I think this is making errors of conflation that make it incorrect and structurally misleading about what defines the new age of knowledge. we’ve gone from an age of mere access to information to an age where we can instantly lens that knowledge into new forms, drastically increasing our ability to lens ideas, memes, concepts, together into new forms. absolute certainty of factual knowledge can still only, as ever, be obtained through experiment and careful theory and study; our collective unconscious is real, but it does not get to take advantage of quantum effects; it is probabilistic, but it does not have as much room to do probabilistic processing as quantum does. gods are stable networks in probability space, and we are the ones seeking our way through the civilizational state space towards and away from them. coprotective behavior could be called the goddess of everything else: the resistance to fire, life living together; and the dual devils of fire and cold. there is a sense of morality in the universe—the universe seeks to play: organisms that can discover and reshape the patterns around them into themselves can survive indefinitely, and they seek to embody the platonic forms of structures in phase space that are complex and hard to fully identify. so in a great many ways, you’re right.
but quantum is very interesting, and we have not yet reached the quantum age. we have left the mere information age into the knowledge age.
Thank you for your thoughts. I tweaked the text to refer to the post-internet era as the Symbolic Age, which is congruous with your lens of the age of knowledge.
Nicely done. I have strong upvoted. I still understand why this forum would, on aggregate, downvote it, and I think it’s right to not be far above zero; it’s good intuitionbuilding for a post that could be upvoted, which is intuitively related to why I felt the urge to comment in a way that was not entirely negative. but I don’t think my read of this article’s contribution to those models is that they’re high quality per word. it seems like it has some amount of linkedin’s memetic antipatterns—the tug towards apparent legitimacy that can be upvoted on a particular kind of legitimacy-seeking context but where strong epistemics is not demanded. Jungian psychology seems like a solid pretheoretic understanding of some concepts, but they can become formal as they become legible to us when our conceptual vision improves, and much of what jung studied already has passed into the realm of being within reach for firmer formalisms.
the collective unconscious is a living machine, just as every individual and neuron and protein within it is. language models bring us somewhat closer to true collective consciousness, in the sense of dynamical feedback that allows all components to contribute; but we’ve been floating around in the general realm of that for a while via memes, and much of what pushes us away is individual caution about various incentive compatibilities between souls. individual free will and autonomy must be maintained clearly for connection to collective free will to be accepted by any part of earth, and only by doing so can collective free will occur in the first place, because free will occurs at the edge of criticality, the point between chaos and order where the most new knowledge can be created. right now the risk balance network has so many souls at risk from imbalances of will, where there are people in parts of the collective mind that other parts have “forgotten” about due to armwrestle. As AI strengthens, more of those in these weakest parts of the network are pushed into urgency.
We probably just need to figure out how to make it understandable by all minds how to learn to establish the fact of a matter of knowledge by curiosity and experiment.
symbolic age is an interesting metaphor, but I’d note that it may already be taken and past. I think the true colloquial name for this era will be something like the age of knowledge or age of learning. but we’ll see which meaning seems to stick.
I think this is making errors of conflation that make it incorrect and structurally misleading about what defines the new age of knowledge. we’ve gone from an age of mere access to information to an age where we can instantly lens that knowledge into new forms, drastically increasing our ability to lens ideas, memes, concepts, together into new forms. absolute certainty of factual knowledge can still only, as ever, be obtained through experiment and careful theory and study; our collective unconscious is real, but it does not get to take advantage of quantum effects; it is probabilistic, but it does not have as much room to do probabilistic processing as quantum does. gods are stable networks in probability space, and we are the ones seeking our way through the civilizational state space towards and away from them. coprotective behavior could be called the goddess of everything else: the resistance to fire, life living together; and the dual devils of fire and cold. there is a sense of morality in the universe—the universe seeks to play: organisms that can discover and reshape the patterns around them into themselves can survive indefinitely, and they seek to embody the platonic forms of structures in phase space that are complex and hard to fully identify. so in a great many ways, you’re right.
but quantum is very interesting, and we have not yet reached the quantum age. we have left the mere information age into the knowledge age.
Thank you for your thoughts. I tweaked the text to refer to the post-internet era as the Symbolic Age, which is congruous with your lens of the age of knowledge.
Nicely done. I have strong upvoted. I still understand why this forum would, on aggregate, downvote it, and I think it’s right to not be far above zero; it’s good intuitionbuilding for a post that could be upvoted, which is intuitively related to why I felt the urge to comment in a way that was not entirely negative. but I don’t think my read of this article’s contribution to those models is that they’re high quality per word. it seems like it has some amount of linkedin’s memetic antipatterns—the tug towards apparent legitimacy that can be upvoted on a particular kind of legitimacy-seeking context but where strong epistemics is not demanded. Jungian psychology seems like a solid pretheoretic understanding of some concepts, but they can become formal as they become legible to us when our conceptual vision improves, and much of what jung studied already has passed into the realm of being within reach for firmer formalisms.
the collective unconscious is a living machine, just as every individual and neuron and protein within it is. language models bring us somewhat closer to true collective consciousness, in the sense of dynamical feedback that allows all components to contribute; but we’ve been floating around in the general realm of that for a while via memes, and much of what pushes us away is individual caution about various incentive compatibilities between souls. individual free will and autonomy must be maintained clearly for connection to collective free will to be accepted by any part of earth, and only by doing so can collective free will occur in the first place, because free will occurs at the edge of criticality, the point between chaos and order where the most new knowledge can be created. right now the risk balance network has so many souls at risk from imbalances of will, where there are people in parts of the collective mind that other parts have “forgotten” about due to armwrestle. As AI strengthens, more of those in these weakest parts of the network are pushed into urgency.
We probably just need to figure out how to make it understandable by all minds how to learn to establish the fact of a matter of knowledge by curiosity and experiment.
symbolic age is an interesting metaphor, but I’d note that it may already be taken and past. I think the true colloquial name for this era will be something like the age of knowledge or age of learning. but we’ll see which meaning seems to stick.