Today's muse, there is no real example in our natural world, of ourselves. We create machines to transport ourselves, we create memory enhancements, we mess with the reproductive systems of ourselves and other species, we have taken unto ourselves the role of "King/Queen" of the planet. Aren't we quite the upstarts.
Individually, especially as we age, we seem to begin to understand that we are not "above" this system, we are part of it, no matter how much we think we are in control, even the largest ego has to come to the understanding it is not powerful enough to transcend the system of its birth. So there is a natural ebb and flow of life, that we all come to grips with, and is written and talked about in countless ways, religious/spiritual, philosophical and scientific.
What interests me is that this system of individual gnosis that we are all forced to deal with by the end of our individual lives, seems strangely absent from the species i.e., the human collective, the human species ego, seems unbridled, almost out-of-control. What is going on here?
- Does our almost unique tool making ability foster this collective hubris?
- Is there a collective human species evolution occurring, one that scientists have yet to quantify, and are we in the equivalent of adolescence?
- Or, are we simply at the top of the food chain, and is this the result of having no real predators (other than ourselves of course)?
- Are we really out-of-control, or is this hyperkinetic human collective energy really a means to some unseen end or a part of some unseen evolutionary process?
One final thought, I try and monitor the latest goings on in human tool building, and I often look to the work of MIT's Media Lab, they have something called the MIThril project:
Individually, especially as we age, we seem to begin to understand that we are not "above" this system, we are part of it, no matter how much we think we are in control, even the largest ego has to come to the understanding it is not powerful enough to transcend the system of its birth. So there is a natural ebb and flow of life, that we all come to grips with, and is written and talked about in countless ways, religious/spiritual, philosophical and scientific.
What interests me is that this system of individual gnosis that we are all forced to deal with by the end of our individual lives, seems strangely absent from the species i.e., the human collective, the human species ego, seems unbridled, almost out-of-control. What is going on here?
- Does our almost unique tool making ability foster this collective hubris?
- Is there a collective human species evolution occurring, one that scientists have yet to quantify, and are we in the equivalent of adolescence?
- Or, are we simply at the top of the food chain, and is this the result of having no real predators (other than ourselves of course)?
- Are we really out-of-control, or is this hyperkinetic human collective energy really a means to some unseen end or a part of some unseen evolutionary process?
One final thought, I try and monitor the latest goings on in human tool building, and I often look to the work of MIT's Media Lab, they have something called the MIThril project:
The goal of the MIThril project is the development and prototyping of new techniques of human-computer interaction for body-worn applications. Through the application of human factors, machine learning, hardware engineering, and software engineering, the MIThril team is constructing a new kind of computing environment and developing prototype applications for health, communications, and just-in-time information delivery.Of course the researchers call themselves the MIT Borglab, but this does pose an interesting question, are we as a species being "accelerated" to create a new "species", in a non-traditional way because there is a some kind of planetary level need that we do not yet see. We often think of our species as causing great pain to our planet, and perhaps even destroying it, but what if we are actually in the process of evolving, or creating, a species that may be able help? Or maybe the earth is "hatching" itself, and we are the new born.
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