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Like David Weinberger I can't help but feel a little depressed with where the world now finds itself on the eve of this election. However when I cast my early vote last Thursday I felt a moment of grace and gratitude, knowing that many people died for my right to do so.
I can't help feeling though that all my hopes and dreams, that invariable narrative that has guided my life up to this point, is coming under assault by larger forces of stupidity, ignorance and just plain evil (a word I almost never use). If Bush wins, then perhaps that is what we deserve. Unfortunately we are living under constraints of a single planet where all our lives are inexorably wrapped up in larger forces beyond our control. Perhaps this is why I have instinctually longed for space travel and freedom of the stars where our spirits can manifest themselves more fully, free from the boundaries of this "Planet of the Apes" we find ourselves stuck on.
As I've seen it up to this point, the harmonious balance of nature has been on the side of progressive change, from simple bacterium, to complex living things, to intelligent life, barbarian feudalism towards technological civilization. Will this grand experiment end here? Was it meant to come to a screeching halt because of a few manipulative bastards struggling for total world domination? I want to think that 4 billion years of evolution is on our side, and that hair brained idiots can't hijack our evolutionary birthright... reaching the stars themselves. Therefore I'm uncertain if in the larger scheme of things, if it really matters who wins.
Wow... this is the most amazing historical discovery in a generation.
The Age:
The story of man is being rewritten. Australian and Indonesian scientists have dug up skeletons of a previously unknown human species - real "hobbits" that stood only a metre tall - that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores, west of Timor, until relatively recently.
The scientists found the first skeleton in September 2003 in Liang Bua, a large limestone cave on the island. The one-metre-tall female, aged about 30 and dubbed "Hobbit", lived about 18,000 years ago.
Six similar skeletons were later found, some of whom lived in the cave just 13,000 years ago. The scientists have speculated that the species may have lived on Flores - which they dubbed the "lost world" - until the 16th century.
Despite having a small brain, the species could cook, hunt large prey and build rafts, the scientists say. Stone artefacts and animal remains were found with the skeletons.
Professor Roberts said the discovery would redraw the human family tree. "It's one of the most important (discoveries) because it shows there was diversity among humans until very, very recently. If you go with the previous models, people say for the past 30,000 years we've been the only human species to inhabit the planet, whereas in fact that's rubbish.
"For most of human history, there's been more than one human species. Right now, it's unusual for us to be the only one around. In actual fact, that's been the case even more recently than we ever believed possible."
"They've got a brain the size of a grapefruit, yet they can make stone tools just as well as we can make them . . . they were cooking, they were making fire and they were hunting those little stegodons, those little baby elephants . . . they were intelligent and almost certainly had language."
"There are lots of local folk tales in Flores about these people which are consistent and incredibly detailed. The stories suggest there may have been a grain of truth to the idea they were still living on Flores up until the Dutch arrived in the 1500s," Professor Roberts said. "The stories suggest they lived in caves. The villagers would leave gourds with food out for them to eat, but legend has it they were the guests from hell - they'd eat everything, including the gourds."
He said isolated Flores was a fascinating "lost world", home to a range of exotic creatures extinct elsewhere, often morphed into giant or dwarf forms through lack of genetic diversity. These included a dwarf form of the primitive elephant stegodon, giant rats, Komodo dragons, and even larger species of giant lizard.
The scientists say Homo floresiensis is descended from Homo erectus, who first arrived on Flores about 840,000 years ago, after leaving Africa about a million years ago.
However, Colin Groves, of the Australian National University, said the skeletons had some extremely primitive features, and could be related to an even earlier human ancestor, Australopithecus, which predated all Homo species and was thought not to have left Africa.
"It's a real lost world . . . until so recently there would have been these tiny little people running around," he said. "It would have been fantastic to see."
My friend Edmond Cohen created a vision, iAmerica, for what ought to replace the World Trade Center in New York. I don't think it actually got submitted to the contest, and it is probably too late. Anyway, I hadn't looked at the latest version, even though it is hosted on my server. But I just saw it, and I think it is fabulous. Much more worthy than the mishmash that came out of the contest. A globe on top, lighted up by LEDs showing an image of the planet. Five domed biospheres on top of five surrounding towers.
Via New World Disorder:
As my notion of the soulitarian suggests, the motive force for change in this is a generation who will build alternative structures to enable them to "make a dent in the universe together," as Warren Bennis puts it - if the old ones are treating their expanded selves in such a brutal way. I think something like the social software movement that gave Howard Dean such momentum, is an example of the true grounds of play being constructed - people bringing different values to new technology, literally expanding the class of political players.
An old piece from Deepak Chopra on What is the True Nature of Reality?
One of the interesting things that science has found, this should have been obvious all along, is that what we call perception, what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, is really the least reliable test of what reality really is. We cannot trust our senses at all!Maddening, eh? Not really. Limited maps are what drives us crazy, when we forget they're maps and they maybe no longer apply. The same as far as perceptions go. They all just access a little slice of a spectrum, and from then can even get stuck in a groove, leading us to adopt an even more limiting interpretation of what that is. The real real stuff is beyond the maps, obviously. Not that perceptions and maps aren't useful, of course. But its not the real thing.After all, the senses tell us that the earth is flat and we don't believe that anymore. The senses tell us that the ground that we stand on is stationary and we know it's spinning at dizzying speeds and hurtling through outer space at thousands of miles an hour. The senses tell us things have a certain taste, smell, size, texture. Maybe that's not the way they really are.
There was an experiment done at Harvard Medical School about 20 years ago. A group of scientists took some kittens and brought them up in a room that had only horizontal stripes. All the visual stimuli in the room were horizontal. Another group of kittens was brought up in a room that had only vertical stripes. And when these kittens grew up to be wise old cats, it turns out that one group of cats could see only a horizontal world. The other group of cats could see only a vertical world. And this had nothing to do with the belief system of these cats.
It's a phenomenon that psychologists call Premature Cognitive Commitment. Premature, because we make it at a very early stage of our development. Cognitive, because that's how they cognize or see the world. And commitment, because it fixes us to a particular reality, it imprisons us in a fixed mode of perception.
There are many variations of these experiments. In India, when they train elephants, they take the baby elephant and tie it with an iron chain to a huge tree. Then they start cutting the size of the chain and the tree. Ultimately you can tie the elephant which a big animal now, with a flimsy rope to a green plant but the elephant is unable to escape. It's made a commitment in its body-mind that it's in a prison!
Or you can do another simple experiment. Take some flies and put them in a jar. After a while remove the lid from the jar and you'll find that most of the flies, except for a couple of pioneers, will not be able to escape. They make a commitment in their body-mind that they're in a prison.
People will tell you who work in aquariums that you can separate fish from each other. They're in big glass tanks and the separations are transparent glass partitions. You can remove the glass partition after a while. The fish will swim to the edge of where the partition was and return . They made a commitment that that's as far as they can go.
All these experiments, and there are many variations of these, are pointing to a very crucial fact as far as the mechanics of perception is concerned. And that is that our initial sensory experiences and how we interpret them or how they are interpreted for us actually structure the very anatomy and physiology of our nervous system in such a way that ultimately the nervous system serves only one function: to keep reinforcing the initial interpretation. Anything that doesn't reinforce the initial interpretation doesn't even get into the nervous system. So if you don't have a concept or a notion or an idea that something exists, then your nervous system won't even take it in.
That's a very peculiar fact because it tells us that with bits of sensory experience, we'll never be able to comprehend the whole. We never will be! After all the human eye can see only between 380 and 500 billionths of a meter. There's nothing sacred between 360 and 370. It doesn't exist for us.
And so too for the other senses. This is true not only of the human species but of all species. A honeybee, for example, doesn't have the apparatus to see the usual wavelengths that you and I perceive. It senses ultra-violet. When a honeybee looks at a flower at a distance it doesn't see a flower. It sees honey from a distance but it misses the flower altogether. A snake would experience the same thing as infrared radiation which means nothing to you and me. A bat would experience that as the echo of ultra-sound which also means nothing to you and me. And a chameleon's eyeballs swivel on two different axis. You can't even remotely imagine what this would look like to a chameleon.
So what's the real nature of the world? What's it really like? We can't trust the senses. They give us a very distorted view. They break up that wholeness into a small fragment and we call it reality. We happen to agree about it. We even call it "objective reality" and we have a whole methodology that we call "science" to explore that . If you really understand what science is, then science at least until now has not been a method for exploring the truth. Science has been a method for exploring our current map of what we think the truth is. And the map is not the territory. The territory that we explore is really an extension of the map we have. If we don't have the complete map then we will not explore the territory that is not within the framework of that map.
Since a long time, one of the subjects I'd like to delve more into and write about is the subject of making realities. That could be addressed from many angles. Personal Reality. Shared Reality. Virtual Reality.
Now, that's starting off with an assumption that each of us have a hand in what reality we're experiencing. Some people don't believe that. Even some of those people who're best at constructing realities that they get others to live in. Many people will insist that reality just is some kind of objective finite thing which one can establish and prove and that's it. Ironically, some of those people probably live more in a reality inside their skull than outside it. But that wasn't my point.
The way I use reality here is as that which we can perceive ourselves to be living in, and which we actually can live in. There can be several or many of those. One might live in one without being conscious of it, or one might willingly step in or out of different realities at different times.
You can think about a movie, for example. If it is well-made and you enjoy it and you're watching it in a movie theatre, you can live yourself into it and believe it while it is playing. Oh, you're still aware that you're watching a movie, but if it is made well enough, you'll forget it to a considerable degree and it will be real, and you have some kind of relation or response to the characters and situations in it. Even if what you're watching is really photos of a plastic model and actors pretending to be other people than they are, you might go along with the whole thing.
Good film makers and good actors know a bunch of things about making convincing realities. For example, a method actor would work hard at developing a lot of invisible things that are part of the character they're asked to portray. Like, what is their past history? What are their feelings and actions rooted in? What is really motivating them? What do they feel? What happened to them before? Where are they going afterwards? Even though you see none of those things directly, if the actor has chosen for himself what they are, his character will appear more real to him and to you.
A very simple example: If a character is supposed to say a sentence that gets interrupted in the middle, like "But why do ...", and then something happens. If the actor only practices saying "But why do .." and then stopping, it will look and sound kind of fake. It will work much better if he worked out for himself what the whole sentence should be and why he's saing it, even if he never gets to do so. The fabric of the reality he's presenting is more coherent and complete. And you notice that, even if you only get to see a corner of it.
Realistic realities have a number of perceptions to them, and they have depth. It is not just that the right words are said. They sound right, they look right, they smell right, they feel right. The periphery seems right.
If you say the word toothbrush, it doesn't count for much. But if you can hold it in your hand, and put toothpaste on it, and put it in your mouth, and clean your teeth with it, and your mouth feels nice and fresh, then it is a convincing reality. It doesn't matter if somebody else thinks it is a hairy-nosed wombat. If you can brush your teeth with it every day, and have a minimum of cavities, you're fine.
No, it doesn't quite mean that it is just as good to live in a delusion as to live in a reality. A delusion would be when you exist in a certain reality and you deny it, and maintain the abstract idea that it is different than it is. A functional reality is made of perceptions, not just of a concept. Perceptions are abstractions too, in relation to what the universe REALLY is, but they're much more solid than recooked abstract concepts that are based on denying perceptions. Important difference. If you sit by a table and you tell yourself you're flying a spaceship, you probably won't be doing anything very sensible. If you can actually operate the controls and land on another planet and pick fruits off the trees, then you might actually have something. If you're only thinking: "This is not a table, it is a spaceship", and you convince yourself, then you're probably just a human who'll have difficulties functioning.
Affirmations are a common newagey way of getting something you want to happen. Nothing wrong with that. Prayers are in the same category. It can be quite useful to affirm or ask for that which you want. You might get it. Better than not to ask for it, or to ask for that which you don't want. But it is also very flimsy as far as realities are concerned. Just a concept and some words. To really get something different, you need to feel it, see it, hear it, taste it. You gotta be able to get into it and drive away. If you only have a movie prop facade, like from Universal Studios, you can't live in it. Workable realities have a whole range of dimensions to it. You can't eat a picture of a cheese. It needs to have a certain consistency, it needs to taste right, and it needs to be nutritious. There's a whole bunch of perceptions and details that need to be there. Realities have a lot of detail, and detail that is not just on the surface, but which sticks quite deep.
However, if we don't need to eat it or live in it, we can be persuaded to accept realities that really are rather flimsy, and which aren't much more than props. But they're detailed enough that we'll accept tham as real without actually inspecting them. You'll probably accept the news and the state of politics in that manner. You don't really go and double-check the news for yourself, to see if it is real. You might check some other sources, but you'll probably stop when you feel you have a picture that is sufficiently self-consistent. It is still just a concept, and has the real substance missing. It is pictures and words and opinions. But it is impractical to get the real thing, so you've become used to accepting a prop. And you're just looking for a certain coherence of the picture, rather than whether it really is edible. And most likely you vote for political candidates the same way. You haven't met any of them. You've just seen them on TV.
So, the people who design mass realities for us have a much easier time than what would be required to design livable realities. You don't have time to receive much more than a cardboard cutout, so their job is simply to provide a cardboard cutout that seems to suit you, and which will survive its journey through the news media, and which will fool you sufficiently. It doesn't have to be the truth and it doesn't have to add up.
But the same rules still apply. You just need less of them. For example, if a certain political character is presented as taking a certain stand, you'll want to hear the history that let up to that. I.e. you want to hear about a background that is consistent with what they're presenting. And you want them to sincerely look like they're playing that part. And you want other people to confirm it. Whether it is the truth doesn't matter. It is obvious that you can't add up everything, so you'll settle for accepting things as more real if you've heard them enough time from people who look like they know what they're talking about. And their story makes sense to you.
You'd want to know about how realities are made in order to protect yourself from mass manipulation.
And for your own sanity you'd want to know how to make your reality that which you prefer. Personal realities are on one hand harder to make than mass realities, because they require more detail and self-consistency. On the other hand they're easier, because there's mainly one person involved, and because the things that make the most difference in your life are rather subjective, and don't really need to be validated by anybody else.
Some people accomplish great things and breeze by even the most impossible obstacles. That's not just because they're gifted in that way from the beginning. More importantly it is because they implicitly believe that things work that way. They don't just believe that as a loose and shakey idea. They feel it, see it, hear it, taste it. They have experiences to back it up. They're both coming from somewhere and going to somewhere that is well-defined, self-consistent and in accordance with that which they're accomplishing. And, no, not just because that's what REALLY happened. Mainly because THEIR reality is structured that way.
The reality you're seeing and touching might appear very real, but it is in no way THE reality. It is probably more real than many of the delusions one can have ABOUT the reality. But as far as the universe goes, there's no scarcity of options. The table you're sitting by is probably just one of zillions of possible tables. The sub-atomic particles it is made of could be in any of an unfathomable amount of states, and they probably are, at the same time, depending on who's looking. You could call that parallel dimensions, or the quantum soup, or Reality with a capital R, or whatever. Regardless, any insistence on that table, or your political views, being some kind of only and ultimate reality is laughable on the scale of infinity. Time and space are but somewhat illusory properties of the way you happen to perceive things. The same pieces appear in so many other guises, at the same time, the appearance of which has a whole hell of a lot to do with how you perceive them and interact with them.
Maybe it is a little pretentious to call it "making" or "creating" realities. It is maybe more like choosing. Every possible different perception you might have about anything at any time forms a possible branching point. Nobody forces you to take any one of them. There might be some inertia going on, but you're always free to start branching off in a different direction at any time.
But it helps to know what realities are made of. Detailed perceptions. A coherent and consistent history. Depth. Multiple levels that all work. Systemic synergy. Things fit together. And for us humans: a meta-story, a set of beliefs about how and why it works. And realities have a certain continuity. They don't flicker on and off all the time. They're there even if you look away and look back again.
You could call it a worldview, but, no, I mean it more tangibly and mechanically than that. As well as bigger. Like the structure of the interface between consciousness and an infinite universe. If you don't believe consciousness really exists, half of what I'm saying is probably making no sense. In that case, think of being able to download yourself into a virtual reality. The power will remain plugged in, and you can populate the reality with what you choose, and you can adjust the parameters of the program. I'd bet you'd want as many perceptions as possible, a certain multi-layered systemic coherence, and you want a certain history and consistency, and some good people to hang out with, and a suitable level of surprise and adventure, and the chance to do really well. Just like in real life.
Human logic, particularly the western mind rooted in latin-based language structures and the canon of science and rationalism, has been primarily binary for the past 2000+ years. It is a logic of certitude bent on easy definition and decisive action. A thing is either A or not-A. Truth is found in numbers and logical proofs. The result is a cognitive interface armed with evidence yet stripped of meaning. There is no motive behind the crime of humanity.
The unfortunate side-effect of such a rational, empirical, ultimately dualistic operating system is a broken connection with nature and the divine. Life is reduced to biochemistry, while spirit is rendered as fantasy or folklore. Thus, the Age of Industrialisation was characterized by a a self-aggrandizing deification of growth and success and the ultimate power of Reason to overcome and subdue anything that stands in our way, giving rise to larger-than-life egos bent on inflicting their will upon the world. But as our desire for control and predictability descended into the subatomic realm, hoping to make better devices for defeating nature (red in tooth and claw), the faithfully predictable mechanistic world defined by Newton, Descartes, and Euclid gave way to the fuzzy world of quantum mechanics and relativity.
Science and especially physics ultimately informs the way we view the world and our relation to its majesty. It takes a while but the prevailing physical paradigms will inevitably seep into the common cognitive logic structures of our remarkably gifted and thoughtful species. We live in a fractal dimension, as above so below, so we'll always try to extrapolate the microcosmic and macrocosmic to the scale of self and society. Much of the planetary crisis that seems to be gripping our species is, I believe, a result of the steady erosion of rationalism and mechanism, so stripped of meaning and unrestrained by the intuitive morality of Spirit. The advent of the physics of light (which has now given rise to an Age of Information that itself is based on light) threatens to completely undermine classical mechanics and bootstrap the human drama into pure science fiction.
Special relativity has evolved a degree of social relativism that is no longer bound by the categorical distinctions that gave rise to the brutal dogmas of religion and racism. Cultures, philosophies, and traditions are simply alternative ways of perception from different frames of reference. Cable TV and the Internet allow one to surf through time and space absorbing all manner of cultural diversities, like different channels of being. General Relativity shows that even spacetime itself is not fixed but, rather, bends and warps, as if god herself is somehow mutable and fluid. Quantum Mechanics continues to climb out of the sub-atomic realm and has been demonstrated on human scales. Non-local communication confounds the Newtonian expectations of distance and time, while seemingly supporting the outcast technologies of magick and metaphysics. Such phenomena as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the Observer-Participant Paradox unseat the demiurge of materialism and place consciousness firmly on the throne of the Kingdom. It would seem that there is no longer any truth, that the once vaulted objective world of the senses doesn't exist. That there is indeed no firmament. The dying god has been crucified and hung upside down, left to perish on the dusty roadside of aeons past.
The new consciousness is attended and reinforced by nonlinear dynamics, fractal mathematics, hypermedia, and the emerging global mind of distributed information networks. Industrialism is fading as the planet begins to spasm under its weight. Misanthropic beaurocracies, greed and selfishness, and vestigial ape politics are doomed to fade against the rise of quantum consciousness. As our logic more accurately reflects the underlying laws of nature, our technology evolves to move into greater harmony with the time-tested solutions of life itself.
Humans seem to have an insatiable need to understand and to make manifest our boundless imagination. Whatever we dream, someone will figure out how to bring it to life.
Here's to sweet dreams.
After thinking about the future for as long I have, I agree with Bucky Fuller that humanity's fate is locked into one of two possible outcomes - utopia or oblivion. I believe such an outcome comes down to just one thing:
Unless humanity trancends hierarchy, we are doomed to oblivion.
This applies both at an individal and collective level. At the collective level all of humanity finds itself in the crosshairs of a war being waged passively and agressively between the old Machiavellian elite and the emergence of a grass-roots, bottom-up, network-enabled, evolving, and rapidly growing collective intelligence. This war is being waged by the elite on multiple fronts. In cyberspace we are being subjected to their weapons of mandatory digital ID, DRM, one-way transparency and our subsequent loss of privacy and civil liberties, while they increasingly hide behind ever-greater degrees of secrecy. In meat space we have the "global war on terror", their latest smokescreen used to justify ever increasing draconian and deadly policies of global piracy, theft and war corporatism (video link).
Unfortunately for them their policies are not sustainable . I think the reason the power-elite are getting nastier is because their hierarchies are under constant assault both aggressively through terrorist networks, and passively through the power of the network itself. For most of human history, hierarchy and alpha-male control has been a part of human culture and politics. However, the emergence of networked intelligence is a direct threat to any kind of hierarchy. Whether it be politics, economics or any other type of game scenario, hierarchy can not compete with massively decentralized networked intelligence.
The power elite controlling the United States government against this new threat is one of several competing heads vying for global domination within this larger campaign of aristocratic hierarchal stuggling to maintain power. It is no surprise then that Vladimir Putin is returning Russia to the days of the USSR in the name of his own phony effort to fight the "global war on terror". It's phony precisely because we can't fight a "war on terror" anymore than we can fight a "war on fear". Their use of this phrase is meant to be deliberately nebulous because it allows them to wage war against an unseen, indefinable enemy that can never be won. That's what they really want, an excuse to fight without any tangible reason whatsoever and without any tangible goal that has an end. Eternal war, straight out of Orwells 1984. Fighting a "global war on green colorless ideas" is perfectly suited to their agenda for global domination. Yes, terrorism is a problem, but not nearly to the extent they want you and I to believe. In the last year alone, 10x more people died from pharmaceutical mishaps than in the World Trade Center. If those in power were truly interested in "saving lives" then why are more people dying under their own policies than by the hands of this so-called "terrorist network" they allege to so enthusiastically fight? Can you imagine a police force that kills more innocent people in one fight against an organized crime syndicate than all other murders committed by this same organized crime syndicate in all of its history?
So if those currently at the top want to remain in power they will be forced by both environmental and political pressures to either surrender to this new emergent more democratic order without hierarchies, or fight it with every last breath they have. So far the latter choice seems to be their preference. Notwithstanding people like Brittany Spears who prefers hierarchies with strong alpha-male leaders in charge to protect us from "evil doers", those in power not only can no longer protect us, they cannot provide us any remaining benefit whatsoever. So why do we continue to tolerate their presence? Because this strong tendency to place our faith and power in teh hands of others was at one time a survival advantage for our species, probably orginating when we were still hanging in the trees. However, we are now on the cusp of space travel and amazing powers of molecular transformation. The use of old primate hierarchies has come to their end. Something far superior has now landed on our evolutionary shores. This new thing is a bottoms-up collective intelligence network that isgrowing smarter each day. It is the way of evolution. If those at the top refuse to accept humanities and in turn the planets new phase in evolution, then they will have to fight evolution itself.
If history is any indicator, evolution cannot be stopped. After at least 5 planetary-scale extinction-level events, life managed to continue, evolve and prosper. Today we are a witness to this 4 billion year plus process of evolution and extropy winning against the background noise of entropy and decay. The signal to noise ratio has increased over time, and in our own lifetimes we have watched this ever accelerating level of intelligence and information grow in the span of a few days.
In the meantime those in power are now struggling to maintain control and are partially succeeding only because they have managed to convince an apparent majority of Americans that all the their lies are the truth. If it wasn't for the most aggressive and impressive propaganda campaign the world has ever seen (even Hitler would be impressed), they would not be succeeding right now. That or they would be forced to take the gloves off sooner. Already they are getting really nasty, which is the first sign they are getting desperate and their grip on power is slipping. In the old days the power elite could sit comfortably knowing their power base was secure without resorting to the gargantuan number of dirty tricks these people have to pull now. Unfortunately for them, these lies are not sustainable when even your typical ignorant Bush supporter will inevitably see this shit landing on his or her front door. Examples of this shit will include a poisoned environment making their families sick from an increased toxicity in the environment, their children going off to fight an unwinnable war, little or no remaining liberties once taken for granted in the constitution, constant government surveillance, a complete lack of basic healthcare, inability to support a basic standard of living they once took for granted. Why? Because if you listen to Republican Party leaders like Grover Norquist, those at the top want nothing less than a complete return to the days of the Robber Barons, where monolithic capitalism had absolutely no limits whatsoever. A return to the days when people had no labor rights or even basic living wages, no social security, no Medicare, no health insurance, no unemployment insurance. Nothing other than abject misery and poverty under the jackboots of their corporate masters. Obviously if these W supporters had any clue that this the future that Bush is delivering them, they would want no part of it. Unfortunately propaganda from places like Fox News and the corporate controlled media have got all these people robotically brainwashed into a one-track mind - 9/11, Sadam, Terrorism. (video link) They don't call it brainwashing for nothing. And because this "shit" hasn't hit the fan quite yet, the Bush administration has managed to keep a lid on it, at least until November 2nd. This is one reason why a part of me wants to see Bush win a second term, because then he and all his cronies will have no choice but to watch as the public, no longer being bamboozled by the aggressive propaganda machine, will finally wake up to the reality of what these people are doing to the planet.
Luckily for us, unlucky for them, this type of society will not come to pass. It simply cannot be sustained. Nowadays, the power of the network cannot be stopped by policy, by legal rollbacks or by draconian technology. The genie is out of the bottle. The network is global, the bottoms-up power of individual and collective action is now unleashed.
The Bush administration is now faced with two ugly possibilities - either they pull out of Iraq, and loose the grand prize of oil and "democracy" (new capitalist markets), or they have to re-instate the draft. Either outcome, which is a sure thing at this point, will prove disastrous for them. If we pull out Bush's greatest base of support, the white macho bully types we all hated in high school will lose face in the wake of defeat. The other option is that Bush will be compelled to re-instate the draft, in which case, the public backlash will be greater than anything we've ever seen before. I suspect the latter will be the option Bush will choose. Since his popularity will fall faster than stock in his previous oil companies, Bush and the power elite will pull off any remaining mask of civility to combat this growing civil unrest. We could see curfews, martial law, economic depression, even mass arrests, you name it. If it gets this bad, then chances are global war is the most likely outcome. In such a scenario the chances of the collective surviving is very slim. Essentially we will watch, as the dogs of war will unleash their self-fulfilling apocalypse.
However, in order for things to get this bad, the Bush administration must be able to hold onto power amidst all this growing power from the bottom. It's quite possible, that even if he does win or steal a second term, during the next four years he will become so unpopular that his administration will not be able to exercise any power. Even if he decides to create some kind of draconian autocratic state as Putin is now doing, America's ability to compete, and in turn generate sufficient revenue from a depressed economy comprised of a disenfranchised unsupporting public will undercut critical financial life-lines.
For example, Airbus will soon likely be suing Boeing in the World Court for tax subsidies given to them by the US government, which by doing so the US violated its own treaty it enthusiastically supports. Unlike the UN, the Bush administration strongly favors these types of global trade agreements. . A trade war is the last thing anyone in positions of high power wants, as its detrimental to everyone, especially their bottom lines. So backing out of it is will not prove as easy as backing out of UN support. The Bush administration is now faced with ever escalating costs and dire consequences in their war for global domination that they will most likely not be able to afford for much longer.
So now we come to the individual question. The ability of people like you and me to survive and prosper regardless of what happens is continuing to increase. It's becoming clear that every person on the earth is fair game to these people. Our odds of getting caught in the crossfire of this war is increasing. However, simultaneously the collective power of the network is empowering us to make connections with like-minded people for support. While the old system crashed down all around us, a new decentralized system of support is coming along to fill in the gabs. Technologies are getting cheaper all the time. What this means is that our ability to create self-sustaining communities with an alternative energy infrastructure, alternative permaculture, alternative medicine is getting better at all the time. This means we won't need to depend on the old system for support much longer. On the near horizon or already hear our cars powered by air, cheap solar cells, wind power under 1 cent per kilowatt-hour, nearly free products from nanomanfacturing, and cheap space travel. Meanwhile every European nation has healthcare for all its citizens. Britain recently put into a place a policy that every new home must come equipped with the infrastructure for easy conversion to solar power.
Although this revolution is untelevised, the power of social software, location based services, peer-to-peer technologies immune to any DRM or law, a semantic web, all of them will make it easier for these types of alternative systems of support to flourish.
The good news is we have evolution on our side, which hasn't lost a fight yet.
Hi Everyone.
You may not be aware, but Future Hi gets about 100-200 spam comments a day that I must de-spam using Blacklist. This has become a huge time waster - with this morning taking over an hour to delete them all. What is amazing about this large number is that it represent the number of spam url's not already on the blacklist. Each day I add the latest spam url's from these comments not already on the blacklist. It works out to about 10-15 per day. Since I've installed MT blacklist a couple of months ago, I've added at least 800 new url's to this list! So what we have here a war between bloggers and spammer companies rushing to create new domain names faster than we can get them into our blacklists.
But alas, I have fixed the problem!! This morning I installed a new program that will automatically close comments on any entry over 14 days old. I figure two weeks is plenty of time for comments on a post to cease. If in the rare instance conversation continues beyond 2 weeks, I can adjust it for more time. The reason this will work, is about 95% of spam comments are coming in under the old archived entries.
By the way, if you've been having trouble making comments, that's probably because the blacklist has bloated to such a huge size that it's now taking that long to decide if your post is acceptable to publish. So when you post a comment, please be patient and allow it time to think.
The good news is that if this new program works as advertised I will be able to de-install the blacklist entirely, and you will no longer have to wait at all for your comment to publish.
Ray Kurzweil says that the biggest challenge for society as we approach the Singularity will be defining what it means to be human.
Heh, yeah right. I really doubt that the semantics of the word "human" will really bother anybody. Derrida and his gang of deconstructionist obfuscators have already shown how easy it is to skewer words and have nobody blink their eye.
People will treat humans as humans in a "I know it when I see it" kind of fashion. And the fact of the matter is, people have had a broad spectrum of what they treat as human for the longest time. Our American founding fathers treated people who were born south of the equator inbetween the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean who also happened to have an evolutionarily beneficial, but darker, pigmentation in their skin, as not human; i.e. slaves.
I think the questions that will come up is how humans, when granted enlightened thinking by machines, will be able to stand on the crutches of traditional human illusions.
For example, Nietzsche announced "God is dead." But I don't think everybody got the memo.
But, in the Singularity, once everybody is given the computing power of a billion Pentiums, they will be able to digest all of the human knowledge in the timespan of a hic-cup, and then get Nietzsche's news. Okay, perhaps this is not a problem because there are many atheists out there who are doing fine without God--or are they? Many studies show that religious faith is highly correleated with happiness.
But what about other illusions, like time, existence, love, purpose.
How will we react when we have a true understanding that time doesn't really exist, and that cause and effect is just a trick of perception, will we cease to treat things the way we treat them? Will we fear death like we used to? Will death even matter?
I guess the answer to those questions is, "it depends on how internalized the knowledge becomes." If we are able to process and deal w/ knowledge in a cold fashion, maybe it won't bother us like it doesn't bother intellectuals now--or does it? I read some of Consciousness Explained from Daniel Dennet, and I had to put it aside because I was seriously starting to lose my mind.
Or another problem in the Singularity is when we have absolute power to control our own emotions. Would we just shut off all pain? Maybe you would say, "but I'll always retain free will, and so I wouldn't choose to shut off all pain." But what if you could shut off your care of free will? "But I wouldn't shut it off." But you would be so smart to know that after you have shut off your care for free will, you wouldn't have any regret, and therefore it is a rational choice. In other words, what is to stop us from ending up in stable equilibrium of being a vegetable in bliss? Would there be safegaurds against it?
I still fantasize a bit about the Singularity and all the cool things I'll be able to do while in it, but to be realistic, I'd say that the Singularity may very well be just one big death. I'm not talking about a physical death, but a pandemic death on every human-laden concept. Even death will die. Life probably won't mean anything to us. Even the notion of "us" and "meaning" will dissolve.
My biggest worry in the Singularity is total dissolution. But then I temper that worry with the trust that even worriment itself will be dissolved. Yipes!
Just came across this (no pun intended) via Fleshbot:
Unlike most of the other online Kama Sutra guides we've featured here over the months, the illustrations on this site are animated—thus making it a lot easier to tell your Black Bee from your Bamboo. But you'll still have to be careful about straining yourself while following the more advanced positions. Those little CGI models are a lot more flexible then you'll ever be.
There's a great interview with author and psychonaut Daniel Pinchbeck, over at The Daily Grail. Here's an excerpt:
One reason that the 60s' mass shamanic journey failed is because people lacked guides or cognitive maps available to interpret and integrate the realms into which they were suddenly catapulted. To make things worse, because our society is so consumer-oriented, people would overdo their intake of psychedelics until they had a regressive or nihilistic effect. John Lennon, for example, said that he tripped over a thousand times on LSD until he destroyed himself. Done in the wrong way, without knowledge or attention to context, psychedelic substances can induce what the Mazatec Indians call "mind shadows," amplifying destructive and negative aspects of the psyche.When psychedelics became politicized and demonized, that also influenced the kinds of experiences people would have when they took them. If you go back to the early 1960s, LSD was considered an "astonishingly safe" drug - even a wonder drug - by psychiatrists. The propaganda against it exponentially amplified the dangers associated with it. The psychedelic experience is personal and delicate and it relies on "set and setting" and cultural context. A lot of other social and gender issues were being worked out during the 1960s, and this added to the general confusion. Those voices that shouted loudest in the 1960s, like Timothy Leary's, tended to be very egoistic and self-aggrandizing. However, even Leary, at first, was trying to find a way to integrate psychedelic use into modern society - he wanted to create a new profession of shaman/psychologist/guide to administer these substances.
As for the "modern neo-shaman," I think they are at a distinct advantage. There is much better information available, and many more guides around who have been through their own initiations. The people who will benefit most will be those who put time and thought and some research into what they are doing. While the professional class that Leary hoped to create does not exist officially, there are people who have stepped into that role.
Spaceship One has won the X-Prize of $10 million!
Yea! This is so cool. A huge milestone in space exploration and I think the X-prize victory will be looked back on as one of the top achievments in space exploration, next to the first man in space, and the first man on the moon.
From our pals over at World Changing:
As oil hit the $50/barrel milestone this week, I thought to myself, "Could Amory Lovins ask for better PR?" Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute recently unveiled a new report on ending oil dependence through efficiency and new technologies, entitled Winning the Oil Endgame. Vinay mentioned it earlier, but it's an important publication and worth highlighting.
With a stellar cast of RMI co-authors, not to mention Pentagon co-sponsorship, this could end up being a very influential report for Lovins & Co. It's already being reviewed in several major news outlets: Fortune, Time, and the Wall Street Journal, for starters. The entire publication is available for free on the website -- so go download and digest:
Saving half the oil America uses, and substituting cheaper alternatives for the other half, requires four integrated steps:• Double the efficiency of using oil
• Apply creative business models and public policies to speed the profitable adoption of superefficent light vehicles, heavy trucks, and airplanes
• Provide another one-fourth of U.S. oil needs by a major domestic biofuels industry
• Use well established, highly profitable efficiency techniques to save half the projected 2025 use of natural gas...By following this roadmap, the U.S. would set the stage by 2025 for the checkmate move in the Oil Endgame—the optional but advantageous transition to a hydrogen economy and the complete and permanent displacement of oil as a direct fuel.
Just came across the Meaning of Life website, where Robert Wright interviews some of the biggest minds in science and philosophy to get their insights and opinions on the big questions. I was pleasantly surprised by some of their views:
Is mysticism an enemy of rationalism? Omid Safi, speaking from a Muslim point of view, says no. (If you're wondering how a Muslim got to be an authority on mysticism: Don't forget about the Muslims known as Sufis.) Is consciousness a mystery--so mysterious as to suggest some higher purpose in the universe? Yes and no, says psychologist Steven Pinker (who more definitively solves the mystery of his hair)
... Why are the world's religions sometimes at each other's throats? Huston Smith, who wrote the book on them, has an answer, and it's inspiring yet depressing ... Can science lead to religion? Well, says Templeton Prize winner Arthur Peacocke, consider the similarity between defining an electron and defining God ... Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, who doesn't (quite)believe in God, nonetheless has a way of taking the sting out of death ... Does mind pervade the universe? Do individual atoms make choices? Don't laugh, says Freeman Dyson; modern physics is full of such weird possibilities ... Not sure if you're living in the moment? Try observing yourself while listening to music, suggests Joseph Goldstein ... Some philosophers say they've explained onsciousness. Dream on, says Francis Fukuyama ... Ever have a religious experience? Andrew Newberg takes pictures of brains that are having them ... Do you have trouble meditating?Meditation expert Sharon Salzberg says that's a feature, not a bug ... The universe seems exquisitely compatible with life. Why? John Polkinghorne has a theory (hint: unlike most physicists, he's a priest) ... Why is biological evolution full of death and suffering? Well, says biologist Ursula Goodenough, if you're so smart, let's see you invent a better means of creating intelligent life. Biologist Robert Pollack has a different take on evil--it's just the toxic waste of free will ... The world's major religions seem pretty different--irreconcilably so, at times. Look closer, says Keith Ward. (Ward also has a few words for those who think science can answer all questions.) John Haught, meanwhile, sees the differences among the world's religions as a bit more stubborn ... Is faith bad for science? Au contraire, says Owen Gingerich ...
For the last 2 days Future Hi and it's hosting provider mysteriously went off line. Glad to be back. Also, I'm looking for someone familiar with perl libraries, and Moveable Type. I need to figure out how to make backups of the entire site, should another server outage result in data loss.