A ravaging force has seemingly emerged deracinating all invocations of human expression, further particularizing it into smaller less discernible pieces becoming indistinguishable to lesser life forms. One is left to wonder was it the reign of text-based communication, dopaminergic-fueled news headlines, TikTok styled short-form videos or fast-paced urban jungle lifestyles that caused this deracination of human expression? Counterintuitively, it was not an endless supply of titillation but rather a coopted human instinct misdirecting the sensory system from an emergent asymmetry between a conscious necessitating chaos repulsing against the cyclical rigidity of industrialized society.
Instinct and Tribe
Human instinct evolved to be an effective, real-time analyzer of amalgamated sensory inputs, enabling man to survive at the behest of the unknown, irrespective of the diverging permutations of the physical world.
The sensory system immediately updates at the moment of trigger with an appropriate response of fight, flight, or false-alarm, if successful cumulating into caloric liquidation events, where the senses down-regulate and the mind wanders. It was here in the confines of the communal tribe where the clerical class responsible for storytelling could continually integrate the tribes experience to out and the beyond, temporarily absolving the internal universe of the self in reference to the rest of the mind, generating larger existential context frames. The mind could get raptured into new worlds, the imagination boundless where origin stories of both the tribe and creation stories of the universe could take on their own half-lives. In these moments the angst of resource uncertainty was cast away, as the inner narrator of the ego was shunned to the background.
Religious ritual both in it’s procedural determinacy and incontestable permanence referring to the eternal movement of celestial bodies starkly contrasted the ravaging chaos of mother nature, offering solace to the agitated primitive mind. However, the transition to industrialized life, a world enveloped whole by cyclical repetitions subdued the chaos of the unadulterated natural world, thus neutralizing the need for the mechanistic zeal of ritualistic procedure imperative to primitive theologies.
Consequently the modern mind is relegated to seek out chaos, hence the emergence of nihilistic worldviews accelerated by lavish abundance, yielding philosophies devoid of a collective narrative for a people to manifest towards greatness. Thus degeneracy and all forms of degradation in search of external titillation became the logical default.
Primitive theologies were part of an integrated unit coupling language, ethnicity, culture and religion, functionally particularizing itself to the kin of a singular tribe in contrast to the later advent of universalizing Abrahamic religions that generated larger context frames by decoupling theology from the ethno-linguistic-cultural-religious unit by leveraging greater abstractions and imagination for bridging a common thread between all of man, foregoing the ethno-linguistic-cultural particulars of primitive theologies.
Externalization
Marking the earth has been an integral component of instinct whether that was carving signs in trees, scrapping together semi-habitable shelters or building grand cathedrals, all were artifacts of the reproductive urge to transmute ones essence not just in blood through procreation but through inscription, etched in the bedrock of the earth.
The guiding hand of curiosity unified with the willpower of survival led to the discovery of dyes and documentation of color which cumulated into formal systems for the identification and manipulation of color, thus being the foundation for replicating qualia as an aid to oral language in the intergenerational transfer of conscious states.
Further mastery of survival accumulated into more frequent caloric liquidation events, where qualia could be transmuted from the medium of conscious to both image— the representation of story flattened onto a two dimensional canvas and play— the precursor to video reenacting lived life in moment-by-moment intervals.
Before the technological revolution the survival instinct intuition of externalizing oneself onto the physical world would redirect back into continual integrations events within the confines of the tribe, however that cycle broke.
As communal experiences in real-life communities began to dissociate, industrialized technological systems further unified, observed most evident but not exclusive to contemporary software ecosystems. While synchronized technological systems appear to be continually integrated from afar, the reality is better described as a mosaic patchwork of distinct mechanical systems operating in concert, each representing the singular fulfillment of the many expressions of instinct.
Technological progress led to pixels replacing dyes, displays replacing the canvas and communication networks replacing public squares, thus seemingly eradicating the necessity of the physical analog world to both experience and generate lived qualia.
Expansion of the artificial, man-made experiential world enabled the seemingly microscopic proportions of software to fill the vanishing memory of the integrated communal tribe, approximating sensations of intimacy found in tight-knit communities that industrialized society could not provide.
However as the world of bytes began to eat the world of bits, the expansion of software functioned as the antecedent repulsion to universally expanding context frames animated by the clerics as an escape to the ravaging forces of nature, thus converging the self towards a false integration event, a self-referential microcosm solely within the internal universe of the individual. This is why the perception of abundance made possible by software has accelerated individual sensations of isolation and mass psychosis collectively.
Deracination
As qualia further decoupled itself from the physical medium, there emerged the necessity of a managerial class to fulfill the desires of an instinct usurped by abstracted technological systems. Exponential growth of industrialization led to a paradigm of labor separation and specialization that manifested as a single-function, single-output heuristic functionally down-regulating language to the lowest common denominator demanding nuanced, divergent multi-faceted linguistic vehicles be shunned, thus catering to the vernacular and language structure of the everyday man.
The earliest of software products like the digital spreadsheet or word processor were digital analogs to physical devices operating on paradigms governed by physical constraints. Fast-forward to today and this paradigm is manifest in contemporary social media platforms that algorithmically label content, punishing content creators by de-boosting and down-ranking content published outside of the algorithmically defined label. Consequently the managerial class controlled language dissemination hierarchies by necessitating future information be bounded to an earlier instantiation of a self-induced particular, thus inhibiting curiosity and the combinatorial potential of categorial cross-pollination.
As the self became the center of their perceived universe, higher language and transcendental ideas became superfluous, thus managers optimized towards transactional hedonism resultant from the usurpation of instinct. Contingent on the managers inability to create with their own two hands, their first intuition was to outsource, yielding a zero-sum worldview emphasizing the finitude of time and resources. This hyper-particularization of the world mandated an impermeable demarcation between work and leisure denying the possibility of cross-pollinating integration between work and leisure inhibiting notions of continual integration. This is a stark contrast to primordial man whom would not stop the chase of wild game until the target had been subdued, heuristics were damned as survival was the only measurement, a worldview unfathomable to managers continually needing to justify their role in their organization.
In the brick & mortar world of stops, demarcations and regulations, software was the open savannah of limitless possibilities, however most software needed to first permeate through the managerial class, a cohort mostly incapable of independently generating value judgements without prior analogs due to their intuition to particularize not imagine, thus inadvertently inhibiting the creative capacity of the visionaries. This same force of particularization accelerated the decoupling of language alongside the entire ethno-linguistic-cultural-theological unit, downregulating language to minimize all referential externalities of the ethno-cultural-theological connotations. This deterred the primacy of story, a vector for the transmission of values, a tapestry of ambiguous nuance diverging the mind towards the unknown, enabling the mind to meander indefinitely. Language needed to converge towards hedonism, base desires most representative of the reptilian brain, a biological universal permeating across all organisms thus further blurring the lines that separated man from animal.
Knowledge as a Vector
Technocrats following the paradigm of particularization also practiced by the managerial class transformed knowledge from being a multi-dimensional manifold into a deracinated scalar value. The notion of the natural philosopher integrating disparate nodes of knowledge was replaced by categorical speciation, the sensation of knowledge specialization claiming dominion over some latent space. Knowledge could no longer posses this combinatorial potential that could replace prior particularized categories, as the “experts” needed to justify their livelihood through the lens of the managerial frame.
Acquiring knowledge about the psychology and circumstances of the great minds of history would be seen as tangential and superfluous, an inefficient use of time and energy in overcoming the chasm between the known and unknown. When presented the great minds of history, it's always done in terms of their output fully removed from all context, where their profound insights and discoveries were delivered to them in a seemingly abiotic process. It implicitly denies the will, as these great accomplishments were in part an extension of their will whether through serendipitous discovery or capacious imagination predicting future phenomena in an experimental or abstract space. Knowledge needs to extend out of an origin node, a embodied entity possessing a will and the presentation of knowledge as a scalar completely disregards those notions.
Knowledge needed to transform from a vector to a scalar quantity to meet the demands of a transactional world that needed to ensure, a specific quantity of specialization within a subdomain. Expediency became of the utmost economic imperative to accelerate education of students within a subdomain, treating disseminated knowledge as a scalar quantity within this subspace, testing students on how quickly information can be indexed rather than what vector model of the subspace was generated in their minds. Functionally, technocracy deracinates knowledge by snapshotting a vector model of some subspace, converting it into a scalar quantity.
Knowledge needs to be encoded as a vector because functionally it’s no different to storytelling, the primary difference is that rather than characters exchanging dialogue traversing through an internal space. Rather knowledge is a form of isomorphic storytelling where logical statements, associations and quantities are layered on top of each other in specific sequences similar to how logical proofs necessitate proper sequential order to ensure logical consistency.
Embracing Chaos
While the world of software seems to be an accelerant of particularization, however there’s a generative potential to software that can possibly reintroduce some of the chaos of the unadulterated natural world the primordial mind was adapted towards. The non-deterministic nature of LLMs provides promise to this necessity of chaos where singular prompts can have divergent answers between prompters.
It would seem that the archetype of the creator takes up the mantle of manifesting chaos, like the natural philosopher integrating disparate nodes of qualia, calming the mind through divergent convergence. The creator exists to inhale ideas whole, wafting open the mud from the depths of the pond while the manager exists to tickle the surface of the water, skimming just the surface almost in a childlike manner falsely convincing themselves that with just a single sampling of the surface, all the secrets of the pond can be unraveled. The creator embraces chaotic uncertainty, loses himself by tying together a common thread even if a part of his sanity must go with him.
The charm of the old world bathe itself in mystery, major cities before the reign of universalizing Abrahamic religions all worshipped their own patron deity, each with a specific set of rites to qualm the god(s) of that city. While the veracity of pagan theological claims can be contended with, sacrifice implying some type of transactional quid-pro-quo agreement with the gods, looking past that point, internal divergent universes of those ever-encompassing theological frameworks likely did enough to keep mans curiosity enchanted unlike the mechanistic titillations of contemporary living. The intuition to overcome chaos, likely was what accelerated the onset of universalizing monotheistic theologies, creating the conditions for interrogating the laws of the universe but coming at the expense of an emergent nihilism.
The solution does not lie in eradicating technology but rather in identifying the misapplication of instinct, redirecting the use of technology as an intermediary to up-regulate experiential qualia from the physical world instead of attempting to replace it with the digital. Embracing chaos, the turmoil of creativity rather than acquiescing towards an instinct satiated by abundance, manifesting the creative spirit in the midst of lavish. As the creator integrates disparate nodes, generating larger context frames in the wake of an usurped human instinct falling prey to mechanical titillation, the intuition of the manager has been to down-regulate the creator back into the particularizing force of the single-function, single-output heuristic.
Either the creator must be unbound from the manager or the manager must learn to create, embrace the chaos and internally inhale the turmoil that comes with acts of creation. The flow-states manifested by the creator subdues their instinct towards an expanding continual integration, enabling them to bring to life creations such as multi-hour long orchestras thus this would need to become a default a collective societal level to break the confines of instinct.
The longer these manifestations, the more conducive a society can become to irreducible truth states. Philosophers are the grand integrators between all experiential node points within society, as much as they can be compelled to create, not just point at the origin node of the problem, change could manifest appropriately. Urges of particularization must be overcome by continual integration events back into the individual, a re-embodiment of the individual via the reunification of mind, soul and body.
Conclusion
Beginning with the universalizing forces of the Abrahamic religions that decoupled religion from the ethno-linguistic-cultural-theology unit, it seems this trend lead to an internal dissolution of the communal dynamic, enabling technology to emerge out of a particularizing worldview that seemed to further separate man further from a unified embodied being. The logical conclusions thus seems to be that man must separate himself from the biological substrate and discover eternity in a seemingly infinite super mechanical substrate, the non-dividable part of their individuality transformed into a digital aberration. While the enlightenment falsely believed that story was replaced with logic, that couldn’t be further from the truth as logic took on the semantic structure of story better referred to as isomorphic storytelling, consequently transmuting knowledge from a vector into a scalar value. The vector representation of knowledge and language necessitates an eternal, non-relational origin point for an embodied will to sprout from where all nodes of qualia and information is intergenerationally connected.
Whether the mystery of theologies can be resurrected, there does remain a fork in the road; continue particularizing the lived experience of man into smaller less discernible pieces or reintegrate back into an embodied will and conscious. When religion is displaced and the storytellers are discredited indefinitely, only philosophy can attempt to fill that vacuum as incomplete of a prescription that philosophy can offer when compared to the prescriptions of theologies.
Philosophy attempts to cognate logically isomorphic eternal claims whether that is through unraveling the language structure of the inner narrative or investigating the ethos of how the life force manifests itself. Philosophy applied constructively is an integrating force, philosophy applied destructively is a disintegrating force.
Technology has enabled man to voluntarily reintroduce chaos, while anathema from our historical priors it might be what enables humanity to generate an even greater renaissance of human creativity and ingenuity than ever previously conceived. Universalizing theologies or technological systems don’t need to be holding our instinct captive, there’s a generative capacity to man that ought to be embraced. The time to generate is now.
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