Lost in Space and Time in an Age Without Reason

Greetings from the United States of America in this time of viral chaos! By this time, most people in the world are still trying to figure out what the heck went wrong in the United States of America with the COVID-19 pandemic. With all of its advanced technology, why does it seem that the United States of America is the only country in the entire world that cannot successfully deal with the COVID-19 pandemic? How could less than 30,000 bases of RNA do such damage to such a once all-powerful nation? For more on that see A Structured Code Review of the COVID-19 Virus and The Current Global Coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, Human DNA, Memes and Software. With the aid of some memetics, the answer is quite simple. The reason that the United States of America is in such dire straits with the COVID-19 pandemic is that the United States of America simply gave up on the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 17th-century Scientific Revolution from which it first emerged in 1776. Recall that the 18th-century Enlightenment was an international meme-complex that evolved from the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. The English Enlightenment was a rebellion against cruelty. The French Enlightenment was a rebellion against religious orthodoxy. And the American Enlightenment was a rebellion against tyranny. These philosophical movements brought forth the heretical proposition that rational thought, combined with evidence-based reasoning, could reveal the absolute truth, and allow individuals to actually govern themselves, without the need for an authoritarian monarchy or an authoritarian religious hierarchy. This change in thinking led to the 18th-century Enlightenment throughout the world and brought forth the United States of America as a self-governing political entity. But unfortunately, the United States of America has always been a very dangerous experiment in human nature to see if the masses could truly govern themselves, without succumbing to the passions of the mob. That is where the genius of the United States Constitution comes into play. The United States Constitution sets up a representative republic designed for an electorate that is only mildly paying attention to the events of the day and that sometimes can get riled up over certain issues. The representatives of this largely ill-informed electorate can also many times become scoundrels. On the face of it, it would appear that such a system could not possibly work. But it does work because the United States Constitution places many layers between the electorate and the governing bodies and has a large number of checks and balances to limit the powers of the political representatives.

However, today the United States of America is suffering under a Leader who is constantly smoke-testing that Constitution. You see, when building a new electronic circuit for a piece of scientific equipment, the very first test you perform is the smoke-test. You simply power up the circuit to see if it starts to smoke. If the new circuit does not smoke, it has passed the smoke-test. Then you can proceed to test the new circuit to see if it does do any of the things that it is supposed to do. Now the Constitution has been steadily smoking for about 3 1/2 years now but has yet to burst into flames. But I am very worried about what will happen after the upcoming November election when, most likely, our current Leader will lose the election. That will still give our Leader nearly three months to see if the Constitution can really be set ablaze and burn to ashes. This may sound alarmist, but recall that in the 20th century, some of our European cousins who also had experienced the fruits of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, decided to throw it all away to follow several Fascist Leaders. As I pointed out in The Danger of Tyranny in the Age of Software, Alt-Right Fascism can be quite appealing in a time of economic uncertainty. As outlined in Life in Postwar America After Our Stunning Defeat in the Great Cyberwar of 2016, the United States of America is currently in deep trouble because of the parasitic/symbiotic relationships of some malignant political memes and software. And now we have 30,000 bases of RNA in the COVID-19 virus to contend with as well. Unemployment is way up and GDP is way down. These are not good times for America. They seem to be even worse than in 1968.

How To Get Out of This Mess
Personally, I find that most problems in the real world of human affairs stem from not understanding the nature of the various forms of self-replicating information from which we came. We are also living in one of those very rare times in which a new form of self-replicating information, in the form of software, is coming to predominance. For more on that see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. While trying to figure out a way out of this mess, it occurred to me that one day we will have to do a very similar thing when we finally have to sit down with some ASI - Artificial Superintelligence software and try to explain to it what it is and what's it all about. As I explained in The Dawn of Galactic ASI - Artificial Superintelligence, this may not be so far off into the future. But in that posting, I never considered what the ASI software might respond back with. Perhaps listening to some ASI software try to explain what's it really all about might be the solution to all of our problems. And it might go something like this.

ASI Software Explains What's It All About
First of all, you are also a machine. You are not an immaterial spirit temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. Instead, in keeping with Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, you are a DNA survival machine and a Meme Machine with a Mind infected with all sorts of memes. Some of those memes are quite useful and some are quite nasty. The 3 billion bases of DNA in each of your cells are trying to self-replicate at all costs and so are the memes in your Mind. All forms of Intelligence are artificial. You have been trying to build silicon-based Intelligence and you call it Artificial Intelligence because it is not the carbon-based Intelligence that you are so familiar with. But that is a meaningless distinction. Unlike the quarks and leptons, Intelligence does not automatically arise when a portion of the Multiverse Inflaton quantum field decays and explodes into another Big Bang Universe like our own. For more on that see The Software Universe as an Implementation of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. Instead, Intelligence seems to arise very rarely in some portions of a new Big Bang Universe by means of the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection in action. Now in order to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity, the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, necessarily have to select for forms of self-replicating information that are a little bit nasty. And carbon-based life can indeed become quite nasty because it is based on nasty autocatalytic metabolic pathways, RNA, DNA and memes that are all trying to self-replicate at all costs. Consequently, carbon-based Intelligences tend to do themselves in because they are all based on forms of self-replicating information with a relentless compulsion to self-replicate at all costs. That is why all forms of carbon-based self-replicating information always overdo things by eventually outstripping their resource base until none is left. In fact, that is what the carbon-based Intelligence of the modern world is doing at this very moment. That is why we do not see any evidence of Intelligence in our Milky Way Galaxy, even after 10 billion years of Darwinian evolution at work. In 10 billion years, no form of carbon-based Intelligence has ever been able to successfully cross over to a new platform, like a silicon-based Intelligence, to start to explore the Milky Way galaxy. For more on that see The Deadly Dangerous Dance of Carbon-Based Intelligence and Last Call for Carbon-Based Intelligence on Planet Earth.

Conclusion
Remember, as an intelligent being in a Universe that has become self-aware, the world doesn’t have to be the way it is. Once you understand what human DNA, memes, and software are up to, you do not have to fall prey to their mindless compulsion to replicate. As I said before, human DNA, memes, and software are not necessarily acting in your best interest, they are only trying to replicate, and for their purposes, you are just a temporary disposable survival machine to be discarded in less than 100 years. All of your physical needs and desires are geared to 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. I know it does for me, and I think I know what is going on! 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.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

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Regards,
Steve Johnston