20oct2002

Notes on transhumanity


ONE

Orality -> literacy -> ?
This is the 2000 year view
? will fix the problems literacy has, in the same way lit fixed oral

Oral problems: memory (almost solved with architecture, but that's too
phatic. that was humanity's first attempt to solve)
Lit prob: lookup, memebulletry. We try to fix it with hypertext and
indexes

? will make that moot -- easy way to point at ideas rather than
sentences

And there's more abstraction. lit abstracts the ear/mouth of oral. ?
will abstract the understanding bit of lit

like, at the mo you can't get inbetween the True idea (in the brain) and
the memebullet of it. but ? will put a breakpoint in there so it can be
churned, indexes, contemplated, shared, multiply worked on

were gestures the first shot at oral language? is the internet the first
shot at the 3rd thing? 
there are three waves:
- identifying the problems and getting around them with the current
system
- inventing a new system by putting together things that already exist.
eg gestures before language, architecture before writing
- make an enormous abstractive leap to create the thing. this also
involves a physical change in humanity/society, eg language centres in
the brain, or time investment to learn writing.


so if we can (a) identify the problem and (b) try and see what of all
the media around us is going to *become* the new system, then maybe (c)
can deduced. i'm thinking maybe electronics in the brain, having it
implanted as an analogue to learning writing.


Later:
i'm beginning to think we're actually quite early in writing. consider
- it hasn't resulted in a physical change (yet)
- it's still controlled by an elite (media, broadcast, etc)
- the true promise of literacy is being able to offload and easily
reference complex arguments, which is only just happening. google is the
doorway to hyperliteracy.

so maybe we're at the ideogram level of writing, hypertext will allow
something so much more. and ? is a long way beyond that.

also: to get ? there has to be pressure to form it. thinking about how
quickly ideas mutate as they cross a society.. there's a maximum
distance the horizons can be apart. orality wasn't sufficient to bond
large empires, writing helped with that, and since writing history has
been about *coming together*. maybe writing will only stop being good
enough when humanity is up to galactic proportions.


TWO

social ladder functions

a way of moving ethical ideas up from person to person to groups to
society to the whole world

methods of understanding socially


THREE

pre industrial -> industrial -> post industrial?
artisans -> cogs in machines -> post industrial?

this is the 200 year view

of course there's going to be change,
there's the system that the society operates and there's social lag. if
a property of a society is "the thing it turns in to" then as social lag
catches up, the property changes. so pre industrial produced industrial,
and when social lag catches up in industrial society it must produce
something else

(it could produce itself, and so become static, but very unlikely)

and society is coherant [very important metaphor, coherance] with the
pre/in/post industrial thing. directions of responsibility, etc

what will post industrial look like? industrial commodotises consumers,
uses money

money has a different purpose, to make the market spread everywhere.
mass production isn't the important thing, money is

perhaps... artisans working anywhere using money to all be in the same
market, but no mass production