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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
GIGO
Jibba jabberin' cyber intercourse.
The Web is the greatest instrument ever invented for journalism, and the most empowering too for free speech since the invention of the printing press.
But "evolve"?
Evolution takes place in other realms.
That's obvious, in the material biological sense; the only way the Web is going to aid evolution is if there's enough radiation exposure to produce positive mutations over the course of generations.
As for the realm of the evolution of human consciousness- well, the Internet's utility as a tool in that process is pretty much contingent on literacy, I think. Literacy is a much bigger quantum jump for consciousness.
Although there are some vitally important types of conscious evolution that the skill set of literacy doesn't develop, the Internet would be completely frivolous without it.
Thanks for the vocabulary workout.
that is all.
Evolution doesn't occur in a void. It is a dynamic process that occurs in response to organisms in competition. the pressures applied by competition cause the effects of evolution to manifest themselves.
Our global human culture is about one thing if nothing else: If anything on this planet competes with us for resources or by competing in someway limits our growth it will either be completely wiped out or neutralized in some way as to render it impotent with regards to us.
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The most striking difference between humans and other animals is language. This enables humans to interact and form a "collective mind" which we call culture. Language developed with the dawn of man.
Some 5,000 years ago, with the dawn of civilization humans made another great leap forward with writing. Now you could learn directly from people who you never even met, advancing knowledge tremendously.
The next great leap came with the invention of printing and the growth of literacy. Now this collective knowledge became available to ordinary people.
The Internet is truly the next great leap in collective knowledge. The fact there is something lost with each leap is simply the cost of progress. The fact that certain people don't use this in a proper way, that is an unfortunate reality.
Well, the thing about the Singularity boys is how much they have in common with South Seas Cargo Cults. If you build it, It will come, It being variously interpreted, although there seems to be a consensus that all the former things will pass away; whether or not this is a Good Thing being dependent on how you feel about the quality of your own life I suppose. Eschatology is like that: what you bring to the theatre is more important than what you find there.
But the core thing of it is pretty simply sympathetic magic: we may not understand this thing, but if we add a whole lot more of it, things will surely change. What ties it all together is how much we either exult in or dread change itself. Everybody dreads the thought that no, actually, things will, in most important areas, pretty much go on as before.
Because in the mean time, as we kick all this around, most of us will get on with the business of life: making babies, making and eating food, crying into our pillows, and so on; pretty much the same as it always was. Dreadful and unmagical quotidian reality, with paradigms unshifted.
Another increase in communication. Another ease in communication. Maybe a mass sharing of knowledge. Of talk. Of experience. Of wisdom. Definitely a sharing of ignorance. It is all there and it is up to the individual to sort it out. There will always be geniuses and fools, the trick is to determine which of these you want to be. The internet IS making us smarter and making us stupider at the same time. It is the same change that has occurred throughout history. Only a hellava lot quicker!
I know this is off-topic, but your Uplift series is one of my favorite science fiction sagas. Do you have any good news on the film front for us fans?
People, it's hard to accept a different view of the world. In "A Brief History of Everything", Ken Wilber resurrected Arthur Koestler's Holons: autonomous structures that are themselves part of a larger structure, for instance, cells within our body. We ourselves are part of the larger structure of society, and it has just developed a global voice and conversation via the Internet, Youtube and social networks. The 2008 election was the first in which a significant peer-to-peer conversation took place unmediated by the powers that be, the main-stream media.
The trend in our culture has been a wider and wider identification. We grow up identifying with our family, our tribe; all else is a threat, an enemy. As we mature, we extend the net of empathy more broadly, until we include all of humanity and beyond. Education and communication are essential aspects of this, and the Internet offers a world-wide conversation to facilitate this.
But I want to speculate further, to suggest that maybe this is the next step in evolution, that we do not only use DNA to pass on life, but the whole of culture also; the Internet is the flood that finally is joining all the small puddles from around the world into a melting-pot of ideas and empathy, and and from it, great things will arise. We are part of a larger thing that has a life of its own, and we can no more understand it that a cell can understand the body it is in.
Finally, I will counter the nay-sayers by pointing them to Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence, wherein he talks about how violence has decreased across the millenia, centuries and decades; proof that we can change, that we are not trapped by our lower selves.
nobody can hear your IQ drop
I may have to quote you on that.
Anyone else think this article was a little dramatic/pretentious?
You criticize the optimists for so-called magical thinking and a "If you build it, It will come" attitude, but isn't that what's worked so far?
The internet (and personal computers in general) was mostly built by pioneering engineers/hobbyists/geeks who didn't have any kind of greater plan or grand design. They just thought it would be cool if computers could talk to each other, and they were smart enough to realize that packet-switching was the best way to do that.
Twenty, fifteen, hell, even ten years ago nobody could really have predicted what the internet would look like today. I remember reading an article (I wish I could find it now) back around 1996 predicting that the internet would fall victim to its own labyrinthine complexity, that one by one the search engines would sputter and die. Other articles predicted that there would be nobody willing to produce content for this new network. That the media giants would ignore it because it didn't fit their business model (ok, that part sort of has happened). But we've seen instead the rise of the indivdual as content-producer.
In light of everything that's happened, you don't think it makes sense to keep building and see what happens?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
