From the Toba Incident to the Future, and Beyond!

Hi there! Time for another waffle, this time on various things...
on the development of humanity, and of various caldera...

We'll be talking about humanity, from Olduvai to now...
and we'll wonder about that 'ancestors paradox' that Sagan and others have observed (well, we'll keep it to the back of the mind) and we'll talk about the origins of sentience, or at least the path to sentience.

At the time of writing, I know of no civilisation that has existed which is older than ~40 000 years, and that is primarily First Nations people. Next, there are the Indus Valley civilisations and the Gobekli Tepe civilisation, then various shorter lived civilisations...
If you know of any, even tentative, evidence for civilisations that have been around in between Olduvai Gorge till now,
or civilisations which are older than 70 000 years old, please share them with me = )








I suspect that humanity became set on the path to better intelligence as a result of the Toba Incident;
a time of great volcanic activity around the world (as evidenced by the many caldera), and a period of great extinction and bottlenecking.
I also suggest that it would therefore be logical to look for signs in similar lifeforms (not only mammals) that were present at that time and similiarly underwent such a 'close shave', for signs of sentience; there are only a few hundred examples... so we should in the next few thousand years or so, see the signs of emerging intelligence.

As a result of this Toba Incident period, it is theorised elsewhere that the human population dropped down to around 15 000 individuals; this is where mitochondrial eve comes from... or all our common ancestors.

Sagan wrote about studying for Oannes, perhaps as signs of extraterrestrial contacts of the past recorded within metanarratives (EPrime as a dialect and concept hadn't been invented yet; nor had existentialism, post-structuralism etc...).
I would contend that perhaps the Toba Incident is also such an event; what if all life had been extinguished, and extraterrestrial passers by happened to, as an act of kindness, fix that for us? (they simply hit the redo/undo button).

When you see things such as the mantidfly, it can be easy to give into such wishful thinking...
(the mantidfly, as weird as it looks, is a type of phenotype-mimic/biomimic, heh).

I also am a proponent of the explanation for Uluru as being either a volcanic plug, or the remnants of a self-launched projectile: the remains of a super-volcanic explosion or collision with earth from our history (and some geotechnical people I've met over the years have seriously suggested such hypothesis, in addition to the more conventional plate tectonics theories).
The projectile either didn't have enough force to reach escape velocity, or its orbit decayed and it collided with the earth.

There is not sufficient evidence in the form of rings to explain this, but perhaps that is due to erosion?
Perhaps also, if Uluru is a projectile from another part of the earths landsurface or crust, perhaps the mineralogical analysis would agree with particular sites? There are a few candidate sites with potential, from which Uluru could have formed.

---

To another perspective,
We've been around since the Olduvai Period, and only recently begun to achieve sentience.
This, as a fraction of the time that the Earth has been around, is a small fraction;
could other lifeforms have evolved here in the past, and potentially have then left the planet?
(ST:Voy explores this with a dinosaur race that lives on the other side of the galaxy).

I think its a possibility; a remote one,
but given that plate tectonics does periodically clear the historic accretion record... not one I can entirely discount.

This has implications for the Drake Equation: if planets can produce more than one sentient species in a given timeframe, and those species can then go on to live outside the habitable zone/differentiate and adapt to different environments... many more communicative civilisations might be possible to exist in the universe (this only makes the Fermi Paradox harder to explain).

The Drake Equation also doesn't consider different modes of communication, just signal emitting ones (both radio and spectra-altering or mass-altering ones).
Nor does the Drake Equation look for alternate types of lifeforms (its a very Earth-centric approach with anthropocentric biases).
So, I'm confident that there must be a large number of other sentient lifeforms out there in the cosmos...

As I've said in the past, and many others must have already thought,
if we extend the principles of natural selection...
if you take life from this planet elsewhere in the universe, and it survives and adapts...
then adaptation will lead to differentiation, and eventually you'll get aliens that way!
How cool is that?

So,
I'm keen to hear your thoughts,
and I would conclude with the thoughts that, from a human security perspective...
if Dr. White's Warp Drive project concludes we can't send manned warp space flight,
or more likely,
that civilisation collapses and splinters within the next 100 years or so,
and if we can't send a Von Neumann probe...
perhaps we'll consider 'seeding' asteroids and comets with resilient genetically engineered lifeforms, or sending out such samples at least in all directions from the Earth,
and trying to do the same thing for other planets/suitable locations within our own solar system (sending stuff there to serve as 'life backups').

This way, even if the only yet known source of sentience and all known life
decides it wants to wipe itself out, it can go for it! if it wants to make that stupid and terribly wasteful decision! = )

What do you think?
Should this be a top scientific project? Project Resilience...

Looking into Sacred Texts

Hi there!
This is an order of magnitude more sensitive than previous theological discussion...
I want to provide context: I think that ethics (which, from a secular perspective, culminate with humanist/liberal thought) no matter the background which led to the development of the 'core' ethics, are a necessary thing in order for the world to function. I think a lot of traditions receive undue criticism in these regards (and that deities are blamed often for the faults of people).

That aside,
how might traditions go about the quest to 'prove' that their work is the inerrant word of a deity? (some traditions/beliefs do not orientate the organisation around such a claim, those traditions/beliefs can be addressed perhaps at another time).
Could combinatorial linguistics/cryptography, cybernetics/systems thinking or a descendent method thereof, pave the way for traditions to examine, quantify and compare their text to all other possible texts of all other lengths?

Pinker observes there might be some difficulties in attempting to map texts, in many of his works (they're well worth a read, even if you don't agree with the premise of all of them, such as "Better Angels of Our Nature"...). Sure, there might be a few 'infinities' problems, but these are similar to the range of genomics problem from SETI. The real problem is if the set can be reduced to a countable few, or if a subset of only meaningful whole texts can be effectively isolated from that larger 'noise' profile...
Ken Wais http://abyssinia-iffat.com/Linguistic_Combinatorics.htm (I can't find a best contact email out there on the web, could you believe? If you have a best contact, or if you are Ken Wais, please relay that contact info through to me on my email at wonderistthinker@gmail.com so we can have a waffle)
Chomsky (monkeys and typewriters eventually culminating with Shakespeare/a target text),
and a number of other people on both Math Stack Exchange (mostly cryptographers and data analysts) and Biology/English Stack Exchange suggest that perhaps it is possible to do, even if the sets are 'countably infinite' beyond certain lengths, and even if things such as how meaning is conveyed are somewhat culturally constructed and problematic to model...
Language is the signifier and the signified: the written, and the mindstate, in combination, for an interval. We call that a reading... and each language is different.
Jorges Borges explores the concept in his "Library of Babel" concept (which is conceptually like a Mega-Library of Alexandria), which is a fascinating short story I highly recommend.
Oliver Burkeman also sort of references the idea of "museum of failure" in his "The Antidote"; also a great chuckle of a read with handy tips and jokes inside.
Dawkins also (his catchphrase 'genes and memes, baby') outlines roughly what is required to construct artificial-construct derived sets of knowledge... you need the genes and the memes

The quest for "pre-knowledge" is the linguistic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine
(in fact, perpetual motion machines are a subset of pre-knowledge, as the perpetual motion machine must have been designed and hence written in a language). You don't get quite out of the linguistic black hole all of that time and effort and words that you put in... still, it sure is an amusing concept to keep at the back of the mind; perhaps in place of dogmatic lessons or social conventions...

 I think there's lots of constraints - time, resources (ERoEI), certainty (LaPlace Demon/Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) and the fact that languages reference other languages via loanwords and loanconcepts at an unknown rate... which might require a reference to an infinite variable, but that, in time and with quantum computing, it may be possible to overcome some of these limits, or perhaps still acquire a glean of some useful concepts at random anyhow --- even if the whole set cannot be represented or investigated substantially. I also suggest that this argument, along with the technological innovation rate, and an appeal to 'darwinist naturalism/stochastic nature of the universe' is part of the bedrock of the 'technocratic optimist' perspective.
I've attempted in the past, unsuccessfully, to use this as a strawman argument against Safeassign as a concept: why do I want to help someone who is clearly using some kind of algorithm such as I have just outlined, in order so that THEY may have better access to the set of all knowledge? Where's my slice of all that knowledge? where's my cut in the royalties? Nowhere. Pay your dues, the greatest double standard of the double standards thats a doubly double standard.

See, one might think that, if one followed and applied these Babushka Principles to language,
one would eventually determine (within a given accuracy of say +/- 10%) the set of ALL possible configurations, permutations, combinations... of a given language, for all conceivable format types...
in practice, how many individual texts do you know that exceed 10 000 pages?
If you answered the internet, hahaha great for you!:
except thats limited not by the amount of paper that can be produced, but by how long the power and other supply lines can be maintained... Yeah, its a much longer limit... or is it?

 You can see where this line of thinking is going...
Once we have that set of all words, we could then evaluate and compare all of the outcomes from that language --- all of the texts of all possible sizes and punctuations etc, and we could then map and find the 'unique' ones: texts which contributed to knowledge, texts which quote other texts...
(Garth Marenghi: If you have to buy one of my books, buy this one, which is all of them)
We may even find the "Encyclopedia Galactica": the book that contains all possible knowledge (which must surely be a book/text that changes at every instant to reflect the perpetually changing universe/multiverse) of all possible species in the universe ever. That is truly the needle in the haystack, and I feel therefore a much worthy candidate of bearing the title "inerrant work of a deity/deities". No such book or text at time of writing comes anywhere close to such a concept.
Not even this article: this is just part of the set of texts that realises that there are other sets of texts/subsets of text --- surely, a vast set. That got a little too "post-structural"/"existential" - I feel like my mind will melt from psuedoscience if the post-structural or existential/abstract levels are too high.

The problem is the sifting of the meaningful from the meaningless:
there must be a very high rate of repetition of meaningless/nonunique texts per language... theoretically, this must then leave (whilst still a large number) a set of only meaningful texts etc...
I don't mean the kind you recieved on your telephone: a combination of "L33TSpeak/Nadsat" and pseudo-erotica images, no, I mean strings that are in a line and all have cohesion.
See, once you have the set of "all meaningful words" (which must be conceptually a very large number, but in practice would be limited by a lot of factors...), you could then start to analyze sentence composition and structure... you could derive incidence rates (say at the sentence, paragraph, page, whole of document, whole of language levels) for all the words, and divide your page into a column and row setup(to remove grammar and punctuation problems...)
you could then derive the interactions between the words.

I think its meaningful
the length of sentences, and in turn
paragraphs, pages, and eventually the whole document.

As above, there were 4 words per sentence, then 7, then 7 again: low polysyllabic words.
Can you imagine all the 6 paragraph combinations? Luckily there are limits again,
typically in a given language (read left to right etc), there are minimum sentences and maximum sentences... Franz Kakfa is an example of the maximum. Usually, people don't write one incredibly unbroken sentence which encompasses all the thoughts and feelings as well as other narrative voices and perspectives into the one sentence without a pause or punctuation or just breaking the sentence off...

Wais, for fun, says imagine all the variants of "good", just a four letter word of a particular incidence rate and genre coefficient...
Good
good good
good good good
good good good good....

then

good good good good good good good good good good good good good good
good good good good good good good good good good
good good good good good good good good good good good good good
good good good good good.

So on and so fourth, for all different line lengths and positions (up to your whole document length).
thats just one word.
We've omitted punctuation, capitalisation and irregularities
(such as "shatner/beat style delivery" ie good... good GOOD good-good
g
o
o
d).
 Clearly, that 'good' type of meaningless drivel would be filtered out as non-unique/uniquely non-meaningful and an iterative function... but could that have been a code, and a unique meaning?

This method might return more results than a whole of document random method, which is randomly trying to generate sentences from that OCEAN of all possible sets (xqaszredgrti, for example, not a word last time I looked. If it is, no offense intended, and if I'm the first to use it, I hold copyright to it.).
There has to be a better way... can't we find some way to emulate the 'mindstates'/choice processes of the author -- which, the author in order to be real, must necessarily have a genome (as far as we yet know) to have had the thought, to have sifted through the language/invent language (Shakespeare style). The genome implies the neurological structure, from there, we 'simply' have to cycle through all the possible configurations the mind could have (basically volatages/neurons at various positions around the brain). Boom! We can get a construct that thinks in a way approaching an individual entity...
but then, the problem becomes which entities do we go to the trouble of emulating... 

Of course, words that form discourses would also have a separate identifier, so that you could compare those words in a particular context. For example, how often do Theological words appear in rigorous Cellular Biology works (hint: not too often, and how meaningful are pseudo-scientific texts anyhow)? How often do law concepts come up in creative writing (often especially around notions of defamation and 'intellectual property law', whatever that is...).

Another of the list, besides Encyclopedia Galactica, would be the History of Everything.
If language is indeed infinite, and there are indeed a number of multiverses (which is approaching infinite, though I would suggest would be limited too, given M-Theory implies only a particular range of universes might exist such as our own, and any beyond that range of consideration would be beyond our purposes at this time), then only one given "History of Everything" will correspond with a particular series of events per universe.
We'd want to find the one that corresponds only to our particular universe (one text out of infinity). And we'd want it to be just before the end/fate of the universe... that way we can utilise the information still... A classic example then would be BttF2: the grays sports almanac. Knowing the exact future of the universe (eschewing the problem of multiple observers, including potentially from other civilisations) would complete the reification/redundancy of people, and potentially lead to defeatist nihilistic existentialism... If such a text could exist at all... to obtain it in the present via a combinatorial linguistic method wouldn't necessarily cause a temporal/causality paradox, yet, if one acted on the knowledge obtained via a method other than time travel, a causality paradox may none-the-less ensue...  I wonder what the 'pliability' would be, that is, how much you could alter had you obtained pre-knowledge via a combinatorial/scientific method, before a Causality Paradox were to occur... thus invalidating your source of pre-knowledge... (Personally, I don't think it would be possible to obtain 'pre-knowledge', at least, not without supercomputers and vast resources and time...).

So, from the brief ramble and consideration of combinatorial/Babushka linguistics,
even just conceptually,
how can the myriad of traditions claim that their texts are the inerrant work of their own deity?
to be fair, how do crystal ball gazers (futurists, futurologists) make claims regarding 'the future'?
Some say its an inerrant word spoken in each age, or to the aspects of the day... yada yada. That would suggest the claim should be downgraded from 'inerrant' to 'literal' - as apparent contradictions and discontinuties consistent with a human-made document suggest inerrant to be a stretch.

Have advocates of 'divine and inerrant knowledge' run the numbers in all possible languages, and produced the set of all possible texts, and noted the pattern that their sacred text recurs most often across all the possibilities of texts in all languages? Better proof again might be if their text IS THE ONLY COHERENT ONE that can result from the method for a given size... again that'd require the claim to be altered though and defined: "This book is inerrant!* *for books written in a particular language, which descended in turn from 3-4 other languages and was authored by 1000s of people over time, only up to a certain document length.

Traditions avoid that hard work by suggesting the onus is on the non-believer to disprove, and that there is a cosmic/transcended author that perhaps wrote it all...

I leave it for you to arrive at your own conclusions,
I don't know, and honestly, there are other decidedly more real concerns that could be addressed, such as poverty or climate change, maybe even SETI at a stretch...