Sapiens? What do you mean, sapiens?

[pataphor]

As usual, I am not yet ready to write another post, however, trying to
raise the sanity waterline seems to require continuous effort, like
hosing water out of a leaky boat in order to keep it afloat. I'm only
trying to do my small part in this huge distributed effort of getting
us to a stage where people who are now silenced, because, you know, the
situation is that stupid that speaking out would only needlessly
endanger them whithout helping much, can start feeling a bit more
reassured that their efforts will not be in vain.

Or, maybe, if it's the case that I myself am rather lowering the
waterline in a kind of dunning kruger mistake, I'm very sorry and I
hope that even if posting in the most obscure and deserted niches of
the internet, my contributions are not unduly amplified by whoever or
whatever mechanism is used to forcibly combine them with watching ads.

The title of this post is partly inspired by the book 'sapiens' that I
am reading now, but don't take this as a review or a discussion of it,
I am only a few tens of pages in and all I can say for now is that
it is stimulating my imagination a lot, like how decentralized can we
possibly get and how much variation we are currently missing out on,
while at the same time I don't believe for a moment that a life of
hardship turns one into some kind of hyper dexterous big brained
athlete and natural philosopher. Like digging up roots all day kind of
turns your hands into something less fitting for fine art, or having to
traverse large distances by foot to find food or escape predators is
not conducive to creative action, on the contrary, long distance
walking, to me, feels more like a third kind of consciousness that is
not quite like being asleep, nor like being awake.

However I enjoy my walks, and certainly sportive activity can be a huge
boost for the good old brain, it's just that if one doesn't have the
right materials and tools to work with, and I mean both physical tools
and theories, nothing much seems to be able to come out of it anyway.

Of course it is very different if one combines these activities with
regular internet investigations, only in that case one also stumbles
upon lots and lots of completely stupid material, cleverly hidden
behind a veneer of intellectual shine. I don't want to sound
ungrateful, because it is just because of the mutual intellectually
stimulating conversation that we have any theories to work with, but I
think it is about time we clean up some particularly pernicious
misconceptions that hamper further progress.

To begin with, we have this discussion about correlations and whether
they can imply causation or not. The discussions about this are as
wide ranging as they farfetched and seldomly one sees someone writing
anything useful. The point is not whether there is causation or not,
the point is what is the pathway, the mechanism of action. Maybe the
causation is as obscure as the movements of some speedcubing robot
solving a scrambled rubik's cube in a few fractions of a second, after
all, humans don't have the same amount of short term memory and
therefore are limited to enacting plans of a more simple nature. By the
way, this seems to be the place to thank that person who wrote about
this, making it clear to me for the first time how much of a
disadvantaged position, compared to a computer, we are in, in that
respect. So the question of causation becomes, what kind of mechanism,
simple enough for humans to understand, lies behuind these phenomena?
And if at this point the reader would turn away and contemplate how much
more efficient their life could be if they had a god's eye viewpoint,
the memory and processing capacity to analyse it, that's fine with me
too, it's just that important a concept that it justifies leaving this
discussion here and exploring only that, at least for a while.

Now, to go further into the concept of causation, we have very
accomplished mathematical physicists behaving not much better than low
level programmers when confronted with dynamic typing systems for the
first time, like: "A pointer must always point to a variable of the same
type! Madness would result if we give up on that basic organizing
principle, the compiler would not be able to warn us for errors and our
whole continuous agile testing framework would go to hell, our souls
beyond salvation and our integrated development environment without
breakpoints." I am slighly paraphrasing here but the point is these
mathematicians seem unable to give up on the idea that there always is
some traceable or defineable history behind a state of affairs. Nothing
is further from the truth though, as for example a simple inspection of
a position in Conway's game of life can learn us: there are
multiple ways we could have arrived at that position (in general, I
won't, or need, to exclude the possibility of there being positions with
only one possible ancestor, as that seems to be rather the exception
than the norm), and without having some extra knowledge there is no way
to determine which was the case. And our universe seems to be just like
this, on the one hand if we go to the smaller and smaller scale our
knowledge seems to diffuse in a kind of quantum foam where the
uncertainty is kind of baked in because the act of measuring something
itself determines the outcome, like, ask one thing, and one gets some
answer that only is relevant for the situation that evolved because of
having asked that, ask another thing and one gets an anwer that applies
to people who have asked that, with there being no human intelligible
connection between those two different outcomes. It is as if a little
piece of metal is missing. And on the other hand, if we go to the
cosmic macro scale, lots of material is continuously falling over the
rim at the end of the universe, beyond our event horizon, forever
taking the information with it that could explain how things came to be
as they are now here in this later stage universe. It is as if our
dads are dying all the time, taking with them all their knowledge and
experience, without explaining to us why we are here and what went
before, and with them having been in the same situation with respect to
their parents, all up the historic ladder until we are back with the
happy nomads traversing the ancient evolutionary environment in a semi
dream state.

I said dad, but I should rightfully have said parents here, but it's
just that I remember my dad having ordered some painter to paint him
the house he grew up in, and even while acknowledging that it did not
quite look like the house he grew up in, he studied it daily in great
detail, immersed in some untraceable memories of the past. I never
understood this until a few years ago, like what use is it to dwell into
some fantasized memory if one has no indication that it is what really
happened, like was this the first sign of his dementia or something
similar. But now I understand him finally, for some things no one can
tell what really happened, for other things it doesn't really matter,
and for other things a useful fiction is a lot better than a sad memory
that is equally baseless. We can repeat the mantra of "in case of
ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess" as much as we want, but at
the same time we know that it's better to ask forgiveness instead of
permission if one wants to get things done in a situation without
complete information.

So we end up not only with different possible explanatory mechanisms
for things that occur on the same scale of abstraction, but more
importantly, with different magisteria at different scales, or with
different models of the world depending on which series of questions
one asked before. If this scares you like a pointer that doesn't know
what it's going to point at yet, remember that this also opens up a
world of possibilities, not the least one of them being the option to
escape the seemingly inescapable dominance of our corporate and
information technological overlords. Imagine that at all levels we can
start again by reinventing a past that equally well or better explains
how we got where we are now.

To end with a simple example and application of the concept, imagine
that even though we might have had exceptional people leading us in the
past, it by no means prevents them from leading us astray, as the
current course of certain programming languages seems to imply, by, for
example, leading protagonists joining search and advertising web
corporations. All the good they did by intellectually stimulating and
challenging their colleagues is now counteracted by setting such a bad
example in the end.

We apply our theory by stating that exploiting information
asymmetries for profit lies at the root of a capitalistic system where
we all collectively destroy the common trust, and end up with a system
where the best way to prove one is trustworthy is to brainlessly waste
cpu cycles and show hard to fake evidence of that. I imagine an
intelligent alien visiting our planet, taking one look at bitcoin, and
reversing course without a further thought, kind of in the same way
that we now have so many intelligent people who choose to stay silent,
so they are not roped up against their will into some brainless feudal
and hierarchical work system, where the people who disagree soon find
themselves without any resources to continue their existence, let alone
voice a protest.

P.
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'gotta pave the way'