of it as anybody else. I was like a fish that didn't know it was wet (or "a fish"). I dove into the world of Skepticism, trying to find a scientific way out, but even science couldn't blind me to the truth that my individuality was a happenstantial construct.
And the battle goes on. Perhaps that's why I'm writing this.
Memes Versus Genes
It amazes me how infrequently the phrase “memes versus genes” (or vice-versa) comes up with solid hits on Google. Even before I'd heard of memes I used software (Diplo, the original Pyroto Mountain BBS, etc.) to experiment with my dawning realization that memes compete against genes (and vice-versa) for the substrate of replication.
The Domestication of Animals
“You know what really drains my energy?” I asked. “My mind returning to the same thoughts over and over and over again.”
“Did you suffer some kind of trauma?” he inquired.
“What? Oh, no, not particularly.”
“Are these negative thoughts, though?”
“No, no. It's not like that. Some are negative. But not all.”
“The rest are positive?”
“Well, mostly. Helpful. Encouraging. Constructive! Yes.”
He nodded. “I see.”
“Why does this happen? Why can't my mind shut up?”
“Oh, that's simple. You're crazy.”
“What? Most of the world is like this! How can that be crazy?”
“Did you think you invented this all by yourself?”
“Did you suffer some kind of trauma?” he inquired.
“What? Oh, no, not particularly.”
“Are these negative thoughts, though?”
“No, no. It's not like that. Some are negative. But not all.”
“The rest are positive?”
“Well, mostly. Helpful. Encouraging. Constructive! Yes.”
He nodded. “I see.”
“Why does this happen? Why can't my mind shut up?”
“Oh, that's simple. You're crazy.”
“What? Most of the world is like this! How can that be crazy?”
“Did you think you invented this all by yourself?”
As a Child
“What does it mean to be as a child?” I asked.
“When you are out strolling on a fine day,” he said, “you are in a world of your thoughts about the world. It appears that you have rarely been in the real world since you were a child.”
“That might be so,” I responded.
“One day, perhaps when you are out walking in the sunshine, you will suddenly realize that it is so.”
“And then I will be as a child?”
“Then you will marvel at the realization. It is the same trap.”
“But if I see through that trap?”
“You will congratulate yourself for having seen through it. That, too, is the same trap.”
“Is it even possible to be as a child?”
“Is that something you really, truly want?”
“Yes! Yes, it is.”
“Then no, it is not possible. It is the same trap.”
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