the skill tree hypothesis — concept
the narrative goes that every single cultural practice behind it has an entire assemblage of possible cultural artifacts that when "activated" the right way (myth/ritual/augment) logic actually create not just cultural information but a civilizational progress in the sense of, social forms of organization themselves are able to unlock hidden or laden native metaphysical principles from scratch, like certain types of progress mixed with organization cultivate lineages of metaphysical principles, and if society as it so happens only orders power narrowly along whatever inherited basis of metaphysical assumption it currently holds, it actively limits itself from unlocking whatever ontologies it abandoned from whatever previous set of social forms of organization
heres an example. think of a mythological dragon, its primarily a cultural information that also creates forms of organization socially, but it isnt a being yet. in totemism it becomes the being of a clan retrsopectively, but doesnt exist on its own. then the scientific skilltree can unlock a real dragon through biomutation, but this dragon would have no social or cultural context to exist, yet would be spawned in an enviornement that encoded it through this compass. but a third type of dragon, a dragon device, is a dragon in the sense of being an actual like mythical social script as in, its not actually a physical or mental dragon but the form of something "kind of" like a dragon, yet, whatever it is, say it was a physical dragon or just a ritual, it would carry with it new forms of its own concept. so, once it would be assumably its own being in space, it would not even be a dragon the way we imagine it, but whatever it would be, it would be further up the assumption of what a dragon is or can be, not lower. so if the scientific skilltree competes with the dragon ritual one, neither of them can actually get to the dragon, so syncretism needs to come back and revive whatever traditions actually felt the hype of a dragon enough to believe it a social reality first, and, if the same amount of total socio-historical labour came in as a resource into this sphere, it would be able to "construct" a device, the same way scientists attempt to engineer natural beings into the world, this same type of logic of "deviceness" would be an actual product of whatever tradition
if evolution requires millions of years to make something, civilization could organize itself in pockets of space that would literally force a creature to evolve into a dragon, to have a real reason to have wings, breathe fire, have sharp claws, whatever it would need to have. imagine a world where there are herds literally everywhere, far more than even at the peak of pure biological mass in weight on the planet. but then also imagine that the land was uninhabitable and you wouldn't be able to walk on it, yet also imagine that these creatures needed deep roasting, yet also imagine that space had obstacles you needed to navigate, randomly froze you into an ice-dome, etc. imagine civilizational organization structures as eggs themselves, as literal cultivation machines that simulate the future existence of a dragon-form. with the help of whatever mechanism of natural evolution, the dragon slowly becomes one by actually strongly learning the action-patterns and mechanisms necessary for itself to be a real dragon. a scientifically engineered dragon may not contain the same dna scripts, whatever mutation is created by different animals may still lack the soul to behave like the animal you want it to.
if you used a computer engine or machine to simulate this movement, its "learned behavior" would be no deeper than the learned behavior of the computer itself, which is itself mostly a vectoral image of a supposed real dragon. so the device itself is not only the space that the social form of organization actually assumes as an organizing principle, and the inspiration that goes into maintaining a cultural myth, but cultural information itself is the sustainable factor that perpetuates a social logic. in that sense, even real dragons of the past could be extinct, even if these dragons arent "exactly real", some aspect of the dragon device does go extinct. simultaneously, the scientific skill tree, or rather, any skill tree whatsoever, within its own logic of reasoning also behaves like other skill trees in its possible constructions. maybe the ritual skill tree needs millions more years than the scientific one to reach the stage of ontogenesis, but on another hand, the ritual skill tree through millions of years of evolution is what actually "unlocked" the scientific skill tree to begin with as a seperate access to reality. yet, if the ritual skill tree is abandoned too early, the loss is much harder to fix than the potential future gain, and the assumptions that any of its outgrowths create cannot be assumed to suddenly be a continuation of the discipline. this is partially why the sustaining of a past tradition is necessary for progress itself, where paradoxically the sustenance of past practices becomes necessary due to the belief of stacking the interest of the future gains the tradition itself can create. if you thought about it computationally, you would come to the conclusion that every single new inspiration can only cut against whatever spawned that inspiration. traditions are partially haunted and limited by the promises its own inheritors create, and power and status simply organize against the capacity of craft rather than parallel to it