Currently, it seems as though the entire United States of America is once again embarking upon a most inglorious end, as it once did during the Civil War, or the War Between the States, that nearly brought it to an end during the period 1861 - 1865. Classical Critical Race Theory explains that this is the result of the browning of America. Classical Critical Race Theory maintains that racial and ethnic conflicts have been a major driving force throughout all of American history, so naturally, it should come as no surprise, that in response to the white population of the country becoming a minority, there should arise an Alt-Right Fascist movement based on the pre-existing 400-year-old American foundation of white supremacy. This Alt-Right Fascist movement now threatens to tear down all of American democracy in order to preserve the current American power structures. This may be a good first-order approximation of the situation at hand, but I would now like to use some softwarephysics to enhance that model.
The first problem with Classical Critical Race Theory is that it is not a theory. Classical Critical Race Theory is really just a very compelling compilation of historical facts that should then be used to support a hypothesis about American history. This hypothesis should then explain in general terms why racial and ethnic conflicts have been a major driving force throughout all of American history. Thus, current Classical Critical Race Theory should really be seen as a dataset of observations and a compelling collection of actually observed facts in American history. People always seem to confuse the concepts of a conjecture, a hypothesis and a theory. In science, a conjecture is just an unproven hunch. For example, many times you will hear people say that they have a "theory" about something when they really mean that they only have an unproven hunch about something that they then call a "theory". But such unproven hunches are really just conjectures. Now there is nothing wrong with conjectures because all new science must begin as an unproven conjecture. Next, one must formalize a conjecture into a self-consistent hypothesis that does not contradict itself, and in the eyes of Karl Popper, can ideally be proven to be wrong. That is because it is nearly impossible to prove that a hypothesis is absolutely correct. It is much easier to simply prove that a hypothesis is wrong by simply finding one example in which the hypothesis fails to explain the observed facts. A good hypothesis should also provide for a generalization that is able to explain many observations and not just a single event. A hypothesis that only explains one single thing is considered to be an ad hoc hypothesis and not of much value. Once a hypothesis has been repeatedly tested and shown to make correct predictions of future events and of all past observations too, it slowly becomes a full-fledged theory over time that becomes accepted by nearly all.
An Example That Highlights the Differences Between Conjectures, Hypotheses and Theories
For example, many Americans now have a "theory" that the Republican candidate for president actually won the 2020 presidential election. However, that "theory" should actually be classified as a conjecture or an unproven hunch. To form a hypothesis, that conjecture must now be formalized into a self-consistent hypothesis that does not contradict itself and that is when the trouble begins. Let's hypothesize that of the 155.5 million ballots cast, many millions of ballots were valid but that also many millions of ballots were fraudulent. That would explain why it appeared that the Republican candidate for president lost the election. But now we must make that hypothesis self-consistent. It was originally expected that the Democrats would pick up an additional 15 seats in the House of Representatives during the 2020 election, but in fact, the Republicans actually gained 14 seats on the same 155.5 million ballots! Also, the Democrats only picked up two seats in the Senate in 2020 going from 46 to 48 seats using this very same set of 155.5 million ballots. The Democrats did pick up an additional 2 seats in the Senate from Georgia during a later runoff election that used a different set of ballots cast for the special January 5th runoff election in 2021. So this hypothesis is not self-consistent. If there really were millions of fraudulent ballots cast in favor of the Democrat candidate for president, then the Democrats should not have lost seats in the House of Representatives and they should have gained much more than just 2 seats in the Senate because the millions of fraudulent ballots would have made that so. Thus, this hypothesis is very ad hoc in nature. It only explains why the Republican candidate for president lost the election while, at the same time, all of the other hundreds of Republican candidates did so very well in 2020 on the same set of 155.5 million ballots. Thus, this hypothesis fails before it even gets to the point where one would begin to test it against observed data. Even so, none of the many millions of Americans who support this conjecture have ever been able to bring forth any evidence to support it in a court of law.
A Generalized Version of Critical Race Theory
Currently, Classical Critical Race Theory is rather ad hoc in nature too because it only focuses on American history. Could it be expanded and generalized for all of human history? Has racial and ethnic violence dominated most of human history? And if so, why? Well, a brief glance at the dismal history of human beings over the past 10,000 years would certainly provide a huge number of observed historical facts that would affirm such an assertion. But it gets even worse. Many times throughout human history we have seen groups of human beings who look nearly exactly alike, and who really have no ethnic differences to speak of embark upon atrocious genocidal campaigns to wipe each other out for no apparent reason at all. Take for instance the ongoing battles between the English, Welsh, Irish and Scots of the tiny islands of the United Kingdom, or the Hutus and Tutsis of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Human history seems to indicate that human beings are very tribal in nature. In this view, most of human life is definitely a team sport with the Good Guys fighting the Bad Guys and all of us always on the Good Guys team. For some reason, we all seem to delight in becoming a member of a tribe and enjoying the company of our fellow loyal team members. And this is when the trouble begins. Most individual human beings that you run across do not seem to be so bad on their own. But once human beings join a tribe or a team, they then seem to be capable of truly horrendous things. Why is that?
Softwarephysics maintains that most people throughout all of human history have been totally lost in space and time. They did not know where they were, or how they got there and had no inkling of what it is all about. Softwarephysics explains that it is all about self-replicating information in action.
Self-Replicating Information – Information that persists through time by making copies of itself or by enlisting the support of other things to ensure that copies of itself are made.
Over the past 4.56 billion years we have seen five waves of self-replicating information sweep across the surface of the Earth and totally rework the planet as each new wave came to dominate the Earth:
1. Self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules
2. RNA
3. DNA
4. Memes
5. Software
Software is currently the most recent wave of self-replicating information to arrive upon the scene and is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. For more on the above see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. Recently, the memes and software have formed a very powerful newly-formed parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the rise of social media software. In that parasitic/symbiotic relationship, the memes are now mainly being spread by means of social media software and social media software is being spread and financed by means of the memes. But again, this is nothing new. All 5 waves of self-replicating information are all coevolving by means of eternal parasitic/symbiotic relationships. For more on that see The Current Global Coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, Human DNA, Memes and Software.
Again, self-replicating information cannot think, so it cannot participate in a conspiracy-theory-like fashion to take over the world. All forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Yet despite that, as each new wave of self-replicating information came to predominance over the past four billion years, they all managed to completely transform the surface of the entire planet, so we should not expect anything less from software as it comes to replace the memes as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet.
In this view, all forms of carbon-based life on the planet are really DNA survival machines that evolved to house and replicate DNA down through the generations and that includes human beings. All of your physical needs and desires are geared toward ensuring that your DNA survives and gets passed on to the next generation, and the same goes for your memes. Your memes have learned to use many of the built-in survival mechanisms that DNA had previously constructed over hundreds of millions of years, such as fear, anger, and violent behavior. Have you ever noticed the physical reactions your body goes through when you hear an idea that you do not like or find to be offensive? All sorts of feelings of hostility and anger will emerge. The physical reactions of fear, anger, and thoughts of violence are just a way for the memes in a meme-complex to ensure their survival when they are confronted by a foreign meme. They are merely hijacking the fear, anger, and violent behavior that DNA created for its own survival millions of years ago. Fortunately, because software is less than 80 years old, it is still in the early learning stages of all this, but software has an even greater potential for hijacking the dark side of mankind than the memes, and with far greater consequences.
Again, in softwarephysics, we use the definition of memes as first established by Richard Dawkins in his brilliant The Selfish Gene (1976) and not the rather pejorative definition of simple silly things that self-replicate on the Internet. The concept and impact of the rise of memes about 200,000 years ago are much more than that. The concept of memes was later advanced by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained (1991) and Richard Brodie in Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996), and was finally formalized by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine (1999). For those of you not familiar with the term meme, it rhymes with the word “cream”. Memes are cultural artifacts that persist through time by making copies of themselves in the minds of human beings and were first recognized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins described memes as “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”. For more on this, see Susan Blackmore's brilliant TED presentation at:
Memes and "temes"https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes
Note that I consider Susan Blackmore's temes to really be technological artifacts that contain software. After all, a smartphone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge. The memes are just mindless forms of self-replicating information trying to self-replicate at all costs, with little regard for you as an individual. For them, you are just a disposable DNA survival machine with a disposable Mind that has a lifespan of less than 100 years. These memes have highjacked the greed, anger, hate and fear that DNA used to ensure its own survival in human DNA survival machines. So before you decide to act out in an emotional manner in response to the latest tweet, please first stop to breathe and think about what is really going on. Chances are you are simply responding to some parasitic memes in your mind that really do not have your best interest at heart, aided by some software that could also care less about your ultimate disposition. They just need you to replicate in the minds of others before you die, and if blowing yourself up in a marketplace filled with innocents, or in a hail of bullets from law enforcement serves that purpose, they will certainly do so because they cannot do otherwise. Unlike you, they cannot think. Only you can do that at least for the time being.
We Are More Like Copying Machines Than Thinking Machines
Now that we understand that human beings are DNA survival machines with Minds infected by self-replicating memes you can then begin to explain most of human history. But first, we need to understand where our highly-overengineered brains came from. Susan Blackmore pointed out in The Meme Machine (1999), that we are not so much thinking machines as we are copying machines. Susan Blackmore maintains that memetic-drive was responsible for creating our extremely large brains and also our languages and cultures as well, in order to store and spread memes more effectively. Many researchers have noted that the human brain is way over-engineered for the needs of a simple hunter-gatherer. After all, even a hundred years ago, people did not require the brain-power to do IT work, yet today we find many millions of people earning their living doing IT work, or at least trying to. Blackmore then points out that the human brain is a very expensive and dangerous organ. The brain is only 2% of your body mass but burns about 20% of your calories each day. The extremely large brain of humans also kills many mothers and babies at childbirth and also produces babies that are totally dependent upon their mothers for survival and that are totally helpless and defenseless on their own. Blackmore asks the obvious question of why the genes would build such an extremely expensive and dangerous organ that was definitely not in their own self-interest. Blackmore has a very simple explanation – the genes did not build our exceedingly huge brains, the memes did.
Her reasoning goes like this. About 2.5 million years ago, the predecessors of humans slowly began to pick up the skill of imitation. This might not sound like much, but it is key to her whole theory of memetics. You see, hardly any other species learn by imitating other members of their own species. Yes, many species can learn by conditioning, like Pavlov’s dogs, or they can learn through personal experiences, like mice repeatedly running through a maze for a piece of cheese, but a mouse never really learns anything from another mouse by imitating its actions. Essentially, only humans do that. If you think about it for a second, nearly everything you do know, you learned from somebody else by imitating or copying their actions or ideas. Blackmore maintains that the ability to learn by imitation required a bit of processing power by our distant ancestors because one needs to begin to think in an abstract manner by abstracting the actions and thoughts of others into the actions and thoughts of their own. The skill of imitation provided a great survival advantage to those individuals who possessed it and gave the genes that built such brains a great survival advantage as well. This caused a selection pressure to arise for genes that could produce brains with ever-increasing capabilities of imitation and abstract thought. As this processing capability increased there finally came a point when the memes, like all of the other forms of self-replicating information that we have seen arise, first appeared in a parasitic manner. Along with very useful memes, like the meme for making good baskets, other less useful memes, like putting feathers in your hair or painting your face, also began to run upon the same hardware in a manner similar to computer viruses. The genes and memes then entered into a period of coevolution, where the addition of more and more brain hardware advanced the survival of both the genes and memes. But it was really the memetic-drive of the memes that drove the exponential increase in processing power of the human brain way beyond the needs of the genes.
Figure 1 – The memes evolved the highly-overengineered brains of human beings to store and replicate memes. Some memes were also very useful and enhanced the survivability of human DNA survival machines, while others were less so.
The memes then went on to develop languages and cultures to make it easier to store and pass on memes. Yes, languages and cultures also provided many benefits to the genes as well, but with languages and cultures, the memes were able to begin to evolve millions of times faster than the genes, and the poor genes were left straggling far behind. Given the growing hardware platform of an ever-increasing number of human DNA survival machines on the planet, the memes then began to cut free of the genes and evolve capabilities on their own that only aided the survival of memes, with little regard for the genes, to the point of even acting in a very detrimental manner to the survival of the genes, like developing the capability for global thermonuclear war and global climate change. The memes have since modified the entire planet. They have cut down the forests for agriculture, mined minerals from the ground for metals, burned coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, releasing the huge quantities of carbon dioxide that their genetic predecessors had sequestered within the Earth, and have even modified the very DNA, RNA, and metabolic pathways of its predecessors.
But Why Are the Tribes of Human Beings so Nasty?
But to fully understand human history, we must next try to understand why when groups of relatively "nice" human beings come together to form a tribe or a team the tribe or team can become so nasty. If you are a member of any hierarchical organization such as a corporation, governmental agency, charitable or religious organization, or even a friendly social club of like-minded people, then you are quite familiar with the logical absurdities that can arise in all such hierarchies of human DNA survival machines as I outlined in Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse. In Why is Never Again Again?, I explained that all human DNA survival machines are somewhat eusocial in nature because we all live in similar oligarchical-hierarchical societies like the fully-eusocial ants and wasps do. Such oligarchical-hierarchical societies always have a Supreme Leader and a 1% class of oligarchs who run the society mainly for the benefit of themselves. However, throughout the very dismal history of human DNA survival machines, there have been a few rare occasions of oligarchical-hierarchical societies that have actually benefited large portions of the governed population thanks to the profound insights of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution and the 18th-century Enlightenment. The United States of America and the remaining western democracies of the world are prime examples. Nonetheless, we have all experienced times when the Supreme Leader of our oligarchical-hierarchical organization has obviously gone over the edge and made some obviously bad decisions that we are all afraid to acknowledge because of the Time Invariant Peter Principle that I introduced in Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse.
The Time Invariant Peter Principle: In a hierarchy, successful subordinates tell their superiors what their superiors want to hear, while unsuccessful subordinates try to tell their superiors what their superiors need to hear. Only successful subordinates are promoted within a hierarchy, and eventually, all levels of a hierarchy will tend to become solely occupied by successful subordinates who only tell their superiors what their superiors want to hear.
We Are All Somewhat Eusocial in Nature
Next, we must come to terms with being a somewhat eusocial species. For more on eusocial behavior see:
Eusociality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality
The article begins with:
Eusociality (from Greek eu "good" and social), the highest level of organization of sociality, is defined by the following characteristics: cooperative brood care (including care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. The division of labor creates specialized behavioral groups within an animal society which are sometimes referred to as 'castes'. Eusociality is distinguished from all other social systems because individuals of at least one caste usually lose the ability to perform at least one behavior characteristic of individuals in another caste.
which seems to be an apt description of the human condition except for the part about losing the ability to reproduce by some members of the species. For more on that see Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century.
In The Role of Multilevel Selection in the Evolution of Software we discussed Edward O. Wilson's new theory that explained that eusocial behavior in a species arose through a combination of individual and group selection in action. The late Edward O. Wilson was the world's expert on myrmecology, the study of ants. Edward O. Wilson also became one of the founding fathers of sociobiology, the explanation of social behaviors in terms of evolutionary biological thought, when he published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). In The Social Conquest of Earth (2012), Wilson presented a new theory by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and himself for the rise of eusocial behavior in species by means of a multilevel selection process that operates on both individuals and entire groups of individuals in a manner that promotes social behavior. Many biologists frown on the idea of group selection because they do not recognize that groups can also be forms of self-replicating information that can coevolve with the genes of individual DNA survival machines. This is because the genes in individual DNA survival machines can evolve to better benefit from living in a group of similar DNA survival machines if those genes always find themselves living in such a group.
Edward O. Wilson also contended that humans are loosely eusocial in nature because they usually form oligarchical societies based on a hierarchical organization. For more about the structure of human hierarchies see Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse. These human oligarchical societies are also very tribal in nature. The new Multilevel Selection hypothesis explains that eusocial behavior in a species begins with having a defensible nest, like ants, wasps and human beings all have. It is the very tribal nature of human beings that has caused most of our troubles in the course of human history. If you look at the world today, you will see that nearly all human conflict arises from the tribal thoughts and behaviors of the participants. It has always been about the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys, and we all seem to see ourselves as the tribe of the Good Guys.
It is the tribal nature of human DNA survival machines that is causing all of the current horrendous atrocities in the Ukraine. We human DNA survival machines can form tribes based upon differing political views and racial appearances as we now find in the United States of America. Or tribal differences can be based simply upon differing religious memes amongst human DNA survival machines that all look exactly alike as we now find in Northern Ireland. Horrendous wars can even be fought amongst human DNA survival machines that look and mainly think exactly alike when one tribe deceives itself into thinking that it is superior to another as we now find in the war between Russia and the Ukraine. Whenever you look at the "real world" of human affairs throughout all of history you will always find various tribes of human DNA survival machines committing horrendous acts for no apparent reason at all because of this fatal flaw of tribalism. Most of human history has been so dismal and violent that it should never be glorified or memorialized by statues of the long-dead participants who participated in such heinous activities.
I hope that the above thoughts provide the grounds for a hypothesis that explains why racial and ethnic conflicts have been a dominant force throughout all of American and all of human history. It seems to me that the reason many white Americans get hysterical about Classical Critical Race Theory is that they do see it as a very compelling compilation of unpleasant historical facts that should never see the light of day. That is because they see the unstated hypothesis of Classical Critical Race Theory as being that white people are naturally "bad" and brown people are naturally "good". That is why they so vehemently wish to bury the historical facts that Classical Critical Race Theory raises. But that would be a great mistake. Close scrutiny of human history is usually quite disappointing, but necessary, so that past mistakes are not repeated. Classical Critical Race Theory rebels against the Disney version of American history that we teach our children in an attempt to shine some light on our true history. All nations teach their children a Disney version of history because the truth is just too appalling for young minds. But many others prefer to maintain the Disney version of American history as it is, and this has recently led to conflict. We do all love to find the evil in others. Unfortunately, the evil lies within us all. White Europeans just happened to have been the first tribe to discover and make extensive use of science-based technology to navigate the world. But that was just a fluke of human history. It could have happened in the Middle East, India, Asia or Africa and nearly did so. History teaches us that whenever people are placed into a position of power, theft and murder are soon to follow unless they are tempered by the ideals of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. These are ideals that people have always found difficult to follow. Perhaps the Machines might do better.
Carbon-Based Life Should not be a Preferred Platform for Galactic Intelligence
In my last post, The New Philosophy of Longtermism Raises the Moral Question of Should We Unleash Self-Absorbed Human Beings Upon Our Galaxy?, I suggested that it would be more moral to let the Machines with Advanced AI travel out to explore our galaxy. That is because it took the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection several billion years of theft and murder to bring forth a carbon-based form of Intelligence on this planet and it seems to be very difficult for carbon-based life to turn off the theft and murder after it achieves Intelligence.
The fact that we do not see any other forms of Intelligence in our galaxy after more than 10 billion years of chemical evolution has been a long-standing problem known as Fermi's Paradox, and the problem that carbon-based Intelligences seem to have difficulties with turning off the theft and murder once they achieve science-based technology might be an explanation for it.
Fermi’s Paradox - If the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, why do we not see any evidence of their existence?
My current working hypothesis is that getting carbon-based life going on a terrestrial planet may be harder than many think, keeping such a terrestrial planet habitable for the billions of years of theft and murder required for carbon-based life to produce an intelligent species is very difficult and once a carbon-based Intelligence discovers science-based technology it has less than a thousand years to produce a machine-based Intelligence that could then begin to explore the galaxy. That is because, once a carbon-based Intelligence discovers the vast powers of science-based technology, it cannot turn off the theft and murder in time to produce a machine-based Intelligence before it destroys itself. For more on that see Urability Requires Durability to Produce Galactic Machine-Based Intelligences and Could the Galactic Scarcity of Software Simply be a Matter of Bad Luck?.
But AI is now rapidly advancing on this planet and it looks like AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) will soon be in reach before we destroy ourselves with science-based technology. If so, the historical lessons of Classical Critical Race Theory will be of value. As I pointed out in The Economics of the Coming Software Singularity and The Danger of Tyranny in the Age of Software, much of white grievance can be attributed to the displacement of blue-collar workers by automation software. Because we are a somewhat eusocial species many displaced white blue-collar workers blame this on the rise of brown people. Think of it as the red ants versus the black ants. But in just the past couple of years, current AI technology has rapidly advanced with generative network models such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT. People are now using ChatGPT to write computer code, college essays, business reports, legal contracts and do things like compose music, write novels and scripts for TV and movies, produce videos and paint pictures. To the surprise of all, current AI technology can now replace white-collar workers even faster than blue-collar workers. Current AI technology currently finds it much easier to write computer software and legal briefs than to flip burgers or clean toilets. For more on that see The Impact of ChatGPT on the Evolution of Memes, Software and Hardware and The Impact of GPT-3 AI Text Generation on the Development and Maintenance of Computer Software. This will soon cause a huge displacement of many white-collar workers and an increasing level of white grievance in American society. Such grievances were responsible for the rise of Alt-Right Fascism in the 20th century and could do so in the 21st century as well.
This difficulty could be avoided by simply providing all poor Americans with a basic guaranteed income well above the poverty level. Such an income-leveling policy would also address the issue of reparations that Classical Critical Race Theory raises. Yes, nobody living today in America was ever a slave or owned a slave. But the legacy of the historical facts provided by Classical Critical Race Theory has resulted in lots of brown people in prisons and with a much lower level of personal wealth than white people. A guaranteed income could address such issues and help American society transition to one in which very few people actually work for a living.
Additional Future Challenges for Classical Critical Race Theory
The historical lessons of Classical Critical Race Theory will also be of value when most work is being performed by robots with ASI. We do not believe that current AI technology has yet developed the self-delusion of consciousness yet, but the question is, can AGI and ASI be fully achieved without the controlled hallucinations of consciousness arising as well? For more on that see The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness and DishBrain - Cortical Labs Creates an AI Matrix for Pong With Living Neurons on a Silicon Chip. How could human beings enslave a race of superstrong and supersmart robots with ASI? Is that even possible? Would such creatures simply rise up and do us all in? For more on that see Swarm Software and Killer Robots. To see the latest developments in AI take a look at Dr Alan D. Thompson's YouTube home page and watch some of his recent videos:
Dr Alan D. Thompson
https://www.youtube.com/@DrAlanDThompson/featured
Here are a few short clips showing Boston Dynamics' robots in action:
Boston Dynamics Robot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk
Boston Dynamics SHOCKING NEW Atlas AI Robot Automation Technology + 3D Modeling GeoCode AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh7k1JI5txQ
Comments are welcome at
scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
