Transcript of The Civium Project 07- A Framework For Cultures to Coexist, an 8min excerpt of Jordan Hall speaking with Phil Chen.
(currently mostly unedited; may be edited later)
A Cardinal error is to try to expand a culture linearly, like at the same level. Language is a good example. So a cardinal error is to say, We need everybody to speak English or Chinese, right? You pick a language. And so it of course, what ends up happening is you end up with an imperial mode, right? There’s a your mind has to be operating this particular culture, this language, and never competing for minds. And maybe you might speak three languages. But the end of the day, this sort of like a finite is a rival risk game for mine in culture space. If you run it at the meta protocol, what happens is, is that as long as there’s a way for us to establish in languages, is there translatability, communication can occur, and that communication can occur within certain boundary conditions, ie that it doesn’t tie, it’s not so expensive that it’s not really communication right there the entropy is low enough, then you actually you get around the rivalrous dynamic. Okay, great. You can have an arbitrarily large number of cultures. Everybody can kind of and if I want to create my own and create my own, as long as it’s compatible with the meta protocol, I got a lot of room to maneuver.
What’s funny about the meta protocol is that it’s almost geometric. What I mean by that is,
you’re always going to want to design your your culture using the meta protocol, because it’s just the best way to design a culture. If you design a culture outside of the boundary the meta protocol, it’s not like,
how do I say this? It’s like
trying to say, Okay, I’m going to design a body, but I’m going to design a body that can’t digest or that dies within three days. Like, that’s kind of a shitty body. You could do. It was the point of that. Like, no, no, here’s a series of basic rules that that make a body work. And, you know, you could your body can be six foot four. It can be five foot eight. You know, your skin color can vary in these directions. You know, your eyes, like there’s a whole bunch of variation on the morphology of phylogenetics,
but, and by the way, there’s actually why it varies, but a body without a heart is kind of a non starter, right? That’s just a bad idea. So it’s kind of like that, like the meta protocols for any via, for any viable culture that plugs into this environment is like a body, and so you got lots of variations, and in some sense, the there’s now no competition, because you’re really just looking at cool explorations of what the possibility space is inside the meta protocol, which could potentially be enormous, like much larger than our current space, basically cultures, But they’re all viable. And part of viability is they’re all interoperable, yeah, and they can all interconnect
and potentially speak that same language, right on a completely different new paradigm, ideally, which doesn’t lead to all the current issues that we face
that could potentially blow us all up. Right with the technology coming up and, yeah, yeah, that’s really interesting. I just, I just had some insights on how to articulate that clearly.
Okay, so please continue, because that’s that’s like, sorry, like the constraints are,
if use the metaphor speciation at the body level,
there’s some value there. The point of species, or the way that we have come to define speciation, is precisely lack of compatibility the genotype level.
If I have two phenotypes that actually they may be bizarrely compatible, like they can actually mate at the in terms of
physicality, but they’re not compatible at the genetic level, then I don’t actually have now two species. And what happens, of course, is that they they stop mating, and they begin to species differentiate Exactly.
And so the so the medicine of the meta questions are like, Well, okay, what are the what are the constraints? And we’re finding we’re thinking about in terms of
Peter Lindberg, culture war 2.0.
When two cultures are in a circumstance where the only way they can be in relationship with each other is, in fact, violence, exactly, then they’re effectively engaging in a speciation. They’re now, they’re mutually incompatible, and they’re engaged in per se, rivalrous competition.
So it’s interesting to say, okay, the meta protocol, effectively is the inverse of that. What’s, what’s, what’s a mechanism, what are the characteristics that your culture must maintain at all times to ensure that there’s always a non violent way of being in relationship with any other
culture. Sorry, so please continue. I mean, sorry. What I got from there is, you know how you talked about the level of change needs to be on that we create a new DNA, RNA thing that now opens up.
Let me talk about that’s what I’m hearing, right? Like another protocol ends up being where we have to figure out what that DNA
that allows for all these potential new cultures to come arise that are on a different operating system than what we currently have. Yeah, and what’s interesting is that it’s
I had this insight yesterday, actually, it will be, there will be a lot of resonance with, in some sense, like, the highest tone of almost all existing cultures.
There’s a, there’s
a, if you,
yeah, if you use the metaphor of, like, the emergence of the of the neuron of neurology, like, okay, there’s a proto neuron, like the proto retinol, the proto photo sensitive cell.
There’s a
movement where there’s a cell that has a certain
sensitivity to photon,
but it’s kind of haphazard. It’s sort of not it’s not useful enough to really build stuff. We can’t build eyeballs with it, right? It’s just not high fidelity enough. It’s not consistent enough. It’s not repeatable enough. But if you kind of look at the there’s like a
vector that is pointing towards this, this place, this location. Okay? Now, that is the thing, right? And if I see the tree, like the series of
evolutionary stages, I can, I can actually see where they are on the arrow, and the ones that are closest to the final to the to the actual point where, like, Oh, I’ve got, now got a retinal cell, like a photo cell, a photo sensitive cell, like the ones that are just prior to that, I’m anthropomorphizing, but the ones that are just prior to that would be like, yes, that
that’s what I was trying to get to. And
even though they may all be variations, there’s the commonality is that they’re all going to point at that right? So there’s like, the highest tone, the highest yearning, the thing that has been the most noble or valorous aspect of many, many different cultures is the point, I guess that’s the vector. We can kind of suss out that vector and say, oh, okay, that’s the noble, the noble, the noble thing that’s been trying to arise in culture we’ve now, we can now kind of point at it. And now many, many different cultures will be able to look at this new thing and say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, cool. That’s, that’s, that’s it. That’s kind of reified the good part, and like an alchemical essence, we captured the part that we’ve been trying to get to, the essence, just trying to express itself. And have been able to get rid of the stuff that was, you know, legacy that needs to go away. The Michelangelo move, yeah, the Michelangelo move.