Imagine the pyramids when new. Polished megalithic temples far beyond anything's else. Obviously built by the gods, who rule directly from the big house and have magical powers to make the water flow and the sun shine.
The cosmological implications would be all-encompassing.
We no longer see things the way people did in the bronze age, but imagine actually living then and being faced with what they were faced with. You would have almost no choice but to see things as they did.
The priesthoods probably had secret technology far beyond that mundanely available, and marketed as the power of the gods rather than as mundane techne. For example: it's possible they had electric batteries, intricate machines, could predict eclipses, floods.
Combine this with hydraulic despotism and palace economy, giving hypercentralized power to impose and control a given worldview. Bronze age common man would have been caught in an inescapable matrix. He could be skeptical, but only within established conceptual frameworks.
Imagine living in a world where what you see, and what is plausible, is one way. But actually, it's the other way. You see living gods. It's just some guys with a lot of wealth and power and secret social and material technology.
Now apply this outside view to our own society. We see it one way. But it's the other way.
What are the big secrets or paradigm shifts held back by immense power and ideology? How is our view of the world carefully constructed as a noble lie from behind a curtain?
I think our big lie is relative equality and democracy. We think we're a mass of similar people with varying wealth and power in a "public" system.
Actually, we have bronze age levels of true inequality, our political system is hydraulic despotism. We aren't even on same plane.
Ideology is so thick and inescapable that even our elites are completely caught in it. (It's always the elites that are most hopelessly bought in). Hence "upper middle class" etc.
They actually have bronze age god-king levels of power, just not consciously or individually.
The cryptarchic hiddenness of the power means it's impossible for our elites to really step up, organize, take their power seriously. It's ideologically impossible. They can only manipulate to perpetuate the system.
They are gods who think themselves upper middle class strivers.
I've called our system "hydraulic despotism". It's like that, but with key logistical flows (oil), services, and finance capital instead of irrigation water. And an upper middle class crypto-oligarchy instead of a god-king.
But we need a more precise study of our real system.
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Our recent article from @SamoBurja proposed that the industrial revolution was socially incomplete, but destroyed it's pre-industrial foundations, so post-industrial society isn't going to be able to just go back automatically. This poses a big problem of development strategy.
The obvious implication is that we have to complete the industrial revolution by extending or supplementing the industrial logic to a full stack of social technologies, especially in the currently failing family life patterns and human capital creation areas.
What does that completion actually look like? What if it does look a bit like going back? Deliberately rebuild the pre-industrial foundations alongside industry. Not something wholly new, but a novel stabilization of industrial alongside pre-industrial social tech.
My wife made me some prototype trousers. Relaxed fit in seat and legs, high waist that actually fits, tapered down to compact ankle, nice deep pockets. Extremely luxurious. You can't buy this.
The era of low-"waist" slim fit trousers that still get caught in your bike chain and assume you have a beer gut and no muscle must be brought to a close by any means necessary.
Ever done a full squat with proper form and normal muscle development in a pair of luxury trousers? Now you can.
What shocks me is how few people there are doing or even checking fundamental work. Half of modern manufacturing management comes from two guys trained in imperial japan. Wings are designed with assumptions cooked up by Prandtl, that even he later realized were wrong.
Works like this everywhere. Science, philosophy, life. Someone comes up with an idea, usually just sitting down and thinking about it for a bit drawing on their experience, and then everyone else takes it as gospel for the next 100 years.
We don't even independently reproduce these core results, even when they are just calculations or arguments. We build billion dollar empires on flawed assumptions that could be checked for thousands of dollars. It's hard to tell what to check, but surely we should check more.
Global trade logistics means local economic sovereignty can be easily dismantled.
Global nuclear and naval strike capability means military sovereignty can be easily dismantled.
Global internet/communication means local moral sovereignty can be easily dismantled.
Prepare yourself for global government. It's inevitable as far as I can tell. Some positives and some negatives.
Among the negatives: we have no theory, experience, or institutions for global government. It might have intractable scale/abstraction problems. It removes all natural constraints on insanity and lazyness.
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.
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.