The Search for Truth

Confusion arises from the internal conflict between what you perceive the world to present itself as and what you intuitively understand it to be. Initially the gap between what man understood the world to be and what it actually was was quite large, superstition reigned and people were largely confused as to the inner goings on of the entire process. Over time the process complexified, building upon previously attained knowledge as best as they collectively could and assembling it into a more complex structure which would provide greater benefit to larger numbers of people.

Yet the fundamental scism remains, and the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. Will we ever reach a break-even point in our knowledge, where we understand so much that we see an ultimate end to what we all unconsciousnessly and collectively been trying to attain, with only a dim or sometimes absent understanding of some overlying, ultimate goal?

As I stated in my previous post on what I would consider to be intuitive smooth exponential growth of progress as an epiphenomenon of the smoothly accelerating rate of change, reality has shown progress to follow a sawtooth pattern of periodic setbacks where despite accelerating change, overlying progress is disrupted by outside factors. Richard Dawkins described the “sawtooth” pattern of biological evolution in his book The Ancestor’s Tale, as evidence that the epiphenomenon of progress does not exhibit a smoothly exponential effect at all, but only emergent exponential pattern disrupted periodically by temporary setbacks. But over time more and more progressive enhancements are preserved, the result of which, in biological evolution, is mammals, who usurped the earth after the fall of the dinosaurs. Brains had inadvertently triumphed over brawn, as the maximize-energy-towards-growth pattern of the simply conceived, tiny baby dinosaur who would continue to grow for the rest of his life was replaced by the complexly conceived placental mammal, which fed off its mother like a paracite in order to develop progressively larger brains. Or at least, progressively larger brains were one branch of the evolutionary tree of placental mammals, and one which coincidentally lead to a solution of a much bigger problem biological evolution by natural selection had been coping with throughout its entirety, namely that it was a blind process with very primitive mechanisms for conveying and utilizing past discoveries. It inadvertently came up with a past discovery conveying and comprehending mechanism, human consciousness, which soon took over the duty that only genes and behavioral mimicry had held alone for billions of years, and directed it in a manner which put the previous process to shame.

I reject the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress and instead advocate exponential and epiphenomnological view. I belive that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation, but rather that the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting in rational self-interest with no concept of what the final, modern result would be or what their contemporaries’ actions lead to.

However, I believe the sawtooth pattern is converging. The haphazard zigzagging has been following a trend. Lots of blind stumbling in the dark, emerging from random walks across patterns of matter and energy have ultimately resulted in the society we know, love, and cherish today. The pattern continues to converge as the mechanisms of change lock themselves into an exponential upward ramping, and has started changing society in such a way that it is scarcely able to comprehend.

Slowly human knowledge, which was initially so far from the truth, in the 20/20 hindsight of modern, scientific understanding of the universe, is converging upon the truth. Ontology, the study of reality itself, and epistemology, the study of knowledge, have converged into a new type of ontology, the graph structure of information relationships which defines the Semantic Web. With the advent of Semantic MediaWiki, the semantic relationships which define the web of human knowledge will be continually revised by forces dedicated to the construction and preservation of a complete web of human knowledge. The amount of data mining that can be performed on this web, particularly by extremely intelligent data mining experts such as the ones who work at Google, is a virtually limitless resource which has only begun to be tapped.  The natural limit of the kinds of associations that can be made, based on the structure of the universe, is the truth.

Progress as a universal epiphenomenon – Part 1: Human Society

Wow, what a lofty title, eh? Well, that’s where it stands in my mind: progress naturally emerges from all sorts of systems in the universe.

But first, here’s a question that needs to be answered: What is progress? Well, that’s easy: progress indicates any kind of change which isn’t aimless fluxuation but instead directed in some manner.

That’s quite the all-encompassing definition. For example, our universe’s entropy is progressively increasing. While that fits the above definition, it’s not the sort of progress I’m interested in.

In this and the next few posts I’ll expore the systems I consider to be progressive by my own personal standards: human society, evolutionary biology, and physical law itself.

Progress in Human Society

We are naturally goal-oriented, however we also formulate our own goals. Humanity only becomes progressive when we agree on goals and combine our collective effort towards accomplishing them. For most of human history, those goals primarily concerned keeping established society running and improving it whenever possible. Following the advent of word we became archivists of past knowledge, the scope of which began progressing dramatically. Societies rose and fell, the Roman Empire collapsed and Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages, but it bounced back after an infusion of Greek and Roman knowledge kicked off the Renaissance.

The major turning point occured following the development of science, at which point humans became remarkably adept at describing reality in a way which is demonstratably true. At this point humans began progressing immensely: science was an incredible benefit to societies who understood it, and knowledge of physical law let us build technology to harness its power. Science and technology have been ramping up at an accelerating pace. We live in a time where computers are designed and constructed with the aid of computers. Consumerism fuels the push to produce better and better technology in all forms.

The rate of change in human society has been increasing with time. This is because one of the many factors that the rate of change depends on is the rate of communication. Initially communication between groups of geographically disparate people was nonexistent or slow. Many times the communications channels have almost completely collapsed, such as in the afforementioned example of the Dark Ages. However, the last century has seen massive progression in the rate of communication, first with the telegraph, then the telephone, then radio. Now communication is increasingly digitized, and thus the overwhelmingly dominant factor in the rate of change becomes the speed of the underlying communications infrastructure. Like all other aspects of computing, communications speeds have been increasing exponentially. Broadband proliferation in first world countries has been staggering, and broadband providers continue to ramp up the speed as they improve their own infrastructures. Backbone links between the various systems which comprise the Internet grow increasingly vast, and more and more electronic communications systems are moving to the standardized Internet Protocol architecture.

It’s been a little more than a decade since the Internet exploded into mainstream popularity, and in that short time it’s managed to tentacle its way into all aspects of our life. The rate of change in society is increasing exponentially just as the speed of the Internet increases exponentially. Computer power is increasing exponentially as the cost of computing power decreases exponentially. The result is a more-power-for-less-money explosion which we’re in the beginnings of. Computers are also increasing the rate of change as they take on a more and more prominent role in society. They organize us, make decisions for us, and manage the explosion of available information they are helping to generate.

Human societies are unquestionably the most progressive system presently known. While nuclear weapons brought on the post-modern era and made us painfully aware of our progressively increasing destructive power, and instilled the fear that we may unleash such power on ourselves, the traditional intuitive concept of progress was questioned. The modernistic view was essentially quashed by the post-modernist movements, and technology became a Faustian bargain. Would we pay for the luxury of a technologically-enhanced life with our own lives? Nevertheless, this perpetually dangling Sword of Damocles and the post-modernist attitude it brings have not detered progress. We’ve remained modernists, even if many of us no longer feel that way.