https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/shrinking-economies-dont-innovate
I am fond of this style of (counter)thinking to the growth/innovation topic:
Economics for the Future: Beyond the Superorganism
It doesn't really argue the point (natalism and other quantitative
measures of growth?) directly but perhaps transcends it?
There's something about this rhetoric that seems to rely on
hierarchical separation, the separability of levels.
Also, I'm interested in an expanded/continued discussion about the role
of "levels" and "hierarchy" if anyone else will take up the task with
you/us...
I mean, obviously, if we draw a hard boundary around "innovation" such
that it only contains things we human organisms care about or
understand, then sure. Innovation halts/slows with birth rate. But
isn't, say, the evolution of our gut biome also "innovative"? Or
totally sans-human, isn't most of earth's history a story of
innovation? What is it about the human-particular level of (primarily
cultural) innovation that makes it so special? If I'm cynical, it's
just navel gazing.
But if I'm generous, there's something inherently computational (or
universal, cognitive, translational, or Platonic) about the kind of
innovation Hanson's talking about. I guess it's a longtermist or
transhumanist way of thinking ... that Our innovations can possibly be
stored and percolated more so than the modest, tightly bound to
circumstances, innovations of our less computational sibling species.
I don't buy it. But I'd like to be able to make the argument anyway.
My current favorite out-of-my-league thinker about some of these
abstractions is Terrence Deacon
<https://axispraxis.wordpress.com/2020/08/25/intrinsic-incompleteness-deacon-on-ententional-processes/>
(referenced here often) who seems to play both sides of the fence,
implying on one hand that /Hierarchy/ and /Levels of Organization/ are
intrinsic to evolving Complex Adaptive Systems, yet also coins the
somewhat mystical term /"Absential" /which might be nothing more than a
fancy word for "system constraints and boundaries" built into the very
idea of self/other (which I know you also often question which is
probably highly related). Another fancy word I've come to like is
/"Ententional"/ which combines the ideas of what something is "about"
with what it is "for".
This leads me around to Deacon's "Teleodynamics" which might be
obliquely related to your invocation recently of a physics "Lagrangian
vs Eulerian" rather than the Anthropological "Emic vs Etic" axis of
understanding first-third person, reductionist-holistic, nominal-real
perspectives? This also leads me back around to the (nearly) ineffable
discussion of Stationary Action revisited from time to time here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary-action_principle#Disputes_about_possible_teleological_aspects
Also worth noting that this is an instrumental part of Ted Chiang's
Story of Your Life <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life>
(2000 novella which was made into the movie Arrival which I felt
obscured some of the best points made in the story).
It is possible that I channel his Alien Heptapods with my frequent
(ab)use of linguistic center embedding
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding> and other (awkward?)
constructions?
/I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not
sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant./
-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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