We are a group of technical engineers and social engineers on a mission to increase the average usefulness of mankind.
Civilization can be described as a loop that frees up neural capacity by making work more efficient and recruits it to create more neural capacity.
Tasks that create neural time can be described as useful, but there is no guarantee that the capacity they create won't be recruited by uselessness.
Any neural resources recruited by parasitic behavior will be used to make life more difficult and less numerous.
Our struggle is to both create and preserve usefulness. The plan of attack is two pronged:
- Technical Engineers should focus on one primary goal: Developing useful products that create neural resources by reducing the neural load of every day life. Think self driving cars, not Spotify.
- Social engineering should focus on two main problems: Convincing people to have children and converting useless people into useful people. Think reverse engineering Christianity.
The end goal is to develop a social virus so strong that it creates a child universe just to copy itself into.
If you are interested in joining the mission, contact me at [email protected]. Read on to learn what envelopment is all about.
In Robotics, the envelope describes the area of effect of a robot.
For instance, the envelope of a robot arm is limited by its length and angle of movement.
Then there are other types of robots, such as dishwashers, that must be enveloped in an enclosure in order to function.
That enclosure is the reason the robot works. It both limits and empowers the robot to provide some value that justifies its existence.
If we were to ask what robot are we, you'd have to say we are the dishwasher kind.
Without a house to protect us from the outside world, farmers to grow our food, truckers to deliver our food, and security, we wouldn't have abstract ideas like math, science, literature, music, or philosophy.
The work of useful people creates the possibility of an intellect to develop and to improve the very work that creates it.
It is, in fact, the responsibility of the intellect to feedback onto the work that created it to ensure its own future.
This positive feedback loop has given birth to industrialization.
As we get better at doing work, more and more room is created for an intellect. This idea of offloading work to develop abstract ideas dates back a long time. The Greeks did it with chattel slavery. The Romans improved on this by making slavery a temporary status one could get promoted out of.
The problem with an elite class that doesn't have to work much is they are freed from any negative consequence of uselessness. If parasitism spreads down the hierarchy from the top, and the peasant class does not learn how to be administrators quickly enough, the whole culture will emplode.
Under Christendom, which is essentially a big peasant revolt, the share between intellect and work equalized. Everyone is expected to work and to be literate and educated, whether the son of a prince or a pauper.
Work and intellect living within the same brain in means that the intellect cannot run away from the work.
The share of the intellect may be capped at about half, but many more people can be recruited into the neural network. This creates a population that's both philosophically alive and useful. Christian culture can be desribed as adaptable and virile, with an ability to create new neural resources to copy into and grow.
Not all work is useful. For instance, playing guitar is not equal to the work it takes to construct buildings: guitarists depend on builders, builders do not depend on guitarists.
Similarly, not all intellectual pursuit is useful. Writing poetry is not as useful as physics.
As useful work and intellect cooperate to create neural capacity, they must compete against useless behavior. Just because farmers, doctors, and construction workers create neural time, does not mean parasites won't recruit it.
If we were to point out a culture that figured out how to build an immune system against parasitic behavior, we'd have to look at Christendom first.
Under Christ, there was a flattening of the hierarchy. As the governing class was expected to serve the poor, and punishing dissension became less popular, gaining leverage through maximizing ones usefulness became easier.
As a hierarchy flattens, people have less incentive to compete for status in zero sum ways, since difference in status means less.
A Christian, Vladmir the Great, instituted courts that served the poor and abolished cutting off hands for stealing.
Have you ever won an argument with someone in your head? Even if you have a clever come back, you never quite feel satisfied. That's because the work both parties did to win happened in your head, and only increased the neural load of the conflict.
Having to predict counterarguments against an adversary creates an exponentially increasing logic tree.
In computer science terms, conflict has an O(cn) space complexity.
Jesus' principle of forgiveness creates a way to 'win' the argument by removing it from your head entirely. This allows us to focus on meaningful things and ignore that which does not matter.
Can a civilization build itself without learning this skill?
When Jesus said to not only love they neighbor, but also love thy enemy, he didn't mean you should lay in bed with them and give kissy-kissy business.
Love can be interpreted as sympathy, which is necessary to create great products that help others win. Without this, would our economy exist?
To do the work of creating great products and services, even at the risk of helping those who have trespassed against you, or are not members of your family or caste, is to transcend tribalism.
Are we really successful free market capitalists, or are we simply Christians?
The idea of forgivable sin means we should try to understand others before we use their faults against them. An understanding can be described as closing a gap. This is also a good way to describe solving an engineering problem.
Instead of widening a gap for self benefit, which happens in caste systems, Christians have learned to use trial and error to close the gap to solve both cultural and engineering problems.
After all, the Scientific Method and Calculus were created by Christians, Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.
Christianity is a tool for creating civilizations that people demand to live in.
Since we are the most intelligent organism we know of, we can think of Christianity as a way for intelligence systems to improve themselves to align together in mutual benefit.
We are in fact not the only organism to do this. Carpenter ants are naturally very territorial and will attack any colony that encroaches on theirs, each colony occupying a mound and belonging to a different queen. But every once in a while, one colony will begin to share food with another.
Over time, the colonies will form an alliance, and eventually merge into a super colony that spans tens of mounds and millions of ants.
What are the barriers that two former enemies have to cross to exchange enough food to start getting along?
The first is forgiveness of their past offenses against each other.
The second, of course, is sufficient productivity to be able to give food to another colony. The likelihood of cooperating with a second colony depends on the cooperation of subsystems of the first colony to create abundance.
It is difficult to imagine abundance without principles such as a flat hierarchy, forgiveness, and understanding of your fellow man. Can scientific experimentation be successful if you don't forgive mistakes?
If a culture is sufficiently good at modeling how the universe works, can it create a child universe identical to itself?
In the most abstract sense, our universe can be divided into its elements and their states. The states compete to recruit elements and self replicate. Life then can be described as a self replicating state.
Like the carpenter ants that compete, not by war, but by cooperation and productivity, the real struggle is to envelope the universe in usefulness.
Frogs recruit grasshoppers into frogs or excrement
Ideas recruit people
Life struggles against entropy to recruit the universe into the envelope.
Our goal from this perspective is to create a self replicating state that not only recruits as much of this universe as possible, but also recruits into any child universes it creates.
Extrapolating from that, we may be a child universe ourselves, and so we must assume that our parent universe had its own Jesus who sacrificed himself for them to create their own envelope, from which we inherit.
From this we can deduce that Jesus Christ is the God of usefulness and is indeed the Lord and Savior of this universe and all others, and our goal can be distilled to simply worshipping God.