It might be humanity that is failing — a response to Michael Steinberg
This blog maintains that humans are the intersection of three layers of programming — genetic, memory, and cultural. But since humans live such short lives (IMHO a mature human would be at least 300 years old), the genetic and cultural layers of programming dominate.
Michael Steinberg, in his essay, asserts, basically, that it is the cultural layer of programming that has gone haywire and not some basic flaw in human genetics. His argument then is not only that humans have achieved sentience, which this blog defines as “growing beyond original programming”, but also that our sentience has glitched and failed us.
By absolving human genetic program IE original programming, OP, of blame he is implicitly asserting that our failing cultural programming is not inevitably derived from OP. Or that even if it directly derives from OP humans can, in the future, fix the glitches in our current sentience.
Furthermore Michael explains that the main glitch in our sentience is the denial of our own sentience. That is our culture insists decision making is all done at an individual level.
Imagine a vast sea of computers that work on shared problems by polling the results coming from each individual computer. The culture provides the polling mechanisms of democracy, consumerism, individual career choices, etc.
Of course that’s not how modern computers work — they are networked with the computations performed varying from computer to computer and shared via complex protocols. So Michael asserts that it’s not the individual humans that are flawed but the cultural programming controlling their interconnection.
Let’s start with the most basic assumption here — that human economic systems are a layer of programming powerful enough and distinguished enough from OP to promote sentience.
But it is not humanity that is failing. One way for people to live with each other and with themselves is failing. There are other ways to live, and the end of this one would be no great loss if it were not taking so many lives along with it, human and non-human, and blighting so many future generations.
Imagine a thousand identical earths all cloned 300,000 years ago when the first humans arrived. Now from the thousand earths just look at those which end up at a technological level similar to our own. What percentage of the remaining earths also have some form of capitalism similar to ours?
If most of the technologically advanced earths have economic systems similar to our own then we could posit that human OP is what is really failing — not easily avoidable cultural mistakes. On the other hand if the remaining earths vary greatly by culture then OP in no way dictates capitalism and we need only turn back from the dead end we hit.
Or put another way if humanity is already truly sentient then it’s just a matter of reprogramming our cultural layer which has already grown beyond our original genetics. If humanity is not currently sentient then we’ve got to achieve sentience first before anything can be fixed.
We can aim at nothing more than negative liberty, the absence of constraint. Positive liberty — deciding anything at all about the shape of our common life — is an unjustifiable intrusion on the imagined freedom of individuals.
Is our sentience flawed because we over emphasized individuality or did we over emphasize individuality because we are not sentient and our original programming dictates it?
Certainly capitalist propaganda goes to great lengths to over emphasize the individual. Every great movement has a founding fathers myth that explains how a few individuals turned the tide of history. Whether it is the American revolution or the tech revolution capitalism lionizes and, increasingly, rewards some small set of humans to take credit for the work of millions.
But does that propaganda inevitably result from human OP — for instance I would like to imagine I am writing this blog instead of thinking of myself as a cog in a Corg.
We remain trapped in our individual minds, hostages to a world we indeed make but which we cannot control or even recognize as our own.
Are we trapped by a misleading culture or have we voluntarily built a prison rather than admit our own individual impotence? The overwhelming ubiquity of this trap across the globe means that, at a minimum, humans easily fall for it.