My friend Bilal recommended me this interview and I enjoyed watching Daniel Schmachtenberger by Rebel Wisdom, even if I didn’t like the discreet connection with J. Peterson, I feel I have learned quite a few things in the process about the ecology of knowledge - in a rather informal way.
Here are some of the most memorable passages, in my line of interest.
“One of the highest value is truthfulness, with other people that are committed and want to do that and not only people who are not lying to each other, but they are endeavoring to not withhold information, which is tremendous intimacy, and tremendous vulnerability, and see if you can create enough psychological safety with some people to begin exploring what it does mean to actually to share information honestly so that we can kinda make sense together. “
1:35:37 The impulse to be right means that “I won't seek someone else's perspective”. And if I am going to seek the truth in someone else's perspective, earnestly trying to get what they as seeing, where they are coming from, I need to stop seeing the way that I am seeing for a little while I have to completely suspend debate and narrative warfare and the impulse to be right and all of that. And so there is a deeper human connection that is involved.
1:39:52 Making a healthy Information ecology If we look at the framework of sharing things that are truthful, true, and representative. we start with the truthful side, we need to remove the incentive for disinformation and the first major there is the kind of game theory dynamic that emerges rom market type dynamics. [...]
As long as we have separate balance sheets [...] we have a fundamental basis that my well-being is separable from, and often time directly rivals with yours, and with others and the commons. So then, we will compete with each other for a lot of things, and we will engage in the worst case in warfare [...] including information warfare at the cost of the commons and each other. To overcome that we need to create alignment between agencies, between is your intention to do and also in my wellbeing and vice a versa, which means we need to have more coupling in our well beings, which means we will have different process of resource provisioning. [,..] The system that could do that appropriately has never been proposed in any kind of major way because none of the systems proposed so far do that.
If we have a rivalrous relationship, then the information will be part of that rivalry and that will also damage the information ecology in the same way we damage the physical environment or each other kinetically, so that's a big ask.
So our balance sheet is at the foundation of what creates rivalrous dynamics and this is at the level of corporations, of individuals that the ground level of families, nations. Can we still have private nation-states that could benefit each other at the expense of others or commons that share information perfectly? So how can we have a perfectly intact information ecology?
It could not happen in the context of the nation-state and private balance sheets, and political left and right and in-group out-group type structures. It will take a while to talk about what a post Game Theory world might look like [...] (Cancer talk) 1:45:21 If you think about vision, and the way that parallax error occurs in vision: one eye does not give me a peripheral vision and it does not give me depth perception. A sing eye also will have errors that are not corrected for. The two eyes together, the overlap and the difference of what they both see and the other one doesn't allow any error in this eye to be corrected and allow peripheral vision. So it's a place of not only the eyes are in competition for which is seeing as true but the process of how they are related in the optical cortex gives me error correction on the imperfections on each of them and gives me new synergistic information that neither of them had on their own. That's fucking amazing to think about.
And your brain as a whole processes information in a way that no individual neuron or type of groups of sub-neurons are processing. Individual neurons can get something wrong but there are error-correcting processes that do not propagate that. But the process does propagate the true information. How does the fuck do this work? The information processes that each of the parts are doing goes through a communication protocol that error corrects the false parts and gives "parallax on the true parts". We do not only get the truth of all the parts but ways of binding that together for synergistically beneficial higher-order information.
The cells are sense-making. They are communicating with each other with hormones. These are singling processes, but they don't have a game-theoretical relationship with each other. They have a mutually symbiotic relationship with each other, so they are supporting each other in sense-making. In that way the lungs are doing better, the heart's doing better.
So if you start to imagine into what type of communication processes, protocols would have to happen between humans that allow for error correction for any individual's perception, but allows the true parts of everyone's perception to be separated from the error parts, and the true parts to be synthesized at a higher level of complexity that individuals could do on their own. When we think about the civilization of the future and the collective intelligence of the future, we can think about it that way.
There is a pt 2 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QGrffjOFko
This reminded me a lot of Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism | VPRO Documentary that I highly recommend watching prior to this video: