Semantic Systems
Learning a World
How is it that we come to be embedded in a world of meanings? If you can ask this question you have already acquired not only a lot of practical experiece with the world, but also acquired a mind that can interpret the meanings of that world and its dynamics. The process of learning a world directly from experience is so automatic and effective that we barely notice it most of the time. The experience of human learners and thinkers leads towards information systems that are invaluable modern assistants in making more and more detailed models of parts of the world and gathering data about the world. You will find a lot of voices talking about how these trends are leading towareds a singularity where the machines will become super intelligent and either save us or kill us.
I want call into question the thinking behind this. If the machines kill us it will be our own fault, and not because we unleashed an independently willful agent that somehow formed the intent to do us in. Even if it were possible, such an intelligence would be more likely to just ignore us. I see the positive possibilities as wishful thinking and justification to abdicate responsibility. For good or ill, the responsibility for the future is in our hands. If we are in charge, then we had better learn everything we can from wisdom received from the past and stand up to the reality of what we have created. This is not them versus us time, it is crunch time for everyone.
How are we thrown into a world already full of meanings and import? Furthermore, how from that does each individual gain knowledge of the world through experience. From cognitive sciences, we know that other animals come into the world with a lot more instinctual knowledge than human beings. We need many years to mature and be ready to take on the world as an adult within the social spheres available. We must talk of disruptive change because the number and kinds of social spheres available to more and more communities on our planet is staggering. I don't like the language that describes our current moment as a singularity. In too many cases it is a reason to hype an idea and attract viewers or funding. If you take a longer view this apocolypse has been brewing for a long time. The lense of this book is focused on the history and evolution of all of the ways that human beings have structured our world with symbolic languages.
A difficulty encountered immediately is just how much this world has evolved even in recent times when we have much better records. That's part of the long-term trend. The further back you go, the less data is available. Only recently have we started referring to historical records as data points. The word "data" relates to current methods and conventions in information systems. At the beginning, there was no symbolic language. Anthropologists study and search for artifacts of early human and use the term homonids for our species and the closely related species in the record.
Modern science is amazing in how they can use extremely subtle signs and find correlations to find meaning in even very limited samples. If you don't trust in their methods, you would not believe them. Along the long path, our ancestors emerged as the only surviving species. We were not the first to make and use stone tools. Furthermore, the anatomical structures of speech also evolved early, long before the founders of the branch that became homo sapiens. Current work in data sciences working with large new data sets from a wide variety of DNA sources is being used to show how we still carry bits of the DNA of our Neanderthal cousins.
The history of ideas starts with language, and we have just shown how the origins of language are lost in a history that was not recorded. The historic period is defined by the start of a data source. It doesn't mean there were historians; that starts much more recently. If I was a historian and not a systems scientist, I would know the history of history going back to antiquity. I only know a little bit of this from what historians say and write. In the beginning there were no fields like history; it had not yet been invented.
The point is to notice how disruptive change is a long-term human phenomena. It has been growing and accelerating all along. What makes it so noticeable is how much change happens in a given person's lifetime. My age cohort got calculators in middle school and later. A for function calculator was a hundred dollars. Fortran was taught in my high school using a slow speed modem that read the program from cards and sent it to a centralized system downtown that also did much of the data processing for the entire Chicago school system. I experienced the hobby and kit computer age which quickly transformed into the personal computer with the IBM PC. Now, some sociologists note the emergence of GenZ with the cohort who got smart phones in middle school.
Not only have our semantic systems, our systems of meaning in our biology and culture, evolved radically, but whole new kinds of systems continue to emerge. Writing systems for both words and numbers are created in multiple places in different ways, and they are created in the context of other cultural shifts that were already underway.
People were settling down and changing from being hunter gatherers to food producers. Let's slow down and look at the practical implications of this. Did the world change when we, as a species, developed new ways of knowing and learning things? How could it not? It may be that the current picture is wrong or incomplete. A lot of meaning is glossed over just in how we refer to the time when we settled down. Is the phrase, "hunter gatherer" even a good description of what the experience of human life was like. In some ways we can only guess, although we have strong evidence that there are no important genetic differences in the last fifty thousand years give or take a large error margin. What antrhopologists mark as the neolithic is distinctive in a large change in the number and kinds of tools humans were making and leaving behind, and we don't really know if that shift is exclusively in behavior and transmitted and evolved in culture.
Some tools are tools for thought, and it may be that once a threshold in language ability was passed, it included capacities to think and learn to modify the world to our needs. Doing is before thinking, first every human being is faced with the problems of living within the material culture available to them. We come in with certain abilities and capacities that we must learn to use through experience. A calf of a herd species must stand in the first few hours of life in order to survive. Humans are nurtured for many years first within the arms of immediate family; mothers in constant attendance and siblings. Then human beings emerge into a social world in the middle years. With the pace of change, each new generation is experiencing a very different material culture. Collectively we know more, but it is fragmented into narrow disciplines. It is said that we know more and more about less and less.
Until the shifts are experienced and integrated into each generation, a coherent response doesn't become fully established.
Radical Failure - Fail Beautifully
Libertarian -> Collectivarian
The danger of an outbreak of sanity
The elephant has no clothes
Signs, Signals and Systems
The Importance of Books
In the past, there were only one or a few books that a large number of people in a given community might be exposed to, but I will focus on two books that have been important to me because of both how they are related to each other and to myself. The first is "Carry on Mr. Bowditch", which I read at an age that this very well written book was perfect for me. I was also a sailor getting my first experiences sailing and racing a small boat around the bouys. At the time it opened me up to a number of things, and the most important things would take a whole lifetime to evolve. The second book was one of the subjects of the first book, "The American Practical Navigator" by Nathaniel Bowditch. At the time I tried but never was able to get my hands on an actual copy from the public library. Partly, I'm sure, that I needed to follow through on getting it when it finally arrived at my local branch. Much later, I came across a copy at a used book store and bought it. Having possession of a copy proves what I knew was true on reading the first book. Bowditch was an American original. He was both a great mathematician and a great sailor. Whatever the meaning of my particular lifetime as a sailor