Dispatch #30

🏹 The time of the hunter

The fundamental dilemma of intelligence lies in the tension between two lemmas:

The time preference closer to zero wins in the long run.

If your time preference is too low, you're dead.

Lemma 1 means that taking a longer time horizon for strategy is always a superior move in that more factors can be correctly taken into account. (In fiction, think of Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Neal Stephenson's concents in Anathem.)

Lemma 2, conversely, deals with the entropy of material existence: you cannot wait forever, and you can barely wait decades. The fruition of infinite-in-time desires is tempered by the relative immediacy of survival.

As The Diff pointed out], the value of time and attention tends to either zero or infinity. This suggests another way of carving the tension at its joints.

We have a mechanical experience of time as a continuum sliced into discrete quanta.  We rarely even make reference to the sky today aside from whether it is dark already. However, our native experience of time is immensurate. A popular derivation from Greek philosophy distinguishes kairos, the unmediated experience of “pure” time, from khronos, the measured and divided notion of time. The alert hunter perceives time like the animal: in the Moment.

For instance, the introduction of the field, as representative of large-scale technology, required an analogous move from the world as experience to the world as plan. Humans had to move from localized strategy (necessary in hunting) to generalized strategy (necessary for agriculture).

The field is a calendar imposed on earth, the threshold of the shift from kairos to khronos.  The development of this as a technology is similar to the discovery of the cardinal directions (as technology) given the winds.

Kairos is the time of the hunter. It is the time of the correct moment, infinite patience beforehand, implacable resolve at the crisis.

In one sense, the best worldview would be seity, constructed entirely from empirical experience even if following suggestions by others. Barring that, we have tradition, authority, education (educō, “I lead forth”), and other cultural mechanisms to make up this impossibility. These unfortunately impose extranea and falsehoods, and in worst-case scenarios are actually poison pills. But taking the longest road you can is almost always the best path to get things right, as long as you have the hunter's ready-to-hand action.