User talk:Peter Scott Norris

Proposed "Wikipedia End Of Knowledge Project” - WEOK Project
Greetings,

(This submission was intended to use RICH TEXT, to help the reader get the main points. But that stuff has all been stripped away. Any ideas how I might write my way?)

My understanding is that what happens on Earth, grossly, is typical of what happens on all Earth-like planets, everywhere in the Cosmos. This includes evolving-experiencing what I call the Terminal Stage of Socioeconomic-Psychological Evolution - the time when everything that can ever be known is known (including knowing all things that can never be known). This is the time when Humanoids on Earth-like planets reach the end of knowledge, science, discovery, change, evolution, competitive advantage, history, newness.

It’s also the point when they must inevitably-necessarily (naturally) accept-adapt to a dramatic and fundamental transition. They have been hurtling through the most rapid and dynamic phase of Human-oid Socioeconomic-Psychological Evolution, during which change was the norm (what we're experiencing now). Over a generation or two, they must accept-adapt to the Terminal Stage of Socioeconomic-Psychological Evolution. This is the very, very long time - the remaining 1.2 billion or so habitable years for their planet - during which their previously hyper-dynamic Socioeconomic-Psychological System merely cycles through the standard-fixed-Universal set of Socioeconomic-Psychological Fashions that are known to be efficient, practical, realistic, and sustainable.

Arriving at the End of Knowledge is a very big deal for Humanoids. It changes everything.

I think we Earthlings will reach our End of Knowledge within the next 250 years (before the year 2250). Then, the last of our biodynamic research scientists will discover the last of the cascades of chemical signals that Manage our individual body-brain-mind systems. Then, the Earth's Humans will know everything they can ever know about the Evolution of the Cosmos, Life, Human Socioeconomic Progress, the Individual Human Lifetime, and everything else.

The process has already begun, judging by the recent closure of physics and astronomy departments in many colleges and universities. Too few bright students (especially white, male, heterosexuals) were applying for physics and astronomy courses, because they knew these fields were dying, and that future jobs in physics and astronomy would be given to the best qualified among the pool of politically-correct/affirmative-action students.

Indeed, in the Western-white nations, all aspects of social participation (which were originally established to serve only white, male, heterosexuals) are now evolving away from the capitalist policy of “equal employment-performance opportunity” and toward the socialist ideal-manipulation-bluff of “entitlement of full equality for all” (this process hasn’t yet begun in any Asian, Negro, or Arab-Muslim institution or nation).

Around the year 2250, this process will be complete worldwide. Education will no longer be linked to getting a job, but will become just another fashion-entertainment. By that time, the zillions of detailed files of Wikipedia will (inadvertently) prevent ordinary people from making sense of being alive in Modern Times. A clear, simple, and comprehensive text will be needed. The Earth’s great thinkers will gather and finish the WEOK Project, perhaps labeling their file The Big Bang and Its Consequences.

I’m Asperger Autistic, prone to obsessions and lists, and have been focused on ‘knowing about everything’ since I finished my PhD in 1975 (social psychology, based on a BA in biology and chemistry). It's become a 40,000-word draft (later, if enough readers are interested). Its working title was, The Appearance Managers, Managing Appearances, with the subtitle The Four Great Systems of Change: Evolution of the Cosmos, Life, Human Socioeconomic Progress, and the Individual Human Lifetime.

The root “Manage” includes the processes of controlling-ordering, and making decisions about, and deciding outcomes for, resulting in “knowing.” The word “Appearance” includes the way something physically looks, as well as the way it is mentally perceived (impressions, illusions, semblances, pre-tenses, facades, veneers, guises), and also includes the processes of physically Appearing, originating, emerging, Evolving, Devolving, ending, Disappearing.

I’m most interested in the PROCESSES that drive the four great systems of change-evolution (Cosmos, Life, Human Socioeconomic Progress, Individual Human Lifetime). My view is that each system involves a very limited set of Laws of Nature (variability, choices), which, by successive iterations among those fixed laws-antecedents-causes must inevitably-necessarily-naturally, in the fullness of time, produce-generate fixed sets of consequences-effects, critical masses, Stages (the last of which is Terminal). I’ve labeled this process The Appearance Managers, Managing Appearances.

Plato (423-347 BC) was the first to establish this line of logic, arguing that all evolution moves-progresses toward the perfection of ‘Universally favored’ forms - his metaphorical shadows cast on cave walls by a central fire. I think Plato imagined-understood that all change-evolution must inevitably-necessarily-naturally operate via fixed sets of extant-behavioral repertoires and physical environments (the Physical, Biological, Socioeconomic, and Personal Appearance Managers), and that they would inevitably-necessarily-naturally select particular-limited-Universal forms that are efficient, practical, realistic, and sustainable in each current, extant, here-now environment-situation.

Establishing the WEOK Project might involve asking interested people to apply and say why they want to join-contribute, providing a few revised-new paragraphs.

I'd like (but don't require) to have the role of inviting the first few dozen applicants to join the Project; when I resign, become disabled, or die (I'm 72), the current editors will democratically, together with Wikipedia man-agement, decide how to proceed.

Information about each of the editors will be held in a dedicated section, which has Wikipedia links with each of their contributions.

An automatic mechanism will invite the current editors to vote on each paragraph or section when they think-feel-believe it is complete-correct-unimprovable.

Only what is now known about each topic will be included-described: • All text will be in clear, simple, direct, and engaging language (I'll prefer Standard American-English, because it's my native-thinking-analytical language). • No history of science will be included (because nearly all of it is wrong, and therefore useless and a waste of time for ordinary people). • No sources-citations will be included (because they just get in the way of ordinary readers, and are easy to find online). • Contributors may use the following literary devices: hyphenated sets of synonyms; bulleted-indented blocks of text; bold, italics, underlines, CAPITALS, lower-case, ([parentheses]), and “quotes.” • The essential minimum of scientific terms will be used (which readers may Google if they wish, preferring .org and .edu websites, because they're more likely than .com websites to be free of bias and self-interest).

Nearly all of the material in my draft was drawn from established experts (mostly Wikipedia), following the procedures I’ve just described. But I’ve included a few personal-original theories:

The first is mentioned in the Introduction and detailed in Section II, about Biological Evolution. It involves the powerful process of convergence. A simple example of biological convergence is the independent evolution of the Old World Wolf and the Australian Thylacine, which share the same body-behavior system. But the idea of convergent evolution is much bigger than the independent Appearance-creation of two wolf-like species in different parts of the world. Convergence is at the heart of what I mean by the Appearance Managers, Managing Appearances. Specifically, all systems of change-Evolution, that is, all cause-and-effect relationships, must necessarily converge on a surprisingly small set of outcomes that are efficient, practical, realistic, and sustainable for particles-planets-suns-singularities, body-behavior systems, socioeconomic systems, and psychological situations.

A second bit of original thinking also involves the Biological Appearance Managers (chapter two), but focuses on the Biological Evolution of Modern Humans, due specifically to the Biological Appearance Manager I call preemption. Two causes (forcing agents) Managed the Biological-Appearance Evolution of all of us, Modern Humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), about 50,000 years ago: 1) The onset of the Most Severe Ice Advance, which forced the Old World’s Human population toward the equator and into hyper-competition for living space-resources. 2) The inevitable Appearance-Evolution of the Socioeconomic-Psychological Appearance Manager that I call preemption, dominated by the inevitable logic that it’s much more efficient, practical, realistic, and sustainable to kill the other guy before he kills you - then, having killed all of the other men, you get to mate with their women and draw them and their children into your power network.

In other words, my view is that Natural Selection produced, in place, the racial-ethnic groups of Modern Humans we see today (rather than pretending that there was another out-of-Africa migration of superior people). My view is that no other physical cause-and-effect mechanism could have produced us. Why didn’t it happen earlier - 1.8 MYA, 2.5 MYA, 1.3 MYA, or even a few hundred thousand years ago? Because it wasn’t yet physically possible for a critical mass of Homo sapiens members to evolve-Appear. And, of course, there hadn’t yet been a sufficiently catastrophic-selective Ice Advance.

And, of course, it’s my personal-original idea to construe The Knowledge as the direct-inevitable-necessary-natural result of the Appearance Managers, Managing Appearances.

Sincerely yours, Peter Norris