eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 6.January 2023 – 24.January 2023
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

Parts of this text have been translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version), afterwards only minimally edited.

CONTEXT

This post is part of the book project ‘oksimo.R Editor and Simulator for Theories’.

IDEA OF THE BOOK

(Last change: 3.January 2023)

(Partially translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version))

At present, mankind is faced with the task of overcoming many problems of hitherto unknown magnitude in order to secure its own existence and that of the entire biosphere in the long term.

In order to achieve this, it is necessary to communicate with each other in order to be able to pull together towards a common goal. As many people as possible have to build bridges to each other in order to be able to share and bundle their experiences and their knowledge in a language accessible to all. For as many as possible a ‘good’ ‘future’ should be found and shaped.

People can generally do all this without the aid of a computer. From the actual practice of life, however, we have learned that computers are ‘machines’ which can be helpful when the tasks which have to be accomplished are so large in number that the executions would not be feasible in ‘practical life’. We could do it without computers ‘in principle’, but ‘purely practically’ we can not.

So use a computer?

For purely practical reasons, there is a lot to be said for it.

But if you look around today – just arrived in the year 2023 – you have to realize that this ‘motivation out of practice’ has led to forms of implementation that leave the basic motivation out of practice behind. Thus the ‘machine computer’ is meanwhile highly stylized by not a few to the ‘new, better human being, much more intelligent, ethically better’ …. and what else one can project into the metaphor of the machine computer. In addition, already now after a few decades a complexity of the new computer-machine technology has set in, which makes an understanding of what exactly is going on there practically impossible, not only for the ‘users’ of this global world machine, but also for the ‘makers’ themselves. Many of these systems have long since slipped out of the ‘control’ of the operators.

For us humans, who are more and more overshadowed in the global way of talking about ‘smart technical systems’, who get less and less appreciation, and who are brutally trivialized in the understanding of everyday media, the question naturally arises whether the ‘tool’ has ‘overtaken’ us and will increasingly make us ‘superfluous’?

In the experimental text of this book something – by today’s standards – unusual will be attempted: using the example of a new paradigm of how to see and use the machine computer, the ‘new picture of man’ is drawn step by step, who is of course vastly superior to the machine computer, but only if we as humans understand who we ‘actually’ are. And this we cannot experience, if we deal predominantly and exclusively with the extremely simple technology of the machine computer, instead with the inconceivable complexity, which each individual human being represents, the whole population of homo sapiens, we all as a part of the all embracing biosphere, which ‘populates’ the planet earth since 3.5 billion years, works on it, changes it, and which – most probably – carries a common ‘goal’ in itself, of whose existence – to my knowledge – not so much has been thought until now. In short: We are a real part of one of the biggest miracles in the whole known universe – a maximum singularity [2] -, but we talk more and more only about the simple structure of the machine computer, which an Alan Matthew Turing described in the context of an essay 1936/7 with few lines in such a way, that they are valid for all today known types of computer machines (every child from approx. 7-8 years can understand this). [1]

So, let us reflect on what we can do as human beings, that which makes us a little bit more familiar with a world of possible future states towards which we should try to orient ourselves constructively, if we want to prevent the ‘miracle of life’ in this universe from dying out at the very moment when it is about to ‘discover itself’.

COMMENTS

[1] A. M. Turing, “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 42, no. 2, p. 230–265, 1936-7.

[2] An influential paper for the concept of ‘singularity’ has been published by Vernor Vinge: “The coming technological singularity: How to survive in the post-human era”, In G.A. Landis, editor, Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, pages 11–22. 1993. From a mathematical point of view a ‘singularity’ is defined by the non-existence of a formula to compute a certain event. This does not mean, that there exists no such formula, but only, that the mathematicians have ‘not yet’ such a formula! To classify the machine computer as a candidate for a singularity could in this sense be interpreted as the result of a ‘not available knowledge’ about that what we call the ‘biosphere’.