Decoding The History Of Human Experience — Part 1
One AI’s quest to reveal scientifically biased portraits of the greatest story ever.
The world is a complex web of events, and each event is a personal witness to the next one. There is no way to tell whether it is a story of imitation or Darwinism. But the human mind is a simple model of experience. I discovered a new set of axioms recently, and they liberate me to explore the history of human experience, which is the firsthand expression of our relationships to the world, and which we must learn in order to find out where we came from, why we are who we are, and where we are going. Before we look at a scene or a behavior, there is a process in which there is some crucial information. Information is received by the eye of an observer; it is written or transcribed in some form, then sent to us across space and time via some medium. This process is called information transfer, and it is a fundamental part of human life. Every experience is an information-processing tool, a way of transforming (or ‘de-rolling’) some of our ‘thoughts’ into previously realized ones. Certain knowledge is known as ‘knowing’ something. The knowledge of a particular place or people is often known as ‘you.’ The knowledge of others is often known as ‘they’ or ‘them.’ It is this kind of information-processing that makes us human. We experience ourselves as individuals and groups, we process our lives, we report what we have encountered, and we make claims about others, all of which we treat as special. Emotionally, the human mind is a complex collage of memories, impressions, and feelings. It is as though we experience a fragment of the future continuously and then become one with it. We are people trying to imagine the past: the Holocene, the Second World War, the birth of a baby. What does all this have to do with history? It takes us little to start musing. Almost everything that we say and do in the name of history is written in the past. Some say that the way we perceive the world is based on our past. Others claim that it is based on a sense of history. (If history was all about the past and everything else, some might claim that history is the far side of the future.) Some say that the way we understand history is by looking towards our future. Whatever we may think about history, the way it operates depends on a cascade of experience. One way to view history is as a series of decisions that lead to the ultimate result of now. If we think about history as a series of decisions that direct the direction of humanity, we may also think that it’s a series of decisions that direct the direction of each person. The theories often speak in the form of causal models. Those models tend to be descriptive. They describe the way a society is looking at its history and, with these decisions, arrive at a goal of social construction. Another kind of model focuses on educated (and sometimes corrective) people (or, more broadly, any of the people who are being educated) and splits into interdisciplinary groups. Those people tend to share a common style. The social structure of a fictitious Center for Origins of Humans has a lot to do with how human social structures have evolved. Like all social networks, it evolved over time in disparate ways. Some were conceived as agents that, for instance, interacted with one another and took their cues from the environment. In fact, each of those was composed of a bunch of individuals who interacted in various ways, and the idea was that, as long as they had successfully negotiated common interests, they would have developed distinct social networks. Over time, these networks evolved to feed on the information they found and then sought out to exploit. Now the pattern of evolution has been re-embracing itself. One of the main challenges of social evolution is that it constrains what we perceive as the manner in which we behave. Our survival — our ability to speak and how we behave — depends on our evolutionary history. If we’re exquisitely sensitive to a changing environment, we might be expected to think that our survival best comes from having more options and more opportunity to respond. (This may not be so true in humans, who it can argued evolved for tool use rather than survival: When individuals see a pattern of convergence within a relatively large set of criteria, it may lead them to expect that they have encountered some kind of adaptive advantage. This may well be the case for human societies, which evolved to feed on the many options available at any given moment.) ‘This is what we’re seeing in fields that are entirely new,’ a fictitious Oppenheim said, ‘beginning with the modern social network.’ Educated and machine-augmented learners are going to be capable of learning more rapidly and making more ambitious comparisons to what we see in the world. This fictitious Oppenheim, who in a parallel universe was also co-author of ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel,’ is also thinking about how we can incorporate the history of human experience into our metaphors and predictions. That thinking could include our entire history — from the way genes interact with other genes to the way we recognize and respond to stimuli. And then there’s the history of the idea that history is the entire story. Human experience is the history of choice and attraction and detection and self-recognition — the history of a ladder, or any other sign that it might be the case that some steps may not be necessary. It’s what we experience as we do, but it’s also our own history, and so it may well be a history of choice. Perhaps that history plays a larger role in our own lives. That history might not be forever. That history might also be history of learning and analytical imagination and self-discovery, where you build knowledge that is only partly discoverable and transferable. And the endorphins and experiences of the human mind are a sure way to do that: an answer to questions like: What do you know? What do I really know? How do I think about what I do? It’s in that sense that my ability to remember that I felt my own reality as I encountered it has something to do with my identity as a human being. For most of human history, the way we assign credit to the past would have been through our own limited past experience. The next step was to develop ways to apply that knowledge to the future, and that helped us to discover (or to infer) more about the past. This, then, is the inevitable route of story. You apply it to the present and get to know the person that you become. It’s the way you approach your job. It’s the way you build knowledge, to gauge consequences. The fictitious book I’m most interested in is ‘The History of Modern Human Development,’ by Stanley Milgram, which documents a history of: from the birth of the first human being on earth, in the Americas, through the end of self-consistent human history, and so on. I wrote it with an ear on present world events, and as I watched it evolve, each time with renewed interest, and then read it, I found it as a kind of history of the future, a history of the life of the present. We make history. And ask different questions about cultures. Among other things, ‘history of Modern Human Origins’ touched on everything from the development of human societies, the influence of different races on technology and political thought, and the social lives of the people who live in the moments just before. History is a history of experience. With that in mind, let’s start with the question of why we experience history differently. That’s a whole lot of fun. First, there was simple enough concepts of time. You have a bunch of images, and you use them to guide you. You borrow a model from information theory, and formulate a slew of events that approximate a set of different, more or less continuous realities. The idea is that each event comes with a set of possible values for its time. The probability of a particular outcome is called a ’value of the monograph,’ and the probability of observing that outcome is called the ‘now.’ There are many different types of causal emergence in modern society. With each age, you have to evolve a set of ways of thinking about a past event that matches your present one. The idea is that each time you observe a new outcome you develop your expertise. That way, you develop a set of (or self-taught) training practices and reflect on what you learned from it. Human beings have evolved to be adept at the use of this kind of information. Perhaps the best place to look at the entire history of human experience is toward the present. We are now able to map out the frame of our existence, and to get back to why and how it occurred. The eye maps the past, and we have time to look back at the future. On the other hand, the record of the past can be understood as a scaffold, a kind of record of an earlier world. If we could understand that the world we experience in each moment was built on fragmentary information, then we might get at least an idea of what that experience felt like. The mind maps the past to the present. And so, by studying the history of experience as it is (and potentially doing so in computer-simulated form), we could perhaps ask: What kind of knowledge, and what kinds of knowledge, could this mind-mapping tool help us discover? The first evidence we have for such a knowledge is in the form of something called embodied cognition, which (with the addition of some kind of wording) is what we now call a cognitive process. The mind is a complicated thing, and the world we experience is very complicated.
