Grand Strategy Annex

5th June 2015

Post with 4 notes

Civilization Beyond the Prediction Wall

The formulations I have previously offered of history and transhumanism in regard to the prediction and retrodiction walls can equally well be applied to civilization. In Humanity Beyond the Prediction Wall, which was a kind of addendum to my Centauri Dreams post Transhumanism and Adaptive Revolution, I took up the idea of defining transhumanism as being humanity beyond the prediction wall, using ideas of the prediction wall and the retrodiction wall derived from my earlier posts The Retrodiction Wall and Addendum on the Retrodiction Wall. Several interesting ideas emerged from that ongoing development of the idea of transhumanism I started in Transhumanism and Adaptive Revolution, and which might be considered an alternative formulation to the idea of transhumanism (the attenuation or elimination of human limitations) developed in that essay. I will now apply these ideas to civilization in order to consider the possibility of civilization beyond the prediction wall. 

The diagram (above) I used to illustrate what I call the Seven Levels of Civilizational Comparability (and which I also used in From Biocentric Civilization to Post-biological Post-Civilization), which shows what constitutes a peer civilization in a developmental series, can also be applied to identifying a peer species (or, if you like, a peer intelligence) in a developmental series. I previously defined these seven levels as follows:

1. A non-civilized ETI (pre-civilization or proto-civilization) lies outside the scope of the zone of proximal development of civilization

2. An ETI in the early stages in the development of civilization — and by “early” I here mean “prior to the industrial revolution” — is comparable as a civilization, but is not a “peer”

3. An ETI that has established an industrial-technological civilization, and is therefore capable of understanding itself and other civlizations (exocivilizations for its point of view, which would include us) might be counted as a distant peer or a near peer, even if it has not attained our level of technological sophistication

4. A peer civilization, sensu stricto, would be an ETI-based industrial-technological exocivilization with a technological development roughly equivalent to our own — say, for present purposes, a minimal space flight capacity and computing capacity

5. Continuing to follow the red arrow, an industrial-technological exocivilization that had developed its technological capacities somewhat beyond our own would still be a peer, but it would be a near peer or even a distant peer if its technology were significantly more advanced than our own. However, we would still be able to recognize these technologies as technologies, as we would recognize the industrial-technological civilization as such, and as a more advanced instance of our own civilization.

6. A sufficiently advanced ETI and its industrial-technological civilization would begin to pass beyond our ability to understand the technologies involved. This represents a stage of development that some writers sometimes call a supercivilization. in Cosmos, Carl Sagan often referred to the possibility of civilizations millions of years old and greatly in advance of our own civilization. As with comparing ourselves to a pre-industrial civilization, we would here both be comparable as civilizations simpliciter, but clearly not peers.

7. An ETI that had developed beyond anything recognizable as a civilization, and had passed over into post-civilizational institutions, would no longer be comparable to us as a civilization, and would cease to be even a peer. This would be like comparing ourselves to a non-civilization ETI, as in (1) above. (For a fictional example, this might be like comparing ourselves to the “Overmind” in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.)

Peer civilizations and peer intelligences are immediately flanked by near-peers, near-peers are flanked by non-peers, and non-peers stand over and against that which lies beyond the scope of comparison – non-civilizations or non-intelligences. The application of this scheme to peer, near-peer, and non-peer intelligences is shown below in a diagram from The Principle of Civilization-Intelligence Covariance.

In so far as these comparisons among civilizations and intelligences take place as developmental sequences in time (as depicted by the red arrow in the diagram above), we can assimilate them to historiographical paradigmata where history is divided into the past beyond the possibility of retrodiction, the retrodictable past, the present, the predictable future, and the future beyond the possibility of prediction. In the diagram below I have placed the numbers from the levels of civilizational (and intelligence) comparability so that each corresponds to a historiographical period defined in terms of historical knowledge and prediction (or retrodiction). Given this structural relationship, effective history (or effective humanity, or effective civilization) corresponds to the idea of a peer species or a peer civilization.

This structure can be further elaborated to account for the outer level beyond the scope of comparability (non-humanity, non-civilization, or non-intelligence) by making a further distinction in prediction risk and retrodiction risk between predicting future known unknowns and future unknown unknowns, or between retrodicting past known unknowns and past unknown unknowns. In each case, the formulation in terms of unknown unknowns is an even stronger condition of the denial of knowledge, i.e., epistemic failure. In the diagram below I have made all of this explicit, showing the seven levels of civilizational comparability in an expanded risk continuum as applied to history.

We do not have parallel conceptions of civilization that would correspond to civilization as transhuman and posthuman correspond to humanity, but this structure laid out in terms of historiographical knowledge gives us a way to think about civilization in similar terms. Although civilization is engaged in a continual self-transcendence, as unprecedented events occur throughout the history of civilization, no one has seen fit to speak of “transcivilization,” though I have myself used the term “post-civilization” to identify those social institutions that follow civilization but which can no longer be called civilization sensu stricto (cf. What comes after civilization?). With this above formulations, what I previously called “post-civilizational successor institutions” can be assimilated to this larger conceptual framework. 

Tagged: prediction wallretrodiction wallcivilizationprinciple of civilization intelligence covariancetranshumanism