Is Humanity Worth Saving?

It's an interesting question given humanity's propensity for shortsighted and self-destructive decision making.  Glibly, the answer is no.  It's not worth saving and should get exactly what it deserves.  It is not earning its way as a responsible contributor to the universe.  

That, of course, begs the question of what does the universe want? Other than a few fantasies that we've crafted it's unclear. We have values as humans such as order, beauty, and joy.  Science is the objective pursuit of discovering order in the universe.  Beauty straddles a line between the objective and subjective.  Much of what is considered to be beautiful are objective observations with subjective assessments.  Joy is entirely subjective and tends to be generated by the orderly and beautiful. These are potential self-centered reasons for humans to continue to exist, but in an of themselves don't answer the question of what the universe wants.

What does the universe want?  What if it doesn't want anything?  It's just a medium where things like humanity can take root and spend their term?  A truly ambivalent perspective is hard to wrap your head around (thus the invention of gods).  It turns out that dirt, as an analogy, has a purpose which is to grow plants.  These plants eventually die and decompose.  Their nutrients return to the soil so that more plants can grow.  It's a thing to do and gives dirt a purpose for continuing.  Dirt generally doesn't care which plants grow just as long as they ultimately contribute to the cycle.  Dirt is a critical component of a cyclic system.  Is the universe a cyclic system? Is life a symbiot in the sense that plants are sybiots of dirt? If so, then so far the universe appears to be a desert.  The discovery of life elsewhere would add more light to this.

There's a lot to ponder here.  What if it doesn't matter if humans become responsible citezens of the universe? We exist to be entirely self-serving.  Humanity, like all other life, has a finite lifespan.  It will eventually pass away and it's own characteristics may play a vital role in this.  Saving humanity is a little like paying attention to diet and exercise.  Then what comes to mind is the following cartoon.

Perhaps this is the insight.  I dunno.

Hubris

Hubris is what will ultimiately destroy humanity.  The belief that you're "better than" rather than "a part of".  It's always good to ponder the metaphor, "What's the most important link in a chain?"  It turns out there isn't one. They each play an important and vital role.  Now if you ask, "What's the most impactful link in a chain?", that's easier.  It's the one that breaks.

When chains break, it happens suddenly but often not without warning. We've had a lot of warning.  Clearly more than we deserve.

Philosophy of Life

Either adapt to the current situation as you see it or die.  There really is no middle ground.

Liberalism and Its Discontents

This is a book I need to read...

Liberalism and Its Discontents, by Francis Fukuyama

Identity

I recommend the book ...

Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment by Francis Fukuyama

In fact,  I'll even elevate it to the status of Lonnie's Core Educational Books that everyone should read.

Understanding

One of the more entertaining aspects of the current conversations around AI is how much it challenges what we've believed, perhaps for centuries, about the nature of thinking.

We've discovered that we don't currently possess objective and testable definitions for words like sentience and consciousness.  For reference, here are a couple of current definitions...

Sentience - feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought. (Merriam-Webster)

Consciousness - the state of understanding and realizing something. (Cambridge Dictionary)

Words like feeling, sensation, perception, thought, and realizing don't add a lot of value and tend to make definitions circular, but if you distill them you end up understanding as a component of each.  "Understanding" is a word worth exploring.

Just for reference here are some of Merriam-Webster's definitions of the word "understand"...

1. : to grasp the meaning of
2. : to grasp the reasonableness of
3. : to have thorough or technical acquaintance with or expertness in the practice of
4. : to be thoroughly familiar with the character and propensities of

Of course, these definitions don't really get you down the path of being objective and testable, but there are hints.

Leaping way ahead of the description of my metaphysics,  I'll assert the following definition for understanding...

In the presence of an assertion made by a teacher, a learner can independently reproduce the assertion utilizing a learner maintained model.

Where...

Assertion - some observation about an attribute of one or more either physical or informational components. 

Teacher - the source and possibly an evaluator of an assertion. 

Learner - the recipient of an assertion tasked with the objective of "understanding" it.

Model - an arrangement of informational components. 

 Here's the process...

1. A teacher generates an assertion about some aspect of the universe.  Note that "teacher" is a broad term that identifies the source of something to potentially be learned.
2. The assertion is communicated to a learner.  A learner is a mechanism that can create and modify a model.
3. The learner takes the assertion and incorporates it into its model.  Note that this may require a modification to the learner's model.
4. The model may or may not be tested by the learner to ensure that it's consistent with other models that it maintains.
5. The learner either inspects or executes the model with the intent of reproducing the teacher's assertion. 
6. The learner echoes the teacher's assertion along with a collection of adjacent assertions generated by its model to the teacher.
7. The teacher compares the learner's assertions with the results of evaluating its models.
8. The teacher declares either understanding or lack of understanding on the part of the learner.

The implication is that, going through this process, the model maintained by the learner can reproduce results that are acceptable by the teacher in the absence of the teacher in similar circumstances.

A variation on this separates the assertion role of the teacher from the evaluation role of the teacher.  This is basically the process of science, where the universe takes on the role of assertor and a peer group takes on the role of evaluator.

Note that models are generally "black boxes".  They generally cannot be directly observed.  Their nature is only detectable by the nature of assertions presented to it and the assertions that it generates.

So what happens to "sentience" and "consciousness"?  Sentience basically means the ability to incorporate externally supplied assertions into a testable model, with an emphasis on receiving the assertion.  Consciousness is the same thing with an emphasis on modifying and/or internally evaluating the model.

The extension of this is that asserting that humans are the only sentient and conscious entities in the known universe is silly and ignorant.  All of life exhibits these behaviors and characteristics in some fashion. This likely makes for a good definition of "life" in contrast to non-life.

 

Strategic Thinking Skills

 I just finished the Great Courses/Wondrium course Strategic Thinking Skills.  You can find it here...

https://www.wondrium.com/strategic-thinking-skills

This covers a huge number of areas that I've been a student of most of my life.  The benefit for me was how it tied so many things together. I would have loved to have this overview available to me when I was in my 20s.

Brain Surgery

 I'm a little slow in making this post.  I've been through an interesting experience over the last several weeks, which culminated (so far) with brain surgery the weekend before last.

Random Thoughts (Part 1)

 In The Origin Question, I brought up randomness and its role in the structure of different models of the universe. This post is a non-authoritative ponder on the nature of randomness.

The Origin Question

In my metaphysics, I've posited two broad classes of components; physical and informational.  I assert that they are here (which may be hasty), but where did they come from?

Individual Components

The pursuit of individual components is fraught with peril in physics.  It's an endless turtles-all-the-way-down problem with no real termination.  I must be able to decompose any component into constituent components and, of course, each of those components must be decomposable as well.  This is an interesting pastime but not always helpful.

Interactions between Universal Domains

In a prior post I proposed a structure where the universe has multiple domains.  I can only cite two domains that are apparent to me; the physical domain and the informational domain.  Components of these domains have state and collections of those components can create systems that modify those states.  It seems clear that these domains interact with each other.  We have an informational system, a mental model, of how we'll get to work in the morning.  This is information that is expressed in the physical domain.  If we hear of an accident that interferes with our plan then we modify that plan to adapt to the circumstance.  This is an example of a physical state impacting an informational system.

Structure of the Universe

The universe appears to multiple domains.  One domain seems to be the physical universe, where a class of entities that we call physical entities interact with each other.  Another seems to be the informational domain, where a different class of entities interact with each other.  Portions of these domains reflect each other and influence each other.  Portions do not.  Systems may include components of both.