The Dark Age

I have been watching the new TV adaptation of Issac Asimov's Foundation. As much as I have detested movies or televison from the past 10 years, It's been long enough since I read the series that allover I find it a pretty good show overall for the science fiction lover. It is a ripoff of Asimov's writing, but most TV adaptions are so what can we expect.

A premise of the story is the need for the foundation to be established, in order to shorten the length of the dark ages from 30,000 years to 1,000 years.

I have been noticing humanity entering a new dark age over the past decade.

We are not yet completely IN the new dark age, but it is amost here. Below are my observations of different aspects of humanity's demise. I am not presenting this in a conspiracy minded way, but in a Psychohistory viewpoint, an inevitable conclusion of sociopolitical and socioeconomical events that change global sentiments and usher in a new era.

In 2020 the global society and economy was permenantly changed by the covid-19 crisis. No matter what angle a person looks at that event, there is no way to deny the world will never be the same because of if.

In 2012 smartphones were proliferating across the globe, providing anyone with the ability for 24-7 access to social media.

In 2013-2014 Google and Facebook began to openly use devious algolrythms for their free services.

In 2025 Internet users praise the algolrythm when they encounter a video or post that spikes their dopamine levels.

In 2011 Dubstep music signaled the end of any original music ever being created again.

In 2010 Inception was the final semi-original movie to be released.

In 2016 Donald J Trump was elected president of the United States of America, signaling the permenant end of the status quo of the old American hegemony.

By 2026, social, political, economical, and technological progression has halted nearly entirely, the new Dark Age has begun.

On Memory

This bit is somehow tied into the last section observing thoughts on pain. When I was taking classes in college, I had an interest in psychology, and took quite a few psychology classes. At that time due to personal experiences, a lot of my interest around human psychology were related to the following:

• Dreams, dream recall, and perception of time from within dreams. And/or the speed at which dreams are dreamed. How can what seemed like a 20 minute dream be dreamed in 3 seconds?
• Sleep, and the lack thereof and the effects on the human brain.
• Time and our perception of it.
• And of course, abnormal psychology. Or the study of mental illnesses. I did not end up getting this class, but ended up doing a lot of study about different mental illnesses and personality disorders out of my own curiosity.

I remember one of my last full terms in college in 2012, I was experiencing anxiety at school, and due to the strange feeling it left me with gained an interest in existentialism and read a lot of Sarte. I have since come to wonder if the derealization I experienced during this time, similar to what Sarte described is just a form of a person not trusting their own memories of what they are observing. Who knows!

Comparing the human mind or brain itself to a computer is in my opinion not a great comparison, even though I often do it. I think the readiness to make that comparison comes from the fact that a computer is the closest analog to a brain that we can understand, or that we even know exists. But just for fun, let's continue with these comparisons, mainly with memory.

Let's just say, brain's working memory would be the stack in a computer. The short term memory would be the heap, and the long term memory would be the non volatile memory. 

I have a condition due to a head injury where I have extreme difficulty keeping numbers anywhere in my mind other than on my stack. And I have to be continuously rewriting there to keep it there. In the sense that I must repeat it in my mind over and over until I can write it down. Other things on the other hand, such as a visual image, I seem to have little trouble remembering.

To continue with this comparison, sometimes things get stuck in my working memory, and seemingly continue to rewrite themselves there leaving no room for other jobs to be run. Even after clearing the stack and running said job, the persistent previous bit reappears and continues to repeat.

The heap in my brain if I were to compare in this badly explained computer language, is like a tangled spiderweb of pointers pointing to pointers pointing to pointers. Some are dead ends, and some of those intermediate pointers have values which may or may not relate to the correct pointer path to reach the actual data needed. Some of these pathways inevitably point to multiple pain values before reaching the needed memory space with the data requested. This is the part of my mind I understand the least.

The long term memory storage may or may not have been corrupted. As above there is no 1:1 storage of anything here, but every entry has multiple index locations as well as multiple addresses, and connected to other indexes and addresses. Data retrieval is not accurate at all times. Data retrieval may fail. Data retrieval may in itself corrupt original data.

Who in their right mind would design a computer like this? That question is why I do think that the human brain cannot safely be compared to a computer. If the above were talked about only a real computer, the reader may decide that said computer has corrupted/malfunctioning memory and possibly some malware. Maybe it does, but where is the software to recover this system?

On Pain

At the bottom of every technological invention it seems that the solution that invention is solving is often based in avoiding human pain, or attempt at achieving one of it's antonyms, comfort.

I am no stranger to this unwelcome but ever seemingly present companion. In addiction recovery programs we are taught that pain is the reason why the addict chooses their addiction, and another type of pain is why they seek to be free of it. One has to outweigh the other before the false comfort of the addiction can be escaped.

Due to modern technology we may now avoid the majority of the pain that was inevitable in times past, but new pains have appeared. A several hour drive by car was at one time days of walking with blistered feet, or a long day on a horses back. A anesthetized surgery today fixes a condition that would be a slow painful death. A houses climate is controlled exactly so it's inhabitants are never too cold or hot. The months of waiting for a response to a letter is now received instantly in a text message.

New pains have arrived with new attempts at solutions. Layers upon layers upon layers. People are connected through technology but are separated by it. All of humans cumulative knowledge is available at our fingertips, but the attention to know what to look at is gone. We pass by our friends probably multiple times a day at a combined speed of 120 miles per hour without even noticing each other. We have so many options we don't know what to choose. Anything can be chosen with one click, and arrive at the front door in less than a day. The package's arrival brings little excitement. We are in constant communication with people near and far but nobody is communicating.

These pains are not new but old. Because there is only one pain, and comfort does not ease it at all.

It was pain in my back that pushed me to pick up learning programming again, envisioning an old future version of me in much more significant pain working the same back breaking job. It was the dull pain of the emptiness of the days that pressed me forward in this endeavor. It was that same pain that budded, flowered, then fruited, that showed me the emptiness of this new journey. A pain there is no pill for.

I sit on my cot, in this nearly empty house, the temperature set for 65F. The walls are bare, the half packed boxes in the other room cause me an internal pain just to think of them. I contemplate all this. I think of all the great inventors, that pushed and pushed and worked day and night before finally delivering that new thing that would deliver a tiny slice of new comfort to the world. What is this?

The pill for my pain when gone was it's own form of misery. If the cure is the disease, what is the next solution?

Some envision the future of humankind in a way that will merge man and machine. Machines will become man, or men will only exist inside machines. Pain will be gone for them. But so will these men. The nerves rebelling and cursing their environment is what it is to be a man. There will never be an invented thing that can heal a broken heart, or a pill to fix a broken brain.

In engineering or scientific situations, denial of possibility is a life or death situation. These things must be certain. When a human is malfunctioning must we also admit that something has gone wrong? Are we but another creatures form of technology? Can a NPC write his own code from within the game? These are questions that seem absurd but when in pain a lot of things may pass through the mind.

If the world is the most advanced, civilized, and refined in 2025 than it has ever been, why do men still make bombs? Why is the collective still so obsessed with violence? For every maker there seem to be 10 takers. 2025 is a scammers paradise, a controlling government's utopia, and a degenerates playground. As comfort increases so does corruption and wickedness. The next new thing is just another link of chain around the wage slaves neck. Is every man's end disillusionment?