INTERSUBJECTIVITY – a new reality

For the sake of precision, I would add that I understand intersubjective reality as a synonym for the “story” in the book “NEXUS”.
It is also worth noting that one sapiens may be influenced by many intersubjective realities and belong to many groups of cooperation simultaneously. 
I assume that in the past people rather unconsciously created intersubjective entities. Their emergence resulted from a need felt by the collective. This could have been, for example, the exchange of services and products, which required money, or the need to define the rules of belonging to a community, in which the worship of the spirits of common ancestors was helpful.

Communication is above all a mechanism that enables cooperation and the creation of social structures.
This is clearly visible in the example of science—the aim of science is the discovery of truth, and information serves to describe the truths being discovered, but formulating hypotheses, building scientific theories, and verifying them together is above all a form of communication that enables scientists to cooperate, without which science simply could not exist at all.
Not truth, but cooperation is the most important product of the exchange of information here.

Up to modern times, we needed both truth and story woven together.
Can they be disentangled and separated without conflict?
I think we are condemned to the eternal creation of intersubjective realities, but can we separate fiction from truth about reality, so that fiction does not obscure reality for us?
The IAI project is meant to be a step in that direction.

Printing technology makes it possible to disseminate complex and complicated concepts on a mass scale, concepts that would be difficult to convey in conversation.

The truth discovered by the Polish astronomer could, thanks to print, be disseminated relatively quickly.
However, it was contrary to the intersubjective reality of the Catholic Church, because it destroyed the myth of the Earth as the center of the Universe, and therefore almost no one was interested in spreading it.
It was different in the case of the “Hammer of the Witches.”

For the Catholic Church to acknowledge Copernicus’s discovery, it would have had to adapt its “sacred truths” to Copernicus’s truth, and this contradicted the infallibility of Catholic doctrine at the time. By contrast, the intersubjective reality created by Kramer could be reconciled with the reality of the Catholic Church, and such a combination increased the power of information’s influence on society, even though it required bloody sacrifices—for example women burned at the stake as supposed witches.

Truth often forces us to revise an existing intersubjective reality, which may weaken the influence of that intersubjective reality within the information network in which it exists.

It was more advantageous for the hierarchs of the Catholic Church to strengthen their intersubjective reality by adding fabricated but hypnotizing concepts to it than to correct the “sacred truths” they proclaimed on the basis of a scientist’s complex research, research that undermined their previous claims and thereby weakened their influence within the network at that moment. 

The distortions of bureaucracy include, among other things, focusing on only one aspect of a problem—in other words, simplifying reality. I think one may say that bureaucracy often creates defective intersubjective realities (far from truth) that focus on only one aspect, such as increasing industrial productivity while ignoring many other aspects such as workplace safety or environmental pollution. This means that intersubjective realities can greatly distort our vision of objective reality, presenting it in an artificial, overly simplified way, so that human decisions based on such a perception of reality will be erroneous and lead to a greater or lesser catastrophe.

Some intersubjective realities can do great harm in society (e.g. racism or fascism),
but there are also some without which our network may become a mortal threat to the ordinary person.
  Such intersubjective conventions include human rights, without which the life of the individual means very little, and for which it is worth fighting as for one’s own life. An important conclusion follows:

our human civilization cannot do without intersubjective entities and conventions!

Kulaks and the counterrevolutionary conspiracy are intersubjective entities created thanks to twentieth-century media [newspapers, posters, radio, books]. The witches’ conspiracy is an intersubjective reality that could arise thanks to the fifteenth-century technology of book printing. Harari’s introduction of a third distinction in defining reality—that is, alongside objective and subjective reality, intersubjective reality—makes it possible to understand the mechanisms shaping collective consciousness and to better understand its changes in different historical periods. Without becoming aware of the significance of complex informational structures in building the intersubjective realities in which we believe as a collective, it is difficult to understand why so often large human collectives follow the pathological visions of a few. 

Although the influence of algorithms on our network of cooperation is enormous and may pose a threat in the near future, I nevertheless believe that it is rather the sheer number of intersubjective realities—produced by humans—that is tearing apart both our social structures and giving every person a headache. Never before have so many intersubjective realities been operating simultaneously that hinder one another or actively oppose one another. It is this tangle of our human stories that must be examined and put in order, even by eliminating some of them. Putting order into the network of our fantasies means at the same time putting order into our network of cooperation, and computers, that is also AI, can help us with this, provided we use them wisely for that purpose.

Centralized communication networks have a simpler structure than distributed networks, and therefore can more quickly adapt new information-processing technologies such as AI to their own purposes. It is enough for the central node [the owner of a corporation, the authoritarian leader of a country] to define the goal of its use.  
In a distributed network, this is more complicated and requires collective effort, that is, coordination of the actions of many information nodes. Example: it is not enough for the central node—President Trump—to order the surveillance of everyone who dislikes him. For this to become binding law on a permanent basis, several other nodes—government institutions, party organizations, and social organizations—must still give their consent. (It is worth noting here that the USA is increasingly ceasing to function as a distributed network and is moving more and more toward a centralized network. Trump’s admiration for Putin probably stems precisely from admiration for the effectiveness of governing a state that centralization of the network provides.)      
There is one fundamental difference between the functioning of the two networks, to which Harari draws the reader’s particular attention: a centralized network does not tolerate corrective mechanisms. I would put it this way: in such a centralized network, the vision of reality is first simplified (into a stark black-and-white division), because then the network functions most efficiently, and then the truth about reality is frozen and cannot be challenged, because that threatens order in the network of cooperation.

By contrast, a distributed network has strong mechanisms of self-correction built into its structure, which is why the evolution of intersubjective realities can proceed within it relatively smoothly. Different nodes influence one another and in this way correct their strategies of action and their intersubjective realities. Unfortunately, this is also connected with disruptions in the functioning of the network of cooperation, because conflicts often arise between nodes and the goals they set are changed.

Changing the network from distributed to centralized may give us, for a moment, an illusion of calm and certainty about tomorrow, but we will pay for it by freezing certain areas of the network into immobility, which may become a nightmare for us in the longer term. The life of the average person will matter less and less in such a network, because more important will be the good of intersubjective entities such as states, corporations, or gods. The voice of an ordinary person in a democratic system may carry little weight, but in a strongly centralized network it carries no weight at all. That is precisely why, despite the inconveniences associated with the crisis of the distributed network, it is worth not taking the easy way out and trying to reform it rather than abandoning it in favor of a centralized network.

Can one hide behind the argument that the main goal of a company is making money?
Can one ignore the impact of information on society and think only about creating a product?
As Harari writes—corporations such as Fb do not want to take responsibility, but rather shift it onto clients, voters (citizens), and lawmakers. They behave as though social media were not, at present, the main arena of shaping collective consciousness.

When we analyze the actions of Fb, we need to take into account at least three stories:
– the economic one—about profit, which is the goal of every company,
– the legal one—about what is mandated by regulations and what is our free choice,  
– the ethical one—about responsibility for the world, for our human species.

To bring these three stories together, what is needed is precisely Integrated Active Information.
Only when we look at the problem from these three fundamental aspects will we be able to understand how these three realities interact with one another and perhaps even come to an agreement – whether one of them is more important to us than the others?
However, to make the right decision, we must base the analysis of this problem on a fourth—and most important—reality, the one we chronically forget, and the one Professor Harari reminded me of. This reality is not based on any myths— it is simply a real being, that is, in this case, the living being that is a human being. 

Personally, I believe that we are completely dependent on them, because as a society we are unable to live without them. We are condemned to continually building new intersubjective realities that form the foundations of our networks of cooperation.

Our choice comes down solely to the decision whether they will be based more on our archaic myths, or on rapidly evolving scientific descriptions, and we will resort to fantasy only in situations where, apart from conjecture, nothing remains to us.

Algorithms in the computer network can either help us build a wiser information network, or they can be used to create a MATRIX from which we will not be able to escape.