2019-05-12
In conversation with my friend SL ages ago, had chance to work through a thought that maybe society is like a board of flickering, disjointed blinky lights, each representing a conscious creature. The acts that we’re engaged in are at their core an act of creating synchrony in that blinking, and holding it as long as possible. So while the board is a proxy, with just one dimension (brightness), we are navigating uncountable other dimensions of potential synchrony. Many of these dimensions are antagonistic. There are countless ways to resolve these systems of equations.
I feel this view is informed by a TED talk I once watched, Do we see reality as it is?. The speaker openned with a story about a beetle that knew to recognize a shape as a mate. That simplified assumption for how to move in the world, it held true for a long time. Until an Australian beer company created a bottle that tricked that beetle’s intuitions. Instead of finding mates, it began choosing the dead-end option of fucking the bottle. And it started to go extinct. Its intuitions, which used to serve it well, were now being hijacked as the environment changed. And while this instance was a change outside its control, humans could theoretically do the same thing within their own environments, sending themselves on a more complex dead-end trajectory.
But I’m curious what underlying process is being hijacked. For both the beetle and for us. What common process is being navigated, that our intuitions are highly tuned to optimize for, but that is being thrown out of whack. And I wonder if it’s sychrony itself. I find this supported by recent research that shows that deep conversation (presumably creating a subjective sense of reward in participants) results in sychrony of brain activity under MRI scans.
So what if the things that we’re moving toward as conscious life (of which “intelligent life” is just a specific subset) is an increase in sychrony with our fellow travellers — the human persons, animals, plants, buildings, internets, and architectures of all sorts. Maybe that’s the thrust of it. A sort of cosmic like-attracts-like of consciousness.
So if that’s the case, then our experience — the things we desire — are just a proxy for the baser need and drive for sychrony. Our senses and intuitions are simply the things we’ve evolved to root out that synchrony. Just like the beetle evolved this attraction to recognize a thing like itself, which implies an underlying synchrony of information and simple concepts within its mind. Perhaps evolved language itself is just our way of seeing other deeper, more nuanced synchrony within the minds of other beings like ourselves.
And these thoughts lead me to the worries. What might we be engaging in that’s like the beetle? What bottle are we fucking? What things are we pursuing away from life, with miscalibrated sensors, seeking sychrony and finding only hollow vessels? I’m still working through this, but I suspect there’s something to be learned about how we can navigate our future “fast AIs” and our contemporary “slow AIs”, the corporate structures we find ourselves navigating amongst as fellow travellers.