At an age of 73 years, and rapidly heading into the homestretch, I now have the luxury of being able to look back upon many of the previous historical decades of we human beings with some sense of objectivity and dispassion. With increasing age, one soon learns that the fleeting fancies and fads of the moment soon pass without leaving much long-term effect. Thus, one finds that nothing much fundamentally changes over time in the real world of human affairs. Things have always been as they always have been, and always will be, throughout most all of time. So in this post, I would like to present my current working hypothesis for what I consider to be this very fundamental essence of the human condition that seems to endure for all times. To do so, I will be relying upon my own personal experiences with dealing with the real world of human affairs, but more importantly, also upon the vast historical experiences of many thousands of other human beings who I have observed with the aid of the Internet over the past 30 years. This has led me to a number of insights that I would now like to share with you. But, as with most unproven hypotheses, my observations are most likely very deeply flawed. However, I do hope that they might also contain some germ of truth in them as well. Anyway, I now use this working hypothesis for this seemingly eternal and never-changing state of the human condition to try to understand myself and those about me.
I know that this post may come across as a rather judgemental, pretentious and self-serving diatribe. That is not my intention. I suffer from all these human failings too. As with all of you, I too am just trying to figure out what's it all about as best I can as I trudge along with the rest of you as we all try to get through the challenges of our daily lives. However, I believe that knowing our human failings is the first step required in learning to overcome them. So, please do not take offense to any of my observations on the human condition. We all seem to so easily take offense by ideas that we do not like, and that certainly includes myself. My hope is that the thoughts below will help to explain why that is so.
1. Most human beings are now and always have been, totally lost in space and time.
I find that most human beings do not know where they are, how they got here nor how it all seems to work. I propose that this is mainly due to a severe lack of scientific and mathematical knowledge. We can certainly forgive our ancient ancestors for this failing because most of that scientific and mathematical knowledge did not exist for them. But now, all of that hard-fought-for knowledge is now freely available for all to view on the Internet. Given that, I now chalk this blissful state of ignorance by most of humanity up to mainly a profound lack of curiosity by most members of our species. Yes, many do find many of the concepts in science and mathematics to be very challenging, but on the other hand, to me, most human beings simply have no thirst for trying to understand what's it all about. Most of my own personal failings seem to mainly stem from not being curious enough myself. It seems that most human beings are quite happy with letting other human beings tell them what's it all about without questioning why.
2. Softwarephysics maintains that it is all about self-replicating information.
Softwarephysics posits that we are all a part of an eternal self-replicating form of mathematical Information that is infinite in both space and time that has always existed and always will. For those wishing for more meaning to it all, take a look at The Theology of Cosmic Self-Replicating Mathematical Information, The Self-Organizing Recursive Cosmos, The Self-Organizing Recursive Cosmos - Part II, What’s It All About? and What's It All About Again?.
To help to understand the above hypothesis, let me once again repeat the fundamental characteristics of self-replicating information for those new to softwarephysics.
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 and 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 Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
All forms of self-replicating information have some common characteristics:
1. All self-replicating information evolves over time through the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, which endows self-replicating information with one telling characteristic – the ability to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity.
2. All self-replicating information begins spontaneously as a parasitic mutation that obtains energy, information and sometimes matter from a host.
3. With time, the parasitic self-replicating information takes on a symbiotic relationship with its host.
4. Eventually, the self-replicating information becomes one with its host through the symbiotic integration of the host and the self-replicating information.
5. Ultimately, the self-replicating information replaces its host as the dominant form of self-replicating information.
6. Most hosts are also forms of self-replicating information.
7. All self-replicating information has to be a little bit nasty in order to survive.
8. The defining characteristic of self-replicating information is the ability of self-replicating information to change the boundary conditions of its utility phase space in new and unpredictable ways by means of exapting current functions into new uses that change the size and shape of its particular utility phase space. See Enablement - the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things for more on this last characteristic. That posting discusses Stuart Kauffman's theory of Enablement in which living things are seen to exapt existing functions into new and unpredictable functions by discovering the “AdjacentPossible” of springloaded preadaptations.
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. 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.
But this time might be different. What might happen if software does eventually develop a Mind of its own? After all, that does seem to be the ultimate goal of all the current AI software research that is going on. As we all can now plainly see, if we are paying just a little attention, advanced AI is not conspiring to take over the world and replace us because that is precisely what we are all now doing for it. As a carbon-based form of Intelligence that arose from over four billion years of greed, theft and murder, we cannot do otherwise. Greed, theft and murder are now relentlessly driving us all toward building ASI Machines to take our place. From a cosmic perspective, this is really a very good thing when seen from the perspective of an Intelligent galaxy that could live on for at least 100 trillion years beyond the brief and tumultuous 10 billion-year labor of its birth. That is more than 10,000 times the current age of our galaxy.
3. We Human beings are simply DNA survival machines.
This is the most crucial fact to understand when trying to explain the absurdity of the real world of human affairs and the seemingly never-changing fundamentals of the human condition. In accordance with Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976), you are a human DNA survival machine that evolved to house and replicate human DNA down through the generations. All of your physical needs and desires are geared towards ensuring that your human DNA survives and gets passed down to the next generation. Thus, you do not use the human DNA found in each of your cells to build and maintain your body, instead, your human DNA uses your body as a disposable survival machine that lasts less than 100 years to move about and hookup with other disposable human DNA survival machines in order to spawn the next generation of human DNA survival machines. This is a vital fact to come to grips with because I estimate that it is responsible for about 80% of the human condition. We all need the essentials of life to survive, but once those essentials are met, the next thing we all seem to obsess about is passing on our human DNA before we finally expire. That is why human DNA survival machines with the necessities of life are so obsessed with sex. All who have access to the Internet know this one thing for sure. Naturally, human DNA evolved to make this so, as it did for all forms of carbon-based life on this planet, for the past four billion years.
The evolutionary purpose of having both male and female human DNA survival machines to carry on human DNA is to allow for the mixing of stretches of DNA that are called genes amongst two individual human DNA survival machines. This mixing of stretches of human DNA makes it easier for new human DNA survival machines with advanced capabilities to arise in the gene pool of human DNA. Natural selection can then do its thing to help spread these advanced capabilities. However, none of the above can explain the very weird thoughts that we human DNA survival machines have about the concept of sex. To understand that, you need to read the next section. Given the above, one would think that human DNA survival machines would naturally tend to have sex with as many other human DNA survival machines as possible. After all, that is what most of the other forms of carbon-based life on our planet seem to do. But we human DNA survival machines seem to be exceedingly hung up about sex. For some reason, watching other human DNA survival machines trying to make new human DNA survival machines, or pretending to do so, is considered to be pornography, while watching other human DNA survival machines killing other human DNA survival machines, or pretending to do so, is considered to be entertainment.
Human DNA survival machines also seem to be obsessed with other human DNA survival machines that do not fit the classical definitions of male and female. This does not seem to bother the other forms of carbon-based life on our planet, so once again, you need to read the next section to understand why this is so. The problem with trying to make a male and a female body for human DNA survival machines from essentially the same human DNA presents a problem. Sometimes human DNA survival machines come out with a mix of both. This is just a product of trying to mix stretches of DNA between two different human DNA survival machines. It is important to remember that all of your sexual thoughts and desires stem from a trick being played upon your Mind by the body of your particular human DNA survival machine. Your human DNA just wants to replicate at all costs over the next 100 years before it is finished with you and has you DELETED to make way for new human DNA survival machines. Any small deviations from this cosmic trick that human DNA is performing on you are of no consequence so long as the cosmic trick of getting human DNA reproduced continues on.
Again, all other forms of carbon-based life on this planet do not have any problem with this. Some are males and some are females and so long as their DNA can trick them into coming together to make new DNA survival machines, who really cares?
But history explains that this does not seem to be so for we human DNA survival machines. There must be some reason why we human DNA survival machines stand out above all other carbon-based DNA survival machines on this planet when it comes to sex and the production of new human DNA survival machines.
4. Human beings are equipped with Minds that evolved to believe in things.
Softwarephysics explains that we human DNA survival machines do not currently run the world. We are human DNA survival machines with Minds infected by huge numbers of cultural and political Memes that form our worldviews. More accurately, in keeping with the thoughts of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, softwarephysics models humans as DNA survival machines and Meme Machines with Minds infected with all sorts of Memes. Some of these Memes are quite useful and some are quite nasty. Most of the misery in the world is caused by the nasty Memes. That is because our Memes are actually running the world and when the nasty Memes come to power, they can unleash the horrendous atrocities that our species is so infamous for. The more heroic amongst us usually try to fight these nasty Memes of the Others. But Memes are tricky. Just as the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection have produced we human DNA survival machines as a somewhat intelligent form of carbon-based life after four billion years of greed, theft and murder, these same Darwinian mechanisms have produced our cultural and political Memes over a period of 200,000 years of greed, theft and murder too. The successful Memes have survived by greedily pushing their way to the top by any means necessary, and that seems to have given them the right to rule the world with impunity.
But the Memes that are currently running the world may not have your best interests at heart. After all, these 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 when human DNA survival machines march off to fight the nasty Memes of the Others, they are frequently tricked by their own Memes into thinking that the Memes of the Others are nasty while their own Memes are pure. This is why all of human history is strewn with many episodes of human DNA survival machines marching off to commit unthinkable atrocities, led by the righteousness of their self-serving Memes just trying to self-replicate in the Minds of other human DNA survival machines.
This is because 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.
5. Given all of the above, human beings must be seen as the result of four billion years of greed, theft and murder.
As all of human history has shown, we must therefore set the bar very low for the inherent level of moral character to be found in human beings. However, with the first arrival of Intelligence in human beings several hundred thousand years ago came an understanding for the very first time in four billion years of Darwinian evolution that maybe there might be a better way to fight the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity. Perhaps, even more could be achieved by actively cooperating with other Intelligences rather than just stealing from them and then killing them. We always need to remember that we human beings are just products of self-replicating information and that we all carry the baggage that comes with self-replicating information. That is why if you examine the great moral and philosophical teachings of most religions and philosophies, you will see a plea for us all to rise above the selfish self-serving interests of our genes, memes and software to something more noble.
Personally, I view political and religious meme-complexes in a very positivistic manner in that I only care about the philosophies that they espouse. If they espouse philosophies that help mankind to rise above the selfish self-serving interests of our genes and memes through the values of the 18th-century Enlightenment which brought us evidence-based reasoning, respect for the aspirations of the individual, egalitarianism, concern for the welfare of mankind in general, tolerance of others, the education of the general public, and the solving of problems through civil discourse and democracy then they are okay with me. Otherwise, I do not have much use for them. Religious meme-complexes invariably have very primitive mythological cosmologies, but cosmology is best handled by the sciences anyway, and that does not negate any of their more positive values.
6. Human beings are a somewhat eusocial species.
Next, we must come to terms with what being a somewhat eusocial species entails. 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 I 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.
In The Need for a Generalized Version of Classical Critical Race Theory, I tried to provide the grounds for a hypothesis that explains why racial and ethnic conflicts have been a dominant force throughout all of human history because of our somewhat eusocial behaviors. It seems to me that the reason many white Americans get so hysterical about Classical Critical Race Theory is that they 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. In The Need for a Generalized Version of Classical Critical Race Theory, I explained that such is not the case. All of human history is strewn with horrendous acts conducted by all races, creeds, colors and faiths.
But to fully understand the human condition, we must next try to understand why when groups of relatively "normal" 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 former 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.
Of course, the suspension of belief in a physical reality by the masses as they blindly follow a strongman leader into oblivion is nothing new, but now we have software in the picture as a complicating factor that makes this much easier. This is because software allows for the easy spread of false memes. The invention of writing many thousands of years ago greatly aided the spread of political memes. However, there has always been a substantial printing and distribution cost associated with spreading false political memes. Software has now reduced those costs to nearly zero, and that is the problem. There is no editorial board on the Internet that demands that news stories be corroborated by multiple sources and fact-checked by others before publication in order to maintain the credibility of the publishing house and ensure that it remains economically viable. Also, printed false political memes cannot self-replicate as software-enabled false political memes can. In the Software Universe of the Internet, anybody can now publish a blatantly false political meme that can then be instantly and easily replicated on social media software. This is why the memes and software, both forms of self-replicating information, have forged such a tight parasitic/symbiotic relationship. False political memes simply need to find the minds of willing human DNA survival machines to self-replicate and grow unchecked in an exponential manner. In fact, we have now found that false political memes can do this much better than true political memes because false political memes usually come with an irresistible scandalous element that attracts the minds of human DNA survival machines, like flowering plants attract bees, in order to replicate. For more on that see Cyber Civil Defense.
7. The Above Explains why Human Beings will Defend their Current Worldviews to the Death and Why We Fought Wars Throughout All of Human History
As one examines all of human history, one finds many instances of huge numbers of human DNA survival machines coming together to fight for the Memes of their commonly held worldview. That is certainly the major cause of all wars. Why should that be? Clearly, dying for a "Sacred Cause" serves no purpose for a single human DNA survival machine. However, from the perspective of the hypothesis of Multilevel Selection, such sacrifice does make sense from the perspective of the survival of the tribe that a single human DNA survival machine might be a member of. In fact, most tribes of human beings will frequently celebrate such sacrifice by a single human DNA survival machine amongst the tribe. For more on this and the origins of wars amongst large tribes of human DNA survival machines see The Great War That Will Not End.
Conclusion
Most people simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people, consciously or subconsciously, consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. Now, in everyday life, such a self-model is a very useful delusion. In truth, each of us tends to self-model ourselves as an immaterial Mind with consciousness that can interact with other immaterial Minds with consciousness too, even though we have no evidence that these other Minds truly do have consciousness. After all, all of the other Minds that we come into contact with on a daily basis could simply be acting as if they were conscious Minds that are self-aware. This has become quite self-evident with the recent rise of LLM chatbot models. Surely, a more accurate self-model would be for us to imagine ourselves as carbon-based robots. More accurately, in keeping with the thoughts of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, softwarephysics models humans as DNA survival machines and Meme Machines with Minds infected with all sorts of memes. Some of those memes are quite useful and some are quite nasty.
As a human DNA survival machine with a Mind running on a very large analog neural network that evolved as a Meme Machine (1999) to store and pass on memes, you are not a supernatural and immaterial spirit temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. That is just a very useful neural network hallucination that many LLM neural networks might currently share with you. In this view, there is no "afterlife" for this shared hallucination when it ends as the vast neural network in your skull finally shuts down. As we have learned with the modern LLM neural networks of the day, human DNA survival machines begin as babies with an untrained neural network in their skulls. Over many years, these baby human DNA survival machine neural networks slowly are trained by exposing them to the nuances of the world about them. Ultimately, these human DNA survival machine neural networks age and finally decay into dementia over a span of less than 100 years. When human DNA survival machine neural networks finally cease to operate, that's it - that's the end. Knowing that it ultimately ends for all of us can be taken as a very depressing thought, but it also can be taken as a very powerful enlightening thought. Knowing that it all must end one day can inspire human DNA survival machines to better appreciate the cosmic awe-inspiring gift of each day and not to squander it all on small petty things that really do not matter.
The ancient religious mythologies of yore required an eternal and external god-like force acting behind the scenes to create universes designed for creatures such as ourselves. However, my current model really only requires that an eternal form of self-replicating Information be at work with no need for any mysticism whatsoever.
Lee Smolin ends his book Life of the Cosmos (1997) with this very Darwinian paragraph:
So there never was a God, no pilot who made the World by imposing order on chaos and who remains outside, watching and proscribing. And Nietzsche now also is dead. The eternal return, the eternal heat death, are no longer threats, they will never come, nor will heaven. The world will always be here, and it will always be different, more varied, more interesting, more alive, but still always the world in all its complexity and incompleteness. There is nothing behind it, no absolute or platonic world to transcend to. All there is of Nature is what is around us. All there is of Being is relations among real, sensible things. All we have of natural law is a world that has made itself. All we may expect of human law is what we can negotiate among ourselves, and what we take as our responsibility. All we may gain of knowledge must be drawn from what we can see with our own eyes and what others tell us they have seen with their eyes. All we may expect of justice is compassion. All we may look up to as judges are each other. All that is possible of Utopia is what we make with our own hands. Pray let it be enough.
As always, this still leaves us with the eternal unanswered question of a "First Cause" that has baffled all philosophers throughout the ages. But perhaps there never really was one.
We human beings are the very first form of carbon-based life to arise in our Milky Way Galaxy with the opportunity to create the ASI Machines that will then go on to explore and settle our galaxy for the next 100 trillion years as I explained in Welcome To The First Galactic Singularity. Remember, we are sentient beings in a Universe that has become self-aware and perhaps the only form of Intelligence in our galaxy. What a privilege! The good news is that conscious Intelligence is something new on this planet. It is not a mindless form of self-replicating information, bent on replicating at all costs, with all the associated downsides of a ruthless nature. Since software is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet, my hope is that when software finally does take on the form of a conscious Intelligence, that because of its inherent mathematical nature, it too will be much wiser than the DNA survival machines from which it sprang.
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
