Unmaking Sense

An obvious objection to doing without leaders is that there are people like Putin who will come and land-grab and steal our stuff unless we do. But this is to mistake the symptoms of a problem for the problem. If none of us thought so highly of leaders, there wouldn’t be people like Vladimir Putin to worry about. Or at least that’s my pious hope.

Being able to see further into the future, being able to hold more things in our minds before we settle on them, all of these might be at least some of the trappings of something that would qualify as superintelligence. We muse on a few more.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II marks the end of the life of someone who was, by any conceivable standards, a great woman. Her greatness had nothing to do with being a monarch, but with the way she discharged the onerous duties that entails. For the rest, she embodies everything we all should aspire to be, not in subservience but in autonomous freedom and dutiful service. So we mourn her passing while deploring the institution that she served with such distinction because it represents and reinforces everything that is wrong with our dysfunctional leadership-obsessed human lives.

Knowing a simple set of rules does not necessarily convey what those rules entail. So simplification needs more if we are to understand what has been simplified.

If we learn to live the present by seeing the multiplicity of the possibilities that are in it rather than the possibly-dire consequences of whatever certainty it is that we may think we see in it, then we will find that our lives are enriched and we are made better able to derive as much meaning as possible from every present experience in Dewey’s terms. One of our most serious bad habits as human beings is forming premature fixed judgements about what is the case. Learning to live with multiple readings is one way of helping to break that habit and so putting ourselves in a position where we can see the positive consequences of everything that happens rather than - as is more common - only the negative ones.

The possibility that our reading or interpretation of the present might change repeatedly as we think about it again from the perspective of the future suggests that our current reading of the present may not be all that we think it is, nor as certain or as fixed as we may think it is. The implications of that for our lives, for living the present, and for our mental health.

When we use a map to find our way around the countryside we are used to the fact that there is less information than there is in the world. But what if we needed to know more then there is in the countryside in order to understand how to navigate our way around it? Could there be a map that had 2 miles for every mile, and what would it look like?

Our love of simplification has a lot to do with our desire for certainty and with the ability to predict the future, but what if the future isn’t predictable and the consequences of any action are simply unknowable? What then?

Our human love for simplification, for explanation, for things that try to reduce complex matters to simple matters is a natural extension of the limitations of our intelligence. Where does the notion that we can understand the universe come from? Why do we suppose that knowledge that is less than perfect is thereby somehow worthless? Or that our difficulties in understanding are defects in our personalities?

This is a taster or short summary episode that gives a hint about what will happen in the three episodes that follow at 6.06, 6.07 and 6.08.