Cultural Musingstag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009-05-20://12009-07-14T14:58:12ZMovable Type Commercial 4.25Earth eyestag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.432009-07-14T13:00:00Z2009-07-14T14:58:12ZktsToday's muse, there is something odd about taking our biological eyes, removing them from the planet from which they are sustained, and then looking back. July 20, 1969: I had turned 15 that spring, having moved across the country three times in the preceding four years, I was in the midst of a pretty serious adolescent depression, but even from that place of pain, the events of this day, and the months leading up to it, were riveting for me, and for billions of others on the planet. It is this image, actually taken from Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968, seven month's before the first moon landing, that remains for me the defining image of this time.
I am sure technology historians have plenty of practical explanations for why computing and the network of the Internet exploded into being shortly thereafter, perhaps even helped by this massive technological objective; but I can't help but think that we are in the midst of the earth waking up, some massive psychic (?) eruption that is currently underway, of which humans at present, seem to be the primary tool of implementation. Perhaps it will quiet down into millions of years of more "normal" evolutionary change, however the big gigantic changes in direction are almost always accompanied by massive heat, destruction and then creation, how hot will it get, how much will be destroyed, and what will be created in its place? Are we the destroyer of worlds, the creator, or all or none of the above?]]>
Andrew Olendzki and observational systemstag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.422009-07-13T13:00:00Z2009-07-13T14:20:54Zkts
Andrew Olendzki talk yesterday. I can only image the level of mindfulness and the organic observational system that grows out of such a set of practices conducted over the last 2,500 years or so.
I was listening for what Andrew had to say about the collective, and I found it interesting that he didn't have much to say. Whether right or wrong, I assume that the collective is not very accessible from the practice, which I found personally unsettling. Unsettling because with this much wisdom and history, that it is not apparent, may call into question any meaningful concept of the human collective. It may also simply mean that with such a powerful focus on individual observation, that the collective is not particularly accessible through this approach. So as is often the case, with anyone operating from a system of beliefs, if something is not "knowable" from the system, it tends to take on the characteristic of being uninteresting, which had I asked Andrew this question, is the way I think he might have responded.
For me the unsettling part, give the power and history of the practice Andrew described, is that he may be right, that any attempt to "see"' the collective from our "cell" like position, is doomed to tautological failure. Perhaps the great questions are by definition unanswerable, and perhaps our thoughts are simply "events" on the wave of motions....
But I am a seeker, I seek therefore I am... or am I not? ]]>
Mindful changetag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.412009-07-10T13:00:00Z2009-07-10T14:51:00Zkts Would it be possible to quantify mindfulness and change rates, in society, and see how or if they are correlated with other social phenomena? While we as individual's will assume, perhaps in our ego, that we can hold mindfulness and motion in our individual selves, most culturally violent rapid action has a distinctly unmindful characteristic, and when was the last time meditators were engaged in revolution?
I have to say, the more I reflect on the human condition, the more I see us as operating in a complex web of interrelationships as though the human species is either some sort of super organism itself, or, engaged in creating one. And I will risk a species-centric comment, and say that this collective organic ability seems to be unlike any other species we have on this planet with us. ]]>
Bio-tech evolution... the human species in motiontag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.402009-07-09T13:00:00Z2009-07-09T16:11:20Zkts
Gamma-ray Pulsars, I am reminded of how much motion/change is an integral part of our lives and the life of the entire universe. When motion stops, we atrophy, just look at our bodies for example, if we lead sedentary, motionless lives. Contrast this with mediators who sit in mindful quiet, paying attention to their breath and to their thoughts; and contrast this with today's childhood obesity epidemic, children it would appear, consumed by their electronic gadgets.
What does it all mean, for example, is there a collective motion with some kind of meaning or intent? Certainly one can image a war, like the mobilization of WW II, where from a motion standpoint, the world was highly agitated, almost frenetic, and change erupted. Interestingly, as technology has advanced, it has allowed humans to move faster and faster, so fast, that we "spin" off the earth metaphorically, but also, as in our children, to move slower and slower.
Is there a coming social crisis of technology, where we as the human species will be confronted with a dialectic, either embracing wholeheartedly the motion that is the integration of technology into human evolution or repelling from it, into what, stillness? Or to state this another way, will we allow biotechnology to morph into "techno-humanology", where the line between traditional evolutionary change and the merger with bio-tech enhancements becomes so blurred as to be indistinguishable, or, are we on the edge of a revolt and return to an "unenhanced" state, sort of a modern Luddite position.
If we follow the high energy here, it seems almost inevitable that we are about to give new meaning to the term human evolution, in fact we may have already started, we just don't have a name for it yet. What will we call this new species? Will we become it, or battle it? ]]>
Planetary Reproductiontag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.392009-07-08T13:00:00Z2009-07-08T14:09:53ZToday's muse, the astronomer Carl Sagan remarked that from a cosmic viewpoint, the space probes since 1959 have the character of a planet preparing to go to seed. Sagan, Carl and Jerome Agel, (1973) "Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective", (Anchor...kts
Sagan, Carl and Jerome Agel, (1973) "Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective", (Anchor Press, , ISBN 0-521-78303-8)
It sometimes feels as though the planet, through us, is searching for its kin, or perhaps, its mate. I wonder what planetary reproduction would look like? ]]>
Metamorphosistag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.382009-07-07T13:00:00Z2009-07-07T12:45:45Zkts ]]>
Wisdom's stasis amid the growth of knowledgetag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.372009-07-06T13:00:00Z2009-07-06T15:02:29Zkts Just as we humans are the constraint in jet fighters, and are slowly being replaced, I wonder if humans are also a constraint in another more profound way. Wisdom, or perhaps I should say the lack of growth of wisdom, seems to be equally constraining in this system (for which I don't really have a name). Wisdom seems to be self-limited by the biological constraint of the human organism i.e., we have to learn and relearn wisdom in each one of our lives. As knowledge and power continues to grow exponentially across thousands of generations, wisdom continues to cycle, limited by our lifespan. Unfortunately, wisdom does not seem to lend itself to growth as does knowledge, or at least I have not been able to see a clear trend of a growth in wisdom over the ages.
Perhaps this is natures way of limiting how destructive we can be, as our inability to grow wisdom almost guarantees our own self-destruction, or perhaps, we have in our future a way to learn wisdom. Here's to the latter! ]]>
The hyperkinetic human collectivetag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.362009-07-03T13:00:00Z2009-07-03T14:41:11ZToday'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...kts 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. ]]>
The human planetary tooltag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.352009-07-02T13:00:00Z2009-07-02T14:33:09Zkts A friend pointed me to an article the other day that takes a geophysical perspective of calling the earth a "living super-organism". While this was strictly a geophysical view, if this view was to be expanded to include biology, I suspect we might be able to step back and see the geophysical life cycle, and planetary biological life cycle operating in unison, and symmetry. The challenge of integration here is both scale and impact. Most biological time frames, even when figured on a macro-level e.g., mammals rather than humans etc..., are dwarfed by geophysical life cycles. And second, as much as we see human/biological planetary impact, this impact is dwarfed by the impact of geophysical life cycles.
Certainly human/biological planetary engineering skills are growing, and it does cause one to wonder if there is some grand design here, will the "planet" need these human tools at some point in the future? I am reminded of all the symbiosis we see in nature, particularly underwater. Perhaps we should worry less about our ability to destroy our own planet, and worry more about what our planet has in store for us.]]>
And the human forecast for today is...tag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.342009-07-01T13:00:00Z2009-07-01T12:56:45ZToday's muse, I was watching Wimbledon tennis on TV the other day, and they have a neat feature showing a player's court coverage. Every time a player hits a ball, they freeze a picture of the player at the time...kts What if we were to use this technique to trace our movements as a society of people. I keep coming back to the image of an ant colony, all purposefully moving about with clear collective goals in mind, at least as observed by us, but convinced, at least so I image, that they are acting from "free will". There are of course lot's of motion studies, automotive traffic engineers have built up an entire science on traffic flows, and I am sure retailers have reams of data on pedestrian flows in malls and of course the demography of migrations. But I am thinking about human flows on a far larger scale, both in numbers or people tracked, the time frames and the data points. Perhaps using a freeze frame concept of tracking as a data point, for example, every time someone talks in person to a "different" individual.
What would we learn? We would certainly see the rhythms of the day, but I suspect that given time and scale, we would see more subtle attributes. For example, would we see any correlation between inventiveness and communication? Correlations with income, education...? Leaving the issues of privacy/big brother aside, this is computationally at least, akin to weather forecasting, would we then have human forecasting, if so what would a human forecast look like? And of course there is the age old question, would watching ourselves to this level of detail and scale, change our collective behavior? ]]>
Caution, brain wave transmission in progress...tag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.332009-06-30T13:00:00Z2009-06-30T13:09:34ZToday's muse, Toyota's brain wave controlled wheelchair was demonstrated to the press yesterday. The breakthrough here, according to AP, is the wheelchair's ability to change direction within 125 milliseconds of the generation of a specific brain wave, which is near...kts In researching a domain name I was interested in a couple of weeks ago, I came across an Australian visual artist, Karen Casey, who is working on creating visual art using brain waves of people all over the globe, collected through the Internet, and in some cases projected live to large outdoor screens in different countries . Although this is a work in progress for now, the concept is fascinating, and the result could be truly stunning, leading I suspect, to outcomes that might even surprise and delight the artist herself. GlobalMindProject.com will launch shortly with an official project launch in October, stay tuned....
Given the technology leaps of the last say, 500 years, it is hard to image what the "global mind" will look like in the year 2509. Probably the wildest science fiction that we can think of today, might just begin to describe the reality of 2509. I can't resist just a couple of speculative thoughts on the 2509 landscape:
- Wi fi will not connect our laptops, it will connect our brains; - we will be able communicate with our friends and co-works without talking or writing; - keyboards will have gone the way of the Model T; - personal privacy discussions will morph into thought privacy discussions; - the term "mindshare" will take on whole new dimensions; - countries may begin to be defined, not by geography, but by mindography. ]]>
The global personalitytag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.322009-06-29T13:00:00Z2009-06-29T13:39:35Zkts So rather than attribution of creation, be it artistic or intellectual, to the individual, it is interesting to think of attribution of creation to the particular biological mix, or even brain mix, on the planet at any particular time. This concept manifests, tangentially at least, in common thought as the same idea being "discovered" by different people, far removed from each other, at roughly the same time.
It would be interesting to develop a language of describing the characteristics of what might be called the "global personality" at any given time in history. While this personality could of course include non-human conditions at any give time, I would propose that it would be most interesting to think about this personality in collective human terms and come up with some attributes for this "global personality" which, one would hope, be described as changing over time. Would this "global personality" have an attribute of age, i.e., maturity? Could it be described in truly universal cross-cultural terms, how about even cross-species terms?
This language will be challenging because we are so predisposed to the individual and to individual attribution. But if we look at ideas and tools as coming out of the perspective of the human collective, rather than the human individual, it may enhance our understanding of current trends, like what appears to be the incredibly rapid and powerful trend of the building of human networking tools.]]>
Today's muse, what to pay attention to...tag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.312009-06-20T13:04:08Z2009-06-21T13:31:52Z- What the collective is doing, the individual has very little information in this context. [Ironic this, as I could be telling you not to pay attention to this writing.]- The intersection of biology and technology, to include biotechnology and...kts - The intersection of biology and technology, to include biotechnology and more "hard edged" intersections, especially intersections that maybe extended beyond the planet.
- Idea "epidemics" that sweep across the global, and through many different cultures.
- The collective unconscious, hard to spot, must be looked for indirectly.
- Species transcendence when observed in collective thinking, especially when it also transcends the earth.
- "Building" that may not take any shape that we know i.e., preparing for the unexpected "building". ]]>
Can we really transcend ourselves?tag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.292009-06-19T11:26:50Z2009-06-19T13:28:04Zkts 1. While tool use has been seen in other species, there appears to be no evolutionary precedent for tool use on anything like the scale of human capabilities, this makes us special, on earth at least.
2. This special capability was "given" to us to build something greater than the species, that perhaps transcends life on this planet, and perhaps, even the biological paradigm we arose from. I know this sounds like sci-fi, at least for now I am using "given" in an evolutionary sense, not in a higher consciousness sense.
3. We as individuals are akin to cells, just as I can imagine how hard it would be for a cell to "know" the larger organism it is part of, or part of a process of, we individual human "cells" will find it difficult to "know" the the larger "organism" or "organic process" that we are a part of. Use of the biological term here is strictly by way of analogy, I do not intend to imply that the larger process is actually organic, or not.
4. There is a lot of talk about what is commonly called the Gaia hypothesis, frequently described as the view of the Earth as a single organism, my working assumption is that "the building" transcends this concept. If there is a single organism, it may be serving the role of "petri dish". I may be guilty of species self-centeredness, I would like to plead Nolo contendere as I am also saying that we as individuals are like cells, or maybe ants...
5. There is also a lot of popular discussion about whether or not we are creating some kind of networked "super mind". Jamais Cascio has a nice survey piece titled Get Smarterin the July/August 2009 Atlantic, though the author also throws in lot's of lower level stuff too. One of my operating beliefs on this quest, is that anything that is high on our individual "cellular" consciousness is probably only a portion of the building, or in this case, another tool, though certainly a collective one. If we are really "brain" cells, look how fast we are growing in this graphic, Human Population through History 1 A.D. to 2020. (Reminds me more of cancer than anything else, but I digress.)
There is something humbling in the idea that we as individuals are the equivalent of cells being used to build something that, almost by definition, we cannot know. For me it is looking around the edges of life, the edges of consciousness, that may illuminating as to what we are being used to build. I find it intriguing, and not at all surprising, that it is physicists who are starting to see parallels between collective human behavior and the atom. ]]>
Transcending our fixation with the tools... what are we building?tag:www.culturalmuse.com,2009://1.282009-06-18T12:50:12Z2009-06-18T13:16:24Zkts While still fairly rare, there are occasionally thinkers who transcend the tools and look at the larger issues of the building. When I run across these thinkers, I will make a point of mentioning them here. Eventually, if there are enough references, I may consolidate them into a special section of the blog. To start this off, I would like to mention Peter Daou's recent piece at the Huffington titled The Philosophical Significance of Twitter: Consciousness Outfolding. It is actually not so much the content of Peter's piece that I find noteworthy, it is the method and perspective he applies to his analysis, his ability, when talking about Twitter, to look at issues of the collective mind, the "folding" of the universe and even quantum theory, all good stuff, and viewpoints that is in general, are sorely lacking in our present day social consciousness. ]]>
Today's muse, there is something odd about taking our biological eyes, removing them from the planet from which they are sustained, and then looking back. July 20, 1969: I had turned 15 that spring, having moved across the country three times in the preceding four years, I was in the midst of a pretty serious adolescent depression, but even from that place of pain, the events of this day, and the months leading up to it, were riveting for me, and for billions of others on the planet. It is this image, actually taken from Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968, seven month's before the first moon landing, that remains for me the defining image of this time.