The Objective Need for Decentralization: Reality Consensus

Homo sapiens share more than 98 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, and 50 percent of a human’s DNA is identical to that of a tree. The genetic difference between individual humans is on average about one-tenth of 1 percent. Yet, these measurable realities are quickly forgotten when observing the behavior of people towards plants, animals, and most disturbingly other humans.

It is the ability for collaborations that allowed the human species to thrive, and assert control over all other species. Humans are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers. Every human alive today is an ancestor of a species of homo sapiens, leaving the African continent some 70,000 years ago, and within a couple of thousand years, humanity colonized most of the Middle East, Europe and Asia, before spreading to places where no human being has ever reached before - to Australia, and lastly, to the North American continent.

What Is Reality

When humans consider the nature of reality, they generally follow one of two approaches: a realist approach, in which there is a single, objective, overall reality thought to exist irrespective of the perceptions of any given individual, and an idealistic approach, in which it is considered that an individual can verify nothing except their own experience of the world, and can never directly know the truth of the world independent of that. Consensus reality can be understood by studying socially constructed observations of a given environment, a subject within the sociology of knowledge.

Consider this thought experiment: consensus reality for people who follow a particular theocentric religion is different from consensus reality for those who follow another theocentric religion, or from those that eschew theocentric religions in favor of applying scientific methods alone, for explaining life and the universe. In societies where theocentric religions are dominant, the religious understanding of existence would be the consensus reality, while the religious worldview would remain the non-consensus reality in a predominantly secular society, where the consensus reality is grounded in science alone.

In this way, different individuals and communities have fundamentally different world views, with fundamentally different comprehensions of the world around them, and of the constructs within which they live. A society that is, for example, made up entirely of individuals with a secular mindset and one which believes every eventuality to be subject to metaphysical influence will have very different consensus on reality, and many of their beliefs on broad issues such as science, slavery, and human sacrifice may differ in direct consequence because of the differences in the perceived nature of the environment they live in.

Technology and Reality

For many people today, reality is shaped by digital technologies, in particular content distributed by the internet over the world wide web. The latter has been absorbed by commercial interest on every level of human engagement. The overriding algorithm for all most internet applications and websites is a subset of the motives of the operating entity - usually a for-profit company, ultimately bound by corporate governance to increase shareholder value. Rather than fostering human collaboration, companies implement incentive systems that “keep users clicking” to increase “time-on-site” and other key performance indicators (KPIs) that serve - not the user - but enriching the entity offering the “service”.

Many of the operators of these content distribution sites have stumbled across the fact that division - rather than consensus - is the driver for engagement with content pushed in front of the unwilling victims. The latter think of themselves as users, but are ultimately non-player characters (NPCs) in game designed to make the human a pawn that serves the objectives of the operating entity of any of these digital services. The results of which can readily be observed by anybody using the internet today: one can live in his/her own eco-chamber of content and other “users” (many of which are indeed bots), or engage in verbal digital combat with a pseudonymous opponent enticed and emboldened by “likes”, “hearts” or any number of otherwise meaningless pixels.

What is needed is indeed the opposite. In order for humans to stay on a successful course of evolution, we must recreate reality consensus, use social-engineering for good - rather than emphasizing the differences in individuals, pointing out our shared humaneness. We must decentralize these digital weapons of mass destructions to eventually empower the individual as the user - and true agent - of the technology - not a persona, stripped of his/her humanity.