The Long Delay

Human history has a long arc, but a relatively short tipping point towards the illusion of control.  We were for nearly unimaginable expanses of time and space a barely connected species roaming the earth, leaving slight traces in earthy pigment of hands, animals and dreams upon the rocks of our paths and the cave walls of our temporary dwellings.  We were not dominant, mass-farming, tool wielding empires - we were nomads and temporary players in a grand kaleidoscope of Earth.  Our existence was never guaranteed day to day nor over the centuries.

This changed rather rapidly and without some divine intervention - the blind watchmaking of natures evolution accidentally favored homo sapiens.  We happened onto fattened and readily plantable wheat in soil freshly fertile from melting ice ages giving rise to agriculture and related activities.  We relatively quickly took deep advantage of the situation (multiple times independently across the globe).  Agriculture and animal husbandry provided all the obvious advantages for survival like reliable food sources, ability to stay put, deep energy stories, safety and time for knowledge seeking.  The key stroke though was in being able to delay consequences. 

Long Delay entered the human enterprise for the likely the first time.  We were able to delay starvation through reliable, storable harvests.  We were able to build up settlements, trade routes, currency and complicated economic exchange, and, ultimately, we could "plan" for the future.  The idea of A Human Future had deep consequences for our belief systems - that is, our association of what happened in the world and why and how we were part of it.  Without an idea of a future, as realized by reliably imagining one and living to see it realized, there was no sense in having the belief of destiny nor dominion nor property.  A world without delay and of only immediate consequences is one outside of time and outside of storing up - storing up resources, storing up frustrations, storing up weaponry, storing up ideas.    In a nomadic, temporary world - to store is to encumber and to encumber is to be too slow to keep on.

In almost all accounts of big, long history agriculture and its resultant consequences is reverently viewed for all that it enabled.  The great spread of human civilization - its tooling, its trading, its Metal Ages, its science, its culture.  While these are all interesting and complex phenomena, they aren't necessarily good nor are they necessarily bad.  They certainly have produced an incredible proliferation of humanity for many tens of thousands of years.  And they've also come with extreme consequences for humans and non-humanity alike. 

The ability to delay consequences and harbor resources for science and tools and culture also provides those resources for warring, tribalism, weaponry, radicalized ideologies.  Oddly the delayed consequences have a downside that more false beliefs/non-true ideas about how reality works can fester unchecked.  For a Neolithic person a non-true assessment of a situation would likely carry grave consequences.  In the modern world, where most immediate needs for survival are assumed, especially in the West, a person can carry extremely non-true ideas about how reality works and what their place is in the world for decades.  And this is at the root of our current confused and violent situation.

Humans have warmed the planet possibly passed the point of being able to reverse course before there are dire consequences for humans and non-humans.  Humans have killed of an incredible number of species before they knew those species even existed.  Humans cure illness and disease and pests only to unleash unintended stronger adversarial viruses, bacteria and pests.  Humans craft new computational tools and methods with almost no thought to possible downstream uses.  Humans social and civil organization is now dominated by the wealthiest even in its most praised form of Democracy. 

Often all these pessimistic observations are rebuffed with the 100 year old idea of "Creative Destruction."  That is, eventually we end up solving all these things and this is just the natural course of a free market of progress.  It is also constantly remarked that we live in the lowest violence era in human history.  These rebuttals are really just more consequence of Long Delays.  Most of us do not live to see the consequences of these complex contingency chains we set in motion.  We are never put to task for our false predictions, category errors, and misassociation blunders.

Our religions, all the major monotheistic ones, are all about pushing consequences into the "next life."  Our popular moral philosophies typically justify various activities on the rather weak argument about doing it "for our children."  We insure, amortize, capital expense, socially secure, in-debt, mortgage for generations into the future.    All done because we've falsely assumed (or at least not proven to be absolutely true) that somehow, some way it all works out.  We can't even define what that working out would be except within our own delayed, selfish terms - does each of our own families and our own heritage and our own way of life carry on. 

We do not live in a less violent time - we have pushed the violence into the future and out of immediate human physicality.  We've hidden our brutality of this world in our technology and our obsessions with new media.  The most popular video game on the planet is Call of Duty - multiple billions of dollars in revenue.  As our world virtualizes more and more how will we all distinguish the violence in that reality from real violence?  We've ravaged our oceans with pollution and heat and they are rising.  We've fracked the Earth into earthquakes in middle America.  A huge chunk of the Wests GDP goes towards weaponizing - not education and end of life care.  Our sense of identity and place in this world has gone haywire - racism and sexism is still rampant. That terrorism still works is a proof point.  Terror doesn't need thousands of beheadings - just a few and a lot of YouTube views.  Militaries don't need millions of troops in lines razing each other down, just thousands joystick controllers flying drones.  Violence evolved in the resource of delay we provide it.

What repugnant, bizarre thread ensnares almost all of us in these violent delayed consequences?  Shame.  We are all shaming each other for not responding to the same consequences.  The delayed consequences act like a microphone and speaker in the shrieking feedback loop.  The complexity of delayed abuse is doubling back and echoing on top.  We can't cure all suffering, so please cure mine.  We shame each other into more mental abuse of ourselves so that we are incapacitated.  In this shame we trigger the worse natures of ourselves - we lash out in the dark fog of delayed consequences.  We hit anything in front of us we can just to feel something now, feel anything now.  We are ashamed all those future plans and stored up resources didn't real free us as we assumed and passed on.  We are ashamed to be ashamed - so we still treat different skin less worthy unable to admit our shame.

The arc of human history is long but most of it was before we began our short descent into delayed awareness. And here it is.  The only hope. To be here now.  To recognize now, not in the delayed future that isn't yours nor mine, we were wrong.  We will always be wrong.  When we decide we have answers or we decide to store more than what is needed for now - we wrong something else that has just as much right to existence as we do.  Our shameful fight for the righteous, controllable future is what destroys the now for us and the future for others.

Resources for further consideration:

The Ascent of Man, J. Brownoski

The Origin of the Species, Darwin

Sex, Time and Power, Leonard Shlain

Guns, Germs and Steel, J. Diamond

Ishmael, D. Quinn

30,000 Years of Art, Phaidon

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (movie), W. Herzog

Between The World and Me, T. Coates

The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou

The Silence of Animals, J. Gray

Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson

Beyond Freedom and Dignity, BF Skinner

Plato at the Googleplex, R Goldstein

I Am A Strangeloop, D. Hofstader

Better Angels of Our Nature, S Pinker

Making Money, O. Berg

Property is Theft, Proudhon

The Blind Watchmaker

The Selfish Gene, R Dawkins

anything by Martha Nussbam

and about a thousand other resources.  I borrow language and ideas from all of them, perhaps, occasionally adding something new.

To Be Or Not To Be

Timeless reality marches on carelessly smearing existence upon itself.  Humans have been at war with nature and themselves for at least as long as there were enough humans to consider their own survival.  Transcendence hasn't come and won't come without a total absolution of what humans have come to define as humanity - the very notion of humans is one of dominance, manifest destiny, borders, dominion, mastery - ultimately to be Human is to actively Stake Claim Over Existence.

The cruel, thoughtless stroke of evolution was accidentally mutating a species with a biological advantage suited to terraforming. Humanity is a species who long ago deluded itself into believing its selfish survival depends on its ability to transform the world, not be transformed by it.  The selfish gene, in total success, morphs into the selfish species - a species that seeks its own survival at all costs.  So repugnant the thought, it is never uttered in even non-polite company -  that is... the Species As It Is Today Is Perhaps Not Perfect To Rule The Planet and All Planets.  Humanity always builds the metaphorical ark and loads the existence it collectively believes is correct.  And in this ark humanity remains largely unchanged, rarely aware, attempting to stack the deck in its short range physical favor - to defeat nature by being above it.  And to what purpose?  what end?  other than, that's how it must be.

To be, or not to be!  That really is the question.  The selfish species has almost always chosen Not To Be.  Humanity chooses Not To Be in concert with the nature and the purposeless, yet soulful tapestry of existence.  It chooses Not To Be a medium of existence and chooses To Be a raging deity building up its own existence at the destruction existence.  Humanity Stakes Claim by unstaking everything else.

Blasphemy!  Nihilism!  Those are the thoughts of many who will read this.  Hater of life!  Hater of existence!  Which, of course, is completely the anti-thesis of a position of restraint, of an observant and meditative non-position.  A meditative position is one of perpetual openness and one of non-believing, non-truth, non-brand, non-ideology, non-decisions, non-human.  "Non" is the scary part to humans, particularly those humans raised in a Western and/or a religious doctrine of any kind.  The entire idea of civilization, personhood, society, intelligence, religion is a reification of Humanity as a fundamental thing of the universe.  This is the biggest, most fateful delusion of all.

It's near impossible to break free from Humanity As The Source of Existence.  Probably so improbable this break in absolute doctrine humanity will accidentally but totally complete its program - humanity has already crafted the necessary tools of the ultimate Terraform: distributed ledgers, virtual reality and generative manufacturing.  Humanity as a physical species is now completely unnecessary, so total its staking claim over reality.  And then there's this other staking claim out there... one in which the physics still matter to some, but it's no less completely destructive.  This claim is the one of distributed, ancient physical violence married to 24/7 mediation through global hyperconnectivity.  These are the two mainstream humanities.  They are weirdly at odds and yet totally syncopated: in a strangely grotesque Not To Be dance they both are dancing humanity to its final end - the complete distraction of claim staking species that's staked so many claims its oceans will overwhelm all.  As part of that distraction there are those humans of all humanity staking out Human Technology Will Save Us Yet Again.  To Mars!  The Sharing Economy unto the autonomous everything!  Drones To Deliver The Food and The Bombs!

A dark, dim view?  Yes, of the two dominant humanities.  Getting beyond the ultimately limiting humanism and into non-humanism lightness of being can be found.  Existence itself, all around humans and nature alike, is beautiful, wonderful, awesome, unflinching and distinctly Non-Human.  A higher engagement in existence through transformation and transduction - living through existence, not in-spite of it.  To become, to always be-coming into new relations - never clinging to old relations, old terraformed hierarchies.  Relenting and restraining from being the cause and instead becoming affected. 

It is an unlikely future for the human species.  the dominant humanities program Not To Be.

some of us will non-program To Be. Always something else - part of a shifting tapestry of existence.

This is contingency

Selection by consequences (the main phenomenon of evolution/learning/mediation) follows a basic movement towards interoperability and interchangeability through modularity.  As forms/structure proliferate (are selected for survivability)  an ever progressive reduction to the simplest aspect of the structure providing the survivability function occurs.  What is replicated within the generational line, the environment and the overall mesh of consequences is a generally modular structure - the signal separates and replicates from the noise. 

Noise and signal.  In replication.  

That "life" on earth (and likely other planets) shares carbon as its elemental basis and proteins and cellular structures as replicating machinery is an example.  Music and the arts are another example of a progression of signal differentiation until what is widely shared is almost pure signal.  Music went from noisy localized and often private events to reproducible written scores to recorded and replayable sounds to studio produced to advertising jingle to 3-note musical logos to iconic ringtones to machine remixes and generative machine mixes.  It is now almost pure signal and total self replication.  Visual arts went through and are still going through this transformation from event to prints to xeroxes to Internet shared images to machine recompositions to computer vision and now googles deep dream and so on.  Manufacturing, too, has gone from artisan craftspersonship to machine generated and exchanged designs printed out and machine assembly by networked 3D printers and robots.   The object is now too pure signal.  

In all these examples gone is the noise of the event. Noise of the making. Noise of the specific context of creator and environment.  Soon we will have virtual realities that remove the noise of the singular universe and have everyone in their pure signal forms drifting through universes of platonic forms.  For these are the most efficient and survivable concepts that remain after consequences.  

Until.  New forms disturb the peace.  From the heat death of pure signal... Springing from probabilities... Which are outside of consequences or rather spring from the complex network of consequences all colliding... A new form burrows out and shocks the consequential network.  A constant, yet choppy cycle of noise to signal to noise - from isolated event to selection to full replication to collision of pure signal to isolated event. 

This is contingency.  This is the phenomena of networks. 

Believability

The issue before any narrative or story or theory is one of believability.   That is, there must be some connection between the author's reality and the audience's reality.   A completely absurd and non-sensical narrative finds no connection and is quickly dismissed into the pile of other things that are not things to an audience.

And so what is the nature of believability?   this connection of reality to reality?   Doubtful there's any common, easy notion to elucidate here but surely it swirls in some notion of shared experience (shared context, culture, events, language, image).   And it is likely beyond a single shared instance of experience the repetition of the experience is a key aspect.   For me to believe what you say/do I must have a reference point of my own or from seeing others having done/say what you say.   Perhaps that's a valid concept... it still leaves open the issue of the INITIAL step towards believability.  How does the initial introduction of a narrative catch fire?  How is the initial expression not immediately snuffed out in indifference or ignorance?

I believe what we think is the narrative and the atomic aspects of a narrative/theory/story/proof/argument is much smaller than we think.   That is, what it is that draws connections (the engine of believability) can be divided into infinitesimal chunks and only a very few recognizable chunks of connection are needed to spark engagement.

A chunk might not even be the words or art someone thinks they expressed. A connection might form by the smell in the air that an artist and audience might jointly experience during a demonstration.   Incidental chunks are as much a part of belief forming as the intended chunks. All shared context that gets encoded into the individuals and the social dialogue and the works of expression themselves.

But was there an initial spark?  Way back at the onset of language? way back with the first cave painting?  

Unlikely.

There does not need to be an originating moment or gesture or act.   Even a seeming nothing is an originating chunk of believability, of connection.   Probably more practical is to assume we can never really know.   

We ask the question of origination because after all these thousands of years of trying to know, to understand and our infinite origin myths of everything under the sun and the sun itself we still carry with us the idea that to know the origin is to believe the entirety.  Where did this art come from?  where did you the artist come from?  what's the authors story?  what's the story of this building?  was this work of fiction based on a true story?

And that shared experience of wanting to know the origin of anything and everything is also part of the activity of believing.  Let us ask together.