I’ve long been fascinated by the interplay of culture, technological progress and biology. Technological progress only takes root when cultural adaptions create a fertile environment. And cultural adaption allows us to make fast evolutionary progress that later gets expressed in our DNA. But because culture primarily evolves in reaction to technological or environmental progress/change, the relationship between these elements is dynamic and non-linear.

Cultural advancement is a gift (or possibly a curse) for future generations.

At its best, cultural adaption enables us to survive and thrive within future environments that are more volatile and less hospitable.

Fiction or forecasts about future environments often focus on architectural, technological or climatic changes, but devote less time to the intellectual and emotional changes we may have to endure.

One of these changes is something I’ve been describing as Post-competence. This is a future (and for me desired) mode of being that recognizes AI will get many things “right,” opening up roles for people that is something else.

In one of my experiments with GPT-3, I wanted to condense my input text to stay within the token limit. A suggestion from the GPT-3 subreddit that seemed helpful was to allow the AI to summarize inputs rather than relying upon full text. But in comparing the quality of the outputs between the two different versions (one summarized and the other not), I found the answers provided were radically different when using my inputs rather than its own. In general, its own summarized inputs were slightly more generic - resulting in much more generic outputs.

Changes in vocabulary, grammar, rhythm and other semantics don’t adorn meaning, they shape meaning - for humans.

Cynically we already understand this. People have advanced in their careers and risen to the highest offices in the country while giving speeches that contain zero information. But less controversially, this is also because emotion shapes meaning to a much greater extent than information.

Emotional communication does involve information - but more recent studies show that emotions operate on a “contagion” model that behaves more like resonance.

We propose that emotion‐dependent speaker–listener neural synchronization is associated with emotional contagion, thereby implying that listeners reproduce some aspects of the speaker's emotional state at the neural level.

In turn, resonance also has a unique role in shaping consciousness.

Synchronization, harmonization, vibrations, or simply resonance in its most general sense seems to have an integral relationship with consciousness itself.

This occurs not simply within one brain, but also in many brains. Writing about the idea of collective consciousness which Allan Combs and Stanley Krippner define as:

the strong sense of a shared feeling of being together with others in a single or unified field of experience (e.g. Midgley, 2006; Ziman, 2006)

they take the idea of resonance even further:

Mirror neurons in the premotor and posterior parietal cortices respond to the intentions as well as the actions of other individuals. There are also mirror neurons in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortices which have been implicated in empathy. Many authors have considered the likely role of such mirror systems in the development of uniquely human aspects of sociality including language. Though not without criticism, Menant has made the case that mirror-neuron assisted exchanges aided the original advent of self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Combining these ideas with social mirror theory it is not difficult to imagine the creation of similar dynamical patterns in the emotional and even cognitive neuronal activity of individuals in human groups, creating a feeling in which the participating members experience a unified sense of consciousness.

Such instances pose a kind of ‘binding problem’ in which participating individuals exhibit a degree of ‘entanglement’.

Entanglement is a core idea within quantum mechanics and prevailing view among quantum physicists is that reality and consciousness are linked in some way. In recent years the debate has moved from “if they are related” to “what is the nature of the relationship?”

Among the more interesting implications of this is that collective consciousness shapes reality in tangible, measurable ways.

According to Lanza and his colleagues, observers can dramatically affect “the behavior of observable quantities” both at microscopic and massive spatiotemporal scales. In fact, a “profound shift in our ordinary everyday worldview” is necessary, wrote Lanza in an interview with Big Think.

The world is not something that is formed outside of us, simply existing on its own. “Observers ultimately define the structure of physical reality itself.”

(This is stunning and still stops me in my tracks regularly even after having thought about it for over a year.)

But apart from the fact that we now have evidence to show that Diderot was correct when he said it’s better to be interesting than right, this series of ideas starts to establish some of the qualities I think about as being post-competent.

Emotion, resonance, collective or entwined consciousness, emergence, transcendence and creation.

My favorite mental model for a mode of communication or being that uses these ideas is jazz, but we have all felt bits and pieces of this during the flow of group creation or group problem solving.

This is one place where - today at least - technological progress and cultural adaption are poorly serving biological evolution. Our fragmented, distributed, digital modes of communication and collaboration are forcing many of us to optimize around the transmission of information to solve the immediate problems of accuracy. Emotion, resonance and emergence are largely absent within much of our communication. Meaning is very literally being lost.

“I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.”

John Coltrane

So what’s the path forwards? I think that’s what we’re collectively trying to figure out. For me it looks more like jazz than zoom. An intention to create resonance and emotion when we communicate rather than a need to transmit information. An entwined act of being, shaping and creating. I don’t think it’s the rejection of information, accuracy or being right, it’s recognizing that those aren’t jobs for us, they’re jobs for AI.

We should instead be focused on reality.