In “High-Dimensional Foraging” Robin Hanson describes a model of the reality that I believe we exist in: a vast universe, a very small slice of which we can perceive.
Information can be beneficial (and support survival) only when there are checks on the behavior that it inspires. If my brain only pays attention to how delicious food is and never gets that fullness memo (which is all just signals), I could eat myself to death.
When humans got better at accessing calories, some cultures developed taboos against taking too many calories from their surroundings. To support that goal, they had natural methods of abortion, and infanticide was fair game, and it was normal for the elderly to *disappear*.
Your/my culture ditched this restraint, and spread to become the dominant culture for 8B people - not because anyone ever determined that it's leading anywhere nice in the long run (it's leading somewhere very ugly!), but because it unleashed our ability to (briefly) overrun everyone else.
“interconnect & exchange information” --> cooperation --> maximize 'group' survival" ... is true long-term only if all living things see each other as group members. If only one species (Homo sapiens) is sharing Success Tips internally while ignoring the "hi you're driving us extinct" signals from other species, human success is merely temporary and then most species (very well including the humans) get wiped out - so much for (any) "group" survival.
> ignoring the "hi you're driving us extinct" signals from other species
I THINK this is what the Christian metaphysics people within ORI would say is the result of the "fall of man". Normally, all creates receive signals and respond to them. Humanity's awareness of its own signal processing allows it to choose what the signals mean, what to respond to and what to ignore ( the forbidden fruit / knowledge sort of thing ).
Where before all you had to do was respond to the signals, and you either responded well, and lived, or responded poorly, and died, all feedback loops were working.
I once again thank you for this reframing exercise especially about engaging with the current culture. Between heaven and earth is a very powerful framework
When I was young I thought humans were very special. Then I grew up and learned we're on the sidelines of a grand cosmos that doesn't care about us. Then I grew up *again* and understood exactly why humans are so special in the grand cosmos. We occupy an ecological niche kind of the same way pollinators serve a small but extremely critical function.
yeah I would say a corporation is one example of an egregore. I think the way to test "is this an egregore" is to look at the "attention connectivity". If something happens, does the news spread to all the nodes in that network? If so, that shared attention (& memory) defines the egregore.
If you apply this rule you can see (1) for each human, how many egregores they are part of, and (2) just generally go hunting for egregores, by what networks information propagates in.
I'm not sure if we need to add "collective decision making" as a property. I think that emerges naturally out of a group of humans who have shared attention & shared memory.
> One difficulty with this is that egregores often rebel and cancel those who accurately describe where they're heading
yes, and, this applies to people too. Which, on one hand is sad, on the other hand, allows us to practice and learn at the small scale (of 1 on 1 with humans), and see how much this generalizes to egregores.
Egregores aren't people, but we do not have words or language to relate to & predict egregores, so we're creating it now, and I think treating them as people is a good base to start from.
I partially agree. I think this has some holes:
Information can be beneficial (and support survival) only when there are checks on the behavior that it inspires. If my brain only pays attention to how delicious food is and never gets that fullness memo (which is all just signals), I could eat myself to death.
When humans got better at accessing calories, some cultures developed taboos against taking too many calories from their surroundings. To support that goal, they had natural methods of abortion, and infanticide was fair game, and it was normal for the elderly to *disappear*.
Your/my culture ditched this restraint, and spread to become the dominant culture for 8B people - not because anyone ever determined that it's leading anywhere nice in the long run (it's leading somewhere very ugly!), but because it unleashed our ability to (briefly) overrun everyone else.
“interconnect & exchange information” --> cooperation --> maximize 'group' survival" ... is true long-term only if all living things see each other as group members. If only one species (Homo sapiens) is sharing Success Tips internally while ignoring the "hi you're driving us extinct" signals from other species, human success is merely temporary and then most species (very well including the humans) get wiped out - so much for (any) "group" survival.
> ignoring the "hi you're driving us extinct" signals from other species
I THINK this is what the Christian metaphysics people within ORI would say is the result of the "fall of man". Normally, all creates receive signals and respond to them. Humanity's awareness of its own signal processing allows it to choose what the signals mean, what to respond to and what to ignore ( the forbidden fruit / knowledge sort of thing ).
Where before all you had to do was respond to the signals, and you either responded well, and lived, or responded poorly, and died, all feedback loops were working.
I once again thank you for this reframing exercise especially about engaging with the current culture. Between heaven and earth is a very powerful framework
I've skimmed this book by Matthieu Pageau (https://www.amazon.com/Language-Creation-Symbolism-Genesis-Commentary/dp/1981549331), a lot of people have recommended it, but it dives into that idea of what it means to be between heaven & earth.
When I was young I thought humans were very special. Then I grew up and learned we're on the sidelines of a grand cosmos that doesn't care about us. Then I grew up *again* and understood exactly why humans are so special in the grand cosmos. We occupy an ecological niche kind of the same way pollinators serve a small but extremely critical function.
Had a similar trajectory. Nature and the cosmos wants us to figure something out, it could be what you are referring to
One difficulty with this is that egregores often rebel and cancel those who accurately describe where they're heading.
Egregores have a bad habit of rejecting "and then what" thinking.
More is the pity.
I suspect that egregores follow the same rules of behavior corporations do. That may help in predicting them.
It's a hypothesis, anyway.
yeah I would say a corporation is one example of an egregore. I think the way to test "is this an egregore" is to look at the "attention connectivity". If something happens, does the news spread to all the nodes in that network? If so, that shared attention (& memory) defines the egregore.
If you apply this rule you can see (1) for each human, how many egregores they are part of, and (2) just generally go hunting for egregores, by what networks information propagates in.
I'm not sure if we need to add "collective decision making" as a property. I think that emerges naturally out of a group of humans who have shared attention & shared memory.
> One difficulty with this is that egregores often rebel and cancel those who accurately describe where they're heading
yes, and, this applies to people too. Which, on one hand is sad, on the other hand, allows us to practice and learn at the small scale (of 1 on 1 with humans), and see how much this generalizes to egregores.
Egregores aren't people, but we do not have words or language to relate to & predict egregores, so we're creating it now, and I think treating them as people is a good base to start from.
People often reject the truth, even if it's for their own good. Why do they do that? One reason is because they don't know how to integrate that truth. I wrote a short snippet on this in the "Uncanny Valley of Self Awareness" https://defenderofbasic.github.io/notebook/The-Uncanny-Valley-of-Self-Awareness