In this series of posts I am looking for a better way. Already this actual world is very complicated. And it promises to grow even more so.
Every day our normal physical reality, our actuality, presents new kinds of experiences. And new problems that go with them. What happens when truly virtual reality comes on strong? That may be in just a few years or so. And soon thereafter, even simultaneously, how about augmented reality!
How are we going to deal with a world made of layers of information stacked, one over the other. Constantly changing. Constantly cross-referencing each other. You think driving and texting is a problem now? By then, even riding in a self-driving car will be fiercely distracting! Some inputs to your brain will be actual, others virtual, and still others a mix of actual and virtual!? It'll be like a brain-sandwich -- stacktuality! On steroids! And, oh, I'm sure they'll chemically be in the mix, as well.
And just before the Singularity, how are we to manage all those competing streams of thoughts coming from other people? They will course through our awareness on parallel telepatech channels of AGI-augmented brain feeds? If we don't come up with a new way of thinking about thinking, and soon, we'll become even more insane than some of us already are!
My posts generally address such prospects. Taking care of things. How, over eons, we've traditionally come to handle whatever we've said to be "reality". And now to work out effective strategies for the brave new world already bearing down, hard, upon us. And looking toward even braver worlds yet to manifest.
Humans pay attention in at least eleven different orders of complexity within their own individual "reality". Attentiveness is so fluid a dynamic that most do not notice the differences, moment to moment. But pay attention to attention itself. How it feels in different circumstances. During different kinds of events.
Each has its very own attentive mode, its specifically structured focus. While growing up each person learns to deal with simple ones first. Then the next more complicated order is put together using elements of the earlier. You can see the maturing cognitive processes at work in sequential stages of a child's art. Over a lifetime each person matures through similar phases. They engage and gradually master ever more powerful and comprehensive ways of dealing with things. They grow up.
And cultures develop in similar fashion, but over many generations. Each new generation has individuals who work out solutions to problems. Their new innovations and discoveries spread as memes among their social fellows. Gradually new ideas feedback into and change a culture's common sense way of dealing with things. It develops slowly over time, fed by individuals also maturing in their own time scales.
The common sense of our own recent western culture, for instance. The era in the Euromerican west, from 16th through 19th centuries, I call C4. It now affects others all around the world. And as it spreads, it often evokes intense hostility among cultures still very strongly committed to earlier ways of understanding reality. But even as the western swath widens, it too changes.
Already, everywhere, via cybernetic processes unleashed by digital computing, we have entered C5. It explodes even more rapidly than C4 out across cultures everywhere. Everyone wants a cellphone!
Where C4 was mechanically industrial, C5 is responsively cybernetic. In C4 people conformed to machines and bureaucracies. In C5 smart devices and sleek institutions organize themselves into what people want and like.
Before most of us are ready, we shall enter C6, a tech-augmented pluripotentiality. (Pluripotent: capable of developing any form.) There lurks the Singularity. There we know not what we become, whether for better, or for worse.
(An overview of this globe-embracing process is at my companion site Manifest Orders.)
Initial blog post topics will deal with the first order of individual attentiveness, M1, along with other factors that M1 relates to. The larger cultural and social patterns of C1 are built of ordinary physical actions and relations attended at M1. Both M1 and C1 still function as essential components of our current C4 and C5 behaviors. We'll look at some of those as well. In every era, M1 attends the most basic and direct actions and relationships; it always is at work, whether we are aware of it or not. And people still echo C1 patterns first engaged eons ago.
In the next post, ancient methods of hunting and policing lead to the modern game of baseball. We'll pay attention to the simplest kinds of actions and relationships. Those simple skills inform everything we do, are, and think. They are so basic that we don't give them much notice, until something goes wrong. (For my own path to these ideas, check out my first Steemit post, Why Steemit is the most important leap in 1,000 years.)
To give a taste of where these early posts are headed, below is a table of forthcoming themes. They deal largely with aspects of our traditions of the actual. The virtual orders, M6..M10, come later, after we've gotten the hang of the more basic ones. We have a way to go before we're ready to take that on. But eventually, I expect we'll get to a point where even stacktuality becomes second nature! I hope so. We're all going to need it! Then maybe we'll be ready for C6 and itching to engage whatever the Singularity brings!
Attentive Orders of Individual Actuality (Manifest Orders)
| M# | Objective Concerns | Subjective Concerns | Example Scenarios |
|---|---|---|---|
| M0 | Awareness | Awareness | Being alive |
| M1 | Action | Associations | Throw or pick up a thing |
| M2 | Manage | Kind | Assist, horticulture |
| M3 | Construct, substance | Value, quality | Trade, organize |
| M4 | Causality, Control | Anticipate, preside | Machines, bureaucracy |
| M5 | Feedback, harmony | Options, coherence | Life forms, computers |