All Horizons are Strange: Is There Progress or just…More?

Progress is an idea that doesn’t match our actions or current understanding of the world.

No one’s perfect, but some are lucky. They are born into a world they are well suited for. And if they could help it they’d maintain that world for their offspring. But, inevitably it seems, things change as time marches on. Sometimes it’s our own doing and we need to adjust. Often children reject what they are given only to recover it when they’re ready but by then it’s too late. The world up and changed.

The world-frame we occupy is not static. All horizons are strange. What we do within them is all we do. Most (all?) horizons you never reach, others circle back on themselves, and others are just flat out made up. But you expect to reach them. You expect to find yourself at their walls. You expect to have control over your own creations. No matter their form or function, however hard or soft, in their context, are they not all considered limits?

A definition 1 for “horizon” is the line that forms in the distance where land or water meet the sky. A definition 2 is something like the limits of understanding. So I guess definition 1 is about the limits of visual perception with respect to distance.

When we reach the limits to what we can understand, however temporary, there are more questions than answers, more conflict than resolution.

Progress

So how can we be making progress in a world that seems like Alice’s dream where the rules change every so often and the only thing you can count on is that you’ve been down this hole before? What is progress?

As I survey the lexical definitions of progress I see words and phrases like “onward”, “better”, and “more complete”.

Onward. “Moving on” onward? Step away from?

Better. Improved? More effective?

More complete. Closer to full, filled?

For the most part, there is in these words a thing not said. That of leaving. Something is back there…or isn’t there and it only is “there” in the past. As a human being—a social animal—I can’t help but wonder if this relates to fear of rejection and abandonment. Don’t people fear progress for fear of being left behind? Y’know, get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’? The last of the gang to die? Lenin’s casualties of momentum where “unskilled riders” fall out of the train of history when it takes a sharp turn? It’s wistful, romantic, nostalgic, sad, lonely, scary. You wanna fight it…if you can. And if ya can’t beat ‘em, ya join ‘em. Or…

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a book called Full House. It outlines his ideas on variation and progress. In one particular point in the book, he leans on work by Daniel McShea. McShea wrote a paper called Mechanisms of Large-Scale Evolutionary Trends. He used a two category scheme to analyze the assumptions in his model of lineage branching. He called them “passive” and “driven” trends. Both trends have a skewed distribution away from an ultimate source of origin.

The idea is that given new lineages form randomly with respect to the position of their parent lineage in evolutionary space—an abstract space (e.g., “adaptive”, “fitness”, or “evolutionary” “landscape”) wherein inherited changes in systems occur—they will form a pattern that fills up the space from the source to the margin over time. This is the passive trend (See the top-left picture of the figure below). Any sample of a lineage out beyond the horizon of origin will have a symmetrical distribution of individuals spread around a central value (See the bottom-left picture in the figure below). This sampling procedure McShea called the Test of Skewness.

If new lineages form going in the same direction as, and away from, their parent lineage, the spread of lineages in evolutionary space will move in a particular direction over time. This is the driven trend (e.g., driven by natural selection; see the top-right picture of the figure below). Sampling a given lineage here will likely give a skewed distribution even if the parent distribution is not skewed (see the bottom-right picture in the figure above; in this case the parent—larger—distribution is skewed…but it doesn’t have to be).

(The pictures in the middle-row of the figure above are essentially the vector field these trends are forming in.)

Direction? Consider the origin of life or the origin of the universe for that matter. There’s a before (presumably) and after. Are modes of “existence” maintained or abandoned over time? Are there still single-cell organisms? Are there still atoms?

In general, the overall picture is that as systems evolve we can think of them changing where previous positions in evolutionary space are not left behind and changes where previous positions are.

Enrichment

I’ve got this idea I call “episodic synchrony”. It’s about diversification, but I wanna talk about the part that leads up to diversification. So there’s two modes of large changes in resource abundance and availability. They are resource enrichment and impoverishment. In this post I’m gonna focus on enrichment.

Consider a situation where resource abundance and availability is increased for a population of consumers. Given consumer survival improves as more mouths are fed, or more bodies are sheltered, more consumers may make it to reproductive maturity and reproduce some offspring. Perhaps some of these consumers are new to the dating scene since they may not normally live long enough or win favor enough from potential mates. So now more offspring born of rare variants live on and reproduce as well. In this resource enrichment scenario, increased resources leads to increased population size through a reduction in mortality and, in turn, this leads to increased variation in the consumer population.

In “The Origin of Species”, Darwin mentions a kernel of this idea briefly concerning domesticated organisms (think of all the varieties/breeds of dogs, pigeons, cows, apples, tulips, etc.). Organisms protected from predation and competition and given a surplus of food, water, and shelter have a lot of phenotypic variation. Also, there’s more and more of them. And often less and less of their wild parents. The idea has since been explored more deeply. It’s supported in some cases (e.g., here and here, among others), but not all (e.g., here). It’s a little mixed (here and here).

But representatives of the wild parents also can receive the same benefits of domestication when in captivity. Captive animals exhibit behaviors in zoos and conservation parks not recorded in their wild counterparts. For instance, when tested, field mice in captivity exhibited less defensive activities like burrowing or time spent in refugia. Additionally, they had slower reaction times to the presence of predators. The concern is that conservationists might want to simulate the wild environment as much as possible if reintroductions of captive individuals to the wild are to be a success.

This also sounds like the characteristics of animals on isolated islands. Easy pickins. Even Darwin remarked how easy it was to kill the now extinct Faulkand fox of the Faulkland Islands which would walk right up to him and he’d hit it in the head with a club. Dead.

Nietzsche also got in on the action in Beyond Good and Evil concerning this dynamic, except he was concerned with its effects on individuals in human society. Great variation in individuals—both angelic and monstrous—springs forth from a cornucopia of good fortune. A boom some might say.

In each of these cases perhaps selection, the culler of creation and the pressure to conform, is relaxed because everyone is a little safer and content and what were once “freaks” are now tolerated.

In human societies, especially the wealthy ones, there is quite a bit of experimentation with different modes of personal expression. Today, it is not uncommon for people to go to conventions that celebrate a strong interest in ideas, themes, or genres in sectors of a life not solely caught up in day-to-day concerns like people were in the past. Now there are “cons” like Comic Con, Mars Con, Star Trek cons. People dress up as Klingons or Storm Troopers. I was once at an Evolution Conference and at the same time there was a Zombie Con or something going on. I remember overhearing detailed discussions of “linkage disequilibrium” while cosplay-dressed R2-D2 and Wolverine rolled by my field of view (the conferences were not completely isolated from each other).

But there are also people who practice other subcultural expressions. There are the furries with the strong appreciation for animal anthropomorphism found in Disney movies and the like. People dress up as animals in theme park-like costumes and get together and act out their characters. To give another anecdote, at a city park near where I live I once saw a woman dressed as a horse giving people rides in a cart that was attached to her waist. She was neighing and “trotting” and rearing back on her “haunches” as she took people around the park. (Admittedly, I live in one of the cities people wanna “keep weird”.) One is probably not going to see anything like this in North Korea or Afghanistan. But the States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia? Yeah.

Another rising subculture are the Tulpas which derive from Buddhist practices. Tulpas are imaginary friends who are more or less treated as real. These groups get together too. I have interacted with someone and their Tulpa once and it was frustrating keeping track of who was talking to say the least.

It used to be small private publications like zines that communicated the behaviors of rarer variants in society. The number of consumers of this information was pretty small too. Now we have the internet and all the forums one could possibly wish to join for free and engage with others in these subcultures. Flat Earthers are making a comeback. I haven’t checked on the gravity deniers in a while, but I’m sure they won’t be silenced either.

Technology, at least as a means of understanding and applying tools and techniques, is the enriched resource in this case. It keeps getting richer. We cultural agents are the consumers. I recall a conversation in an episode of the travel show Parts Unknown hosted by the late Anthony Bourdain. The episode took place in Seattle. At one point Bourdain talked to this couple who run an internet porn business. They decided to get into virtual reality porn. And one of the anecdotes the wife of the duo said was that a person reported finding their sexuality using the virtual reality. Bourdain commented that at the time “stepmom” was the most searched porn-related term in the Seattle area. Tech opens a space and we rush to fill it like organisms to a newly formed island. In the process a lot happens while the gettins’ good.

But it also leads to a lot of confusion and discomfort because, as social animals, the rules keep morphing not only between, but within, generations. Variation in identity and ethnicity is expanding as technology is accelerating. And, for a while at least, tolerance was increasing.

Aside from the West’s traditional views on sex and race, now there are call out cultures and heated debates on and offline about gender pronouns. Furthermore, there is an attempt to make a general reference to “people of color” since, in all honesty I presume, it is becoming more difficult to peg any one person’s source of origin in the migrant melting pots of the West (as well as some in the East). Regarding gender, people refer to themselves in addition to she and he, as ve, xe, per, and they, among others. I imagine the list is still growing.

Is this morally good? Is it morally bad? Is tolerance good? Bad? I think it’s neither. But I do think morality is used as a means to compete against, appeal to, and persuade others to one camp (echo chamber) or another. It has even made it into legislative conflicts. This kind of stuff is what I think a number of the members of the “Intellectual Dark Web” are so upset about. The potential for forcing others by law to refer to each other by their pronouns has IDWs and their sympathizers all up in arms and ready to fight. In a specific case, IDW member Jordan Peterson claims being legally bound to call someone by their pronoun of choice infringes on his right to free speech. Lines are being drawn, differences being contrasted. It’s not completely related but this can be seen in the battle lines drawn between Antifa and the Alt-Right/Proud Boys.

Top left: furries going bowling. Bottom left: depiction of a person and their tulpa walking down the street. Large image on right: Jordan Peterson explaining to a variety of young students why he’s right. Small inset on the right: the colorful variation of youth today.

But I don’t think it’s a matter of morals as much as it’s existential like climate change and the effects that will come. The horizon is fuzzier and more uncertain than before. We don’t know what’s next exactly and whether we will even be part of what’s next. For many today, both young and old, they already feel this way. We look to the horizon and expect to arrive at a destination that was arrived at before, but instead, things are out of place.

All this variation in society is personal. It’s not intellectual. Where do I fit in? I feel this way. Does anyone else? When times are good everybody’s friends. But if I’m worried about making ends meet, if the future doesn’t look bright and I fear (or can see) close friends and relatives—heaven forbid, my children—suffering, I may be less sympathetic to your “rights” to live the way you want. I may downgrade you by perhaps seeing or assuming you have no kids and thus think you have luxuries I don’t. Why should you have access to resources I need? We won’t be friends. I won’t bake you a cake. There’s too much pressure. My discriminating intolerance might get the better of me. And I wonder if this is the crux of what happens between different tribes and ideologies on campuses around countries like the US and Canada and on what seems like every damn weekend in my city’s downtown. We’re nearing a ceiling and all cultural variants are asking, “What about me!?”

Combination

So how does technology change? The economist and complexity guy W. Brian Arthur makes a good case that technology evolves by a combinatorial process. Everything is stacked upon each other. He gives an example of a jet that has assemblies brought together like wings, engine, and electronics system. Each of these is comprised of still their own assemblies. One could also just think of a house, however. There’s the roof, the wood frame, and the foundation. Embedded in these are the electrical wiring and plumbing. Then again, the wood frame is set together with nails. There’s also the drywall that covers the frame on the inside and siding that covers the outside. Older homes have fireplaces and these were often connected to furnaces. All these assemblies have their own assemblies of materials (e.g., chimneys have bricks and mortar which are made of sediment and water) and so on and so forth. Fuck, even the tools are made of combinations of materials.

Combinations make more stuff and the stuff they’re made of still hang around. But the combined things can be combined together as well. Now there’s more stuff. When one walks around the “manmade” world there is a great variety of things we’ve made through combination. These in turn facilitate our thoughts and actions which can be made into more behaviors and technologies, and so on and so on…

More, more, more. But nothing disappears now that there’s more because it is directly responsible for the new stuff to begin with.

I don’t know if it’s possible to rid the world of prejudice or cells or nitrous oxide. Yes, there is species extinction, but there is also evolutionary convergence. What is lost often returns if not in concrete terms, in abstract ones like ichthyosaurs and dolphins.

I don’t worry that we “can never go home again”. I worry that we cannot leave. And that the only way we can alleviate the existential pressure of learning is to create. We learn we aren’t the center of the universe. Crisis. We learn that Earth and the Universe are billions of years old. Crisis. We learn that we evolved in a process that has no central control. Crisis. We learn that we have no free will or that there is no self. Crisis. We learn that we are easily manipulated. Crisis. We learn that there is no God. Crisis.

Where’s the meaning in life? How do we solve the latest paradox? How do we explain tragedy? Cathartically paint, write, and sing our way through the pain…in a church, in a local hip music scene, in an educational institution, in a social media platform. From crisis to catharsis and back to crisis.

So is “more” progress insofar as progress is a state of being better and more complete? Or is it just shit banging into each other? How much are we in control of our baser nature? And if we’re not in control of it and it’s responsible for what behaviors come from it while also a product of combinations—molecules, cellular structures, cells, networks, organs, circuits, bodies, populations, and so on—then show me progress?

What have we left behind?