Internal State and Information Acquisition

Plants, animals, humans, companies, countries, and civilizations are different scales of what is mostly the same phenomenon: groups that have greater flexibility of internal state have better adaptive response to the environment.

Though humans have internal state affixed by DNA, our ideas, culture, and other forms of symbolic relation create a shared internal state that transmutes faster than that of biology itself, humans have created a constructed layer, a sort of technosphere, in the built environment separate from that of natural biosphere.

Politics and disagreement is simply conflict between internal states that differ—whether they be biological, language, or ideological. Thus, a religion or governing idea set which is not particular, that is, not stubborned entrenched into one specific way of doing things but rather omnivorous in finding what is best at fast enough rates to not be hindered, will likely be best able to reproduce itself at high levels suited for technological society. Asked what religion I am, I may simply say: pragmatist.

Thus, in order to transmute one’s internal state well to be adaptive for a modern technological environment, one must have both the biometabolic foundations and ability to acquire/forage search or generate knowledge, store, and index/redredge relevant stored information. This necessitates that necessary information technology softwares are paired together to do this. Going back to internal states of paper could work for small-scale processes, but arguably since much from procurement to payments to accounting is digital, the question is creating digital systems which do work well.

The two potential routes a society can take are education & biometabolism, or artificial intelligence. Arguably humans are have already separated into two layers: one that lives in the world—goes to the supermarket, consumes media, and sort of ‘exists’, and those who compete on a societal, infrastructural level. Those who live in the built world often see changes happening to the area around them faster than they can comprehend; abstractions of permitting, municipal bond sales, and construction are beyond them.

A society with faster changes in internal state would rapidly see its ways of being become more prominent, and others would be like nature in the face of man’s encroachments. People fear a potential skynet because its internal state and observation of the environment would be faster than what humans are capable of; like animals and plants today are powerless against roads that suddenly appear, so too would humans be against an artificial intelligence which manufactures and creates constructions much faster than humans can.

Despite the development of layers, humans have not been able to wholly rid themselves of the natural world, defined as the productive goods of plants and animals. Yet more and more of our inputs to processes and goods are inorganics: steel, petroleum, plastics, and so on. It’s unknown whether an artificial intelligence/algorithm layer would in the distant future require humans as inputs into its processes, sort of farming us like we do animals.

We are however limited in our inputs and outputs; our hands can only do so much. Our brain cannot spawn multiple processes or split its attention easily. It is faster to read than write, and faster to speak than hear, so digital input is often multimodal. This does suggest there is an upper limit to how fast civilizations can grow.

In a future course, I will share relevant software and techniques for information acquisition in the modern era, spaning search (making decisions that are exhaustive of the search space; relevant search engines; using AI agents; searching for past information), archival (data storage; laptop setup), software and hardware tools for input/image/object manipulation.