Juan David's Newsletter - February 13, 2022
Context and The Limits of Civilization
Give me enough context and a neural net on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
For years, I’ve thought about how counterproductive education is. We spend years giving information to our brains nonstop. This information can be interpreted as context.
We learn context and more context in order to make sense of the world. Even then, we could spend years learning and still not have enough context.
First, I don’t think our brains are the most productive with flooding them with information. Second, it just sucks.
What if there was a way to teach all the context there was and there is to know? My immediate thought would be plugging in a USB into our brains and downloading the context.
Obviously, that’s not realistic as of now. Perhaps with Neuralink or Kernel but that still seems far away.
I won’t get into the details of that or how we could make it happen but I do want to explore that question: “If we could learn all the context in an instant, how do humans change? What do we do? What do we think? Who are we? Are we humans at this point?”
Meet Henry.
Henry is a new human and when he was three years old, he somehow had all the context in the world in fields of physics, mathematics, business, art, history, and really anything.
You couldn’t really say Henry knew everything but you could say he definitely knew all the context.
How does information differ from context? Information is facts. Context is the meaning behind the facts.
Before humans needed to spend decades learning and learning to be able to see beyond those before them. To be able to reach and stand before the shoulders of giants. If someone wanted to become a theoretical physicist to the likes of Einstein, he would need to spend about 30 years from birth to P.h.D to kind of know what is up with what he created. Let’s not mention quantum yet. 30 years and assuming he didn’t forget much.
Henry skipped all of that. He was already at the shoulders of the giants. He wasn’t a giant himself yet because he had not advanced nor extend our understanding of any field.
Henry had the context of what Einstein had done and the context of quantum mechanics. Could Henry see the relationship between both of them?
In theory, Henry should because it would be like combining all the physicists’ brains into one brain that somehow Henry possesses.
Henry would be able to figure out the theory of everything and become a giant himself. After that, he went into startups and rapidly became a decillionaire (don’t get impressed, inflation increased a lot. Still impressive though).
But that’s assuming Henry was the only one with all the context in the world. What if every single of us had all the context there was and there is to know?
Henry isn’t such a “giant” anymore, and obviously not a decillionarire.
If we all have that equal ability, we’d figure out every and any problem, after all, we have the context.
A world with no problems is an unknown world to us but a world that is not impossible to think about. Perhaps, they have different problems. Or perhaps, they create such a powerful technology that they all end up killing themselves.
But if they have the context, such problems would not arise, and they’d never extinguish themselves.
Would you consider those people humans? I would think so. Just a human we’d never seen before.
What would they be doing? They fixed all the problems, they are all happy, everyone is wealthy.
Maybe such humans would create simulations of other humans where they’d increase or decrease their ability to grasp the context and investigate the power of context.
You do understand that this is the very limit of civilization. One thought would be to think that is meaningless because there’s nothing and because everything is perfect. Some people would want to come back to the imperfect, exciting world we live in today.
We are not used to thinking in limits: the very very end or start of anything.
Thinking in such a way could allow us to unlock what we cannot see in front of us. Limits are what allow us to discover the undiscoverable and find the unfindable.
Do we want to reach the limits? Are there limits?
I don’t know but it’s important to imagine such scenarios once in a while to know that what we want isn’t getting all the context per se. Or what we want is to have all the money or power in the world. What we want is perhaps something else, anything else is merely a distraction.
Perhaps, we’ll never reach the limits, or perhaps thinking on the limit is the limit itself. Such question we’ll never figure out until we, in fact, reach the limit.
At that point, you might as well reach the limit itself, and get all the context.
It’s all an experiment. Choose your view, choose your role. We think the scientists are the ones with white coats but the true scientists are those with the ability to get us closer to the limit of the limits.
Today, they might be computer programmers with t-shirts. Tomorrow, they might not be humans at all but 1s and 0s deciding what limits we take on next, all with one goal: the pursuit of the contextual limits.
For more on limits, read this essay.