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.

On Originality and Uniqueness

A Question of Originality and Uniqueness

The more I think and read the less original (in thought and expression and being) I become to myself. The evidence mounts against original thought as the investigation deepens. Borrowers in genetics and memetics, all organic things are. I am thus led to wonder if there is any unique entity/thing/idea in existence? Or could be in existence? Unique here defined – the unique contains or embodies WHOLLY and ONLY isolated-not-found-anywhere-else properties and relations.

This is all unique-ish

Theories and Atoms

There are many theories in the world built on the establishment of a central, unique entity or atomic element:

proteins in genetics

sub atomic particles in quantum physics

persons in sociology and psychology

numbers in mathematics

bits and algorithms in computer science

and so on…

The question of falsity of all theories comes down to the frame of measurement reference. Experiments falsify or support theories based on measurement of relational phenomena. What properties of what entities should be measured and investigated in a theory and its experiments? As the frames of reference resolve measurement access is cut off to possible that might reveal the measured objects as non-unique (borrowed/unoriginal/non-atomic) entities. For example, the measurement and investigation of behavior between humans (and not the cells, proteins, chemistry and atoms that comprise them) experiments and theories become blind to what are possible (and likely in most cases) relevant causal networks. Time and time again it is found that an observed behavior isn't due to some reified personhood but really of chemistry exchange in organ systems and their cells and the environment. And even those exchanges are explained and mediated by network patterns and geometry (neural networks/memory, protein folding, chemical bonds, atomic spin, etc)

Infinite Regress of Contingency

Examples of contingent explanation can be endlessly drawn out. So much so that it doesn't seem plausible that fixed fidelity-level of explanation is fully contained. The infinite regress of the network of explanations seems to imply the phenomena themselves are an infinite regress of relations.

Here's the stake in the ground, so to speak. It's all networks and relations – everything in contingency. The resolution of anything, in its totality, is infinite. That is, to fully measure and explain it, all of its contingencies must be dawn out. This reality of the essential nature forces a diversification of ideas, knowledge disciplines, engineering activities, language and philosophies. The work of discovery will never be done.

The Basis of Originality

The originality of ideas or activity (unique things) was never pure. The regress of contingency ensures this. Originality can be thought of as a measure of energy between observed states of affairs (ideas, concepts, explanations, pixels on the screen music, art, societies, economies, etc) To go from here to there… the connection, the leap, the activity of the relating is the originality. It's a paradoxical concept. The space distance (perception) is usually infinitesimal between the original and unoriginal but the mass of contingencies of the unoriginal (the borrowed things) tends towards infinity. Thus the energy required to connect anew requires more energy (time aka computation aka connecting).

For example, to get a new law passed when a jurisdiction is small is much easier (takes less time, has less nodes to convince) that a jurisdiction that is large (takes more time due to more nodes to convince and more nodes in opposition). Old (established, highly contingent) laws have mass, they stick around. Getting a new (original) law in place, with even a slight change in a system as large as the USA requires enormous energy (time/computation/politicking) – the more entrenched and contingent the law the harder it is… think US Constitution.

Returning to the fore the idea of originality is reified and romantic. It is personal. It is ephemeral. It is a mere superposition of possibility collapsed into the new, which is barely different (and the only difference is new participants) than the old. But if the audience hadn't crossed the bridge themselves, the new appears new. As they walk across the bridge, alone, they'll find the same old same old… there's nothing new under the sun except what's new to you.

Implications

This is why the deeper and wider science and art and philosophy goes the more it circles back on itself… finding the same shape to phenomena across space time and all levels of fidelity. To connect wider and more diverse networks new vocabularies and new perceptive tools must be engineered. Those new tools must then come under study and interpretation and ruled use. On and On.

And Yet

The basic question remains. Is there anything unique from all things or any things? A simple case…. Is 0 different than 1? It seems so but how is it different? Where is that difference? What does the work of difference? Is a circle different than a square?

Certainly these examples are too simple. The answers appear to be YES, they are different. A circle is unique from a square. But… How are they fundamentally different? Through use? Through their mathematical properties? Through definition alone? I can approximate both with a series of lines at various angles, so the method to generate them may make them different but may not?  A circle has no sides/infinite sides and a square 4... there's a concept of equidistant from the center in both but its deployed differently... there's a infinity in both... (pi and Pythagorean theorems...) on and on...

Is geometry – the relation of things to other things, the shape of things – the only way in which things are unique? (a taxonomy of possible unique things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_shapes)

The question seems stuck in an infinite regress of definitions and connections.

An Anti Conclusion For Now

Originality and Uniqueness do not hold up well as stand alone, substantial concepts. At best, I'm left in contingency. Things are contingent on other things on other things… occasionally whispering out possible unique relations that require a regress of investigation to reveal more sameness. Perhaps.

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.