This link has been bookmarked by 11 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 Aug 2007, by eyal matsliah.
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04 Mar 11
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Perhaps our science over-estimates the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating.
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any evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself.
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Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote our real biological fitness, but it's even better at delivering fake fitness
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Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it.
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The traditional staples of physical, mental, and social development (athletics, homework, dating) are neglected.
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Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality
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In 2005, most inventions concern virtual entertainment
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We have already shifted from a reality economy to a virtual economy, from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator.
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a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves.
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Those who persist will evolve more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing, and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the Religious Right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace Left.
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Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and anti-consumerism activists, already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it.
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Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the earth
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26 Aug 07
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CARLO ROVELLI
Professor of Physics, University of the Mediterraneum, Marseille; Member, Intitut Universitaire de France: Author, Quantum Gravity
What the physics of the 20th century says about the world might in fact be true
There is a major "dangerous" scientific idea in contemporary physics, with a potential impact comparable to Copernicus or Darwin. It is the idea that what the physics of the 20th century says about the world might in fact be true.
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We still haven't digested that the world is quantum mechanical, and the immense conceptual revolution needed to make sense of this basic factual discovery about nature.
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Another example: take Einstein's relativity theory. Relativity makes completely clear that asking "what happens right now on Andromeda?" is a complete non-sense. There is no right now elsewhere in the universe. Nevertheless, we keep thinking at the universe as if there was an immense external clock that ticked away the instants, and we have a lot of difficulty in adapting to the idea that "the present state of the universe right now", is a physical non-sense.
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I think that seen from 200 years in the future, the dangerous scientific idea that was around at the beginning of the 20th century, and that everybody was afraid to accept, will simply be that the world is completely different from our simple minded picture of it. As the physics of the 20th century had already shown.
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KAI KRAUSE
Researcher, philosopher, software developer, Author: 3DScience: new Scanning Electron Microscope imagery
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My first thought was: what if any really smart set of people really set their mind to it...how utterly and scarily trivial it would be, to disrupt the very fabric of life, to bring society to a dead stop?
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This was not meant to sound like doom and gloom naysaying. I see myself as a sincere optimist, but one who believes in realistic pessimism as a useful tool to initiate change.
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GEOFFREY MILLER
Evolutionary Psychologist, University of New Mexico; Author, The Mating Mind
Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox
The story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was talking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence with some other physicists. They were impressed that our galaxy holds 100 billion stars, that life evolved quickly and progressively on earth, and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years. They reasoned that extra-terrestrial intelligence should be common by now. Fermi listened patiently, then asked simply, "So, where is everybody?". That is, if extra-terrestrial intelligence is common, why haven't we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi's Paradox.
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I suggest a different, even darker solution to Fermi's Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.
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Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Those who persist will evolve more self-control, conscientiousness, and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs, and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratification, child-rearing, and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the Religious Right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace Left.
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3.2. The Ultimate Superset can affect our individual lives. Another analogy: Say that geese flying south for the winter have rather unreliable magnetic field detectors in their brains. However, there's a rule built into their brains that leads them to try to stay near their fellows as they fly. The flock as a whole would navigate far better than any individual bird, because the noise in the individual bird brain navigation systems would cancel out. The emergent entity — the flock — in turn would affect the individual geese, helping them to navigate better than they could on their own.
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4.4. Next, consider our species. One could try to push this perspective into a historical context, and note that evolution by natural selection reflects the effects of interactions among living things. If so, then the emergent properties of such interactions could feed back to affect the course of evolution itself.
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As much as I admired Stephen Jay Gould (and I did, very much), perhaps he missed the mark on this one. Perhaps there is a grand project waiting to be launched, to integrate the two great sources of knowledge and belief in the world today — science and religion.
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How counties adapt to massive, rapid upheaval will go a long way towards determining the eventual outcome. To paraphrase Darwin, it is not the strongest, not the largest, that survive rather it is those best prepared to cope with change.
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Within the U.S. there are many who are adapting very successfully. They tend to concentrate in a very few zip codes, life science clusters like 92121(between Salk, Scripps, and UCSD) and techno-empires like 02139 (MIT). Most of the nation's wealth and taxes are generated by a few states and, within these states, within in a few square miles. It is those who live in these areas that are most affronted by restrictions on research, the lack of science literate teenagers, and the reliance on God instead of science.
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When we assume stability and continuity we can wake up to irreconcilable differences. Science and a knowledge driven economy can allow a few folks to build powerful and successful countries very quickly, witness Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Ireland, but changes of this magnitude can also bury or split the formerly great who refuse to adapt, as well as those who practice bad governance. If we do not begin to address some current divides quickly we could live to see an Un-Tied States of America.
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28 Feb 06
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06 Jan 06
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Let's all stop beating Basil's car
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