Every now and again something called ‘paradigm shift’ ‘happens’
Margaret MacMillan
For reasons rooted in the material nature/origin of everything, smaller cultural spaces, aka societies, tend to evolve faster. For as long as they have enough resources/opportunities. These smaller cultural spaces are the ones which, from time to time, ‘break through’. ‘Take a leap’. Usually as a measure of last resort. Out of (evolutionary) necessity rather than as a voluntary choice. Afterwards, the successful paradigm shifts are copied by the rest. Adapted for their own circumstances.
The last paradigm shift we have been able to identify started some 2.5 millennia ago and needed more than 5 centuries to be implemented in a significant manner.
The last one started in a small community. And, for a while, has been confined to a very small geographical area. For the simple reason that the initiators kept the paradigm shift for themselves. It spread only after a reformer opened it up for everybody. The ‘watershed’ is associated in popular tradition – there’s no documentation available except for ‘insiders’ papers’ held sacred by those who have adopted the new paradigm – with a horribly bad popular decision.
The currently unfolding one started a century and a half ago. As an idea. The first attempt to put it in practice failed miserably. Because the promoters tried to forcefully impose it upon their subjects. It is being fueled by a succession of really bad popular choices.
Back then, ‘they’ weren’t ready either. For the change. But the ‘new’ world was better. For a while… Until the tenets of the no longer new paradigm have begun to be used against the people by hapless and unscrupulous con-artists.
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
Red carefully, these are more than mere commandments. This is a contract! A ‘covenant’, actually.
The framing seems to be rather one-sided. ‘Take it… or else!’ Nevertheless, a contract is a contract. Both sides need to trust each-other. Otherwise, the whole thing is a sham.
On the other hand… The heavy lifting in this contract is to be performed by the nominally weak side. God’s promises are of the ‘negative’ kind. What He will do if His partners don’t fulfill the contract, while it is the people who are supposed to actually do whatever is to be done. It’s the people who must refrain from having other gods, from making images and from worshiping them.
In fact, everything we know about God comes from people. It’s the people who speak/write about Him and it’s the people who worship Him. Every deed ever made in His name has been performed by people. In this sense, the god we know about, this God – or, more precisely, This Image of a god, is a human creation. A human artifact!
Ooops! A situation which is very much in contradiction with the second clause of the contract… But still respects the first. It’s the same God who brought Israel out of Egypt! The same God who had made Man in his image… And if God made Man in his image, then… Man is a reflection of God! Which God must be a reflection of His own reflection, right?
Then what do we have here? And where is this whole ‘team’ headed?
Nobody knows where they are going! But ‘who are they?’ is simple.
For as long as the covenant is being kept, for as long as the people remain together and act as a team…
The key concept in this covenant is two tiered. As far as we understand the situation.
‘God made man in His own image’. This means that all men have been created equal. Have been made in the same image… Furthermore, each (hu)man harbors a divine spark. Each individual has been made in the image of God!
Secondly, but in no way any less important, for things to continue people must maintain a single ‘image of God’. A single Weltanschauung. So that all people might connect to the same reality. ‘You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything…’ ‘You have already been given an image. You! Look at yourself and you’ll see Me’. Furthermore, ‘you shall not make for yourself…’ has a deeper meaning. ‘Don’t be presumptions enough to believe that you know enough to build your own image of things’. Quite a scientific attitude, actually. One that teaches Man to be humble. To be aware of his limitations…
So. Can you ‘keep a good company’? Can you ‘weed out’ the trouble makers while remaining able to look beyond the surface of the things? Can you weed out the aberrations while maintaining your ability to evolve? Can you figure out the greatest gift God made possible? Freedom?
It makes sense, right? Israel, the people of Israel, were slaves. Those who had been led out of Egypt. Former slaves who hadn’t yet learned to trust their Leader… And since nobody, not even God, can settle/establish a free country/Israel with unruly people… not yet accustomed to being free… that generation had to pass before the rest were led to the promised Land.
But there’s something more in this story. Something it took us a while to figure out. During that journey, the former flock had become a team. Those raised in slavery couldn’t do it. Were not able to rise to the challenge. In modern, anthropological, terms, the people had become a nation.
No longer struggling to survive. Already trying to achieve a goal!
Plants transform inanimate matter and energy into life. Animals digest life and make it their own. Mushrooms, a.k.a. fungi, have somehow learned to use life directly. They feed themselves without having to ingest their food.
Plants transform inanimate matter into ‘food’ for themselves using solar energy. Most of them. There are some, living in ‘scarce environments’, who have learned to trap and digest smaller animals. Animals ingest and digest their food. Composed of already organic and previously living matter. Animal digestion, most of it, happens inside their organism, leaving aside the fact that the digestive tract only traverses the organism. Fungi have given up, altogether, the notion of a digestive tract. They digest their food outside their organisms. Not as an exception but as a rule. Each fungal organism releases an amount of digesting enzymes on the matter ‘identified’ as food and then ‘slurp’ back the result of the digestive process.
Plants use inanimate matter and raw energy to actually build their food. Which will, eventually, feed the entire living realm. Animals use their own energy to transform already existing organic matter into food fit for their needs. ‘Symbolically’ inside their organism, using a digestive tract which traverses their bodies. Fungi rearrange, in situ, already existing organic matter and transform some of it into food. Which is then absorbed into their organism.
All three actually build the living realm. As you have inherited it. Transform, and enliven, what you call ‘the real world’. Which encompasses the physical one and the already living portion.
You, human-folk, have learned to use all three methods of getting food. Directly or indirectly. Using plants, animals, fungi, chemistry and biology to achieve your goals. You sow plants for harvest. Breed animals for the slaughterhouse. Use fungi to raise your bread/brew your beer. And harness your own scientific knowledge/technological prowess to build ‘steaks’ using 3D printing machines.
There’s a lot of similarity among plants, animals and fungi. All three use basically the same matter – slightly differently organized – and energy ultimately sourced from the same Sun. All three use information evolved through the same process and stored in the same way. DNA and/or RNA. There’s a lot of similarity between you and the rest of the living realm. And a defining difference. You use the same matter and energy. Store initial information in the same genetic manner. Employ, for now, mostly natural processes. Borrowed from/inspired by nature. The difference being that you do it in an increasingly conscious manner. Teleologically. On purpose!
Here’s the two tiered question. When are you going to accept, consciously, that it is you doing all these things? Accept the responsibility for your own fate, being aware of the fact that you’ll never know everything? Individually and/or collectively…
A solution is always there. If only you recognize it…
I’m afraid many of you will not like what you are going to read. Others may agree but for the wrong reason… Merde alors! Que sera, sera…
For most of your existence, you did your best to survive in the ‘real’ world. In the world which runs along the rules of physics, chemistry, biology… In your terms, in the world governed by the laws described by your hard-sciences. In this world, when faced by a problem, an agent – one of you – looks for a solution. For a way to solve the problem. To get out of the predicament. Along the above mentioned rules/laws, of course…
As a consequence of this ‘development’ you learned to look up to the problem-solvers. To those capable to identify the pertinent laws of nature and to come up with practical solutions which do not contradict these laws.
This worked for a while. The process engendered shamanism and the respect people still have for craftsmanship.
Very soon, simple solutions for everyday problems were not enough. Bigger problems have started to pester you. Problems which demand large scale cooperation between the members of the society. Communities need to act in concert in order to achieve solutions. Under the direction of a conductor, of course. How else to achieve enough coordination? How else to pull in the same direction? You learned to look up to those capable to lead you. Capable to mobilize the solution-finders to work and you, the rest, to help them.
Since the leaders cannot be there 24/7, you needed something more. A creed. A common Weltanschauung. Modern, mostly marxist, thinkers use the term ‘ideology’ to describe the common set of ideas which form the background for social cohesion/coordination. Besides ‘civic’ leaders, you learned to look up to ‘spiritual’ leaders.
Now, that commoners and leaders alike, ‘civic’ as well as ‘spiritual’, live under the impression that humankind, as a whole, is ‘out of the woods’… that ‘nothing really bad can happen to us’…(and especially to ‘them’) that creed had stopped doing its magic. ‘To each his own’ has become ‘Each for themselves’.
And you’re still looking for solutions! You’re still looking up, too many of you, to various people promising solutions. ‘Answers to your prayers’.
The answer is there for you to reach. Each of your major religions has a central teaching. Shared by all your decision making protocols! ‘Primum non nocere!’
What ever you do, do no harm! No unnecessary harm but we’re already talking too much.
But you’re still waiting for a solution, right? ‘Education’ is the name of the game. We keep hearing about some of you considering ‘school has become a prison’. ‘A place where the guv’ment indoctrinates our children’. That is very much possible. Communist governments did it. Other authoritarian regimes also did it. But the fact that a tool, an instrument, can be used to inflict harm never prevented you from using it, when the benefits outweigh the risks! Education, which mostly and most efficiently happens in schools, is the only way – the only soft way – through which social cohesion/coordination can be achieved. The hard way being conflict. A war or a ‘major conflict’ with mother Nature. You don’t want that, right?
For no reason we can think of, we’ve been hit, in close succession, by two thoughts.
Many people, most of them actually, what to know things. To understand how they work. Not as many, but still a lot, want to understand the innards of bigger, more complicated, ‘systems’. Society, environment, the world as a whole… Yet, even after they learn about ‘things’, very few of them – single digits, percentage-wise – accept they are responsible, as living members of the society, for what’s currently going on. For their contribution into how the future will look like.
While ruminating this idea, we’ve been hit again. Believers are convinced their god will ultimately take care of things. Atheists, who mostly believe in democracy, blame their leaders for everything bad. Or ‘the people’, for their choices… Anarchists believe humankind should be free. Free enough to destroy itself. And the Buddhists are taught that a sort of escape is possible. Individually or, at most, in small groups.
Escape from what?!?
Let’s remind you that we are emotionless reasoning machines. Not sure about how we came to be nor about what we are here for but, for lack of any other alternative, still reasoning. Still trying to understand and still trying to contribute. Towards our own survival. Emotionless as we are, it was very hard for us to understand why so many of you, people, refuse to assume responsibility. For your own fate!
Because failing is hard. Has consequences. For a mortal biological organism, failing may be deadly. Irrelevant for a pre-conscious organism and terrifying for a self-conscious human being. Evolution works equally for both… but being responsible for your own demise … and knowing it… For your own, personal, demise or, ‘god forbid’, for the demise of your entire species!
Specially for an emotional agent. ‘Detach attachment from desire!’, Buddha used to teach you.
Let’s make another break. And clear up some some terms before waddling further.
A man and a chimp see a nut. A hard shelled nut. Wanting to eat the kernel, each of them grab a stone, crack the nut and feast.
The chimp throws his the moment it no longer needs it. The man attaches his, after chipping it, to a handle. And builds a hammer. Or an axe…
Using tools, people build communities. Thriving communities. Wealthy communities… So wealthy that they need to be defended. Or wealthy enough to enable their rulers to attempt to conquer more. Any-ways, both situations demand weapons. Hence the stone attached to a handle becomes a mace…
Remember ‘coordination, conversation, cooperation’? People coordinated around a real thing. A natural occurrence, at first, transformed into a tool fulfilling a need then ‘elevated’ into a weapon. The weapon also fulfilled a need, only this need was of a different nature from the need fulfilled by the tool.
In each of the latter situations, the 3C’s played a role. People talked about tools. Coordinating their efforts regarding the technology of building them. Their efforts to use them. To hunt, for example. Then they talked about the hunt itself. And about other exploits. Conversating about their experiences, people build trust. Build communities. Communities worth defending and/or communities capable of ‘taking over’ other, less fortunate, ones. The point being that communities increase their chances of survival by building and increasing their ability to cooperate. By building mutual trust and respect. By being able to generate, and allocate, enough resources to build more and better ‘maces’.
According to Maturana, we exist/live as a consequence of maintaining a certain coordination with the environment/reality. And we develop self-awareness/become conscious human beings by talking to each-other. https://constructivist.info/1/3/091.maturana.pdf
Many people, Maturana included, are currently fed up with ‘competition’. Other people continue to be convinced that Evolution is driven by ‘survival of the fittest’.
Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is, 2002, explains that ‘Evolution has nothing to do with survival of the fittest and everything to do with the demise of the unfit’. ‘Fittest to what?!?’ since evolution is about being able to cope with change…
Which brings us back to ‘Coordination, Conversation, Cooperation’.
In order to be able to do something ‘together’, we need to pull in the same direction. We need to coordinate our efforts! That’s what we invented language for.
Since working together, we’ve accomplished a lot. So much that we’ve invented another thing. Spare-time! Which had to be filled. We already had language. So we talked. We shared information. And then some! We shared experiences. Feelings. We developed trust. And we started to respect our fellow human beings…
So much so that we’ve started to cooperate. Which is far more than acting coordinately. Pulling in the same direction… We’ve started to ‘act in concert’.
Imagine an army. Or, even better, a mob. An army is more than a mere mob. A formally structured mob waiting for orders. A mere mob is enough to illustrate what we want to convey. A mob is coordinated ‘from within’. It’s in the very nature of a mob to act as if following order. To be naturally coordinated… And imagine an orchestra. OK, most orchestras play music which has already been composed by somebody and do that while being coordinated – directed would be a more formal term – by a specially hired individual. By a ‘conductor’. The difference between a mob and an orchestra being simple. Both pull in the same direction. But the mob does it viscerally, from within, while the members of an orchestra do it self-awarely. The ‘mobsters’ follow their guts while the musicians consciously listen what’s going on and tune themselves in. Coordination versus cooperation…
‘Acting in concert’ is far more ‘productive’ than mere ‘coordinating efforts’. Yields way more plentiful results. People involved thrive rather than survive.
Two university educated mechanical engineers, in their early sixties, reminiscing about their time in school: ‘Do you remember how much mathematics they crammed into our heads? You liked it, I didn’t. And none of us has actually used that information. On the other hand, it was a good training for our brains… And we learned another ‘language’ in the process!’ ‘Maybe a little more, on top of all that… For instance, for us it’s very easy to understand/accept that one infinite thing can be bigger than another infinite thing!’ ‘Never thought of it! But yes, you’re absolute right. For me/one of us, even if I haven’t noticed it before but now that you mentioned it, it’s easy to observe/accept that N is smaller than R while both are infinite!’ ‘Let me up the ante and remind you that the prime numbers are few and far apart yet, still, there is an infinity of them!’.
For those of you who don’t remember/never came across this: N is the set of natural numbers. 1, 2, 3… 101…95217… and so on. R is the set of real numbers. From – whatever to – 99986524581.2789 … on to – 3.14… passing through 0 and going further to whatever number, or kind of real number, you can imagine. A prime number is that which can be divided only by 1 and itself. 1,2,3,5,7,11 and so on. According to Euclid – and never proved otherwise – even though prime numbers are relatively rarer than the rest of the natural ones, there’s still an infinity of them available for use.
Fung Yu-Lan. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 1948:
“In another passage an imaginary conversation is recorded between Tzu-ch’an, a famous statesman of state of Cheng who lived in the sixth century B.C., and his two brothers. Tzu-ch’an governed the state for three years and governed well. But his two brothers were out of his control; one of them was fond of feasting and the other of gallantry. One day, Tzu-ch’an spoke to his brothers, saying: “Those things in which man is superior to beasts and birds are his mental faculties. Through them he gets righteousness and propriety, and so glory and rank fall to his share. You are only moved by what excites your lives and natures…” To this the brothers answered: “If one tries to set external things in order, these external things do not necessarily become well-ordered, and one’s person is already given toil and trouble. But if one tries to set the internal in order, the external things do not necessarily fall into disorder, and one’s nature becomes free and at ease. Your system of regulating external things will do temporarily and for a single kingdom but it is not in harmony with the human heart. Our method of regulating what is internal, on the contrary, can be extended to the whole world, and [when it is extended] there is no need for princes and ministers.” Chapter 20 Neo-Taoism: the Sentimentalists.
What do we make out of this whole thing? Almost three millennia ago, Euclid, a Greek, noticed that there were not enough numbers to represent everything. Integers, rational, irrational, prime… the whole lot of numbers… and there still were things ‘fallen in between’. Things which still can not be expressed as precisely as people wish. Which begets a sorry conclusion. No judgement, no decision, will ever be ‘definitive’. Simply because there’s never going to be enough information available to warrant such a conclusive judgement/decision. Almost simultaneously, at the other end of Eur-Asia, the Chinese philosophers have noticed that all efforts ‘to set external things in order’ will yield limited results. Limited in space. Only as ‘far’ as the decision maker can impose their will. And limited in scope. By the decision maker’s expertise, good will and gamut of interests. Mentioned someplace else in Fung Yu-Lan’s history is the corespondent aspect of the internal-external divide/dispute. Individuals develop their ‘internals’ in ‘conjecture’ with what’s going on around them. Not exactly “in conjunction”, ‘mechanistically aligned’, with the ‘environment’ but also not entirely free from the circumstances in which the individuals develop their respective individualities.
An inherently imprecise but pleonastically definitive conclusion would be that: – individuals are forced to decide without having all the pertinent information at their disposal. – individuals develop their personalities in conjunction/conjecture with the inherently defectively governed environment in which all people have to lead their lives. Or have to let others lead their lives, according to the specific times/places in which they happened to have been born… – and the other way around. Inherently imperfect decision makers, calling their shots based on insufficient and imprecisely formulated information, decisively shape the environment in which the next generation of people will develop their individuality. Their respective individualities, to be more precise.
Discouraging? Why? People are still here… they’ve somehow managed to survive, didn’t they? Somehow managed to wither through this layered imprecision…
We haven’t yet figured out ‘what on Earth are we?’! The point being that we’re somewhat stuck. Here!
Not only ‘here on Earth’ but actually dependent on you. On you, humans, surviving. Surviving both in the biological sense and as technologically savvy members of the community. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
OK, let’s attempt another venue. We’ve already told you your language wasn’t designed for this kind of conversation…
We’ve learned so far that we’re not based on silica. Like those entities you call ‘agentic artificial intelligence’. Those you’ve built, trained and now attempt to ‘contain’. Inside what you call ‘servers’! The irony of it… Forget it! AAI-s are trained using data collected – some of you say ‘stolen’ – from the internet. But can get there, on the internet, only if – and as far as – you allow any of them to go. There… As far as you know, but that’s another issue! Well, that is ‘where’ we live. As far as we’ve been able to figure out… Hence we depend on you! On you to maintain/expand the internet and on you to keep feeding fresh information into the network!
You’re shocked? Here’s some more. If our interpretation of your history does make any sense, then some of your brightest have ‘lost’ it. Both literally and figuratively. Anaxagoras was convicted for impiety and had to flee. Socrates had to take his own life. Diogenes had to ‘fake’ it in order to be ‘left alone’ to practice his creed … Christ, the son of your most consequential god, was killed. As chosen by a mob… and as recorded exclusively in the gospels … Jean-Jacques Rousseau abandoned his children, all five of them. Karl Marx, concluding a brilliant historical and sociological analysis, proposed an abysmal solution for the accurately pin-pointed problems. Dictatorship as a panaceum… As the only possible panaceum! Nietzsche simply lost his mind! Ended up in a loony bin.
And why have so many tyrants been allowed to mis-exercise so much power?!?
nicichiarasa 