Amerika

We are now entering into the last era of managed humanity. The idea of managed humanity is that we do not need to share a goal, only be united by self-interest and a set of rules. It derives from jobs, which are an offshoot of technology, or finding methods that work and mandating them.

For example, irrigation turns out to increase crop yields, so farmers add it to the list of what works and hire people to do those things. Eventually someone makes a rule that this list must be followed and repetition sets in.

Entropy works against this. The bugs that you could drive off with nicotinoids get resistant, the storms get more intense, or a famine hits. The rule-followers are caught in means-over-ends thinking, so they repeat the same methods despite those methods failing.

In response to the panic of the herd, the rule-makers make harder rules. Follow the list, or else. If the list fails, a scapegoat must be found. Whoever did not follow the list is a handy scapegoat, so the crowd burns him at the stake and prays to the rain gods.

The age of symbolism leads itself to means-over-ends thinking. A symbol exists without context, that is, without cause-effect relationships. It is like a form of magic, much like the methods and technologies we depend on: you just do the means and ignore the ends, hoping for the best.

Humans engage in a constant fiction, designed to make this process seem sane, that humans are essentially “equal” in ability and therefore, only need the right methods, money, opportunities, and so on to achieve the same results.

To us, it seems logical. When we made all the farmers use irrigation, crop yields went up and we could have more people; why cannot everything else be that simple? Unless you use end-over-means thinking, where you find a goal and then use the appropriate methods for it, you are lost.

A counterpart to means-over-ends thinking is rationalization. In this method, people decide they want something and then invent reasons why it “could be” what they want, when really they are arguing for a method instead of a goal.

When the rule-makers take over, people live by rationalizing what they want or need in terms of the rules. If you want everyone else to give you what you want, tell them that it helps the poor or makes the gods happy. Then they let you do whatever you want.

The human fiction of equality denies an obvious fact of life: in nature, everything is hierarchical, because having the most competent in power benefits everyone, not just the competent. No wonder the herd talks about absolute power corrupting absolutely; it would corrupt them.

One form of hierarchy is intelligence. IQ measures the ability to have intelligence; it is like a mechnical test of the brain. This becomes important when we encounter complexity that most people cannot process:

“Ultimately, we found that a hybrid model — combining a classical behavioral model (the quantal response model) with a neural network — could match the performance of the best unconstrained neural network,” said Zhu.

“This means the level of behavioral noise is no longer fixed—it depends on the specific game, or context, that the player is facing.”

Essentially, the team suggests that people behave more rationally while playing games that they perceive as easier. In contrast, when they are playing more complex games, people’s choices could be influenced by various other factors, thus the “noise” affecting their behavior would increase.

The ability to manage complexity allows smarter people to make sense of holistic systems like reality, and to be able to forecast the likely future based on similar patterns in the past:

Smarter people don’t just crunch numbers better — they actually see the future more clearly. Examining thousands of over-50s, Bath researchers found the brightest minds made life-expectancy forecasts more than twice as accurate as those with the lowest IQs. By tying cognitive tests and genetic markers to real-world predictions, the study shows how sharp probability skills translate into wiser decisions about everything from crossing the road to planning retirement—and hints that clearer risk information could help everyone close the gap.

Narrow systems like education reward means-over-ends. People who memorize the right way to do an equation do not need to understand the point of doing it. They have to remember the steps and make it all happen in the right order.

This however leaves them minimally connected to the world. School, rules, jobs, and other means-over-ends enterprises narrow the complexity of the world to a few tokens or symbols, and this allows normal people to navigate it but not understand it or know the why behind why they do what they do and how they know what they think they know.

With holistic systems, people are connected to the whole of the complexity of life, sort of like quantum entanglement of mind and matter:

If two microscopic particles are said to be entangled, then if someone measures a quantum property of one of the particles and then repeats the measurement on its entangled partner, they will always find that the pair is correlated, even when the two particles are separated by vast distances. Therefore, knowing the state of one particle automatically provides information about the other.

However, an equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics — which dictates that processes tend towards increasing disorder (the aforementioned entropy) and that perfect reversibility is an attainable though rare and highly efficient ideal — has remained stubbornly out of reach. Here, reversibility does not refer to time symmetry but the ability of an external agent to manipulate the system into a different state and then manipulate it back to its initial state without any loss.

The more complexity, the closer they get to seeing the whole of the picture. If thoughts could entangle with particles, then having this kind of knowledge of complexity would anchor the individual to all parts of the world and cosmos out there.

More complexity means more representation of the whole universe, as if sampling distant particles to form a bigger pattern. This in turn would mean more links between the structure of the universe, as exhibited in sampled particles, and the structure of the mind.

Perhaps there is a cosmic reason for intelligence after all.

Tags: free will, intelligence, IQ, quantum entanglement