Noocracy: The Intelligent as Civil Servants?

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I have been ruminating on the concepts of classes determined by intelligence, indiscriminate of many other factors such as race and gender, and what kinds of problems would emerge from such a structure.

Then I thought about it not in terms of class (although that is still a contending factor), but in terms of a bottom-up hierarchy. That is, what a democracy is in principle. Top-down hierarchy is despotism, bottom-up hierarchy is democracy, from what I gather.

What would accountability look like here? How would democratic policies/components sit into a "noocracy" (government by intelligence)? Could civil servitude realistically become vocational for intellectuals, with politicians (?) perhaps being some kind of mediating/representative stratum?

One is inclined to think that this is already how it works, only not as an accountable and transparent bottom-up hierarchy, but an unaccountable and opaque top-down hierarchy. What would it look like if it were inverted, and the intelligent were to constitute a vanguard?

One of the primary axioms here, as it relates to intelligence distributions and how such distributes map on to other demographic distributions: I genuinely believe that, while statistics and data may indicate otherwise, that no race/gender/demographic of human is essentially more intelligent, and that any such intellect-difference is incidental, determined largely by socio-economic conditions (a materialist perspective?). If anyone here sees ethical issues that they think I overlook/diminish, please point them out. This seems to synthesize the genetic biodiversity debate, but again, maybe I'm overlooking some crucial element.

That said, in the intelligence distribution would need to be more evenly spread across demographics before such a "noocracy" could be implemented, and even then we can't be sure that certain inter-distributional biases won't spill in.

The point here is just to ruminate and consider the pitfalls of such a structure. Perhaps the most glaring: how can the intellectual civil servants be held accountable by the masses, who are, according to this framework, not as intelligent? How could such a civil servant stratum be prevented from coalescing into an unaccountable elite? Perhaps this can be aided by (as frightful as this may seem) a supreme database that rigorously quantifies all individuals (Deleuze, "individual" becoming "dividual"), in which case we can account for those who "rank" highest in terms of intelligence. How would we then account for the accuracy of the database, and make sure that certain intellectual elites don't manage to evade its index?

Another idea to tie into this, albeit a largely unformed/illinformed one. I like the idea of a legislative body that might register to our standards as hypersectarian. The body would be an ecosystem of ideologies, consisting of groups of manageable size, each representing some ideological vector. There would be a structural policy that incentivizes a medium group size, in the interest of precluding a monopolistic/hegemonic reign by one group. What would this incentivization consist of? Not quite sure. Perhaps it could be modeled after blockchain, something else I direly need to understand. Perhaps the admittance of a new group would consist of a petition that gets passed around the others, all of which would impact the terms of admittance of the new group.

How would this inherit the capitalist baton from any current model of government? Again, I'm far from being sure. I do think that the capitalist impetus can be abstracted and reconfigured in such a way that may render such a bottom-up hypersectarian/noocractic/blockchain government. How? Not sure. Perhaps there is much to gain from a deeper familiarity with blockchain theory and technology. Some kind of peer-to-peer checks and balances? Although that seems like a theory that has probably been laid out before, and arguably even attempted. Not sure. But given the novelty of blockchain, in the scope of human economic/political development, I'm sure there is still a lot of ground yet to be broken, in terms of modeling.

To be sure, I think I'm pushing for a new arena for our ideologies to contend within, rather than pushing for new ideologies - although I'm sure I can't get off that easily. As has been pointed out, there is an odor of despotism afoot - although maybe I'm paranoid.

How can something like this appeal to capitalists, even if we are able to abstract the core of capitalism (growth of the rate of growth; acceleration) and give it new form, perhaps even a non-monetary form? Surely, the capitalists are less concerned with any non-monetary essence of capitalism, assuming such an essence even exists.

Also, my understanding of "noos" as intelligence is not limited to human characteristic of smartness. While noos does express itself through human smartness, it seems to be a cosmically broader phenomenon.

Also, a semantic point: Need the most intelligent be intellectuals? Insofar as "intellectual" connotes academic and scholarship, I don't think it is necessary, insofar as academia/scholarship bring with them their ideological/bureaucratic baggage. But this is a real point of contention, from what I gather, seeing as "intellectualism" seems to enable/occasion/justify obfuscation in a way that "high intelligence" does not (?)

Final disclaimer: I readily admit that I may have a looming elitism underpinning this, and I would appreciate help in sniffing it out and uprooting it. Don't want it to subsist in any substantial way.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
"Noos", from what I gather, is the Greek root present in Gnosticism, knowledge, etc.

It is translated as something between intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, understanding, the intellect, etc.

I think there can be made a distinction between noos as intelligence and episteme as knowledge. Given that the translations of these terms overlap, sorting them out is fuzzy and nebulous.

I take knowledge/epistem- to mean the product of noos, and noos to be the force of understanding. Much like profit accumulates wealth in its wake, noos accumulates episteme. That is, intelligence accumulates knowledge.

I'm arguing that noos can be generalized beyond the human intellect, which is where other interpretations may disagree. That is why I am always harping on my semantics and etymology, to foreground the assumptions and interpretations that underpin the theory.

If we generalize noos beyond the human intellect, we can consider it the force of organization, order, negative entropy. This force evolves, through iterative/combinatorial dialogue with its environment, to become human intelligence. In that sense, we occupy the cutting edge of noos, but we are seemingly midwifing the next stratum, the next cutting edge.

At this point, it becomes rather fantastic and cosmological, but it sets a seemingly fresh stage for theorization in all departments (science, politics, religion, art, etc).
 

luka

Well-known member
sounds cool but i don't understand it. too many big words. hopefully some of the more intelligent people here will grasp it.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I mean the central provocations here involve

Affirmation of the information age, to the extent that we incur full digitized quantization of all humans. What kind of problems emerge here? A vast array of them, I'm sure. The ones that rush to mind are the "New Jim Code" inherited and objectivized (?) biases that may set the tone for such a database.

That the intelligent can be kept accountable, largely by means of a "supervising" database, which can increasingly come to resemble artificial intelligence.

That the ecosystem of parties/sects can be incentivized not to grow beyond a certain extent. How will this work, given that we are, at this point, increasingly affirmative of the essence of capitalism as growth-of-the-rate-of-growth?
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I place emphasis on the cosmological capacity of noos/nous, in order to distinguish between human smartness and cosmic intelligence. A nooism would involve a sort of faith in cosmic noos, and an effort to embody it as effectively as possible: by getting better and better at solving problems.

I have trouble seeing any such project find success without an element of faith - in this case, a faith in noos as a function/algorithm of the cosmos, a function/algorithm whose most recent iterations have given rise to us, as subjective beings.

But I also think that, as complimentary as a cosmology/nooism would be to other developing theories, it should be an optional component of the theory. This is what I have in mind by a modular motherboard theory: a broad framework which can be customized within larger parameters of harmony. Take the cosmology or leave it, you can still subscribe or investigate something like noocratic theory, psychotopology, nootopology, etc.

Each independent, but also compatible.

An attempt at clarifying:

Nooism - etymologically, this would mean "a set of beliefs, practices and doctrines revolving around noos, cosmic intelligence" This would be a cosmology above all else, an interpretation of the development and future of the cosmos. In this interpretation, humans are framed as highly-iterated/highly-ramified superstructures of intelligent matter; the human is the best incarnation of negative entropy. This cosmology could directly inherit from other cosmologies, such as those of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and maybe Nikolai Fyodorov. Concepts like "the omega point" and the "noosphere" and such can be incorporated into this cosmology with relative ease.

Noocracy - a configuration of governance based on human intelligence. A whole variety of problems emerge here, but perhaps they are reconcilable or otherwise surmountable. This, as a theory and praxis, ought to be compatible with Nooism, but not bound to it.
 

luka

Well-known member
what about if you think 'intelligent' people are the last people you want to trust to make decisions?
 

luka

Well-known member
not to say you can't make use of them in certain circumstances. cracking the Enigma code say. that's the kind of specific problem with fixed parameters that you can safely set intelligent people to work on.
 

luka

Well-known member
you need A Leader, not overburdened with Intelligence, to order them around though.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Poindexters are tools for A Leader to employ.
Populism means that whatever the boffins say gets ignored, because the people have had quite enough of experts. In fact this was going on even before populism became the dominant ideology - remember what happened to David Nutt?
 

luka

Well-known member
well I'm not advocating that. That sounds bad. We need the input of our social brain cells.
 

luka

Well-known member
We will croscheck their findings against the gut cells and heart cells and so on. Then Leader will make his decision.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Your point about fixed parameters is worth reckoning with, I believe. And I think I see your point: That rule by the intelligent will not amount to anything much more than overthinking or idealism. Not to put words in your mouth, but I do see the validity of that reasoning, even if I didn't articulate it well.

What if parameters for governance were more well defined? And what if they didn't have to interface, as leaders, with the masses, but were still effectively supervised by the masses. There could be some mediating stratum of leaders that functions as a sort of liaison organ of the government.

What kind of parameters? Perhaps those afforded by an optimized theory of systems and behavior of systems. I believe it is always possible to achieve an effective theory/map of the Real/territory.

Or maybe the intelligent civil servants will function as the primary milieu around the database, the proto-AI? Their function would be a democratic steering/mothering of the machine.

Unfortunately AI still largely registers to me as stuff of fantasy, despite how rational it seems on the surface. I understand a little bit about convolutional neural networks, and how machine learning learns, but man is that stuff dense.
 
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