Polymathness

I want to define “polymathness” as a measure of polymathic potential. I searched for an existing concept that would serve as such a measure, but found nothing. Thinking the problem might be the Japanese language, I searched in English for “polymathness” and “polymathyness,” but still found nothing. Thinking it might be the declining quality of Google Search, I asked ChatGPT-4, and it came up empty too. In other words, the concept may not yet exist anywhere in the world. At the very least, as of February 2024, the term I am looking for does not seem to exist online.

What I want is a measure like “robustness,” the noun derived from the adjective “robust.” With such a measure, we could optimize for it, just as robust optimization does¹.

Humans Are Evolving Toward Greater Polymathness

Humans mistakenly believe that hyper-specialization is the path of evolution to the next species, but nature clearly does not ask the human species to specialize. Look at the evolutionary lineage²: single-celled organisms → multicellular organisms → deuterostomes → chordates → vertebrates → fish → amphibians → amniotes → synapsids → mammals → Purgatorius → omomyids → Aegyptopithecus → Proconsul → apes → australopithecines → Homo erectus → modern humans (Homo sapiens). It is self-evident that evolution has been moving in the direction of greater polymathness.

If nature wanted humans to specialize, we would have eyes as powerful as microscopes, or legs that could jump faster than Earth’s escape velocity. But that is not how we are made³. Humanity cannot explore the microscopic world without microscopes, and cannot leave the planet without the thrust of rockets.

Humanity has acquired a meta-intelligence: externalizing bodily functions and evolving them as tools. This has made it possible to take on specialized functions by putting them on and taking them off as needed, without specializing in any particular skill. The organ that matters most for this is the hand. The hand itself can be seen as a tool that externalizes the brain. As anyone who watches dogs, cats, or other four-legged animals can see, back when our hands were feet we could neither make nor use tools, and we grasped and carried things with our mouths. Back when we had no limbs, like snakes and worms, we could only crawl, but we did have mouths. It took a very long time to get from using the mouth to using the hands.

In today’s human world, specialists enjoy very high status. Specialists are people who have specialized: faster at running than others, better at flying, more skilled at swimming underwater. Enhancing specialized abilities like these may lead to evolution into a different species, but never into the next species. The universe clearly asks the human species to increase its polymathic potential. The proof is that for a long time after birth, a human being can do nothing alone. A baby cannot sit, stand, or walk. It can only sense through its five senses, breathe, cry, and suckle.

But that also means a baby can do anything, with help. Like a king, it succeeds in making others its tools. And it holds the infinite possibility of becoming anything at all. Polymathness is the latent capacity to “become anything one wants to be.” Wanting to know everything and wanting to do everything: that is the essence of life, and the strength of that drive is vitality itself⁴.

A calf stands up almost immediately. So does a foal. Most animals soon learn to do everything on their own. Humans are probably the slowest-maturing creatures relative to their lifespan, but that is the flip side of delaying specialization as long as possible and keeping possibilities open in every direction.

Human Common Sense Is Cosmic Nonsense

The universe has no directions. For an astronaut floating in space, there is no up or down, no left or right. These are merely common sense acquired on Earth through gravity, and they do not hold in space. North, south, east, and west are a way of fixing positions on Earth relative to the North Star, and they do not hold in space either. In the universe there is only inside and outside. Only concepts like a membrane separating inside from outside hold true in space as well. In this way, human common sense often fails to hold in the universe⁵.

Unless humanity falls out among itself and destroys its own civilization, technological progress will lead us to live on multiple planets⁶. When that time comes, humanity will be forced to ask itself about Earth from a cosmic perspective and about the value of human common sense, just as a young person who moves from the countryside to the big city realizes how steeped they had been in the common sense of a small world, or as a young person studying abroad feels keenly the peculiarity of one country’s local rules, where their own identity lies, and how precious home is.

Even taking this into account, I believe the concept of nature is not confined to Earth; it is a concept that holds wherever in the universe we live. Once you begin philosophizing about nature, asking questions such as “What is natural?”, “Are nature and science opposed?”, and “Is the convenient, civilized society that science has brought natural or unnatural for the cosmic planet Earth?”, you realize that “nature” does not really refer to the greenery of Earth. It refers to the universe. This cosmic perspective on “whether something is natural” will surely remain an important question for as long as Earthlings live in the universe.

The Gap Between Cosmic and Human Understandings of Earth

There are as many ways of seeing things as there are people, but from Earth’s point of view, a picture emerges that human common sense would never reveal. From Earth’s perspective, the health of the planet can be understood as a question of homeostasis. War can be defined as inflammation of Earth’s ecosystem, caused by the uneven distribution of food and energy among the microorganisms living on Earth’s skin; and peace as a state in which an expanded Earth ecosystem resolves that uneven distribution of food and energy and maintains homeostasis. By this definition, true peace has never come to Earth; if anything, the planet has been in constant pain. It looks as though we are doing nothing but consume the fertility of the land that nature spent so long building up.

I think the root cause is ignorance of nature and a lack of awareness of that ignorance. Seemingly eco-friendly efforts that appear to care for the Earth, and organic farming methods practiced in the belief that they are kind to the environment: we need to ask, from Earth’s point of view, whether they really are. Helping to regenerate Earth’s environment from Earth’s point of view means, for example, being able to turn deserts green, and enabling forest animals to live with an abundance of food.

If human activity is shaped through and through by human common sense and is not correct from a cosmic standpoint, then even actions taken in good conscience to protect Earth’s environment may, over time, be turning green land into desert, ravaging mountains, and increasing the number of wild animals wandering in hunger. In other words, they may be good deeds by human standards but not by Earth’s standards, and may in the end turn out to be harmful to the Earth.

The gap lies in the discrepancy between a cosmic understanding of Earth and a human one. How, then, can we close it?

The Rising Value of Know-Why

The only way to raise people whose thinking is so miraculously wired that what they believe to be good is also correct from a cosmic standpoint is to increase their polymathness. As the saying goes, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”: a single specialty can yield only a single specialized viewpoint and the solutions that come with it. The value of people who are well versed in the know-what (“what is it?”) and the know-how (“how does it work?”) of one particular field is falling.

Such people have fulfilled their historical role and are beginning to be replaced by tools. That kind of specialized intellectual capability is being successfully externalized into tools such as books, computers, and the internet. With the arrival of recording media, the know-what and know-how once handed down by word of mouth could be transmitted more accurately and more widely, with fewer transmission errors, and passed on to the next generation. Almost all of humanity’s information is being encoded and formed into distributed networks, and these continue to be built out as an invisible barrier that can be accessed from anywhere on Earth.

But as the perceptive reader will have noticed, the value of people versed in know-why (“why is it so?”) is not falling; if anything, it seems to be rising. That is because know-why is meta-information that compresses the chaotic information that grows with every passing second. Without cosmic principles, ever-growing information is nothing but disordered noise; to find patterns in it and catch the signal, you have to know the structure. If you do not understand “why it turns out that way,” everything is a product of chance, and you cannot tell what to use, or how.

In the third century BC, Archimedes’⁷ discovery of the principle of the lever made a little of the universe’s invisible workings visible. This gave rise to visible technology in the form of convenient tools that dramatically improved the efficiency of human work: scissors, shovels, faucets, boat oars, and more. In this way, know-why gives value to a great deal of information that once seemed worthless. I believe humanity needs much more of the know-why that would allow the activity of Earth’s living things to function as a meta-brain for the planet.

The Super-Intellectual Work of One Era Becomes Commonplace in the Next

Investigating the laws of physics, an activity essential for acquiring know-why, is regarded in the twenty-first century as the highly advanced work of a small group of intellectual specialists called physicists. I think this is a holdover from the days before computers were well developed, when investigating the laws of physics required computational, logical, and mathematical ability. Yet the work that only a chosen few performed in the age of early humans**—super-intellectual work such as writing, or moving large numbers of people in step with the motions of the heavenly bodies—**is something modern people now do every day as a matter of course, at the office or at home. Some people are even paid a salary to create new universes.

Human history shows a tendency for the super-intellectual work of one era to become, in the next species, work done by the general majority. So people from the late twenty-first century into the twenty-second and beyond, who can dramatically extend their thinking through collaboration with artificial intelligence, are likely to engage in work that circulates know-why.

Augmented, Extended Intelligence Requires the Ethics of Polymathness

Just as cars, ships, airplanes, and spacecraft dramatically expanded the range of our movement, humanity will dramatically expand the range of its thinking by developing computers. As these replace dangerous and grueling human labor, anyone will be able to take on the kind of intellectual work that physicists do today, and the amount of know-why humanity holds will grow dramatically. As a result, humanity will venture out into the universe and take on supernatural work. But unless polymathness rises, humanity will use tools developed with magical degrees of specialization for the wrong purposes, and destroy itself.

In that sense, polymathness can be called a kind of ethics. I believe a certain number of individuals with high polymathness are needed as a safety device to save humanity from the road to ruin. At the immature level of science and technology of present-day humans, using powerful technology means, as a matter of course, consuming enormous amounts of energy. As long as we depend on technology that develops only narrow, local specialties, humanity will devour Earth’s energy and keep damaging and destroying Earth’s homeostasis, and a future in which the planet exceeds the limits of its self-regenerating capacity and collapses irreversibly on a global scale cannot be avoided. Recent climate change already shows the signs.

Powerful Technology That Makes Life Flourish

In the first half of the twenty-first century, the human species still uses the powerful technologies it has developed at such a dizzying pace to take the lives of fellow beings who live on the same planet. If we can take hundreds of billions of lives, surely we can also make hundreds of billions of lives flourish.

Where in life does the turn come that leads us to value science over nature, ability over character, money over the heart? Why do humans try to advance science at the expense of nature? Why do we try to develop ability rather than character, money rather than the heart? What would happen if we reversed those relationships?

Humans developed “agriculture” as a technology to stave off physical hunger. Next, they developed “education” as a technology to stave off mental hunger. But both have been updated by continually reflecting human desires; they have obeyed the demands of human society, not the demands of the Earth. Technologies for raising living things need to be elevated, by applying the workings of the universe, the Earth, and life, into technologies that make life flourish.

For that, developmental theory research to discover know-why is indispensable. It must be not emotional, ideological, or conventional, but physical, mathematical, and universally applicable across the cosmos. To achieve it, physics, which cannot deal with consciousness or life, must be extended into a new physics that can. Mathematics, which is solid and timeless, must also be extended into a new mathematics that is non-solid and includes time. And we need to learn much more about the structures and patterns of the natural universe with regard to the universe, the Earth, and life. The importance of this work will become self-evident once plans for settling Mars get fully under way.

Optimizing for Children’s Polymathness

What are humans gaining at the cost of their innate desire to “know everything and do everything”? Are we not expressing our thirst for universal capability by the wrong means? If you sincerely wish for “a peaceful world for our children,” I strongly hope you will join our concrete work of “increasing the polymathness within children.”

Buckminster Fuller pointed out this possibility in the twentieth century, and, as Maria Montessori likewise pointed out in the twentieth century, peace begins with children. This sense of the problem is why we are so passionate about “protecting children’s polymathic potential,” something 99% of people in the world today, in the twenty-first century, do not consider important. And we are convinced that the greatest obstacle to achieving it is human common sense and preconception.

Human history is a history of mistakes. If humanity takes the stance of reflective fallibilism, saying, “We have made many mistakes in the past, so many things we are doing right now must also be wrong,” and makes a Copernican turn toward a cosmically correct understanding, then technologies that make life flourish will function on a global scale, and a world at peace in the truest sense will be built.

Will we leave our descendants a peaceful Earth, or an Earth that has lost its homeostasis and fallen into decay? We stand at that crossroads now.

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Footnotes

1. Robustness is synonymous with homeostasis in living organisms. The state of “being healthy” in an organism can be defined as the state of “maintaining homeostasis.” In other words, it is a state of heightened robustness. ↩

2. Naturally, there are various competing theories. There are “not enough fossils” to say anything definitive, but even if future research rewrites this history, the overall direction of travel will not change. ↩

3. Buckminster Fuller already made this point in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Why is it that the phrase “Spaceship Earth” is so widely known, while the problem of specialization discussed in detail in Chapters 1 and 2 of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is not? Perhaps because it exposes flaws and vulnerabilities in the very design philosophy of educational institutions, and risks undermining trust in the many academic authorities on which today’s civilized society rests. ↩

4. This does not mean that those who are not polymaths have weak vitality. It means having the strength to live in any environment. Animals that live everywhere from the upper reaches of rivers to the deep sea have strong vitality. So do animals that fly from the Antarctic to the Arctic. So do plants that live for thousands of years. Insects, grasses and flowers, small animals, microorganisms: every living thing, at every scale, can be said to have equally strong vitality, in the sense that each realizes the potential given to its own life and fulfills its cosmic mission. ↩

5. Buckminster Fuller points this out in his books as well. His books such as Cosmography and Critical Path are available in Japanese translation as well. Anyone interested in uncovering cosmic principles should read them. It is a disgrace to us as Earthlings that so many great works, such as Tetrascroll, are out of print. For out-of-print titles, there is no choice but to make use of libraries and the like. ↩

6. For example, Elon Musk, who leads the private space company SpaceX, has published a paper titled “Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species.” ↩

7. Archimedes is renowned as an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Judging by the number and quality of the principles he discovered, his polymathness ranks among the highest in human history. ↩