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Last login: 4 hours agoLaodan: laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.; Likes 1,587 pages, 24 videos, 8 photos • 227 fans • Received 64 reviews; Member since Aug 08, 2005

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The Archdruid Report: Not The End Of The World: May 1, 9:47am 1 review evolution, society, change, worldviews
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/04/not-end-of-world.html; Not The End Of The World in The Archdruid Report by John Michael Greer
It's not the end of the world, or even the end of industrial civilization, but if history is anything to go by, we could be in for a couple of very rough decades. A crisis phase in the downward arc of catabolic collapse is not a pleasant thing to live through, and we can expect it to have social, economic, political, and (unless we're extraordinarily lucky) military dimensions that will transform most people\u2019s lives for the worse, temporarily or forever. That need not stop us from facing the emerging crisis with as much grace and humanity as we can muster, while doing our part to lay the foundations for the ecotechnic societies of the future - unless, that is, we allow premature proclamations of triumph or catastrophe to distract us from the work that must be done. Not The End Of The World. A most enlightened vision of societal change. This post is perhaps John Michael Greer's most influential one. He is undoubtedly right that "Human societies are complex homeostatic systems that respond to changes in their environments by trying to maintain their equilibrium." Failing to understand this organic way of societies leads to simplistic interpretations of present events that contracts reality into its dualistic visions of doom and gloom versus technophilia. Those are unhelpful perception crutches at best and devastating at worst. We are not close to the end of the world as the title of Greer's post states but we are at a societal stage of evolution that is going to displace modernity for something new often referred to as postmodernity. But the word has been twisted to say so many things that its meaning has often been lost on its users. Postmodernity is the stage of societal evolution that follows modernity and the transition is, for sure, going to be traumatic for most. Each stage of societal evolution has its own economic, social, cultural and other characteristics but what differentiates each of them is the worldview (understanding of reality) that is shared by the citizens within their societies. We observe 4 stages of evolution: - animism: citizens of tribes share an animistic worldview. - religion: citizens of kingdoms and empires share one or another form of religious belief and or one or another philosophic derivation of animism. - modernity: citizens of nation-states share a common vision of rationality (derived from the logic of capital) and believe that science has technological answers to everything. - postmodernity: citizens of the world will share a common vision of reality wherein humans are seen as interconnected minuscule particles of a whole that is unattainable. The transition between modernity and postmodernity is a process of change that will take many decades to stabilize and, for sure, there will be ups and downs along the road. Before to tackle the causes of climate change we'll suffer its consequences. Before to tackle peak oil and other resources we'll be confronted with shortages in energy and materials that will oblige us to revise our ways of living. Before to tackle poverty we'll be confronted with individual and societal violence that will oblige us to care for the weakest ones among us. Our future is in ecotechnic societies interconnected through solidarity.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: The Open Future: Open Source Scenario Plan…: Feb 5, 5:31pm 3 reviews complex-systems, evolution, future
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004246.html; Open Source Scenario Planning in WorldChanging by Jamais Cascio
... scenarios offer a range of possible outcomes used less as predictions and more as "wind tunnels" for plans. ... Imagine a database of thousands of items all related to understanding how the future could turn out. This database would include narrow concerns and large-scale driving forces alike, would have links to relevant external materials, and would have space for the discussion of and elaboration on the entries. The items in the database would link to scenario documents showing how various forces and changes could combine to produce different possible outcomes. Best of all, the entire construction would be open access, free for the use. As a result, people around the world could start playing with these scenario elements, re-mixing them in new ways, looking for heretofore unseen connections and surprising combinatorial results. Sharp eyes could seek out and correct underlying problems of logic or fact. Organizations with limited resources and few connections to big thinkers would be able to craft scenario narratives of their own with a planet's worth of ideas at their fingertips. This is what a world of open source scenario planning might look like. Open Source Scenario Planning OtF Core: Open Source Scenario Planning in "Open the Future". WHAT IF? THE ART OF SCENARIO THINKING FOR NONPROFITS FREE 119 pages ebook. The Limits To Scenario Planning in TOD by Big Gav Limits to Growth, The 30-Year Update Whow! This idea is just great. I guess after reading the available material I'll need some time digesting it. I had read "The Limits to Growth" in the seventies and came out of it strongly influenced by this idea, that was new to me at the time, to look at the future as being the outcome of a scenario intertwining the possible evolution of a given number of determinant factors deduced from our understanding of the present. But I had never encountered before this idea of open source scenario planning. So no further comment for the moment only that I will now also have to read the 30 year update to "The Limits to Growth" that came out in 2004.

Evolution And The Hive Mind: Dec 15, 2007 4:57pm 3 reviews evolution, worldviews
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/hive_mind.shtml; Evolution And The Hive Mind via 3QD, in Science a gogo by Rusty Rockets
Now that scientists are readily identifying genomic changes due to selective pressures, what's next? Would it be too far fetched to suggest that social pressures could affect brain function at a genetic level? At least one study has identified collective behavioral differences between Western cultures like the United States and China, possibly suggesting the beginning of brain divergence among humans. The study, from the University of Chicago, makes the claim that people living in the United States have difficulties with accepting another person's point of view, which they put down to US culture prizing individualism. They say that in China, where a collectivist attitude is encouraged, quite the opposite is true, with Chinese citizens being much more in tune with how others are thinking. Evolution And The Hive Mind This idea that societal ways are among the shapers of the evolution of the brain is a most interesting one. The interaction between the polarities of any unity is the central hypothesis upon which rests my personal worldview. In that light my understanding of humanity is resulting from the interactions between its societal polarity and the polarity represented by the individuals. This idea that societal ways are among the shapers of the evolution of the brain is kind of putting some flesh on the skeleton of my hypothesis.

The New York Times & Log In: Nov 29, 2007 10:16am 1 review evolution, art
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/science/27angi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin; The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start in The NYT by Natalie Angier
... many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions \u2014 the intimate interplay between mother and child. The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start Art and Intimacy : How the Arts Began This article is about a symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art. Ellen Dissanayake's vision is interesting. It focuses on the reproduction of the individuals or the relationship between mother and child. The relationship between mother and child is also subtly reproducing societal mechanisms of inclusion which relate to the reproduction of societies but those aspects strangely are totally absent from Dissanayake's analysis.

Climate swings shaped human evolution, researchers claim | Environment | The Gua…: Nov 19, 2007 8:10am 0 review evolution, change
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/19/climatechange.evolution?gus...

The Loom : In Praise of Yeast: Oct 11, 2007 6:24pm 1 review evolution, art, life
http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2007/10/11/in_praise_of_yeast.php; Endless Forms Most Beautiful in The Loom by Carl Zimmer
We do a pretty good job at appreciating the visible intricacies of nature: the antennae and legs and claws of a lobster, the geometrical order of the spots on a butterfly's wings. But a lot of nature's intricacies are hidden away inside single-celled creatures, such as the baker's yeast that makes bread rise and beer ferment. At an audition for a David Attenborough documentary, a yeast cell guzzling away on sugar is bound to do a lousy job. ("Thanks, don't call us; we'll call you. Send in the King Cobra!") But the intricacy of its metabolism is no less impressive. What's more, scientists know how to manipulate yeast in ways they can't with animals, and that power lets them set up experiments that yield clues to how that intricacy evolved. The latest study of yeast's intricacy comes from the University of Wisconsin lab of Sean Carroll. Carroll has become the public's go-to guy for evo-devo, or the evolution of development, thanks to his book Endless Forms Most Beautiful. In Praise of Yeast Endless Forms Most Beautiful The Making of the Fittest in "The making of the fittest" Carroll writes "DNA is the genetic blueprint of all creatures; it contains the operating instructions for everyday life and for making the next generation. Very recently, an important new dimension of DNA has been revealed -- it contains a vast and detailed record of how species adapt and change. That is, DNA is a living chronicle of Evolution. We can now pinpoint the precise changes in DNA that have enabled the marvelous creatures that inhabit our planet to adapt to its many shifting and sometimes extreme environments, from the freezing waters of the Antarctic to the lush canopy of the rain forest. We finally understand not just how the fittest survive, but how they are made." This is the scientific heart of my theory of beauty in art. The history of the evolution and the development of the principle of life is recorded in our DNA. The forms, colors, patterns, sounds and rhythms that have been retained are representative of beauty while non-beauty and ugliness represent what has been rejected. So, knowingly or unknowingly, we all are carrying the code of beauty as well as the code of ugliness inside ourselves. Gone is that old idea that germinated in high modernity that art has nothing to do with beauty time has come for artists to recognize that beauty is something objective that they can't run from. There is no hiding place left...

Cosmic Dust Could Form Inorganic Life, Study Suggests: Sep 19, 2007 9:50am 1 review evolution, science, life
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070917-alien-life.html; Cosmic Dust Forms Inorganic Life in The National Geographic by Scott Norris
A new study suggests that under certain conditions cosmic dust and plasma can organize into stable, helical-shaped structures that resemble inorganic life-forms. Using computer simulations, a team led by Vadim Tsytovich, of Russia's General Physics Institute in Moscow, found that under certain conditions dust and plasma can organize into stable, helix-shaped structures resembling DNA. While the structures exhibit none of the complex chemistry associated with even the simplest forms of life on Earth, they appear to at least mimic some the basic processes associated with living systems, the team said. For example, the helical strands were sometimes capable of reproducing by splitting and reassembling into two identical copies. The structures also exhibited a kind of evolution, according to the researchers. Structural changes that took place in the strands were passed from one "generation" to the next, the researchers said. As conditions changed, only the most stable configurations were able to persist. Cosmic Dust Forms Inorganic Life A nebula in the constellation Orion shows starlight being reflected off a mass of interstellar dust and gas. Emergence. Yes life emerges as the result of chain of complex chemical reactions flowing in particular conditions. What's the problem with that? I have none but why do humans experience such difficulties in accepting that fact?

Reason Magazine - Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around A…: Sep 12, 2007 8:20am 2 reviews evolution, science, technology, reality
http://reason.com/news/show/122423.html; Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets? in Reason Online by Ronald Bailey
By 2030, or by 2050 at the latest, will a super-smart artificial intelligence decide to keep humans around as pets? Will it instead choose to turn the entire Earth, including the messy organic bits like us, into computronium? Or is there a third alternative? Computer scientist Stephen Omohundro argued that self-improving AIs would be ultra-rational economic agents, basically examples of homo economicus. Such AIs would exhibit four drives; efficiency, self-preservation, acquisition, and creativity. Regarding efficiency AIs optimizing their resource use would turn to nanotechnology and virtualization wherever possible. Self-preservation involves protecting its utility function from death which it would do by building in redundancy and embedding itself in mutually defensive social relations. The drive to acquire more resources means that AIs could be dangerously competitive with humans. If Omohundro is right, there are good reasons to doubt that an AI that is a relentless utility maximizer will be friendly to less than perfectly efficient humanity. Given these big concerns about how super smart AIs might treat humanity, should they be created at all? Famously, former Sun Microsystems chief scientist Bill Joy declared that they are too dangerous and that we should relinquish the drive to create them. Charles Harper, senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, suggested there was a "dilemma of power." The dilemma is that "our science and technology create new forms of power but our cultures and civilizations do not easily create parallel capacities of stewardship required to utilize newly created technological powers for benevolent uses and to restrain them from malevolent uses." Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets? I more and more often observe myself wondering if the collapse of our late modern systems (economic, financial, scientific, technologic and other), in finale, is not the best thing that could befall humanity. We are, like automatons, driving on a freeway leading to "we don't know where" and, as automatons, we are never questioning if this "we don't know where" is somewhere we really like or want to go. Its like our minds had been hijacked. By by what could they have been hijacked? I suggest that our minds have been hijacked by what drives our totalitarian modernity to be the most efficacious tyranny humanity has ever been the prisoner of. But what drives modernity? The only valid answer is the logic of capital or the rationality that the use of capital imposes to its holders. We are automatons driven by that rationality and it should thus not come as a surprise then that the automatons we build should be at our image.... self-improving AIs would be ultra-rational economic agents, basically examples of homo economicus. ...there are good reasons to doubt that an AI that is a relentless utility maximizer will be friendly to less than perfectly efficient humanity..

Seed: The Meaning of Life: Sep 5, 2007 6:45pm 6 reviews biology, evolution, life
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/09/the_meaning_of_life.php; The meaning of life in SEED Magazine by Carl Zimmer
We create life, we search for it, we manipulate and revere it. Is it possible that we haven't yet defined the term? It's hard to think of a word more charged with meaning\u2014or meanings\u2014than "life." Some of the most passionate debates of our day, over stem cells or the right to die, genetically modified food, or wartime conduct, revolve around it. Whether we're talking about when life begins or when it ends, the sanctity of life, or the danger of playing God, we all have an idea of what we mean when we talk about life. Yet, it often turns out, we actually mean different things. Scientists, despite their intimacy with the subject, aren't exempt from this confusion. "There is no one definition that we agree upon," says Radu Popa, geobiologist and the author of Between Probability and Necessity: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life. In the course of researching his book, Popa started collecting definitions that have appeared in the scientific literature. He eventually lost count. "I've found at least three hundred, maybe four hundred definitions," he says. The meaning of life Starts with L, Rhymes with Rife initial posting about the same subject on The Loom DEFINING `LIFE' free 7 pages pdf by CAROL E. CLELAND and CHRISTOPHER F. CHYBA. University of Colorado, Generative art by Jared Tarbell An interesting post that all living beings should make it a priority to read. The comments on Carl's initial article on The Loom are particularly interesting. So here are some aspects of a definition: - self-assembling system that reproduces itself and expands - encodes the information of its evolutionary path in its offsprings' (in DNA or other). - successful outcomes are like the links of an evolutionary chain. - all the evolutionary changes carry the beauty of the miracle of reproduction - as such life is beauty and beauty is life.

YouTube - une mission ephemere - piotr kamler & bernard parmegiani: Sep 2, 2007 10:45am 1 review evolution, video, life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aulXlb8Dt24; une mission ephemere in You Tube by piotr kamler & bernard parmegiani
Animated by Piotr Kamler, featuring music by Bernard Parmegiani. une mission ephemere http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aulXlb8Dt24 An animation about the long evolution of the principle of life and how, in the span of an eye blink, humans literally boxed themselves into the prison of singularity.