The Biological to Intelligence

The inorganic is restrained to dealing in forces and as a result, we observe a number of different phenomena. One of these is the organization into organic compounds that bootstrap to life. There are of course other bootstraps that have occurred and we can see them around us in the solar system and out in our galaxy. The sun, the planets, black holes, etc are all phenomena that result from the interplay of forces in the inorganic world.

In the same way that the inorganic can bootstrap in many different ways, so can the biological. The case that we are speaking of here specifically is that biology bootstrapped another kind of mind that was not just societal in nature. This mind does not just deal in the trading off of resources. It is above that. This mind deals in a very different resource that has always been present nature, but has generally been ignored by the other economies that we have discussed. This mind is called intellect and the stuff at the core of its economics is time.

You may consider it an odd thing to say that time has no value at the inorganic, biological, and societal levels, but this is the reality. Time is present at those levels, but it isn't until the human mind that we see a bootstrap to a level where a system can deal in time and recall back to a previous state of nature and use that previous state to affect the future.

The inorganic is subject to natural law, biology to the mad blind god of evolution, society to the blind raptor god of the market, but with intellect, we achieve rationality and that changes everything. We can observe the past and project events into the future. This ability is not perfect at all levels, but it is good enough to be superior to society. We often call this bootstrapped level of time use 'science.' The ability to observe the past and use those observations in a way that affect the future will help us bootstrap to a super-intelligence. But we aren't there yet. Getting there is what this book is about.

Just like the societal systems, the intellectual system has access to the levels below it. It is a bit unique in that it has access to a level, society, that it wasn't built on.

Let's look at each level starting with society. What is the economic system at work on intellectual - societal level? It is an economic system based on culture at the outset and culminates in diversity as quality culture is pursued. We see this level manifest itself in the study of the arts and many of the social sciences. We observe cultures, see how the development plays out, and then attempt to explain how and when similar patterns may emerge in the future. Are these patterns of quality?

At the intellectual - biological level we find the life sciences and in particular the study of human biology. The currency here is that of self preservation. When we reach quality at this level, we finally find the immortality that I speak of in the title of this book. Much of the remainder of this book will seek to determine how we can steer and manipulate the economic system to reach this level of quality so that our existing minds will continue to exist far into the future.

At the intellectual - inorganic level we find the replayability of inorganic manipulations...in other words machines. When we pursue these machines to a level of quality we produce industry. These are our engineering sciences. Increasing the quality at this level will help us get to immortality as well as many of these machines help us self preserve at the biological level.

We find ourselves, in our modern world, with a brain that has two minds inside of it. System One processes things in frame without time. It is instant and reactionary. It colors all we see and what we see is all there is. System Two is a mind that understands and uses time to its advantage. Currently, System Two does a very poor job of not being influenced by System One because it developed with that system in place. Many of the arguments we get in about what our modern life should look like are based on the fact that we don't think much about the fact that these two minds have two very different economic models. In fact, between society and the intellect we have seven different economies all interacting and crossing over. Perhaps by separating them out and creating a framework for thinking about them from a moral perspective we can begin to find a path to the place in the future where we all want to be.