I think we have to understand mathematics as a new kind of consciousness.
By disciplined study you can learn to see in terms of the secret relationships behind nature.
Not a mistake that the philosophers centered mathematics in liberal education!
For those keeping track of types of consciousness:
Raw physical primitive consciousness
Evolution by natural selection
Cellular control systems
Neuronal consciousness
Linguistic social/cultural consciousness
Mathematics/precise diagrammatic culture?
Networked computing machines
The single most important causal cultural factor behind the industrial revolution isn't any political system or philosophy other than the tradition of (applied) mathematics itself.
It is the precision and depth of mathematics that gives us access to technology.
From the outside, math just looks like this weird thing that you don't understand. You don't feel it's power or appreciate it as a nearly spiritual discipline until you are initiated in a moment of revelation: "IT WORKS!"
Even then you occasionally regress and forget.
Mathematics is enormously expensive to produce and learn. You need wizards dedicating their whole lives to maintaining and advancing our mathematical concepts. It is a necessarily social, institutional, and initiatory form of consciousness. The individual is helpless before it.
What makes mathematics possible is the self correction and compressibility inherent in concepts with exact precision. If you are missing an area, it can be built out from the ragged edges of nearby math. It's almost a form of abstract life.
Of course like anything, it is possible to fall into an idolatry of mathematics. Modern academic culture arguably has in many areas. Use of math beyond and outside it's practical value for social and ideological reasons.
But the thing itself lives on in other fields.
We could easily lose mathematics as a live tradition. First substitute a fake cargo-cult imitation that lacks depth, then collapse the social support for the real thing. No one would even notice, except that history would include great feats of implausible magic.
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Each layer of consciousness shuffles information about in pursuit of some purposeful drive, within some logic. Each layer builds on and implements the teleology of the previous layer, and does its thing faster and better.
For the primitive intelligence of matter, the purposeful drive is perhaps time and thermodynamic progression. The logic is raw physical interaction. Perhaps this implements the will of God.
For genetic evolution of life, the drive is autocatalytic growth into ever more successful forms, within the logic of natural selection. Life exploits thermodynamic gradients, accelerating the primitive drive of matter and time.
Complex plans and taste can only form in singular minds or tight discourse circles. But they can be propagated and extended to large crowds of action through simple statistically-driven methods.
The mistake of many online crowdsourcing link aggregators and comment threading systems is they try to use statistical methods to define their fundamental taste and strategy. This is a mistake.
Use professional moderation to define fundamental complex intention for a community, and crowdsourcing to carry it out. Best of both worlds; wisdom of crowd, discernment of a single visionary. This requires new voting systems that explicitly target this spec.
It's interesting that the emerging principle of legitimacy of the regime is that its subjects are morally compromised by various intersectional bigotries. Not "we are leading you to a great future" but "you have no right to complain and are probably a bad person".
Is this similar or different from past essentially stagnant regimes?
Like a cruel inversion of aristocracy. A moral gradient from rulers to ruled, but negative instead of positive: the ruled are especially depraved and deserving of oppression, rather than the rulers being especially enlightened or virtuous.
Our aesthetic culture in all areas is defined by an extreme conservatism of form right now. Simple lines, flat design, tight greyscale pallets, and aestheticized poverty.
Extravagence, complexity, flair, joy, and fun would be very powerful if done well right now.
But maximalism needs discipline, meaning, and skill, or it just becomes a gaudy and messy LSD-core. The difference between complexity and entropy is virtue.
Have we lost the skill or cultural depth to produce or appreciate complex visual meaning?
Here's what complexity looks like done well. Very different aesthetic philosophies. All religious, all overflowing with life and virtue. All very different from modern minimalism.
Want your team to write good software? Put in a time-delay killswitch on event processing. If any event blocks the process for more than 5ms, crash with a BSOD.
5ms is plenty. But demands for computation grow without finite bounds until DISCIPLINE is imposed.
ENFORCE hard realtime 60 frames per second. All updates and redraws finished and flushed every 16 ms or CRASH.
This counts for startup too. If your program isn't responsive within 5ms of startup, CRASH you're FIRED.
It's clear our current paradigm for how to achieve civilizational progress doesn't work anymore. Maybe it exhausted it's gains, maybe we lost the true thing.
Either way, what comes next?
Six ideas:
One: we need to consciously think in terms of purpose hierarchies more. Society at its best is a holistic collective project, and it's parts can be understood as functional parts towards our missions. This has limitations, but we currently completely neglect it.
Two: justice is closely related to institutional functionality. It is not just consequentialist. It's about the institutional standards of excellence that get us where we want to go. Currently, justice has no grounding, and institutional functionality has no moral legitimacy.