Table of contents
Byron Reese is known to Startupbusiness readers because in 2018 we published a review of his book entitled The Fourth Age in which he analyzes the impact of new technologies from different points of view: social, economic, technological, geopolitical, ethical, and even religious. That book was also translated into Italian and published by Franco Angeli (with a preface by the writer). It’s been about five years but Reese hasn’t stopped and we go back to talking about his two books that he has written in the meantime, the most recent was released on December 12, 2023. Both are only available in the English version.
Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Thinks
The least recent book is ‘Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Thinks’ first published in August 2022 in which Reese analyzes in depth the reasons behind the human ability to use his intelligence to learn, to plan, to manage the present and the future. “The thing that transformed us — the radioactive spider that bit us — was something so rare and so serendipitous that it evidently never happened to any other creature. That’s why there are no Bronze Age beavers. When we got our mental superpowers, about fifty thousand years ago, we became “us,” with our language, art, music, and all the rest of it. With this range of new capabilities, we were able to draw on the past to imagine multiple futures and predict which of them would occur. This gave us mastery of the planet in an evolutionary blink of an eye. With it, we invented agriculture, created cities, devised writing systems, divided into nations, and explored the world. We wanted to systematize forecasting, transforming it from an art to a science. We succeeded. But to do so required a new understanding of the nature of reality, of why the future unfolds the way it does,” reads a paragraph in the book’s introductory part.
We Are Agora
The most recent work , however, is ‘We Are Agora’, where the author starts from the concept that humanity actually functions as a single superorganism which is what defines the world and the future. “A superorganism is a single life form composed of other living organisms. It would be easy to gloss over this short sentence of a dozen words, but it is a big idea, as there are many. Because? Think about yourself for a moment. You are made of cells, that is, of living beings. But you are a completely different creature from your cells. Isn’t that strange? After all, if in an alternate universe people were not made of living cells, but were composed of equally talented pieces of inorganic matter, one could still imagine a normal human being, only made of inorganic parts. Similarly, consider the opposite: If there were a universe in which your cells were living creatures but there was no “you” that arose from them, that would also make sense, right? Basically, you’d be a simple bag of cells, something like an aquarium full of fish,” Reese writes in the introduction . But now imagine a weird and crazy universe where both things are true. Your cells are alive and living a full and complete cellular life, and somehow, superimposed on that, there is a completely different creature, which is you. It would be a strange reality and, fortunately, it is the one in which we find ourselves. Somehow we live in a universe where multiple life forms can share the same matter – it’s baffling to think about. They do not share the same body, as if one received half of it and the other the other half; in fact, they coexist on the same matter. You live in your body and your cells live in your body, but you are not roommates. You share the same material, superimposed on itself. If we weren’t so used to this idea that we’ve taught it all our lives, it would seem absurd.” He continues: “It’s hard to find a corollary that helps conceptualise this, but let me give it a try. Have you ever seen one of those posters that depict something like a kitten, and if you bend down to look at it closely, you notice that it is not made up of pixels but thousands of tiny photos of other kittens? Then, hypothetically, you could take a microscope and look at those tiny photos and notice that they are made up of even smaller photos of kittens. Taking a step back and looking at the big poster, you might think that maybe it also works the other way around, that the poster you’re looking at might itself be a tiny dot in a poster inconceivably bigger than a kitten. Now, think about people again. We seem to operate at only two levels of life: the cell and the man, the dots and the poster. But is that all there is to it? Only two levels? Perhaps the cells are made up of even smaller living creatures. We don’t think so, but there’s nothing inherently impossible about this idea, right? Now let’s go in the opposite direction: Is it conceivable that we are in turn cells of a larger creature of which we are completely ignorant because it exists on a different scale from ours? We can observe similar things in other species. Honey bees exist on at least three levels: there are cells and individuals, just like for us, but a group of individual bees forms a third level of being, the colony. A bee colony is not a simple cluster of bees, but an emergent creature that is created through the interactions of bees. The colony, the hive, is not metaphorically a living being, but it really is. The question that this book poses, and seeks to answer, is whether human beings, each of us, are part of a larger living organism. Again, not in a metaphorical sense but literally. Are we cells of a larger creature? The challenge in answering this question is hinted at above: How do we know if we are part of a larger creature? It doesn’t look like we are, but we can’t be sure. We wouldn’t be able to perceive it, just as our cells can’t perceive us. Humans occupy a rather narrow swath of reality, seeing only a small range of colors and hearing only a limited range of sounds. We are not aware of things at the microscopic level, such as bacteria, nor at the macroscopic level, i.e. planetary. An infinitely small cell within you, or a planet-sized being of which you are a part, could be at a death metal concert right now and you would not have the slightest inkling of it. So, to repeat the question, how could we know if we were? Science is the study of things that can be observed or measured in our material reality. We have built the modern world on a set of processes that we call the scientific method, which allow us to better understand the nature of this reality. Metaphysics, on the other hand, is the study of what lies outside of material reality, such as the nature of mind, consciousness, being, causality, and, in general, everything we ask ourselves but have no scientific way of investigating. The line between the two is blurred and shifting as science solves old mysteries and uncovers new ones. But it would be a mistake to say that scientific truths are the only ones we can know with certainty. Rather, they are the only ones we can prove – a very different thing. In fact, the vast majority of things that are known cannot be scientifically proven. The old adage of journalists, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” is funny because you can’t control it, but you can of course know it’s true. This book is mostly about science – about what we can observe and learn about cells, life, intelligence, emergence, and the functioning of superorganisms such as beehives and anthills. But it is also metaphysics, because it deals with the mind, being, consciousness, and the nature of the self. So it straddles this confusing line, while addressing the question of the existence of a real superorganism that includes human beings and that I have called the Agora.” With this new book, Reese continues to take the reader on his journey of deepening the things of man, of the mind, of scientific research and even of metaphysics. We Are Agora as it was for The Fourth Age and Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think, is also written to be very clear and very pleasant, without taking anything for granted, accompanying the reader, almost taking him by the hand, to the discovery of elements that are scientific and technological but that also have a whole series of implications between which it is often difficult to draw a boundary because the interaction and development of the same leads to a constant change of points of view, of the armament of knowledge we have at our disposal and consequently our ability to understand ourselves, our world from micro to macro and better equip ourselves to face the future. All the information about Byron Reese’s books is available on the pages of his website dedicated to the works.
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