Human ingenuity is not important.
I'm not talking about creativity, here. I'm not talking about novels, I'm talking about the printing press. I'm not talking about a great song, I'm talking about taking a sound out of the air and burning its pattern down into an object that can then be read. When I say ingenuity, I mean "the ability of a person to design and acquire 'know-how.'"
Human ingenuity is not important. No one's invention is a necessity. The action of ingenuity is not the action of individual brilliance, but of simple attrition. That action is made inevitable by the combined weight of all of our minds, wearing away in their slow course forward, carving ever deeper canyons into the possible as they seek - in the dumb way that weight seeks gravity, or like a charge seeks discharge - the course of least resistance.
In short, on a macro scale, human ingenuity is water flowing downhill. It doesn't matter what any of us can conceive - what we can't conceive will be stumbled upon. Not so much by accident, as by the unthinking and unending wearing away of whatever's in the way, that happens to be soluble. The soluble will be dissolved.
Not everything we can envision will end up being possible! Some obstacles may end up being foundational aspects of reality, which we will have to work within, or work around.
But soluble obstacles are intrinsically toast. Given directed pressure and time, the possible cannot be stopped. Soluble obstacles to the path of least resistance will always be worn away, by directed survival and competitive pressures, whether or no we have geniuses available to shout "Eureka!" and slap each other's backs as they induct each other into halls of fame. The only difference a genius makes is a few years or decades - or even possibly, centuries - either way. These are insignificantly molecular specks of time, on any reasonably cosmic scale.
Did Benjamin Franklin discover electricity? Some crispy neanderthal beat him to it by a long sight - but the lightning was there, long before that. Did Newton do anything significant at all, other than to increase the grasp our mental hand has upon levers that are themselves fundamental - and fundamentally independent of sentient thought? What does it matter to mass and gravity and electromagnetism how we formulate their interactions in our squishy little minds? Would we never have unlocked the atom, if it handn't been for whoever we care to credit for that advance? The answer to these and to most questions is a resounding: "Duh."
Sure, we can say, "Thank God for Henry Ford! He invented the assembly line." And yes, why not? Let's celebrate our individuals, for their eureka moments. Saith puny human to puny human: "Yay on you!" But seriously, did we really think nobody else was going to ever come up with that?
The assembly line.
I'm not denigrating the assembly line. The assembly line is by a good god-damn sight a far bigger deal than the transistor, than the integrated circuit, and than the microprocesser. The assembly line is a far bigger deal than the three put together. But the point is that each of these is a solution to a problem that was toast to begin with. It does not come down to a matter of creativity, nor a matter of ingenuity, nor a matter of genius. What do innovators actually do? What importance does any one of them have? What importance as individuals? Why do the adherents of rival geniuses holler over who got there first, when there clearly were crowded fields of people who were going that way and going to get there?
Innovators are the impersonal, interchangeable agents of a dumb, blind, inevitable wearing away. The great mass and momentum of our slow sight and thought flowing over it will wear down the thickest sludge of this dense, imprecise conception of reality we labor over, and under, and through. We have within our mass of minds many pairs of sharp eyes, one of whom will always suddenly spot the glittering glint of the possible - once it has peeped out from the muck. This innovator will seize upon it with a yell, and be dubbed a pioneer! - just as if no one else was going to have seen that increasingly large, sharp shard of metal sticking ever further outward, as the soluble sludge that had once concealed it keeps wearing down and away.
The sludge is ours, not reality's. There is only one obstacle we ever actually deal with, in all of our progress into unlocking "the mysteries of the universe" and "how reality works." That obstacle is not reality. It is our own ignorance, as to how reality actually works. This ignorance wears away, not by dint of our brilliance, but by our endless dumb rubbing up against it.
In the final analysis, human ingenuity has made no achievement at all, except in lessening humanity's own towering-to-begin-with-and-still-considerable ignorance. We can throw all the parties we want, but what are we really celebrating? It's as if I write a really stupid computer program that has the ability to solve its own stupidity, given enough time. Yay? Yay for me? Yay for the computer program?
No yay. I mean, why? Why yay? None of that computer program's problems were problems - except for itself.
Our species as a whole is in on that great wash of progress, and no individual droplet in the stream is going to particularly matter when it comes to reaching where we can eventually end up. That's because no genius, no trailblazer, no innovator - no matter how colossal - makes any real contribution to what is actually physically possible.
Faster or slower, the flow will uncover what can be done.
Anything that can possibly be done better, one way or another way to unlock that potential will be worn clear over time.
Now, not every possible individual idiosyncratic method will be discovered! There are, after all, nigh-infinite redundant solutions to most problems. Just as occurs via selection-driven speciation and adaptation to a given ecological niche, a solution will appear and predominate, which hinders the explosive proliferation of a competing solution (even one marginally better). But the point is: the individual innovator doesn't matter, any more than their individual solution matters.
The desirable possible is inevitable.
None of us, not even the most brilliant of us, makes a damn bit of difference when it comes to achieving what was simply, and finally, physically possible to begin with.
I'm not talking about creativity, here. I'm not talking about novels, I'm talking about the printing press. I'm not talking about a great song, I'm talking about taking a sound out of the air and burning its pattern down into an object that can then be read. When I say ingenuity, I mean "the ability of a person to design and acquire 'know-how.'"
Human ingenuity is not important. No one's invention is a necessity. The action of ingenuity is not the action of individual brilliance, but of simple attrition. That action is made inevitable by the combined weight of all of our minds, wearing away in their slow course forward, carving ever deeper canyons into the possible as they seek - in the dumb way that weight seeks gravity, or like a charge seeks discharge - the course of least resistance.
In short, on a macro scale, human ingenuity is water flowing downhill. It doesn't matter what any of us can conceive - what we can't conceive will be stumbled upon. Not so much by accident, as by the unthinking and unending wearing away of whatever's in the way, that happens to be soluble. The soluble will be dissolved.
Not everything we can envision will end up being possible! Some obstacles may end up being foundational aspects of reality, which we will have to work within, or work around.
But soluble obstacles are intrinsically toast. Given directed pressure and time, the possible cannot be stopped. Soluble obstacles to the path of least resistance will always be worn away, by directed survival and competitive pressures, whether or no we have geniuses available to shout "Eureka!" and slap each other's backs as they induct each other into halls of fame. The only difference a genius makes is a few years or decades - or even possibly, centuries - either way. These are insignificantly molecular specks of time, on any reasonably cosmic scale.
Did Benjamin Franklin discover electricity? Some crispy neanderthal beat him to it by a long sight - but the lightning was there, long before that. Did Newton do anything significant at all, other than to increase the grasp our mental hand has upon levers that are themselves fundamental - and fundamentally independent of sentient thought? What does it matter to mass and gravity and electromagnetism how we formulate their interactions in our squishy little minds? Would we never have unlocked the atom, if it handn't been for whoever we care to credit for that advance? The answer to these and to most questions is a resounding: "Duh."
Sure, we can say, "Thank God for Henry Ford! He invented the assembly line." And yes, why not? Let's celebrate our individuals, for their eureka moments. Saith puny human to puny human: "Yay on you!" But seriously, did we really think nobody else was going to ever come up with that?
The assembly line.
I'm not denigrating the assembly line. The assembly line is by a good god-damn sight a far bigger deal than the transistor, than the integrated circuit, and than the microprocesser. The assembly line is a far bigger deal than the three put together. But the point is that each of these is a solution to a problem that was toast to begin with. It does not come down to a matter of creativity, nor a matter of ingenuity, nor a matter of genius. What do innovators actually do? What importance does any one of them have? What importance as individuals? Why do the adherents of rival geniuses holler over who got there first, when there clearly were crowded fields of people who were going that way and going to get there?
Innovators are the impersonal, interchangeable agents of a dumb, blind, inevitable wearing away. The great mass and momentum of our slow sight and thought flowing over it will wear down the thickest sludge of this dense, imprecise conception of reality we labor over, and under, and through. We have within our mass of minds many pairs of sharp eyes, one of whom will always suddenly spot the glittering glint of the possible - once it has peeped out from the muck. This innovator will seize upon it with a yell, and be dubbed a pioneer! - just as if no one else was going to have seen that increasingly large, sharp shard of metal sticking ever further outward, as the soluble sludge that had once concealed it keeps wearing down and away.
The sludge is ours, not reality's. There is only one obstacle we ever actually deal with, in all of our progress into unlocking "the mysteries of the universe" and "how reality works." That obstacle is not reality. It is our own ignorance, as to how reality actually works. This ignorance wears away, not by dint of our brilliance, but by our endless dumb rubbing up against it.
In the final analysis, human ingenuity has made no achievement at all, except in lessening humanity's own towering-to-begin-with-and-still-considerable ignorance. We can throw all the parties we want, but what are we really celebrating? It's as if I write a really stupid computer program that has the ability to solve its own stupidity, given enough time. Yay? Yay for me? Yay for the computer program?
No yay. I mean, why? Why yay? None of that computer program's problems were problems - except for itself.
Our species as a whole is in on that great wash of progress, and no individual droplet in the stream is going to particularly matter when it comes to reaching where we can eventually end up. That's because no genius, no trailblazer, no innovator - no matter how colossal - makes any real contribution to what is actually physically possible.
Faster or slower, the flow will uncover what can be done.
Anything that can possibly be done better, one way or another way to unlock that potential will be worn clear over time.
Now, not every possible individual idiosyncratic method will be discovered! There are, after all, nigh-infinite redundant solutions to most problems. Just as occurs via selection-driven speciation and adaptation to a given ecological niche, a solution will appear and predominate, which hinders the explosive proliferation of a competing solution (even one marginally better). But the point is: the individual innovator doesn't matter, any more than their individual solution matters.
The desirable possible is inevitable.
None of us, not even the most brilliant of us, makes a damn bit of difference when it comes to achieving what was simply, and finally, physically possible to begin with.
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