The Megabit Bomb
From the pollution of the information environment and the fraying edges of knowledgeThe title of this essay, which was taken from the 1964 book "Summa Technologiae", has expanded in importance a little over time. At that time, I was thinking of the exponential growth of the accumulating data from science, especially the exact sciences, ie physics, astrophysics, biology, geology, anthropology and so on. Even the equally spontaneous and probably irreversible as fundamentally unforeseen emergence of computer networks, which electronically weave the earth with different density of connections, demands to look again at the avalanche-like growth of information.
This is not information that is frozen or frozen in libraries, university institutes, military headquarters or stock exchanges and banks, but rather information that is constantly moving through the thickets of networks that make up the World Wide Web, that is, in the web of communication wandering about, which continuously increases their performance potential. You could build a taxonomy by distinguishing between the micro, macro and mega variants or types of information. The ever-increasing vast amounts of knowledge gathered by humanity, even in the form of most radical summaries, have long surpassed the spiritual capacity of an individual. The simplicity of access (not just on the net) to any data has in no way improved the situation of the "knowledge hungry". The worsening situation is influenced by several factors.
The information environment is polluted by a terrible amount of nonsense and lies. This nonsense owes its spread to the terrestrial and orbital television networks, through which it is broadcast from the increasingly numerous satellite dishes. It seems that in the future either a "dismemberment" of certain areas of the television mission will occur, which already happens in part, or the state legislature could be forced to carry out a selection of stupidities. Currently, only visualizations of some of the most pathological and unworthy types of human sexual activity (with pedophilia at the top) and the publication of political and military secrets are prohibited. On the other hand, jokes are typical, ranging from extrasensory phenomena such as telepathy or telekinesis to clairvoyance and astrology with their already often proven fictionality of attractive lies. Then there are the television programs from the SF area, which originate from the USA. According to them, the universe should be understood as space simply filled with intelligent, but mostly silly, alien civilizations. If they are contacted by the Earth during conflicts, it can easily lead to a "Star Wars".
In general, the universe is presented to the earthly audience as a hyperspace in intercultural clashes, with pseudo-scientific devices playing the role of the former innocent props that are simply invented: the "tractor" in "Enterprise" and destructive rays as well the specially designed fairy tales (Superman, Batman, Spiderman, etc. with female "anti-sexist" variants). In addition, there is the popular area of criminal investigations, where you "start with the corpse" and in which it is about drug smuggling, robberies, kidnappings or the search for explosives that are (often) explode remotely. The repertoire is entirely determined by the audience ratings, whose wishes are controlled by analyzes, as in Germany.
The number of puzzles and secrets to investigate would be huge on Earth as well as in space, but they do not attract producers or scriptwriters because people are supposed to want only flying saucers and criminal extraterrestrials. Because the market dictates the approach to filmmakers and the cash register is the queen on the market, the writers' imagination has narrow limits. Everyone works with a view to the cash register and not to the mind or at least to the innocent fairytale mythology. Television itself has become an incredible shark, processing venerable legends and fairy tales, sending them, hurled through the simplification centrifuge, into the orbits of the satellites that are bombarding us out of space. I am of the opinion that the weak protests from the mouth of the few psychosociologists will do nothing. Of course, the foresight of such innovation of opinions based on experimental results is difficult, and one can hardly understand "prognostic intuition" as something that could be taught. The fact that "not everything" is a story of lies seems a matter of course, but a nut that is as hard as it is hard to crack.
Shortly before the turn of the century, new cosmogonic and cosmological hypotheses began to emerge which are difficult to accept by the "sound mind". However, nearly one million years ago, this understanding was shaped by the first generations of anthropogenesis, so that it is not suitable for understanding the whole. That's why I called the mathematical methods, to which we owe a lot of overthrows, the "white stick of a blind man." It now appears that after many attempts at the formation of human-like organisms that lasted many millennia, we have emerged from primates, i. from the superfamily of hominoids. This superfamily includes anthropoids and hominids, but I am not one hundred percent sure that the taxonomy we have created will remain incontrovertible. At present one can distinguish the differences between the genera - Neanderthal - Pithekanthropus - Homo habilis - Homo sapiens u.ä. - thanks to new methods, the genome can be reconstructed on the basis of paleontologically preserved, albeit fossilized metamorphic remains of excavated skeletons, even though there are specialists who deny the security of the pedigrees exclusively on the basis of paleontological data.
Nevertheless, mathematics is not - and not only in my opinion - a method of investigation capable of leading us to the "definitive truth". In fact, neither the 61 elementary particles are explained because they can not be "peeled out" of any single theory and lastly the neutrino has also been "multiplied", e.g. there is already a "Neutralino". We still do not know if the search for a single theory is a search for a black cat in a dark room, but you do not know if the cat is even there. Even the classic model of cosmogony with the Big Bang and the phase of inflationary expansion has encountered difficulties. On the margins of the wrestling of cosmologists with the problem of the "initial state" one can modestly remark that mathematicalization, even if it allows to foresee with structural accuracy phenomena that will occur first, must give no guarantee of truth, because one can mathematize approximations that sometimes also prognostically fertile. However, they can also be predictive, but only partially fruitful, and further progress can turn them into anachronisms. An example: the world of Newton. the world of Einstein. I see no end to this path, i. I see no end to science.
In addition, get in the way:
a) the non-linear or little linear chaos theory (from a small initial deviation an incomprehensibly large (end) scattering arises)
b) the already controversial catastrophe theory
c) the neo-Darwinian theory of natural evolution, which is repeatedly supplemented by improvements.
Weight has the following conclusion from these upheavals: The people always proceeded from a simple and aesthetically acceptable assumption and were then forced in the continuation of the cognitive march again and again to complicate the assumed original image. The complexity grows continuously in all areas of science, sometimes as boring and barren as the humanities "fashions". Recently, I was astonished to see a philosopher's conversation with a theologian, who wondered where the individual human sense of identity came from, where the "I" came from. The neurology, supported by pathological investigations, can already say a lot, if not everything, on this topic. However, the two interlocutors seemed to completely overlook the empirical findings on this topic. Thomas Aquin could follow her early medieval rhetoric with full understanding. Meanwhile, the soul is slowly beginning to succumb to erosive naturalism similar to medical, neurological and psychiatric pathology. Openly naive boast, on the other hand, is the more and more frequently published explanations that soon a robotic cat will be built, from which the way to the intelligent robot should not be terribly far. That is not true. A robot cat will certainly not limp, but no one will make a pie from the mice he will not catch. Strangely enough, our present loves the cheapest stories of lies and poor art such as the packing of cathedrals, towers and bridges. If you can present everything as art, then you can not find art anywhere.
So, the accelerated detonation of the megabit bomb in front of my horrified eyes turns into a gigabit or terabyte explosion in which the small pieces of "irrefutable truth", e.g. the mortality of people, rising like bubbles in the sky. One hundred billion neurons are supposed to catch the "essential" in humans. And that is the magical mirror in which the whole world should reflect. No one has to be ashamed of the ignorance of basic data, especially no philosopher hiding in the deep past of our species. After all, the demographic bomb will not explode because the birth rate in the world is falling. In contrast, the information technology bomb has already exploded and is in full splinter flight. The communication network will not help you. And "Artilekte" (Are we building gods or our possible exterminators?)? The artificial intelligence, adorned with new names or nicknames, does not yet exist, as we note, and when it does emerge, then quickly in a variety of variants. Maybe it's better that they do not exist at the moment.
We might urgently need a new edition of the work entitled Encyclopaedia of Ignorance as a guide to the mainstream of science: the first issue, which by the way is not quite outdated - dating back to the '70s - is on the table. Here questions were discussed that we do not yet have an answer to, or there were questions that were put wrong. But it is also the problems that have been completely eliminated that are noteworthy because you can learn from mistakes. I once mentioned the erroneous evidence of "transcomputability" for computers of arbitrary computing power by H. Bremmerman: this impossibility, which he proved to be confirmed by the constants of solid state physics and solid mathematics, was proven by the biogenomic, that is refuted by an algorithmic derivation from natural evolution. Manfred Eigen told me that one should never "never say" in science. But one can speak about the indestructibility of what is possible in the abstract. I believe that humanity will never unite, and this would be the necessary precondition for the idea which the Dominican P. Dubarle took up in 1948 in "Le Monde" after the publication of "Cybernetics" by Norbert Wiener, namely for the construction of a Machine "for the governance of the entire world" (crossroads of information). With such a lord of the earth, neither ordinary people nor, a fortiori, would the politicians agree, for whom the complexity of human existence has outgrown their thinking and leadership qualities. What has diminished neither their ambitions nor their desire to govern in the least.
The 21st century will be different than the numerous prophecies predict today, adorned with jewels of strange ideas. It may also be crueler than the bloody century we just left. What global power will take over is difficult to anticipate - such as the collapse of the USSR, the triumphs of biotechnology or the communicative networking of the world. Maybe the world actually has no edges, but we ourselves will create the abysses, including the edges.
