A-Void by Babak Govan (trending books to read .txt) 📗

The Violent Humans now utilize technology beyond adaptation, misguidedly, strengthening their immortality fantasies through more and more information. Everything. Everywhere. Faster. Bigger. More. Now. By engineering increasingly faster machines to dispense increasing amounts of information to increasingly appear everywhere they are, the Violent Humans are exponentially growing the volume and intensity of stimuli, or stress, with which a human interacts.

Accelerating Environmental Change

Definition – an exponentially increasing rate of change in the environment.

Equation – stress (units of stimuli) per unit time = y2 / t

WHERE

stress = y2 = y1x

initial stress level (units of stimuli) = y1

new stress level (units of stimuli) = y2

exponential growth rate of stimuli = x

time = t

Imagine that at the beginning of a month (time), you must process 250 units of stimuli (y1). There are constant changes, however, to information, responsibilities, obligations, requirements, prerequisites, instructions, procedures, policies, rules, laws, forms, and deadlines—update demands. Now, imagine that we increase the amount of stimuli by a power of two (x = 2) over the course of this month. At the beginning of the next month, the level of stress (y2) will have ballooned to 62,500 (y2 = y1x or 62,500 = 2502). Each day this month, there would be approximately 2,085 units of stimuli to which to respond (62,500/30 days). If one could sleep seven hours per night, this would allocate two units of stimuli to each wakeful minute, or 120 units of stimuli per wakeful hour!

What happens when this level of stress continues to grow exponentially? This equation demonstrates an ever-increasing gap between stress and the time available to respond to such stress, reducing adaptation.

New stimuli that condense information or deliver efficiency cannot keep up. Soon enough, the Violent Humans have boundless variables and no constants. It is imperative to identify that the actual change of an increment of information from old information to new information is in and of itself information for processing.

Outside of The Centrifuge, New Jamestownians proceed with conscious awareness, to prevent rather than to correct, to remain masters rather than becoming slaves to their own makings. At the breakdown point, not even our wonderful machines and gadgets could be our lifeguards.

In 1871, in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles Darwin wrote, “Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.” Undeterred, the Violent Humans will bring on The Reversal, an accelerating and self-reinforcing decomposition—self-inflicted extinction.

We are currently witnessing the Second Stage of The Reversal.

Section III

The First Stage of the Reversal

The Loss of Control

The concept of selective attention is important to self-control.… To keep your car on the road, you must pay more attention to driving conditions than to your hunger pangs.… Adaptation to our environment involves learning which stimuli must be attended to and which ones can be safely ignored.13

We know from psychological experiments that an individual can attend to only a few units of stimuli at once, if not only one stimulus. When we cannot decide what to focus on, our unconscious mind makes that decision for us. Information overload brings on decision fatigue.

There are larger-scale risks. As they are outdated before enactment, policies, rules, and laws cannot work in real time. This loss of relevance is doubled when governing bodies cannot initially develop policies, rules, and laws at a rate fast enough to match cultural shifts.

To the contrary, through the continuous drip of stimuli, a few people could manipulate the behaviors of mass populations, metamorphosing them into robots sent to the assembly line daily.

The Loss of Memory

What happens when there is no time to remember? Whereas we remember sounds for up to four seconds, we remember images for about half a second, and the hippocampus—our memory center—absorbs only the information to which we attend. The fact that the preliminary memory banks of the brain hold only minute amounts of information simultaneously is another limiting factor. Unless there is repeated rehearsal of this information—to learn it—it fades from your memory within seconds. The loss of learning is not an isolated loss. Prolonged stress could actually kill brain cells.14

The Second Stage of the Reversal

The Loss of Fulfillment

Why do the Violent Humans continue along this destructive path? When such a bombardment of stimuli occurs, little time remains to sense appropriately. Still, a deeper illness exists.

In the “24/7 society,” one can be whomever one wants and can be many people at once: entrepreneur, clothing designer, movie critic, health guru, relationship expert, author, politician, professor, and so on. When everything is available all the time, there is a loss of desire, of pursuit, of awe. Everywhere becomes the same. Long-term fulfillment killed by short-term gratification.

The Third Stage of the Reversal

The Loss of Sanity, the Loss of You

Ivan Pavlov observed that an organism required but unable to discriminate between highly similar sounds, shapes, messages, or other stimuli, or required but unable to solve problems, experiences a “breakdown” characterized by high levels of anxiety, repetitive unproductive behaviors, disorientation, disorganization, extreme emotional displays, hysteria, apathy, and catatonia. If the experimenter returns the organism to an original discrimination task it had passed successfully, it would then fail to discriminate again.15 As insanity brews, eventually so many clowns play in the circus that the ringmaster is no longer identifiable.

Section IV

Menacing Memes

But if we consider culture as … a system with its own … pressure to survive … memes can quickly accumulate their own agenda … the primitive drive to reproduce itself and modify its environment to aid its spread.16

A meme is an idea that spreads from person to person within a culture. Like genes, memes follow natural selection, but they do so through non-genetic means. Those replicating most effectively best their survival chances, and these may not always be the memes most beneficial to our own living. Meanwhile, the maladaptive memes of the Violent Humans, with their accelerating multiplication, spread epidemically.

Section V

Who’s Ill?

The Violent Humans cast off their dissenting and, worse, decaying members to physicians, therapists, unemployment offices, and prisons for “fixing” of their “disorders.”

Every society defines for itself “right” and “wrong,”