Mind Hacks or Food for the Dead

August 12. Thank you for spending a moment with me here. Grab a coffee and let’s get smarter together.

It’s the traveling season, so let’s travel together to Egypt to before what is today known as the first Dynasty around the middle of the fourth millennium BC. The banks of the river Nile are studded with a surfeit of tiny kingdoms and courts centered around an uber-explorer with a core of blood relatives and a motley collection of other retainers and servants. Tiny as they are, these courts can be quite magnificent in their own ways, leaving behind large tombs filled with sacrifices including the bodies of killed humans. The most spectacular, at Hierakonpolis, includes not only a male dwarf, but a significant number of teenage girls, and what seem to be the remains of a private zoo: a menagerie of exotic animals including two baboons and an African elephant. What these courts still lack though, is any control over their territories, the massive bureaucracy and military power of later dynastic times. What changed to make these dynastic times happen?

It all started with a question that was asked, a quite innocent sounding question: What are the responsibilities of the living to the dead? As it turns out, this question is everything but innocent, because the desired answer those who raised the question worked towards, hacks the human protocol.

The power of observation alone can tell us – and told our ancestors – that we as humans don’t experience the reality of the physical universe. What we experience is a model of the physical universe we generate ourselves from a very limited set of available data, that set of available data, collected by our cells, again is very limited compared to all the data available in the physical universe. By nature, the modelling is geared towards optimizing our chances to interact with the energy patterns that promise the most payoff towards the two main goals of all material matter: reaching the lowest energy state and being in equilibrium with the whole of the physical universe. And, as we are supposed to be able to engage in as randomized a search as possible for the most promising patterns, the high risk of such a search for the individual is offset by a feature of our world generation called mirroring. It ensures that the self we cut out of the tapestry of the generated model of the world includes data of other patterns – most importantly other humans. Thus their selves/goals and ours overlap, and we support each other. Ther you go Hobbs.

The question about the responsibilities of the living towards the dead could also be rephrased as: Do patterns ever leave the support network we naturally feel between each other? The answer derived from the rules of the self-generation process of the model of the world we live in as humans is no. Our mutual support is necessary so the material things that make us up, can strive to achieve their goals in an active search. Death ends the ability to engage in an active search.

But the initial focus on creating the self, what is the actor with which we engage with the physical universe and thus the beginning of everything for us, makes it appear to us as if the world is maintained and updated by an outside entity even though it’s done by our mind as well. It takes practice to overcome this feeling once we have the creation of the self down, and gain control of the world generation again. Practice requires the free access to information, as you need to find your limits before you can grow beyond your limits. Limit access to necessary information - like that the world is really also generated by us - and you can manipulate the answer to the question whether dead ancestors should get the same support as the living.

In the Nile valley around 3500 BC people did get it into their head that ancestors got hungry and needed feeding – what required something which, at the time, can only have been considered a rather exotic and perhaps luxurious forms of food: leavened bread and fermented wheat beer. Families who found themselves unable to command the resources – sufficient quantities of arable land to grow wheat, means to maintain ploughs and oxen – had to obtain beer and loaves elsewhere - from the people who brought up the question and directed the answer in the first place while limiting access to information - creating networks of obligation and debt that eliminated the existing natural support networks. The obligation also made it impossible for them to freely explore, defying why cells came together in humans.

That’s the danger of forgetting that it’s us generating our own reality and that the process is a tool. Others perfectly aware of the fact can manipulate us to achieve what they have come to believe are their personal goals in their self-generated world. The world generation of each one of us today is influenced by more or less successful manipulation attempts that in some instances started several thousand years ago.

Take control again. Explore. AKA think. Make a habit out of thinking. Let’s turn thinking into the norm again.

Like, comment, share – and follow, lest you miss a single opportunity to improve yourself and society. Once you do, we’ll meet again. At the coffeepot.

To watch this post as a video, go here.

#science #history #reality #WorldGeneration #AncientEgypt #funeralrites #information #control #manipulation #self #mind #brain #thinking #explore