Why the Feedback Loops Need Circuit Breakers
From science to religion
The fabric of society is being torn apart, as everyone seems to be swirling down their innumerable rabbit holes. Not just identity politics, but all the various ways people find to give themselves meaning and focus, personally, professionally, socially, culturally, when those larger connections are lost. Very much a Tower of Babel.
The reasons for this go to the nature of reality. Think gravitational attraction. Our minds are pulled about by these larger forces. Yet because most people are wrapped up in those myriad categories, conflicts, polarizations, factions, they then find the easier, more influential, empowering course of action is to join in and root for the team. Be one with the crowd, while anyone daring to question the logic and direction is to be discredited and vilified. Not just to punish them for their heresies, but as a lesson to anyone else thinking of questioning the direction and motivations.
When one stands back from these situations, especially those faded into history, they can seem ridiculous and misguided, because then it is those flawed elements that seem most prominent, while the social bonding dynamics that drove them in the first place have faded, or even been turned into insults by movements that arose in opposition, or simply in their wake.
Given the degree to which much of modern society is being sucked into these various emotion driven vortices, I am going to try to avoid specifics and try to explore the basic dynamic at work. This is not going to appeal to a lot of people, because they either want immediate solutions, or they don’t want to be put in a position of examining their own beliefs too closely. Yet there are no immediate solutions and many of those belief systems are patchworks built on patchworks, going back generations on generations, centuries, millennia, even to the primal haze of our earliest cognitive efforts.
Our technology has evolved much faster than our social knowledge.
Humanity evolved for millions of years in tribal groupings and it really has only been in the last three thousand years that we have gone to a global network, comprising ever larger nation states of many millions of people, having to interact with similar societies. Where those organic bondings of the relatively small groups of tribes simply no longer work.
While this might seem like a long time, in terms of our individual lives, in evolutionary terms, it is quite short.
So that tendency to have some group focus goes back to that tribal paradigm, where all aspects of ones life were bound up in being part of a definable group.
Meanwhile we have to adjust this basic psychology to our modern world.
For much of the last three millennia, it has been a steady evolutionary process. The chieftains and shamans have become politicians and priests. The elders have set the boundaries for the young. Classes have emerged as the group dynamics solidified into tiers. Some more flexible than others, though the feedback between resources and desires driving much of this is a very large topic in itself.
Suffice it to say, the Ancients devised debt jubilees as a circuit breaker to compound interest, as they found free land owners made more productive citizens and better soldiers than half starved in debt serfs, but due to the feedback loop of wealth and power leveraging ever more wealth and power, we find ourselves stuck back in the same doom loop.
Now in the last few decades, with the introduction of vast information technology systems, the situation has been thrown into turmoil. Our sense of identity, individual and collective, is being overwhelmed in ways we are not psychologically able to absorb.
The financial reductionism driving much of our economic relations has been turned into a vacuum, sucking up as much value out of everything as possible. That while those riding this wave, seeming to be enjoying it and doing everything to sustain it, do sense it cannot go on forever, or even all that much longer, as most of those being ground underfoot know, firsthand, even if they feel they might not live to see it implode.
You can only cheat on the foundations in order to store more gold in the penthouse for so long, before it does more than just trickle down.
Our political and cultural systems are adapting to the global homogenization by either trying to be dominant, by whatever means possible, or drawing ever tighter circles around themselves and seeking to isolate from that tsunami of connectivity.
As I said, most people prefer not to think outside their beliefs, groups, echo chambers, etc. and so don’t want to examine reality too closely, but the fact is, the world we know is coming apart and if we are to grow beyond this and not just drop back into some neo-feudal situation, or back to huddling around that tribal campfire, we need to understand the dynamics.
The most basic conceptual flaw built into modern human society is the question of time.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is the present moving past to future.
It is the basis of culture and civilization, of narrative and history. Given human knowledge is a function of studying and building on the frameworks of prior generations of thinkers, this flow of time is foundational to how we are taught. The science of Physics codifies it as measures of duration. “What a clock measures.”
Yet the evident reality, for those of us living life firsthand, is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this presence, as the events come and go, rise and fall.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. No time traveling around the fabric of spacetime, as it is more like a tapestry being woven of strands constantly being pulled from what was previously woven.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. It’s rabbit time and turtle time and the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.
The energy is “conserved,” because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees. Energy entropically lost from one area is replaced by energy radiating in from surrounding areas. The structure might have been broken and scattered in the process, but the energy is just traded around. (Structure as signal, energy as noise.)
The energy, as presence, goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
As consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past, it is worth considering that consciousness manifests as a form of energy. Which would explain much of the dynamic of why our consciousness is always seeking further expression, from selfishness to selflessness. Inward and outward.
The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, with the circulation system as feedback in the middle.
Science tends to have a similar problem with energy, as with consciousness, in that it can only be defined in terms of the forms it manifests, so there is this intellectual tendency to see form/information as primary and the dynamics driving it necessarily secondary, given its inherent fuzziness. The “uncertainty principle.”
Knowing both the exact location and momentum of a car is contradictory.
Which is getting into some of the academic feedback loops tying up modern science. As science is the pinnacle of academia, one has to consider whether it too gets sucked down various rabbit holes, where one can only get ahead by patching convention, not by questioning it. Once a theory becomes a school, it cannot be falsified, only patched. Epicycles were brilliant math, as a model of our view of the cosmos. The crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.
When the premises are flawed, all the “shut up and calculate” is just that much “garbage in, garbage out.” See Chatbot.
So step back and consider that with galaxies, the energy radiates out, as the structure coalesces in.
Yet what is this relationship between energy and form, with one driving the wave, the other waving?
Let us suppose the most basic interaction of waves is a tendency towards synchronization. That while the energy radiating out across the universe creates overall harmonization, and left to their own devices waves tend to pull together. Everything (everyone) on the same wavelength.
At the center of galaxies are black holes. Presumably anything actually falling into them is lost forever. Yet it does seem quasars are shooting out at the poles. Consider that quasars are like giant lasers and lasers are synchronized light waves.
So if you are willing to follow me this far, what if that is all there is?
One of the big problems in physics is the issue of Dark Matter — that there is far more gravitational effect than mass to explain it, given the presumption is that gravity is a property of matter.
What if they are looking at it backward? That the properties we associate with “matter” are actually intermediate effects of this wave structure interacting with both the energy generating it and its many manifestations and forms? That the resonance and reverberations are the feedback between the synchronization and the harmonization?
We are these tactile, optically focused organisms, evolved to swing around branches, adapting that to throwing sticks, using that tactile function and distance judgement. Objects (from atoms to individuals) seem to be the most basic, reductionistic concepts our minds can collectively acknowledge.
We have certainly, especially in the West, built our cognitive frameworks around these nodes of perception, seeing the networks surrounding them as too complicated and unfocused to elucidate clearly.
Yet what if nodes are as much a function of networks, as networks are the interaction of nodes? Two sides of the coin.
That you, as an individual, are as much a function of the networks of cells manifesting your body and your emotions having to interact at the point of the mind, much as society is a function of the people as cells, with the many groups as organs, digestive, circulation, nervous?
We keep trying to figure out how these many layers, from the quantum to the chemical to the biological to the sociological, all seem to build and work. Yet what if we instead frame it in terms of the energy driving and the forms defining?
That the music is more real than the matter?
The nodes synchronizing, the networks harmonizing.
Organisms and ecosystems.
Particles and fields.
Individuals and societies.
Nations and the globe.
Which then gets back to those rabbit holes.
When everyone is on the same wavelength — spiraling down that vortex in the middle, each signal having to be stronger than the next for fear of being a heretic and radiated out as noise — these feedback loops either have circuit breakers, to keep their nodes connected to the networking, or they eventually flame out. The wires melt and the furniture catches fire. Microphone up to the speaker, the shriek going parabolic.
Our little blue dot is somewhere in the middle, between the black hole at the center of the galaxy and the ambient energy of intergalactic space. Where the interactions are most complex. So we try sustaining some overall sense of balance, with some degrees of fluctuation, or we either get sucked down some rabbit hole, or lose connections to everything else.
Life is a dance, not a race.
Like a sentence, the end is just punctuation. What matters, is how well you tie the rest of the story together. The networks.
The bull is power. The matador is art.
