The Search for a Fair Society: Birthday Edition
October 31. Happy birthday to me. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society, but with a slight twist.
Someone who made the headlines this week was an Italian man who’d woken from a long coma. Upon waking, he believed that he was still in his twenties living in the 1980s. Only once he saw himself in the mirror did he realize, none of it could be true. It got some attention because it sounds unbelievable. But I want to go beyond the craziness of the situation.
As soon as this man regained his consciousness his senses came back online. What they didn’t tell him though was his age. He used the last information he had to create his self. And his self was his truth, his reality, his conviction, the basis he acted on. Until he gathered new information that caused him to reassess and make a new model. What we can conclude from this is that time as a fact does not exist in the physical universe. Otherwise, we could tell the passage of time with the same certainty that we can predict gravity at any waking hour. Time emerges. Where does it emerge? In our mind. We create it and we use external indicators. The mind itself has no age. It’s us who assume along with our age also a need to act in a certain, age-appropriate way. It limits what we could be.
The man, upon regaining his consciousness, had also never heard of the internet, smartphones, or AI. He had no idea of the fall of the Berlin Wall, of the Euro, a Putin or a Trump. And he believed that the hole of the ozone layer caused by spray bottles and acid rain damaging our woods are our biggest problem climate-wise. I could go on, but I already can make my other point today. If reality were something we shared because it somehow entered our mind when conscious, as soon as he was back online he would have shared the current reality. But the man, while fully conscious again, thought the world was still like it was the day in the 1980s when he fell into a coma. The world – the physical universe – had moved on for him as well as for anyone else. His body had changed i.e. the composition and way the material things that make up his body bonded and merged had changed – their state of energy and their relation to their surroundings. The thing that hadn’t changed was the reality in his mind. Since his mind had been offline, no new data had been added to the model that his mind generates of the world. This proves that our reality is just that, our creation, the creation of our mind. Since we self-generate our models of the world (of which the self is a small part which we deliberately separate with a border) the results are bound to be diverse. The shared reality we need to cooperate is something we must produce ourselves, by actively aligning our models.
Alignment requires us to replace some data that we would choose ourselves to generate a model that’s perfect for us, with data that every cooperator uses. And here is the third point I want to make today: the man – as he lacks the whole adjustments made to the replacement dataset since he fell into a coma and went offline – proves how much of the data that goes into the model of the world of ever one of us today is really replacement data. And we aren’t aware of all the ways we are fed it day in and day out. Every bit of replacement data – data not chosen by us to generate the best fitting model of the world for our circumstances – governs our behavior a bit more from the outside and limits our ability to explore and expand. Cooperation requires some alignment. But the motivation to cooperate requires that we remain still able to execute truly random searches when our ability to do so through cooperation increases in a sustained fashion. Too much replacement data makes it impossible as it forces us to exploit the existing knowledge contained in the replacement dataset. It forces us to behave a certain way.
Any thoughts? Tell me. Tell all. Since our models of the world change with every new information we gather and the models are only accessible to others when we communicate them, we are part of never-ending negotiations that require constant conversation and debate.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
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