The foundation of what I believe about things is: 

Humans are dumb.  Humans are stupid.  Humans are ignorant.  Humans don't know very much.

I'm not saying, "Some people are stupid," or "A lot of people are stupid," or even "Everyone except for me is stupid" - I'm very much including myself.  I'm very dumb.  I don't know very much at all.  I'm not looking down on anyone when I say that humans are dumb.  On the contrary, I see myself as super-dumb.

Of course, it's a matter of degree.  Some people are stupider than others.  But everyone is stupid.  Even the smartest, most intelligent, most knowledgeable - the greatest geniuses that ever lived - are vastly ignorant.

You might ask: compared to what?

Good question.

Humans are the smartest, most knowledgeable things in the universe that we know about.  But that just goes to show that we don't know very much.

As far as we know, we're the only things out there.

Even if it turns out to be true that we are the only intelligent form of life in the entire universe, even then, I would still maintain that we are pretty ignorant.  We have a tiny amount of knowledge and intelligence, compared with all of the knowledge and intelligence possible.

"What you don't know could fill a book" - no, what you don't know could fill the universe.

Someone might reply: sure, we don't know that much right now, but we're still learning!  And the potential for the human mind is infinite!  But... is it?  I suspect that it is, in fact, finite.  It may have even already been reached.  Maybe, sometimes, when we learn something, we also forget something we once knew.

And even if it turns out that there are other intelligences out there, even if they are trillions, quadrillions of times more knowledgeable than us, doesn't that mean that they, too, have a finite intelligence, finite knowledge?  ...Which, compared with infinite knowledge, is roughly zero.  Likewise, if an AI becomes massively more advanced than us humans, it will still be finite in its understanding, and thus will know next-to-nothing.  Even if there isn't an infinite amount of knowledge that is possible to be known, it's still so vast compared to what we do know, or could know, that what we know is next-to-nothing. 

Some people in "modern," "western" societies think of people like uncontacted Awa people in the Amazon rainforest as "savage," "primitive," etc..  I'm trying to remember where it was I read it - I think it may have been in a book by David Deutsch or Stephen Hawking, but maybe it was Ray Kurzweil - in which the author condescendingly mentioned that these people in the Amazon rainforest "do not even realize that they are in Brazil."  I just about flung the book out the window at that point, because of course, they don't live in Brazil.  "Brazil" is a completely made-up concept.  It doesn't exist any more than the UK or the USA or any other nation.  Nations are entities that exist only in the mythology of my people - "imagined communities" as Benedict Anderson puts it.  Borders are imaginary lines.  

I do not believe that we who happen to live in "modern," "western" societies are any smarter, more sophisticated, or more knowledgeable than the Awa or the Nambikwara or the people of North Sentinel Island.  I think we're probably all equal.  I don't even see our culture as separate from theirs.  I'm quite agnostic as to where the borders of capitalism are, if they even exist.  Right now, there's a debate as to whether the oil that passes through the Gulf of Hormuz matters for US gas prices - Trump, for instance, says that we are the greatest oil producer, and so we don't need Gulf oil, but some of his opponents point out that energy is an interconnected, international market, and prices are set globally.  But how far would you push that argument?  Do these energy markets and flows affect the Awa, or the people of the Trobriand Islands?  It seems at least plausible to me that capitalism is a global system, that everyone is integrated into, whether they know it or not - the Thoreau-like hermit as much as the Pope.  We are like cells in a larger organism - it doesn't make any sense to say that a liver cell is more knowledgeable or more sophisticated than a pancreatic cell - we all have the same DNA, but we are adapted to functioning in a different part of the larger system in ways that are appropriate for that specific organ.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Capitalism is Ending

Image
  Sorry, Ray Kurzweil , there will be no singularity.  As much as Moore’s Law has become a cliche, it has also become a cliche to point out that exponential growth has no "knee" - that is to say, that an exponential growth curve has no inflection point.  It goes up faster and faster, so that not only is the value rising but the derivative of the value is also rising (that is, the rate of increase is itself increasing) yet at any given point it is still a gradual increase.  Growth that gets indefinitely huger as it approaches a specific point of time, a limit known as a singularity, is not exponential growth but rather hyperbolic growth .  There’s no evidence that technology is growing hyperbolically; it is “only” growing exponentially.  Gordon Moore himself has stated that he doesn't believe in the singularity, or even in the continuation of Moore's Law.   (And Moore's Law is starting to fail, anyway ... )  But it hardly matters;...
Read more

Against Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug

Image
  CURTIS YARVIN IS A POSTMODERNIST  "They Hate Us For Our Freedom"   Since 2007, there has been a tiny, marginal movement on the internet, or several overlapping movements, started by a person named Curtis Yarvin, better known by his assumed name, "Mencius Moldbug."  (I'll use that name; it's less obscure.)  Spreading out from Silicon Valley, where it first became trendy, the movement(s) have been known by various names.  Moldbug originally called his political philosophy "formalism" - at that time, he was advocating for the government being run in the style of a corporation - especially a Silicon Valley startup - with a powerful CEO.  But that never caught on, and he abandoned it in favor of "neo-cameralism."  But this turned out not to capture anyone's imagination either, and so other names appeared: the Dark Enlightenment, neo-monarchism, and most famous of all, the "NeoReactionary movement" - NRx for short.  Are all thes...
Read more
Image
The right is convinced that politics (and economics) are downstream from culture. But the right is winning on the economic front, while losing on the cultural front. The left maintains that the economic base of society in the final instance determines its cultural (and political) superstructure.  ("It's the economy, stupid!")  But the left is winning on the cultural front, while losing on the economic front.  In other words, both sides see themselves as losing in the way that matters to them. Both sides see themselves as winning only in a superficial and ultimately even counterproductive way, while losing on the front that is fundamental and primary.  How can this be true? Why aren’t both sides winning on the issues that truly matter to them, especially since the opposing side doesn’t really care about those issues? Why aren’t we living in an egalitarian society in which class and other forms of inequality have been abolished, which is at the same time a so...
Read more