* THE HUMAN MIND
What a human can and cannot conceive of is constrained
by the biological facts underpinning psychology, such as
the brain's structure. That is why this essay is organized
into sections, which are organized into paragraphs, all
sorted by topic. Humans seem to like thinking hierarchically,
and by sorting things into categories and trying to imagine
things as discrete objects. No matter what particular patterns
characterize human thought, it is difficult to deny that we
think a certain way.

This also means that, when we take in information from our
universe and process it with our minds, some information
must be lost. Furthermore, there are also ideas that the
human mind cannot formulate through its particular process
of thinking. In other words, there is an untold portion of
this universe that we are unable to process or conceive of.


* HUMAN TOOLS
A tool as simple as the hammer, something which is likely
older than human history, has a shape that reflects the
physiology of the primates who use it. Its handle is uniquely
suited to a primate's hand; if an octopus were to develop a
hammer, it would look much different.

Tools aren't just suited to a human's body; they're also
made to work with a human mind. Something more complex than
a hammer, such as a power drill, has buttons that correspond
to an abstract, conceptual representation of the drill --
perhaps a finite-state machine. This conceptual representation
is something that the human mind is able to easily understand.

If we think of a "tool" as anything that humans develop in
order to accomplish some task, we can define some surprising
things as tools. Corn (like many other plants) has been
selectively bred over the centuries so that it is easier to
harvest, transport, and eat. Is domesticated corn a tool?
Can we say the same about domesticated dogs? Perhaps modern
businesses also treat workers as tools, slotting the workers
into systems of conduct and relationships with one another
that make them easier for another human, such as an employer,
to manipulate.


* EXTENSIONS OF THE HUMAN MIND
Just as something like a hammer is an extension of the human
body, more complex tools are extensions of the human mind.
Whether they be subordinate workers or digital computers, they
live inside the psychological structure of a human mind. It
is also the human who gives its tools meaning. If an alien
observed the earth, they would see meaningless lines of asphalt
instead of highways, silicon arranged into a meaningless grid
rather than computers, and so on.

The shapes and ideas that tools have in order to conform to human
minds and bodies, outside the context of human understanding, are
highly arbitrary. It is not likely for nature on its own to
construct a skyscraper, or a plant that puts an incredible amount
of energy towards developing gigantic fruit. The human mind is like
a parallel world with its own logic, where everything lives inside
an invisible superstructure dictated by human psychology; the
invisible forces of psychology manifest themselves as a fitness
function that evolves buttons, streets, and binary trees.


* HYPERCOMPLEX TOOLS
Returning to the example of corn, we can see how the world of
human logic can manifest strange effects at scale. The parallel
mind-world evolved a species of plant based on a few simple ideas
-- bigger kernels, higher yield, et cetera. At scale, these simple
ideas impacted the environment and the genealogy of plants at large.
The type of corn we have created is invisibly marked by our mental
patterns of hierarchy, categorization, and so on, and those invisible
patterns create a visible effect in the natural world.

We have an idea of what simple ideas look like on a large scale,
but what about complex ideas? Even though the modern era is full
of computers and other complex systems specially designed for humans
to build, understand, and debug (to any degree at all), we have not
yet created hypercomplex tools.

But what are hypercomplex tools? If the main ideas in this writing are
correct, a hypercomplex system is one so large and so complex that it
runs into strange, asymptotic areas, where the invisible structure and
markings of human thought create gigantic, maybe even chaotic, effects
as the tool runs into universal complexities that are impossible for
the human mind to understand or even imagine. Such a tool would reveal
in spectacular fashion the human mind that invisibly (no longer so)
marked its creation. Hypercomplex tools are essentially tools that are
so strange as to make visible to human mind's "invisible" mark.



--
As a final note, I'm sure there are fictional examples of hypercomplex
tools, but I can't think /that/ clearly because it's the end of a long
week and also past midnight as I'm writing this. I'm thinking there might
be something like what I'm trying to describe in /Neuromancer/ -- it
could be the strange Tessier-Ashpool mansion (a singularity, so crammed with
things that it seems to warp reality) or wintermute (a digital being
touched by the human mind, in such an exotic state of being that the human
mark's pecularities become noticeable).