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Why go so deep? Why talk about philosophy??
Many people are expressing feelings of "unraveling". The fabric of society, and their own ability to understand what's going on, and any grounded direction about "what is good?" A mass of humanity still clings to axiomatic hierarchical sense-making structures (religion) or stick their heads in the sand and pretend change isn't happening. Such people take on the risk that when the accumulated change is large enough, they will have no mechanisms to process it and land on their feet.
For those who have the intellectual curiosity or the broader situational awareness to know that the substrate of humanity is indeed shifting, they are left with an unsettled sense that they don't have the right tools to begin to perceive, integrate, and model all the change. If a noisy bar is blasting music from 10 different stations, you can tell there are notes and lyrics, but it's impossible to grasp on to any single thread of melody or even pick up a consistent bass beat. This breakdown of perception is a metaphor for our modern-day breakdown of philosophy.
I think most people cannot conceive what is even meant by "a breakdown of philosophy". In the Western world, we are taught basic concepts like "freedom", "rights", "property", "government", and because we grow up in a relatively stable environment where these concepts have coherent presentation in many walks of life, we take these philosophical constructs to be concrete reality, and not merely subjective constructs. In fact, so many of us live a life of such unviolent privilege that some very smart people will go so far as to claim certain aspects of human law are part of natural law. In reality, they have just lived in a environment where most people adhere to the painted lines on the pavement - and those lines were painted hundreds or thousands of years ago by philosophers.
But in this new virtual reality we've created, human law is natural law. Or rather, human have self-elected to participate in a "virtual" plane where natural law is malleable. Typically, the parameters of our online interactions are "frozen accident", laid down by grad students in the 1960s or by haphazard web developers in the 1990s and 2000s. They were almost never designed to optimize for human quality of life when deployed at scale.
The Matrix really is a perfect metaphor for our times. I have to admit I always found it a bit contrived that when you die in the Matrix, you also die in real life. But now given what I've seen with online interactions, I can believe it, but maybe it plays out differently: when you get ejected from the Matrix, or when a dominant majority of your self-identity is manifest in cyberspace, if that gets trashed, you unplug and lose all will to live. Your biological self continues, but you've died a social death; just as when your body dies, many of your cells will continue living for hours afterwards. ("AFK, soon to be RIP")
Thoughts to expand:
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Human communications have undergone a phase transition.
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Peak words; semantic density of the human cognitive field is at breakdown voltage
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Cannot model messages and text as artifacts on their own. The New Medium of communications that has emerged - and this is not strictly social media per se, but social media platforms best demonstrate the phenomenon - allows for messages to resonate with and be modulated by individuals (or systems) in realtime.
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Model of humans as bells with memory
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Cannot simply view humans as individual atoms, and then solve from bottom up (individualist rights) or from top down (collectivism). Instead, we must:
- acknowledge that the mesoscale, emergent dynamics of large groups (10x-1000x Dunbar) now dominate civilization
- understand the role of information technology in organizing, destroying those groups
- build up new philosophy around this recognition: that humans are not atomic individuals unto themselves, but cells in a dynamical soup of loosely-cohered organisms.
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Both #2 and #3 require a consideration of mereology as a foundational, first-class concern. Furthermore, in the face of the messy metaphysics of cyberspace and digital information, the need to adopt something like Four Dimensionalism becomes critical. We cannot continue to reason about the world by building a metaphysics around "static snapshots", and then approach understanding of dynamics by stringing them together with a timeline. Rather, we have to consider both temporal horizons as well as sampling frequency of phenomena in a holistic temporal metaphysics.
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Groups of people create their own consensus reality. In the first era of humanity, Reality was defined by consensus. In the second era, it was defined by models, prediction, and experiment; and models were needed in order to have Explicit Control. In the third era, we stop needing reality to be defined in a way that fits within people's heads, and simply immerse ourselves in an experiential Present, confident that the structures we've created will enable our collective patterns of behavior to converge on optimal actions.
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Sensemaking is not optional (draft piece in my Civ2.0 Evernote)
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Social Physics
- Trust and Intertrust
- Privacy and Identity
- Identity, Names, and the Social Field
Trust and human relationships are two very deep and rich topics. Trust is the foundational mass-energy that occupies and manifests in a social graph of humans. It is outside of this document's scope to deep-dive on Trust (and human relationships, and values). But fortunately, the common connotations of "trust" are generally good enough when we contemplate it in the context of communications technology.
Core components for humane networking, capable of giving rise to collective/emergent intelligence
Establishes an explicit metaphysics of what is real and not real in the context of a trust network.
Trust in such a network is the encapsulation of "settled risk". Generalized Credit.
As an aside, this "intertrust" phenomenon is also why cryptocurrencies based on blockchain are possible at all. One would not imagine suggesting blockchains replace, say, airplanes, or vitamins, or love. Why do people want to use it for money? See my blog post "An oversimplification of cryptocurrency".
Privacy gives the space for us to become our future selves (See this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/pwang/status/1148911531515621380)
Privacy is critical as part of the mechanism that the digital field lets give rise to identity. This is because the social field is intersubjective, and a lack of privacy means that what we believe about our selves cannot diverge from what others believe about us (and one step further: what we believe about others' beliefs about us). Without privacy, we have no space in which we can innovate and develop our future Selves. We have no space to think, imagine, dream, suffer, reflect, ...
Digital technologies have the unmatched, almost unimaginably powerful ability to destroy privacy in a single stroke.
We must advocate for strong privacy (and strong identity) protocols as the basis for a technologically enabled future.
Reflecting on the movie Spirited Away, it's interesting to note the mythical nature attached to the names of things. This is also present in the Earthsea novels, and in the Kingkiller Chronicles, and in many other fantasy novels.
The idea of a name and a shared name in particular is something that is so taken for granted in the modern-day as to not even be worth a mention. However if we really think about it, there is a lot of power there and it is the power of framing. The name of the thing anchors it and frames it in a way that is subtle and invisible and inescapable. There's a mystique that is real in referring to Voldemort as "He-who-must-not-be-named".
How a human society decides to arrange and organize the naming rights (and over what kinds of things) actually has a deep impact on the society. This is pretty viscerally obvious when it comes to things like the names of people and buildings and even sometimes maybe even abstract concepts. But when there is no shared value system or social context, simple conflicts in names can create mass confusion. Because all human expression - at least all modern languages - rely deeply and implicitly on a shared name space and a relatively ad hoc way of resolving simple divergences there. But with our communications moving to the internet, and with all of the wildly divergent communities and sub societies there, the very concept of a shared lexicon is starting to dissolve. It used to be cute when the Oxford dictionary would have to add entries for things like email or other technological inventions and things that arise from the internet. But so many modern words that we use in our sub societies really don't have standing to enter into the canonical lexicon for the language.
What then of the ideas and the sentiments that can only be really captured on the basis of those words? With new words we get new dialects, and with new languages we get new shared small spaces of ideas. By allowing these to diverge and grow like mushrooms are we setting ourselves up for fundamentally intractable problem?
Identity is the portion of the intersubjective field that you control
Control (or just the perception of it?? control is also intersubjective) is the key factor, at least for western mindsets. We elevate individual agency over virtually all else, and therefore our neuroses tend to stem from when that imperative of perspective runs counter to objective reality.
American moral systems are also tied, then, to this model of utter individual agency. Because an individual has control over themselves and their lives, then all success and all failure can be attributed to their individual performance.
One might humbly thank Providence for the opportunity to be successful, but if one is not successful, presumably due to the obstacles Providence has thrown in his way, then he still has a path to virtue, which is to (1) suffer the slings and arrows while (2) all he time re-affirming his faith in the same Almighty which is slinging arrows at him. To fail to do #2 is to opt out of the religious and moral system of the community, i.e. commit social suicide. To fail to do #1 is a sign of individual weakness, or worse, an abdication of your sense of
The social order defines "intimacy"
And intimacy is only the closest thing to our "self" (at least, the social dimension). There are other well defined zones of relations at varying distances.
In fact, society could be said to be "the field in which self-hood is a gradient", as opposed to a binary self/not-self world view. Liberalism, i.e. the assigning/ascribing of rights to other individuals, is one way to generate a social fabric which allows for a diversity of outcomes. [TODO: clarify “outcomes”] But it is not the only way.
A key point here is: Intimacy is subjective. And it’s possible to erode the possibility of intimacy for an individual, or within a society. For an individual, that erosion is typically rooted in an selfhood’s inability to contemplate vulnerability. For a society, that erosion is due to social norms which don’t permit the expression, between individuals, of vulnerability.
What are the failings of societies that lack intimacy? What are their vulnerabilities?