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Maybe I can create a set of better examples to illustrate my theory of External Influence. Here goes!
You are driving down a highway. The car ahead of you slows to a stop, so you do as well. Why? The car in front of the car in front of you probably stopped earlier, as the did the car in front of that one, etc. Up to the point of an accident or a flashy light (humans seem to panic-stop or at least slow down to look at flashy lights). Before all of this happened, you were cruising along, your world was that of speed, highway speeds. But, something way up ahead, beyond you ability to see has affected you. How do you know that there is something up ahead? Because of clues from people around you, and they from clues from people around them, up to the point of the person with knowledge. You have determined that there is something wrong without the actual information in your model of the universe. This external information has left a trail that you can follow in the minds of the people ahead of you making it possible to sense a pattern of wrongness without knowing what caused it.
Now for the example: school. If you want to become learned, there are many paths, but let us consider two: taught in school or self-taught. If you decided to teach yourself, you would get some books or try to figure out things from first principles. Without a guide, you would wander aimlessly, learning a variety of things, possibly building towards something or maybe not. At the end of say four years, will have a base of knowledge that would probably be broad, but probably not too deep in any one area (unless you found a reading list that took you through a path of books that guided you to building deep knowledge layer upon layer towards something). If you had found some topic interesting, you might strive for depth, but without a guide, you would spend some of those four years searching for the next bit of knowledge that builds on what you already know but will take you to the next step where you will spend some time searching...
If you had decided on going to school instead, they would have teachers and a curriculum designed to take you from a certain point of knowledge to some destination. At the end of the same four years, you would learn deeply some discipline (ie engineering, philosophy, or architecture) and maybe a little something else. But, you wouldn't find special areas of knowledge, or little tricks, you would follow the path laid out before you, followed by many before you.
Comparing these two ways of learning, that which I consider to be External Influence is better defined by the second way. Human society at any point in time only knows what it has discovered up to that point, but not a destination and a path to get there. The knowledge we would gain as a race would tend to be random-ish, deeper in some areas than others, but never really seem focused over the long term. Without a guide that is all that it can be. But, if there were an External Influence, we would see us moving along a predefined path, one obviously traveled by many before us. We would make fewer mistaken turns on this path and see fewer branches of interesting tricks that do not lead to where the guide is taking us.
I hope this better clarifies the concept of External Influence and why I believe it would be possible to spot such an influence if it existed (as we can spot external information in the car analogy). Do we seem to have a destination in mind as a race when there is no way we should unless some being has told us that is the way to go? Do we seem to know a path to that destination?
-Edward
4 comments:
Very interesting and a good pair of examples. I'm curious to see if anyone can poke holes in it.
You say we would make fewer mistakes if there were an external influence. Fewer than what? You need to be able to compare tour current state with a different state- i.e., set up two earths- one with an external influence, and one without.
However, we are living in a data sample of one. We really can't say whether we would have arrived where are now any quicker or slower, depending on the existance or non-existance of something guiding us. So, it'd be difficult to prove or disprove this influence.
Your car analagoy is somewhat flawed because we can step back from the car and highway to examine the state of the road. We can't step back from our existance and examine it.
There may be an influence, but since it's part of the totality of what we are, it would be difficult for us to separate ourselves from it to factor it into our lives. Is the fish aware of the water in which it lives?
Ah, madpuppy, but we do have another state against which to compare: the past. Looking at past trends, we can predict future trends. Nothing is 100%, hence we predict based on our internal models, and models are based on experiences. True, cavemen could have suddenly developed nuclear power, but based on models, we would doubt that if someone told us that they had. Using these same models that would argue against cavemen going nuke, we can determine if we believe we are some future generations cavemen with nukes. If something that was unlikely to have happened did, external influence might be the culprit and we could reason whether we believe this to be true or not.
The "fewer mistakes" comes from my classroom example, if we had a guide (or teacher), by definition of a guide, we would get somewhere with fewer mistaken turns. Sure, many things can be overlooked while we advance, but I'm saying we can look for patterns then see if that matches what we believe would be a pattern would be if we had a guide vs no guide.
In a car, you can not get out and see the highway from above. Some else could and they would have a better model of what is going on. But, with your limit knowledge from within the system, you can gain other knowledge that is not directly connected to what you can observe, is my claim. I have many examples, but what I claim is that you can guess what is going on, not that you can know. But, the more information you have, the better your model can be, and the more accurate about causes of events one can be.
Sorry, posted to soon.
And a fish might not be aware of the water in which it lives, but it would be aware of external influences on that water. If it looked around, saw rocks, and felt the current change because of them, it would have a model of influences. If the water moved in a weird way in some spot from nothing it could explain within its known world, it could speculate about things outside of the water, but it wouldn't know what the actual cause was. (say, sound waves or wind) I am saying, look at the movement of the water and see if it matches what you believe it should be based on the rocks around you, or does it move more strongly in some directions than known rock positions would allow for. External influence should be detectable, unless well covered.
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