Fata Morgana

This time it was Robert, who sparked my text, asking:
“Do you believe that people are capable of functioning without the lies of nationalism and religion? These seem to be the myths and opiates that fuel the states' ability to control it's people.”

I rephrased the question to “Do you believe that people are capable of functioning with the lies of nationalism and religion?” and i had to control myself not to write a book. Because pondering about information, information processing systems and the strategy of the latter to detect information in a random world i understood that the whole human life is nothing else than information and information processing.

So i started to see history with other eyes – the DNA? Just a (successful) progress in storing information about the own body. The language? Just a (successful) progress in communicating information between humans. And suddenly i knew that i had to study the earliest findings of human culture, because they would tell me about the thoughts of the early humans with culture as “information processing system between autonomous units”, therefore telling me about their competence to master information.

It was marvellous. Listen and be amazed: Since 400,000 years humans used things the archaeologists couldn’t really understand, decorated with parallels and squares, lines and circles. Because i looked for tracks of information i tried to understand the reasons why people created such things.

The usual wisdom was to categorize the findings in weapons and tools, ornaments and religion, just because?

Yes, just because its natural, self-evident, a matter of course: things are either for use of killing or working, decoration or voodoo-stuff.

300,000 years ago we find round disks with a hole in the middle, 100,000 years ago graves with eggshells, pieces of antlers and the color “Red”. Ornaments are used more and more and then, 40,000 years ago, humans buried their dead with flowers and burial objects and the colors “Red” and “Black”. 20,000 years ago they finally invented division of labor.

Yes, guys, it was not Adam Smith or another European or American: it was a village somewhere in South Russia (Sungir) who realized that with the fabrication of statuettes it can live without hunting and gathering. They build settlements (37 * 21 m), where the factor of about 0,57 gives you a hint about how they constructed their settlements: by using equilateral triangles. Btw: a factor found in many ancient buildings.

And the “division of labor” had the same results as in modern times: more and more efficiency. The ancient people, 20,000 years ago, produced the statuettes in a line of 10 workplaces, using prefabricated parts. 20,000 years ago we find proofs of teamwork and use of mathematics, orchestrated processes and “not useful” things leading to the conclusion, that there had to be a fully implemented trade system.

So question: What do you need if you work in teamwork? You have to communicate between the team partners, you have to plan the job, you have to have bluepints and quality control, because if you don’t do so, your clients may not be satisfied – and you stay hungry.

Therefore, you have to have instruments to measure. To measure at work, to measure after work – to measure and to control. New instruments. Instruments not needed before. And not thought about before, so they may have been a little awkward in the beginning.

And – naturally- they were not made of stainless steel. But they were not made for decoration and for religion and not made for killing – they were made for work. A new kind of work.

To make a long journey short i just want to mention two things: first i found many “ornaments, maybe used for religion”, looking like simple measurement tools and second: you need no “god of cleanliness” if you have a bathroom in your house. Actually that is what some archaeologists think about the Indus Valley Civilization, just because the people there had bathrooms in their houses and a big public bath.

Searching for tracks of information i wondered more and more about the unimaginativeness of the modern scientists, about their inability to abstract from their own lifestyle.

They all use bathrooms in their houses and don’t pray to the “Great Lord of Soap”, they all use laptops and cell phones and no one would believe it is for “ornament” or “religion”. But 20,000 years ago they had no laptops and cell phones – so all they could have was weapons and cookware, ornaments and religion?

Self-evidence, matter of course.

That’s what the conclusion of the archaeologists had coined. Not the facts itself, but their own believings how it had to be in times, when people lived as hunters and gatherers. Primitives don’t have sophisticated tools and ideas.

But that “primitives” invented writing and science, division of labor and mathematics. 20,000 years ago.

The early humans had to be primitive, because they didn’t use the internet, that’s a matter of fact? But something like “self-evidence” doesn’t exist.

Even the natural laws had a beginning, the true moon will leave us, mothers can decide (per thoughts) about the sex of the child (Sarah Jones, University of Kent, published in"Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biology Letters"), people, who never learnt the “number 10” can’t count until 10.

What is a matter of course today, can be meaningless tomorrow – and vice versa.

That’s simply because of the nature of information as process. Processes start and end. As long as the process lasts you can use it to foresee the future.

But you should never be too sure of your knowledge. It may become a Fata Morgana, an image of another place and another time.

Information gives you probabilities, not certainties.

Remember?
Information is repeatable, identifiable – is process, not eternal state. It heralds you the future as it might be, but...
it promises you nothing.

But without stability, how will you have “natural things”, “self-evidence”?

State and religion are nowadays the most coining element of each human culture, so it is “a matter of course”, that the early humans must be religious and patriotic, too? Why? Because we don’t understand their stuff? Are chimps religious? Surely not. So somewhere in the evolution of humankind there must be the point where religion and state were invented. We can’t just say: “because nowadays government and religion rule the human mind, it has to be the same in the past”.

Processes can end – and have to begin.

Disks with holes could be used for building tents, ornaments with regular structures could be used to “stamp” your belongings, used as “names”, as information about the identity of the owner, triangles could be used to measure angles, bathes could be used to wash yourself.

Convictions.

We are so convicted of many things, that those convictions color the whole big picture of the world we live in. Convictions are useful if they describe some existing patterns in our world, like instincts and emotions, like the physically optimized brain of children: if they are “default solutions” for some real existing structures, they fulfill the function of “symbols”: to characterize an event or object by some key signals: short and precise we are able to analyze a situation including those key signals.

That’s why instincts and emotions, convictions and prejudices are so valuable.

If, yes if they are correct.

Otherwise convictions, self-evidences are just that: Fata Morganas, leading us to nowhere.