Humans are highly pathological beings, as we all know. There is one simple reason for this: while human civilization/culture/progress has had some 5000 or whatever more or less active years of cumulative progress (some 250 generations) every single new generation of humans themselves start out basically from scratch. While the group growth in technologies, skills, knowledge, power structures etc. is cumulative the individual is not and only takes up a very small part of that social development in himself.
If you took a modern human and teleported him at his birth 5000 years ago he would be raised there just like everyone else, not at all different. Likewise if you took a baby from 5000 years ago and raised him today it would be just like us. The individual is mostly unchanged over 5000 years, with whatever individual changes that do occur being surface level and merely acquired arbitrarily from around him, while the world has steadily progressed and actually grows in substance with each generation.
So as more generations are born the discrepancy between the individual state of development and the state of development of the world increases. Each generation has more to assume in itself and try to account for, but less capacity to do so for that very same reason.
It stands to reason that humans will continue to be mad and perhaps get more mad with time; a cruel irony, because the growing substance of the world actually would make it more likely the individual would have the tools needed to overcome his madness, were it not for the fact of the growing discrepancy between him and that world, for the fact that the society/civilization’s development is basically unable to change the nature of the individual, it can only mold it more or less into a partial and arbitrary image of itself.
I guess you can call it madness.
There are endless variations of madness.
Alternatively I could call it failure.
Anyone that considers it madness probably values and wants sanity.
Yes it is a failure, and there are a hundred other names we might call it too. I choose “madness”, but pick the one that seems best to you. The point is what these words are expressing as the reality of human nature. And the word you pick will reflect whatever value and standard you hold up humanity against, in my case an implicit standard of sanity, rationality and non-pathology- thus I use the word “madness”.
And it can also be noted how the discrepancy is starting to really ratchet up due to its exponential growth. How many more generations will exist that have any sense at all of themselves with respect to that discrepancy?
We’re all here still so very young in historical terms. I bet most of us still remember a time before the internet, before cell phones and even before personal computers. Think about that. How rapid is the pace of change of the world, really? It is so rapid we can’t really even conceptualize it.
And yet we individuals are the same genetic stuff we’ve been for thousands of years and most people, including us, despite some understanding of the massive changes going on tend to feel that life/the world has “always been like this, more or less”. Our feelings can’t even begin to contain this.
Some people believe there is coming a technological singularity.
It will probably be very poorly managed.
Some people say that we already have a technological singularity but it is kept a secret.
This seems especially true now more than ever being that we are nestled in an increasingly technological world. The network of systems and devices that make up our environment represent a marching accumulation of intelligence and capacities, whereas individual human beings are so far still anchored to the traditionally sluggish pace of natural selection. Our technology may or may not yet have a life of its own, but each new device is an opportunity for self-contained progression that can often be replicated effortlessly in all future devices. For us, it has presumably taken many generations for minor developments, and it will take many more generations before we come to the equivalent a truly updated ‘operating system’.
We do have the shared external memory of recorded things, but the availability of googolbytes of knowledge is overwhelming when we can only process it in bits.
I think the development culture and civilization from generation to generation has lagged pretty far behind technology as well. I view these changes to be mostly superficial. I always wonder how we would fare if all knowledge of the last 1000 years of technological advancement was lost.
Can you give me a better sense of what you mean here?
Such a technological singularity will never be absolute, since the differences between them will be predicated upon a conceptual, ever increasing field, the distance between markers widening toward the indiscernible. The differential will develop ‘real’ non discern-able variables on one end, and virtual and identifiable ones on the other. When this limit is reached, 2 relative singularities , almost totally identical will develop, discernible by the measure of the differential.
Record of technological advancement is regained, never lost, miniaturized data by abbreviation and assignment of signs enclosing ever more entropy, will not make recall impossible. Hence the virtually redundant fields may never become totally antithetical.
Technology and the varieties of action, language, potential interactions and so on have all increased. It is more complicated, at least at a surface level. I think however it is the particular complexities and qualities of modern life that create madness. Modern life does not fit humans - take the simple example that being near trees and the chemicals they emit, makes our immune systems function much better. This is the problem. Some societal development need not create madness, some does.
And yet a lot of us are not mad. I think we are more than passive vessels placed into a weird world. Our natures are a check and balance against our society. The technological advancements persist and proliferate or decay in large part around what our species will bear, tolerate and embrace.
So I don’t know that it’s madness. I feel it’s madness that might have lead to this world we created, not the world that leads to madness now.
I often think about how we are all fat because we still have metabolisms for a society where sugar and fat are scarce. So our bodies have gone a bit loopy, we eat too much for no survival related reason. That’s a kind of madness. Sure there are other examples. We are disconnected from our surroundings in many ways. I think there are examples where we can recover some connection and step back into our nature, via technology. It’s a tangled web. ILP has allowed us to have a tribe, it creates a sense of regaining something lost that’s human and primal. A quiet place to express and explore ideas with like minded people, away from the cacophony. I believe in the end technology will make us whole, not mad.
Your basic assertion seems hard to argue against. The traditional cultural ideals of established companies and families are little help in conquering the products of accelerated development that fill our present world. Perhaps a solution can be found in the adoption of fresh cultural practices incorporating something more futuristic in their approach?
I think this madness is also a good thing, it is always forcing man to reorient himself more actively in his environment. Creative destructions become more commonplace. And the stated reason for this madness acts as a limit to the pace of technological progress, which is necessary for that progress although arguably the limit is too weighty in this respect, or at least too “single minded”.
The problems with this limitation may cause more undo harm and impede progress more and more, but also then will spur the creation of new impetus to better limits. When faced with the choice of completely losing technology or of fighting to retain it I would bet man fights. Which is to say those who feel this instinct to fight will rise naturally over those who do not.
Man is becoming a pathos of distance with respect to himself. This is after all in large measure what man’s society “ought to be”.
There is an inherent madness within any sense of normalcy. This is the singularity of the human predicament, described variously between man poised between heaven and hell. On another level, various institutions of normalcy, trying to overcome this discrepancy by institutional means of learning, qua social and cultural artifacts and technically adaptable methods, will determine the course of events.
The mind of man is alway seeking an accommodation on a third level, of overcoming the distinction, of alienation, and the undo effects of this split between progress and the regressive nature of reactionary sentiment.
As progress reaches certain limits, the level which will become the primary focus of attention,is the singularity , and it will define the role it should play in the scheme of things, as they-ought to. Deficiency on one level will be compensated for in another, as Ken Wilber pointed out.