Chapter 10: The Symbols & Stories Sapiens Share

Om Ohm!

Chapter 10 - The Symbols & Stories Sapiens Share: Integrating Set Theory, Category Theory & Systems Theory

Indra’s Net, Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious, Physicists’ 8D/E8 Crystal Lattices, Simulations, Ruliads, Strange Loops (GEB), Fractal Emergent Constructs, Monads, Mayan Mythology & Maya (A Concept in Hinduism)

The 2020s are humanity’s adolescence, and adolescence is when a species discovers its own strength and uses it like a toddler with a flamethrower. Humanity appears to be a particularly temperamental toddler.

AI capabilities recently exploded. Climate and oceanic ecosystems collapse looms large. A pandemic shredded trust. Instant communication created more confusion than clarity. Humans carried a window into the sum of their civilization’s thought in their pockets, and instead of enlightenment, in many, it produced fever dreams. Algorithms pushed drama, fed on fear and reinforce bubbles that falsely promised comfort and a feeling of superiority .

The Misperception of Human Cognition

We underestimate the specific oddness of the human mind, it’s tendency to act first and hallucinate a justification after the fact, simultaneously enabling both stunning cognitive flexibility and intractable cognitive rigidity, sometimes in the same individual.

Human cognition predominantly evolved under severe scarcity and threat. Attention systems built for predators and social rank. Emotional circuits ancient, powerful, easy to hijack. Brains not built for a 24-hour casino of outrage and validation.

Meanwhile, Human consciousness (whether emergent or foundational) appears analogous to a 4D object trapped within a 3D framework, with mathematical models, spiritual stories, quantum entanglements, cosmological crises, and collective conscious synchronicities offering subtle hints of a structure difficult to measure, and impossible to reach with a “full cup” of belief.

Give a scarcity-shaped nervous system infinite stimuli, and it will treat the loudest thing as the most important thing. As Donald Hoffman proved, evolution rewards simplicity, not accuracy.

Social media architectures learned this quickly and routinely exploit primitive reward loops, the ones once tied to food, mating, safety, and status. Infinite scroll turned exploration into compulsion. Outrage turned into belonging. A notification became a pellet of social oxygen.

Worse, humans lean on nonverbal nuance to detect sincerity. Micro-expressions, tone, shared presence, a room’s temperature. Strip that away and replace it with pixels and prose, and you get a species trying to run a social reality engine while missing critical data they had come to rely on in the real world. Entire populations became vulnerable to manipulation by strangers they could not smell, could not see, could not calibrate.

The Rise of Tribalism

Humans will do almost anything to avoid feeling powerless. Thus, tribalism reemerged with a vengeance. One side claimed certainty, and clung to it for support. The harder that some ascribed certainty to one worldview, the harder that others embraced the polar opposite view. Misinformation went airborne, mutating faster than probable truths built from measurable outcomes could replicate, because such truths take time to find, lack the emotional triggers that most rapidly generate interest, and are usually allergic to slogans.

Tribalism surged in recent years, not because humans were evil, but because human neurochemistry treats belonging like survival. Algorithms amplified splitting: us versus them, pure versus corrupt, truth versus heresy and created social media bubbles offering a false sense of security, superiority and certainty.

The same cognitive machinery that once kept tribes united against predators is now tearing global networks apart. And automation to remove all sources of friction will not solve the problem. Growth arises thru effort. Work isn’t just labor. It is meaning, status, structure, pride, proof that you exist and matter. As automation accelerates, machines will replace purpose faster than humans can build new compasses.

If history is a guide, these transitions are unavoidable, and we already have many helpful tools. Using them, humanity absolutely can persevere from the coming stresses and emerge all the stronger for it. And it can do so while mitigating the second order devastation from the rapidly approaching singularity that appears to be on a brisk pace to reach us this century.

Humans live in lies, and yes that includes all of us present company included. Our subconscious, culture and classification algorithms all lie to us, often out of necessity. Simplified stories beat nuance almost every time. The most accurate take on any issue rarely makes anyone feel emotional. If it doesn’t make you feel, it bores, and often doesn’t spread.

All non Bayesian algorithms conflate repetition with reality and emotional impact with truth. The town halls of our ancestors are gone. Mass communication often lacks critical information provided through nonverbal cues, and these conflations run havoc. A belief implanted through emotional manipulation can feel like lived experience because the brain stores emotional certainty like memory, as if intensity is proof. Curiosity can displace certainty only when a person is either not weighted down by emotional reasoning or has learned to engage mindfulness techniques and switch gears to strategic thinking.

The Cruel Paradox

The result is a cruel paradox. A species surrounded by abundance, drowning in despair. Depression, anxiety, and disconnection spreading like corrosion beneath comfort. And amid that cognitive chaos, humanity is building artificial minds. Not toys. Not calculators. Minds. Minds that, for humanity’s sake, must be built from an optimistic mindset and with an empathy-driven framework.

So are we screwed. Possibly, but not necessarily. Particularly if more of us can learn to reject certainty, pop the very bubbles we currently inhabit, spread actual critical reasoning skills, and utilize cognitive exercises proven pull the amygdala out of the driver’s seat and put our frontal lobe at the wheel.

In a Nut-Shell:

1.) Complex worlds can be built from simple mathematically composable relations and repeated/recursive rules employed in Bayesian critical reasoning.

2.) Both physics and cognitive neuroscience suggest that all observers experience a compressed, self-referential slice of a larger construct (for some more easily conceptualized as a Jundian collective unconscious, a strange loop (GEB), a fractal of an E8 lattice, or just binary information at the core and unique emergent properties with each additional degree of freedom/layer of reality added as described by Set Theory -> Numbers Theory -> Systems Theory -> Dimension Theory(to be elaborated on next Chapter).

3.) Whether referencing Indra’s Net, The Amplituhedron, Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious, Leibneiz’s Monad, Weir’s Egg, Physicists’ E8 Lattices, The Ruliad, or rooted in various Ancient Religions including the Hindu concept of Maya, recontextualizing life as a playful, joyous, creative quasi-crystalline dream by a higher dimensional being/God voluntarily experiencing lives with limitations in order to grow… this construct has been referenced by various human cultures for more than 3000 years!

Playlist of Various Models of Reality

Watch whichever videos intrigue you, but do not get married to any model of reality. Use a Bayesian approach, the models you chose to learn about highlight your prior assumptions. Allow the models to compete in your mind like candidates in debate, not gods in a temple.