I must ask your forbearance for this comment. It may or may not be within good propriety, because it is long. I hope you'all can make it through it anyway.
I'm relatively new here and am very excited by this, because I have heard it in a very different muggle form before, and liked it then too. Perhaps one of the “Invisibles” that you would grok with, even though he may want nothing to do with Magic at all these days (he converted to Christianity recently), is Jordan Hall.
He talks in a way that puts off many people I have tried to introduce him to. Instead I'm going to jump to what I take as his main ideas:
The City:
- The point of the age of literacy/trade contract and agriculture has been the city. The point of the city has been the relative collective advantage obtained from many different minds interacting in the one space, so that the larger any given city the greater the dynamism and creativity exhibited by any given individual in that city compared to that individual in a smaller city, all else held equal. Hence there is also a tendency for large cities to just get larger.
- The city has been the point and has also been the centre. In many ways everything outside of the city exists by virtue of its usefulness as support infrastructure, e.g. in supplying resources or waste processing needed by the city.
- Limits to reaping this quantitative advantage mainly have to do with fact bodies and emotional needs accompany minds. The Dunbar limit, describing the kind of local familiarity/intimacy that our embodied humanity finds the most satisfying, can only be sublimated to a point, and I argue it always leaves its mark anyway. Telecommunications has up to this point not transcended that limitation.
Language:
- There are three types of language or use of language: mother, trade, and Sacred.
- A child learns the mother tongue by virtue of his connection to his family that supports and protects him when he is all need and vulnerability. Tone, look and posture can convey just as much as what is said, and very rapidly. Story and mythological referants are closely shared.
- The trade language comes into play as that which has maximum utility when associating and cooperating with those outside of the Dunbar limit. Meaning is much less tactile, nuanced and immediate, and involves a manipulation and translation of symbols to be obtained and shared.
- If the above two are related to Agape and Philea respectively, then Sacred language is from Eros. When a group of individuals are resonating meaning not so much because they understand each other, but because they are all resonating in tethering to powers higher than them all, then the sacred is in play. Sacred language is hence a result and a facilitator of this.
The opportunity:
- Trade language has dominated the age, and has come to replace them all for many cultures, in large part because the city thrives on its advantages and ignores (at best) what is lost. Now AI can do trade language level translating far better than "humans as mediocre-machines" can, BUT it will never do mother or Sacred language as well as we can.
- This is true for many previously vital functions of the city that nevertheless required a narrowing of one's humanity in order to fulfill well, e.g. lawyer, accountant, Western doctor.
- Digital communion is opening to possibilities for minds coherently connecting into living networks that can outpace the advantages to creativity and dynamism of large cities. There are still protocol problems that mean mostly it is a mess of distraction and mutual emotional triggering. If/when a group figues out those protocol issues that group can only grow.
- This all means the local and embodied, as well as the mother and Sacred tongues, have an opportunity to be re-emphasised and redeveloped, as the literary age problems outpace its advantages. Those that can do this will thus be more human than mediocre machine again, and will have no competitive disadvantage with AI, because they will specialise in what humans are more designed for, namely making good, true and beautiful judgements (/magical perceptions), and allowing those to fully manifest in the world we are made to be custodians of.
Thank you for this - when I belonged to a community of followers of an Indian guru decades ago, we did think of ourselves as Invisibles of a sort, shifting the culture & our own consciousness. It even applied to my employment at the time, which indirectly worked towards international scientific friendship in the smallest, most insignificant of ways (& the Cold War hadn't yet ended).
And I love including the non-human in our communities
I must ask your forbearance for this comment. It may or may not be within good propriety, because it is long. I hope you'all can make it through it anyway.
I'm relatively new here and am very excited by this, because I have heard it in a very different muggle form before, and liked it then too. Perhaps one of the “Invisibles” that you would grok with, even though he may want nothing to do with Magic at all these days (he converted to Christianity recently), is Jordan Hall.
He talks in a way that puts off many people I have tried to introduce him to. Instead I'm going to jump to what I take as his main ideas:
The City:
- The point of the age of literacy/trade contract and agriculture has been the city. The point of the city has been the relative collective advantage obtained from many different minds interacting in the one space, so that the larger any given city the greater the dynamism and creativity exhibited by any given individual in that city compared to that individual in a smaller city, all else held equal. Hence there is also a tendency for large cities to just get larger.
- The city has been the point and has also been the centre. In many ways everything outside of the city exists by virtue of its usefulness as support infrastructure, e.g. in supplying resources or waste processing needed by the city.
- Limits to reaping this quantitative advantage mainly have to do with fact bodies and emotional needs accompany minds. The Dunbar limit, describing the kind of local familiarity/intimacy that our embodied humanity finds the most satisfying, can only be sublimated to a point, and I argue it always leaves its mark anyway. Telecommunications has up to this point not transcended that limitation.
Language:
- There are three types of language or use of language: mother, trade, and Sacred.
- A child learns the mother tongue by virtue of his connection to his family that supports and protects him when he is all need and vulnerability. Tone, look and posture can convey just as much as what is said, and very rapidly. Story and mythological referants are closely shared.
- The trade language comes into play as that which has maximum utility when associating and cooperating with those outside of the Dunbar limit. Meaning is much less tactile, nuanced and immediate, and involves a manipulation and translation of symbols to be obtained and shared.
- If the above two are related to Agape and Philea respectively, then Sacred language is from Eros. When a group of individuals are resonating meaning not so much because they understand each other, but because they are all resonating in tethering to powers higher than them all, then the sacred is in play. Sacred language is hence a result and a facilitator of this.
The opportunity:
- Trade language has dominated the age, and has come to replace them all for many cultures, in large part because the city thrives on its advantages and ignores (at best) what is lost. Now AI can do trade language level translating far better than "humans as mediocre-machines" can, BUT it will never do mother or Sacred language as well as we can.
- This is true for many previously vital functions of the city that nevertheless required a narrowing of one's humanity in order to fulfill well, e.g. lawyer, accountant, Western doctor.
- Digital communion is opening to possibilities for minds coherently connecting into living networks that can outpace the advantages to creativity and dynamism of large cities. There are still protocol problems that mean mostly it is a mess of distraction and mutual emotional triggering. If/when a group figues out those protocol issues that group can only grow.
- This all means the local and embodied, as well as the mother and Sacred tongues, have an opportunity to be re-emphasised and redeveloped, as the literary age problems outpace its advantages. Those that can do this will thus be more human than mediocre machine again, and will have no competitive disadvantage with AI, because they will specialise in what humans are more designed for, namely making good, true and beautiful judgements (/magical perceptions), and allowing those to fully manifest in the world we are made to be custodians of.
Peace.
Thank you for this - when I belonged to a community of followers of an Indian guru decades ago, we did think of ourselves as Invisibles of a sort, shifting the culture & our own consciousness. It even applied to my employment at the time, which indirectly worked towards international scientific friendship in the smallest, most insignificant of ways (& the Cold War hadn't yet ended).
And I love including the non-human in our communities