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Future Hi is soon approaching it's one year anniversary. In that time the site has grown in size and popularity. In order to keep it going, there are some bills coming due. In the ten years I've been on the net, I've managed to pay all the bills required to host websites, blogs, etc. This time is different. I'm in grad school now and between the cost of school and my resultant lower income I'm in a crunch to get the bills paid for both the domain name and hosting for another year.
Additionally, I'm looking to move Future Hi to a new hosting provider who offers more bandwith for less cost. Currently this site gets uncomfortably close to the limit of 6GB of transfer each month. I have found a great hosting provider that offers 80GB/month of transfer for only $8/month, or $96 a year. This is a great deal! Better, this provider is rated number #1 in the world two years running. What that means for Future Hi is we could start hosting high quality content, such as audio recordings, video, music, and even a radio station (which I've been contemplating for a long time).
Mark Pesce approached me a few months ago looking for a good place to host some high-bandwidth content. If we can transfer Future Hi to this new provider, then we can offer that space for Mark to host it for the rest of us. There are lots of other things we can do with that space too. I'm looking to add a wiki, forums, and maybe a chat room. I think if Future Hi can meet these goals, it will become an even better site for everyone, and probably attract a lot more people.
There are several other projects in the works. I've been hard at work getting online a psychedelic classic that is been out of print for 25 years. The author has also been dead almost that long. It's a stunning and heartfelt work and deserves to see the light of day. It's also one of the few psychedelic books written by a women. I've put up the introduction and first chapter, so you can see.
Marcia Moore: Journeys Into the Bright World
So if you can donate I would be very grateful. I'm looking for money donations in any quantity you wish to give. I promise you, all this money will go directly to keeping Future Hi alive and growing. Even if you can only donate $5, that will help. If you can donate $10 or even $20, that would be even better. I'm hoping to raise about $200, with a maximum of $300. Once that limit is reached, no more donations will be accepted. If we reach $300, the extra money will go to those of you want to help me with the technical end of things. I already have one volunteer who has graciously offered his skill and time. He isn't asking for anything, but a little money can go a long way.
So please if you can donate something, we will appreciate it greatly. All donors will get an honorable mention on the site, unless you request anonyminity.
To donate, just click on the paypal button here, or on the bottom right hand column.
Two interesting articles in Nature about the brain and spiritual experiences. The first debunks the recent study claiming that the brain was inventing ghosts during sudden electrical storms across the temporal lobes.
The second relates a recent conference on neuroplasticity between western brain researchers and the Dalai Lama. The Lama is keenly interested in neuroscience and how scientific insights can shed light on the mysteries of transcendence.
For many Buddhist monks, this interest in science is focused on an intense curiosity about the workings of the brain. Monks typically spend hours in meditation each day, a practice they say enhances their powers of concentration. Highly trained monks report being able to focus on a single object for hours without distraction and to recall complex scenes in exquisite detail. A question that deeply interests the Dalai Lama, and indeed some neuroscientists, is whether these phenomena have a biological basis.
... Before the late 1990s, it was thought that adult brains were more-or-less complete. Learning involved the development of new connections — but no new neurons were born, and when these cells died they were gone forever. Now it turns out that new neurons do grow and our brains are much more flexible than was once believed. As a key component of Buddhist belief is that meditation literally transforms the mind, Buddhists are keenly interested in scientific advances that could help explain this observation.
Richard Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the coordinator of the Dharamsala conference, has learned from the monks through study. He found that certain neural processes in the brain are more coordinated in people with extensive training in meditation, an observation that may be linked to the heightened awareness reported by meditating monks (A. Lutz et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 101, 16369–16373; 2004).
[neuroscientist Fred] Gage says that what particularly impressed him was the Dalai Lama's empirical approach. "At one point I asked: 'What if neuroscience comes up with information that directly contradicts Buddhist philosophy?'," says Gage. "The answer was: 'Then we would have to change the philosophy to match the science'."
So far that hasn't been necessary.
A psychedelic quilt only possible on a computer. Use the flash version if you can. Amazing.
Panexperietialism or Panpsychism is the belief that mind, or consciousness, is omnipresent throughout the universe and is a fundamental aspect of the universe. It is a position I have argued from here, here and here.
It represents one side of the long running mind-body problem. David Chalmers is probably the most well known and respected person who argues this position. He wrote a great book called The Conscious Mind. Daniel Dennett is the most well known and respected peson who takes the other position. Chalmers and Dennett have had many arguments over the years, and they represent the contemporary philosophical celebrities of this long-running debate. Interestingly, Chalmers and Dennett both believe in free-will.
What is also interesting is that regardless of what position you take in this argument (often called the hard problem of consciousness), either position is not necessarily incompatible with the whole notion of uploading.
To my delight, I came across several blogs today of people who hold the panpsychic point of view. Steve Esser's Guide to Reality (Ideas and Arguments Toward a New Worldview), Justin's Panexperientialism (Exploration of the Philosophical and Scientific implications of a Panexperientialist World View), and Doug Mackey's Qubikuity (Musings of a quantum module of perception embedded in the folds of an unfathomable cosmic superbeing). Doug wrote a science fiction book called Weird Scenes Inside The Godmind, published by Quantum Cosmos.
Steve Esser finished reading A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World (Philosophy of Mind Series) by Gregg Rosenberg. Steve has this to say:
Clearly, I’m a fan of this book. This is no doubt partly because I was already persuaded by the panexperientialist approach to solving the mind/body problem (and I have believed Quantum Mechanics provided evidence for panexperientialism as well). But Rosenberg has added important new strength and depth to panexperientialist ideas by addressing the metaphysical problems posed by causality and showing their connection to the existence of subjective experience in the world. In particular, his system puts forth a credible way to solve the combination problem in showing how experience might participate in causal structures across all levels of nature, including our own “middle” macroscopic level.
Gregg Rosenberg has an online thesis, A Place for Consciousness, exploring the problems of causation and consciousness, leading to a panexperientialist solution.
Another good more science related book is by Goswami called the The Self-Aware Universe.
A few months back I spoke with Dr. Edward Close whose book Transcendental Physics I read, and is a good rigorous scientific covering of panpsychism. Dr. Close uses G. Spencer Brown's calculus of distinctions, from Brown's book Laws of Form. John Lilly based a lot of his thinking around these laws of form. Saul Paul Sirag, who was mentioned in Robert Anton Wilson's book Cosmic Trigger, has a slideshow titled, G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form & John Lilly’s Take on It.
If you want to know more about panpsychism, Justin has listed many more good links on the subject:
Why I became a Panexperientialist by Charles Birch.
Panpsychism by William Seager (encyclopedia article).
Panpsychism by T.L.S. Sprigge (encyclopedia article)
Panexperientialist Physicalism and the Mind-Body problem by David Ray Griffin
Consciousness, Information and Panpsychism by William Seager
Whitehead's even more dangerous idea by Peter Fairleigh
Participation, Organization, and Mind: Toward a Participatory Worldview by David Skrbina. Interesting panpsychist theory based on ideas from chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics. Also contains an excellent history of panpsychism.
For a more mystical approach, I recommend Godspace.
If you've been following the news, school districts in places like Ohio, Delaware and Georgia are now requiring that 'Intelligent Design' be included in public school curricula along with 'Evolutionary Theory'.
Ok. As it turns out there are a lot more intelligent design theories than scientific ones, so which one are you going to teach, or are you going to teach them all? Because the new mandate doesn't stipulate which intelligent design theories you teach, you have plenty to choose from.
Via Preposterous Universe, here is a list of the Top Ten Intelligent Designs:
I can just see the look on the faces of fundamentalist Christian parents when their children come home spouting Zorastrian theories. If the parents were to complain, there is little they could do about it, since it was probably their church that helped pass the law in the first place. I'm sure this isn't what they had in mind.
With the latest shutdowns of Bittorrent tracker sites, the genie of widely and easily available free content is completely out of the bottle, forever. As Mark Pesce explains in this new article at Disinfo:
Pointing up the single greatest weakness of BitTorrent - take down the tracker and the torrent dies - has only served to energize, inspire and mobilize the resources of an entire global ecology of software developers, network engineers and hackers-at-large who want nothing so much, at this moment, as to make the MPAA pay for their insolence. Imagine a parent reaching into a child’s room and ripping a TV set out of the wall - while the child is watching it. That child would feel anger and begin plotting his revenge. And that scene has been multiplied at least hundred thousand times today, all around the world. It is quite likely that, as I type these words, somewhere in the world a roomful of college CS students, fueled by coke and pizza and righteous indignation, are banging out some code which will fix the inherent weakness of BitTorrent - removing the need for a single tracker. If they’re smart enough, they’ll work out a system of dynamic trackers, which could quickly pass control back and forth among a cloud of peers, so that no one peer holds the hot potato long enough to be noticed. They’ll take the best of Gnutella and cross-breed it with the best of BitTorrent. And that will be the MPAA’s worst nightmare.Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you’ve screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you’ll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that’s already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.
It’s said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.
Wow, I'm normally a fan of p2p. I've always thought that content companies would get a clue before it's too late. Now the final nail is being driven into their coffin. A sad day for them. The good is that content can more freely move around without censorship. Creative artists of all stripes will now more easily be able to distribute their creative work widely and more easily than ever before. The downside is the lack of revenue. Will this mean the end of big budget blockbuster movies? How will someone like Peter Jackson make Lord of the Rings without a couple of hundred million dollars and a means to get that money back? It's hard to say. Some claim that strong DRM will prevent it, but that idea has been disproven time and time again, when someone like a 15 year old can circumvent it in an afernoon, and another can write a p2p application in only 6 lines of code.
This may spell the beginning of the end for large creative content projects. The future of film, music and art may now come from smaller producers who are willing to produce their work without nearly as much financial reward. Stupid hollywood... stupid MPAA, RIAA... stupid all the way to the very end.
For some more on the positive side read my Counter Culture 2.0.
Ever brilliant Dale Carrico wrote this piece recently that clearly articulates my own position as well as problems with the singularity idea.
Technophiles who drift uncomfortably in the direction of the megalomaniacal end of the temperamental spectrum often wax enthusiastic about the near term arrival of post-biological superintelligence. Undaunted by the relentless deferment of the "inevitable" arrival of even the modest artificial intelligence we've been promised interminably by enthusiasts for decades, they warn of and (let's be frank) pine for the near-term and inevitable arrival of greater-than-human artificial intelligence to this day in the same urgent, sometimes hushed, tones.Not to delve too deep into my skepticism about this way of thinking, I will simply suggest that these starry-eyed projections (1) tend to overestimate our theoretical grasp of intelligence in general, (2) tend to underestimate the extreme bumpiness we should expect along the developmental pathways from which the relevant technologies could arrive, (3) tend to assume that these technologies, upon arrival, would function more smoothly than technologies almost ever do, and (4) tend to exhibit a rather stark obliviousness about the extent to which what we call technological development is articulated in fact not just by the accumulation of technical accomplishments but by social, cultural, and political factors as well, in consequence of which they simply rarely take these adequately into account at all.
I have no doubt that technology will continue to accelerate. I also have no doubt that computers in general will get smarter. And finally I have no doubt that given time, future intelligence will vastly exceed current human levels. What I do doubt however is that this greater-than-human intelligence will be an AI.
My position has always been that greater-than-human intelligence will be us. The future of intelligence is much more likely to be IA (Intelligence Augmentation) - augmented humans, and soon afterward fully nanoengineered post-humans. Singularitarians are probably correct in their assumption that its much simpler, theoretically speaking, to create a super-intelligence from scratch without all the messy genetic inheritances and logical fallacies that have plagued human intelligence throughout history. But like Dale points out, they vastly overestimate the complexity of actually doing so. This is why my position has always fallen on the more difficult task of figuring out how we humans can use what we have to make ourselves better. This means that both a combination of inner transformational work, along with the outer work of technological development will be necessary to make the transition to a greater-than-human, kinder-than-human intelligence. I think a good start would be to acknowledge the vast human potential (unassisted by technology) that has yet to be tapped.
Combining this human potential along with the powerful tools of nanotechnology should bring about this greater-than-human intelligence we seek. Otherwise, if current events are any indicator, without this kind of inner 'spiritual' transformation these unleashed technologies will bring destruction rather than liberation.
Those in the AI camp have no faith that such an inner transformation can occur, which is why they have put all their faith in a aritifical superintelligence. Some of them have put their faith in one individual who claims to be the one person who has the one solution to making all this happen.
So who is the more foolhardy?
Iceland geothermal vents
In the wake of the very interesting discussion on Peak Oil last week I spent a couple of hours seeing what's happening on the frontiers of alternative energy. I found so much it overwhelmed me. Here's a sampling:
Solar Cell and Battery all-in-one:
Scientists from Toin University of Yokohama in Japan have designed a single, compact device that can both convert solar energy to electricity and store the electricity. "We succeeded in incorporating both photovoltaic and storage functions in a single cell with a thin, sandwich-type structure," said Tsutomu Miyasaka, a researcher at the University.The researchers' photocapacitor is also efficient at capturing energy from weak light sources like sunlight on cloudy or rainy days and indoor lighting.
Many countries around the world are moving aggressively to move their energy production over to alternatives. Here are a few countries - including Iceland, Great Britain and Spain.
Iceland is movng forward to be the first country to have a complete self-sustaining Hydrogen Economy:
The Icelandic government is now backing an ambitious programme to remove all fossil-fuel requirements from Icelandic society within a generation. The key is to use hydrogen or hydrogen-rich compounds in vehicles powered by fuel cells. The first hydrogen buses will hit the streets of Reykjavík early next year, filling up with hydrogen-rich methanol at a new filling station built by Shell, one of the major corporate backers of the project along with Norsk Hydro and DaimlerChrysler.
UK: Solar power for all new homes :
John Prescott has demanded that all new homes built in Britain be designed so that they can receive solar power. Draft building regulations from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, due to come into effect in January 2006, stipulate the change. The move is significant since the government is on the cusp of a major housebuilding drive. It will infuriate housebuilders, adding millions to the cost of constructing homes. But it will delight environmentalists as concerns mount over the effects of climate change. The government's own agency, the Energy Saving Trust, is trying to ensure that all new homes will be powered in part by solar power before the end of 2010.
Spanish government has mandated that solar power be incorporated into all new buildings.
UPDATE: Germany Shines a Beam on the Future of Energy - Nation Gambles on Amped-Up Push for Renewable Power.
Germany is showing how to get alternative energy done. Wind and solar, combined with higher taxes on carbon fuels, all while creating jobs and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.The biggest solar energy power plant in the world just went online in Bavaria, and is expected to quickly turn a profit. 16,000 windmills generate 39 percent of the world’s wind energy; wind and solar now provide more than 10 percent of the country’s electricity, a number expected to double by 2020. 60,000 people are employed in the design and manufacturing of wind and solar equipment. (Germany’s population is 83 million.)
Taiwan moving to Wind Power for at least 10% of total energy needs.
Maldives: Solar Power for Water Purification.
A solar energy powered, off-grid, water purification project will begin in the Maldives in January 2005. The units use solar power to draw the water up and pass it through a system of reverse osmosis units to remove all pathogens, metals and dissolved solids, using just 20% of the power of a standard reverse osmosis unit. Each unit can produce 500 litres of water per day from a single 100 Watt (1 square metre) solar panel. Most systems using reverse osmosis are usually powered by diesel. Using solar power can be both cheaper (based on per litre cost) and avoid air pollution.Two obstacles to renewable energy powered infrastructures in remote areas have been high up-front capital costs and the difficulties ensuring maintenance of the system. Using a new business model where the water itself is sold rather than the purification equipment have helped avoid these. This is also applicable in other off-grid island communities such as Indonesia and the Philippines. Solco expect to be able to six litres of clean water for less than 10 cents (U.S.) per person per day.
Alternative Energy Cambodia: 100% rural electrification by 2020
Green Power can cost the same as non-green (via Worldchanging):
As the Houston Chronicle reports, Green Mountain Energy now offers Houston-area customers electricity from all-renewable sources for the same price as the non-green power sold by the area's major producer, Reliant Energy. Though there are other local providers that have lower rates, Reliant's was the "price-to-beat", and it's a trend that will only continue as oil prices rise. Over the next few years, green power will get more and more competitive, even without advances in renewable-generation technology.
Want to use Hydrogen Now? Hydrogen without the Hiccups.
The picture above is of a Laddermill kite assembly for wind power generation (story courtesy of Alt-Energy Blog).
High-altitude kites could be used to generate clean energy at a cost comparable with that of fossil fuel generation , researchers claim.The "Laddermill" is a chain of controllable wing-like kites attached to a looped cable stretching more than five miles into the sky. Strong high altitude winds acting on the "kitewings" produce as upward force on one side of the loop and a downward force on the other, causing it to rotate. The slowly turning cable drives a power generator in the Laddermill base station.
Although the concept sounds far fetched, its developers at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands hope to build a working model in the next four years. They claim one Laddermill could generate 100 megawatts of electricity, compared with only a few megawatts from a conventional wind turbine.
Winds at 30,000ft are 20 times more powerful than at sea level.
Professor Ockels, an ex-astronaut and head of the European Space Agency's education office, told The Engineer magazine: "Above a certain altitude there is a massive amount of wind power. "Kites that can tap into that wind can generate a great deal of energy."
Molecular Manufacturing vs. Peak Oil - great article that points out how nanotechnology will empower us to create alternative energy technologies before we run out of oil. Read the comments section for some excellent follow-up discussion.
The potential of nanotechnology has long held promise of delivering very very cheap solar power. Here are three companies working on using nanotechnology to create cheaper and more efficient solar cells.
At least three startups -- Nanosolar, Nanosys and Konarka Technologies -- are using nanotech to try to make solar energy more viable. In time, such work could become "world changing," said Josh Wolfe, a managing partner of nanotech-focused investment firm Lux Capital in New York. Lux has invested in Nanosys."All three of these firms have a different approach, but all of them are trying to create solar energy anywhere, any time," Wolfe said.
Needs To Hit 7-Cent Mark.
Nanotech solar cells could come down to fossil-fuel prices within a few years, says Steven Milunovich, an analyst with Merrill Lynch. Electricity now costs 7 cents per kilowatt-hour in the U.S. and 19 cents in Japan. Solar cells run about 43 cents. "There could be significant adoption" if nanotech solar drops below 7 cents, said Milunovich in a recent research note. Nanotech could have "a significant impact" on the $3 billion-plus solar power market.
"Cheaper manufacturing plants and processes could make solar competitive with fossil fuels," he wrote.
Nanosolar, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is building nanotech panels that are 100 times thinner than current solar panels.
If it's a 100 times thinner then that means 100 times less material to achieve the same or greater energy about. This equates to a lot less cost for making solar cells.
The Future of the Car: Plug-In Hybrids?
The next step may be the "plug-in" hybrid... unlike the electric cars of the 1990s, none of today's hybrids needs to be plugged in - but if plugging were an option it would be a good idea. Andrew Frank and his team at the University of California Davis' Hybrid Electric Vehicle Centre are working exclusively on plug-in hybrids, which can operate as pure-electric vehicles over short distances (up to 60 miles, with a large enough battery pack) but can switch to a hybrid system when needed. Since the average American driver travels about 30 miles a day, plug-in hybrids could be recharged overnight, when electricity is cheaper to produce, and need never use petrol at all, except on longer trips.
Related Hybrid Links:
Plug-In Hybrids: The Cars We Can Have Now and for the Next Ten+ Years.
Green Car Congress Article on hacking the Toyota Prius to make it a plug-in hybrid
Ok, I might be pissing in the wind here, but over the last couple of years I've become more eager and passionate about community building - both online and off. I started Future Hi with the hidden purpose of bringing like-minded, progressive thinkers together under the banner of 'visionary futurism'. What exactly is visionary futurism?
If my experiences at Burning Man have taught me anything is that utopia is not only desirable, it is achievable. All that I have believed about the desirability of sustainable communities, alternative economics/currencies, the leisure society, accelerating technology, creativity, genuine freedom, authentic happiness and spirituality, I see embodied in some form at Burning Man.
What impressed me the most is that all these people come together with such passion and hard work to make this event possible. Although credit is due to its founders and organizers, the real magic happens on the playa itself... the unpredictable, the unexpected, the sublime. The real burning man is all the individual people and communities coming together the way it does… the Dionysian, spontaneous, orgiastic explosion of spirit becoming manifest on the blank canvas of the playa.
Why then can't this be re-created and sustained every day? Some would say politics, economics, the rigidity of the legal code, conservatism in our communities, lack of coordination, all of the above.
Despite these obstacles, I have come to believe that personal utopia is possible. For most people Burning Man is utopia for the short time they are there.
Here are my questions for you the readers:
1) What can Future Hi do specifically to get this idea going? Is the email list I just created a good start? I felt the blog format is too limited for this purpose. I created the email list so that anyone could start a topic. Would creating a wiki or forum be better? Does anyone know how to start a wiki? I think a Future Hi wiki would be a good idea anyway.
2) What specifically is needed to create sustainable communities that are not dependent on any kind of centralized commodity (i.e. petroleum, government issued currencies, Wal-Mart and other corporate goods, centralized agriculture, etc.)? I don't think this has to be a black and white issue, rather the more a community can depend on itself the more sustainable and stable it is. Is this correct or faulty thinking on my part?
3) What are the major obstacles from this happening?
4) is this whole idea flawed from its lack of global thinking? What I mean by this, is it too selfish to focus on community building that only assists those in this community who share similar goals, or is genuine transformation only possible by embracing and building global systems that support the same thing (i.e the internet, social software, the semantic web, alternative digital currency technologies, etc.)? In other words is our own personal utopia better built by staying within the mainstream culture and changing from within? Is working towards more personal goals in this regard doomed?
I just came across this site:
Star Stuffs: Physics & Consciousness.
Quantum physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists and mystics have evolved to the point where a significant paradigm shift is happening. The universe is viewed as sympathetically connected, unifying, matter, energy and consciousness.Physics unites the many mathematical principles and perhaps one day physics will merge with spiritual and religious principles. The gap is narrowing.
By the mere sample I've given here, it surely demonstrates the connection of the role of science and consciousness plays. It's an interweaving of basic fundamental processes. Science has everything to do with consciousness, it is One with it. There is no one place something "starts" and "ends". It is a continuum of the same. Just like there are not real defining lines of the dimensional levels. All is connected.
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On a wim this morning I created a Future Hi email list. I though it might make a perfect venue for people here to communicate more easily with each other. More importantly it allows everyone to bring up their own topics for discussion.
The idealist in me is hoping that sites like this, and others like World Changing, can help foster and bring together like-minded people to create more sustainable offline communities that would culminate in the creation of, for lack of a better world, a "Burning Man" like lifestyle 365 days a year.
To join go here:
The latest edition of NeoFiles includes a conversation between Daniel Pinchbeck and R.U. Sirius. Here's an excerpt:
NF:What happens if 2012 comes around, the rent is still due, and another Bush is President? Are you exploring 2012 as a possibility or committing to it? Isn’t there a risk in hitching prophecy to psychedelic culture — the chance that it will go the way of Edgar Cayce or Ramtha? And the risk that people will engage in silly apocalyptic actions on the chosen day?
DP: One way or another, by 2012 we will know decisively whether or not there is any interesting or even possible future for humans on this planet. We are ruining and desecrating the biosphere at an incredible and unsupportable rate. The planetary ecology is crumbling at this point, as the climate disintegrates. When I wrote my first book and saw huge sections of the Amazon that had been destroyed, systematically, to extract enough oil, in most cases, to supply the US demand for 3 - 5 days each, I knew that it was curtains for this present system. We are already in the apocalypse, and most people are in an apocalyptic mode of consciousness — either narrowing themselves down into hellish corporate scenarios or freaking out and stuffing themselves with anti-anxiety meds to become functional robots. Those who are going to make it through the transition are those who remain calm, spacious, open, and maintain presence of mind. It seems to me that there is a lot of subliminal preparation going around with the mass interest in yoga and various forms of meditation. Ultimately, both the Apocalypse of hell and the “Golden Age” of unconditional love and compassion are states of mind — and that is what the present situation is making increasingly clear. As the Buddha said, “What you think is what you are.”It is very interesting to me, of course, that Bush and his minions are themselves seemingly accelerating the apocalyptic prophecies of the Christian Fundamentalists. We are in a transition to a new form of consciousness. However, I see their perspective as regressive — regressing back into a tribal-magical consciousness — rather than progressing into a truly global, compassionate mindset that incorporates a deeper understanding of time, with a non-dualistic perspective on mind and matter.
What we are seeing right now are endless projections of the Jungian “Shadow” into our material realm. Having accepted that consciousness creates reality, my own perspective is that we are soon going to enter a harmonious and utopian situation on the Earth. That seems to me to be strictly logical."
Is this our future?
or this?
or something else altogether different?
Peak Oil is getting more and more attention these days. Most people either think that Peak Oil is decades away so we have nothing to worry about, or it is now upon us, or soon will be, and that society as we know it will collapse. Most of the latter think progress will not continue and we will not be able to transition to an alternative energy economy. They say most people, at least in the developed world, will die and those that are left will be living like the Amish; making do with what scraps they can find (Think The Postman). Do you agree, disagree? Why?
Some people say that we must transition to a hydrogen economy. Our pals over at World Changing, just posted an overview of the hydrogen economy, with some good links. I have become more skeptical of the hydrogen economy, in light of some of its proponents saying we may have to depend on centralized nuclear power to make it feasible. For me, that is two strikes against it - nuclear (with all of its waste), and centralized (controlled by elites). My opinion is that the more decentralized and ecologically sustainable our energy infrastructure is, the more democratic, and politically and environmentally stable our world would be. I'm hoping we can transition to an alternative energy infrastructure before it's too late.
Is it too late for a Design Science Revolution?
Do you think that we will transition past Peak Oil into a transhumanist future? How? Or is the future going to look like the Amish in rural Pennsylvania? Do you think that this whole question is the wrong question? Is Peak Oil a myth?
My main reason for starting this open forum is to hear from people who can provide a third point of view - one that acknowledges the peak oil problem, while providing a way out that does not consist of going back 200 years and living like the Amish.
Let the conversation begin.
I just became aware of this new Robert Anton Wilson site. It has some downloadable mp3's.
RAWilson Fans - A Time Binding Site
Courtesy Disinfo.