Six sided cubes of everything collapse
Here is proof that the world cannot be contained in our puny heads. I am unable to sort out in my head what are some of the drivers of the current mess we are in. They are self driving systems out of anyones control.
I was dissatisfied with results of writing efforts. Life has many other things to distract me. Drafts make as much a mess as what they try to describe. Nothing is clear. Fortunately for me, more determined writers have ignored handicaps like this, and published.
Other writings provide the foundations of abstract concrete words, which reinforce what I think, feel and observe. Nothing is really new, or uncommon, so all these reflections, memes, tropes and observations have been around in many forms for a long time. In today’s mess of wild events they keep popping up like too many “I told you so”.
All things are finely connected in this human-centric world of predicaments. Today I am grateful to read a recent series of articles by indi.ca. I will try to reflect on some of his content, and refer to a few other ideas strongly expressed in recent books and media.
Indi.ca’s theme is the six-number / sides of view and collapse in each article. This is mostly a writers artifice of course, but it allows for a nice title-illustration. It kind of fits with a physics principle of the universe, which is the “holographic principle”. All the information available in a volume, is proportional to the surface area enclosing that volume. Of course, a cube doesn’t have the same surface area of a sphere. We are humans with even more limited view-points, conditioned by our species evolution. We manage the four orthogonal directions on the compass, plus some up and down, which is pretty limited. We stand locked inside our own notional cubes. Some humans live entire lives inside their own box, A real thing now with city apartment living.
In the article “Israel’s Six Front War” Indi.ca writes of “A perfect cube of resistance”. It has been four months, since the fuse was lit on Israel’s “Othering” bomb, by a military breakout from the Gaza City Prison by Hamas fighters. He connects this to part of the Israeli collapse process that is conjoined to the USA, Europe, and global trade systems collapse. The USA is already well into its US dollar trade collapse sanctions war with Russia, which goes poorly for the Dollars-first Empire. The only good news is collapse of an industrial empire must be better for our biosphere, the more it reduces global industrial output. The consumption of weapons and fuel reserves for war, and mass deaths of people, moves us closer and faster to exhausting and collapsing our human species overshoot capacity.
We are primates, gifted with the illusion of stereo-graphic depth, but what we see is a construction inside our heads. Evolutionary selection has chosen this for us, so our internal model is not the real world, just the perception filtered and survival-relevant deductions that served our ancestors enough to be improved upon.
Our “binocular vision” and small area of fine detail in the most receptor dense part of our retinas, which receives only a tiny angle of view with highest definition information. The rest of our 3-D interpretive color world we make up in our heads by rapid scanning motion of our coordinated eyes, with visual arrests on details between movements. Our visual maps only in our heads, assume things tend to stay put, relative to our sensed body position, when we are not looking directly at them.
From this we extract a rather slow bit rate of incremental learning about our perception models, associated with even more filtered data from our other senses, a memory trail of our body movements in space, and feelings about survival goals we may have had at the time. Part of this requires modelling the other beings around us and attributing to them, similar intentions and feelings that we can comprehend in our selves.
From our narrow window on the world, and our slow perception and updates on how it really works, it is no wonder that human beings fail to cope with the predicaments of civilizations of any size, and can be herded into self-immolating wars.
I read a extended view about this blindness, in the book. In “The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes”, Donald D. Hoffman makes a startling claim that what we think as reality in our own heads, is a evolutionary determined illusion. There is a strong theme to claim this, because our brains consume energy, have limited space, and limits in neural connectivity, no matter how much physiologists may boost of our cranial skull volume. Our combinatoric computation capability is gene-survival programmed. Our brains are divided into many specialized modules, for all the different perceptions and activity interactions we must handle in a lifetime. Our modules are like trained computer chips that only do one thing well. To do another thing requires training another module.
We cannot grok the gaps and spaces between, that our expectation driven neuronal perceptions miss.
The physics going to down to quantum mechanics and space-time granularity, shows reality to be fuzzy, ghostly and may be some form of trick holography. Space and Time might as really be “unknown — unknowns”. Mathematical models have be used to try and compute anologs of reality from them, but so far, this is in principle, not in practice. It seems that all prediction is imperfect because of the irreducible computability of exact physics. For the detail of most complex things, there is no possible exact short cut formula. To know the future one must live the entire computation time of all related physics in full. We is no option other than to live through our moments, and base our expectations on aggregate behavior.
We limited beings compute with our wet-ware according to strict limits of our selective instincts of survival and our most relevant social connections to maintain. Society requires frequent direct personal updates, otherwise we can be quite often wrong.
Humans are also exploratory seekers after desire, driven by hormones and metabolism, exactly like, and with no claim to overall superiority over other species. Our lifetime training in new knowledge is hard to acquire and accept, and really only achieved by accumulations of collaboration over large numbers of people and multiples of generations, even with today’s cultural and science achievements. Science does not trump our “hard” instincts. It only lent itself to them. Again our thinking requires rules of thumb, in aggregate, and for longer term.
For our consciousness, Donald Hoffman makes good use of the computer GUI desktop metaphor. What we have accessible in our heads is an abstract perception from senses and control systems which are tied to unknowing, unconscious complexity of both inputs, outputs, filtering and computation going on beneath the interface. They are interpreters of the immediate past, and await expected feedbacks from the immediate future, with some sorts of long term plans constraining behavior.
A neuro-physiologist may appreciate all the interconnected mappings of our senses and neural wiring, and specialized brain modules, all the way up and down our nervous systems. We are far better off not being aware of how it really works, just as computer interfaces to systems of binary logic and coding, are way beyond most computer system users comprehension.
As for the bureaucratic interfaces of social institutions, societies, and nations, their interactions with a reality of our dynamic resource depleting world, are even more limited and deluded, given strict and simple rules to cope with the complexity of the systems they interact with. Bureaucracy is a system designed to force mistakes in a reliable fashion.
We fail entirely to preserve the biological systems we depend on, yet even while we are destroying them, we continue to promote our competitive instincts to grow to our biotic potential in reproduction numbers, and eliminate all perceived growth rivals.
B. Sidney Smith, has recently uploaded a you-tube series about the complexity of the systems we humans are fooling around with, in “How to enjoy the end of the world”. Our overshoot is producing our collapse. We have collectively ransacked earths “Net Primary Production”. We have managed to diminish it overall, and take almost all of it for our own selves and our domesticated plants and animals.
In his You-tube explanatory series “How to enjoy the end of the world” ( HTETEOTW ) Dr. Sidney Smith continues to describe the bare-bones of what he thinks everyone ought to know, in order to understand, accept, and maybe start preparing for some of the big changes that are happening now.
“… Nothing lives that doesn’t also die, an outcome guaranteed by the fundamental laws of nature that govern both energy and complexity. Civilizations, including our own, are no exception. … “ — B. Sidney Smith
Dr Smith holds a Ph.D is in Mathematics, and a summary of his outlook includes this essay in 2012, entitled “All the bunnies in the meadow die”. Some of this essay material is re-used in this latest video on Ecological Overshoot. The basic definitions are very clear.
As for the possible longer term survival of the human species, all I can say is, humans seem to have been dudded, blind-sided, by evolution, and the down-sides of civilized agriculture, and straight-jacketed by state bureaucracy, which also allows deregulation of corporate systems whose large immediate returns defeat regulation.
More likely to survive our ecological collapse, are those people whose flexible physical and mental characteristics have not been softened and degraded by several generations spent in civilization. Some lines of humans have not lost the independence, intelligence and hardiness of hunter — gather peoples who survived to become adapted to co-exist with their local biosphere environment, have not yet wiped out by the guns, germs and steel of civilization. But civilization is still working hard on that.
As fossil fuels deplete and our biosphere collapses, our capacity for supporting our dependent city populations with both agriculture and steel production could drop to nearly nothing, and a very narrow bottleneck of survival selection is coming.
Our social circles are best enhanced by direct interaction with other beings. We are limited to at best tracking around a hundred other human beings, the Dunbar number upper limit being around 150, never more than 250. This is no excuse for the exclusion of entire categories of “other” human beings, as being worthwhile humans to interact with, by class, living circumstances and location, political affiliation, or any other convenient excuse. Modern national politics and propaganda media is all about the “othering” of other people. This works because as a whole, we and especially the “media we”, cannot fact check or know too much about “other” peoples, who can always be described as threats to our groups survival.
We are now technically labelled as “detritivores”, as Modern Industrial Civilization is living off fossil fuels enabled food production. Without this civilization collapses within weeks. Our overshoot induced collapse will bring on an advanced stage of the inter-tribal murder called genocide. As soon as our short-term, local carrying capacity is not longer perceived to exist for every kind of everyone, the usual suspects will be attacked.
Immediate reduction of carry capacity means competing for living space with the “others”. From the viewpoint of Israel, their gaze seems fixated inside their own sacrificial cube, at Gaza. Gazans are the chosen lucky losers who get to be slaughtered early. These “not-Jewish” peoples are termed “cockroaches” or such-like, and are easily squished under collapsing-bombed buildings, for the benefit and stress reduction entertainment of their murderers. It is not a new theme in human history, and seems no different for simple human social-brained modules of othering concepts that occurred in the exterminations done by Nazi Germany. It is not anti-antisemitism, it is simple anti-humanism. Not human beings. Others who are not us.
Too bad for Israel jewish state survival, it is also exists in a box-cube of its own, gazed upon in fear from the outside, from a much larger, older, diversified middle-east cluster of nations from all sides, enough of them to counted to more than six. All of the real outsiders, are used to fractious rivalries, and also cooperation, with experiences of having to get on with each other, and share a long cultural histories.
The new Israel is but a recent colonial invasion and outpost gas-station for the USA — Military Aggressive Financial Industrial America, -MAFIA, AKA “the great Satan”. Israel is so in great danger of receiving final external judgement in the biblical sense. It has behaved as a modern loot Crusade from the Christian West, to play the old geopolitical shove aside and not really convert game. Its neighbors have collectively have been given so much to fear, for so long a time, from the USA- MAFIA. And again, as in history, they have had plenty of time to learn and grow so much from this point of view. Their complex adaptive immune systems have emerged, and their defensive systems are planning how to reject a most harmful invader at any and all costs.
As a nation supposedly founded as a special religious state, based on the Bible of the Jewish peoples, the Israel elite peoples seem to have lost entirely their religious sensibility and moral functions, and began by turning themselves into an exterminators race of Daleks. This is always within the range of human social behavior, if it overrides respect and controls that actively guard against it. As colonists expelling the peoples of a different systems, Israel required peoples to carry this out by first creating their own tight mental boxes against their victims.
Being guards, of a subject race of prisoners, guarantees of moral destruction of the guards and leads to the creation of a slave-prisoner rebellion. If the wars against Israel goes nuclear, these peoples will emulate the story of the fictional wars leading to the creation of the Dalek race. Israel failed to survive as a state in ancient history. For what historical reasons its fleeing religious refugees seem to have failed to understand, appreciate and record, excepting their god promises revenge by land re-acquisition. This is pretty much the story of all abusive human relationships, they are not special at all. Only the people they took revenge on, never agreed to this, and now this Israel religious state reincarnation already seems to have failed again, being based upon replays of abuse, by fallible human beings. For among the miscellaneous narratives in the Bible, their are strong hints, that what we sow, in human affairs, we shall also reap …
Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
- Matthew 7:1-King James Version