Stefan Bringezu, Professor in Sustainable Resource Management at the Center for Environmental Systems Research (CESR) at the University of Kassel.

nto the work of the Science-Based Targets Network

The Earth Commission provides this report in its role as a component of the Global Common Alliance.

what are the challenges of translating global scale targets into concrete and actionable targets for local actors?

New Earth Commission Working Group to Focus on the Challenges of Cross-Scale Translation

The cypherpunks Who Um was this move-in from the 1990s these sort of 00:05:33 radical crypto little Libertarians who and that they call themselves crypto anarchists even who believe that they could use encryption tools and anonymity tools enabled by encryption to take power away from governments and 00:05:46 corporations and give it to individuals and they dreamed up you know things that would become vpns and tour and the dark web essentially and that's where Wikileaks came from for instance 00:05:58 Julian Assange was a Cypher Punk too who dreamed of using these tools to give anonymity to journalistic sources um but then in 2011 just as I was like uh writing a book that was kind of in 00:06:10 some ways a history of the cyberpunks um I Came Upon what seemed to be this new Cypher Punk invention which was Bitcoin you know

Bitcoin was monetizing this new Anonymous underworld of the internet and um that it was a way to kind of like send a briefcase full of unmarked bills from anywhere across the internet to 00:07:25 anywhere else in the world without identifying yourself and only now you know I mean not quite now but like only about almost a decade later that I kind of fully have this Epiphany that 00:07:38 actually it was the opposite the Bitcoin was the opposite of untraceable that it was in fact extremely traceable and that not only that but but it had served as a kind of trap for people seeking 00:07:51 Financial privacy and particularly criminals uh cyber criminals of every stripe for years and years and once I sort of Saw that this had happened I actually really 00:08:02 it came from seeing Justice departments announcements of takedowns and in each one they credited this one company called chain analysis which was uh I knew at the time a Bitcoin a 00:08:15 cryptocurrency tracing firm and it's began you know I sort of like read the research I'd seen hints over the years of how traceable cryptocurrency was but once I saw like how many of these cases 00:08:27 chain analysis specifically this startup tracing cryptocurrency was involved in

at some point in human history, culture began to wrest evolutionary control from our DNA. And now, they say, cultural change is allowing us to evolve in ways biological change alone could not.

he concept of cultural evolution began with the father of evolution himself, Waring said. Charles Darwin understood that behaviors could evolve and be passed to offspring just as physical traits are

cultural evolution can lead to genetic evolution. "The classic example is lactose tolerance," Waring told Live Science. "Drinking cow's milk began as a cultural trait that then drove the [genetic] evolution of a group of humans." In that case, cultural change preceded genetic change, not the other way around. 

But nowadays, humans mostly don't need to adapt to such threats genetically. Instead, we adapt by developing vaccines and other medical interventions, which are not the results of one person's work but rather of many people building on the accumulated "mutations" of cultural knowledge. By developing vaccines, human culture improves its collective "immune system,"

evolution no longer requires genetic mutations that confer a survival advantage being passed on and becoming widespread. Instead, learned behaviors passed on through culture are the "mutations" that provide survival advantages

While we have already tried to build a new and viable society around concepts such as democracy, sustainability, sustainable development, and resilience, all these terms have been corrupted by forces determined to incorporate and embed them into the Anthropocene where they become normalized, business as usual.

The longer it prevails, the more likely we will suffer catastrophic failure as a species here on earth. While this would be a tragedy of huge proportion for humans, we will take thousands, perhaps millions, of other species down with us.

If the new abnormal I just described is the consequence of human dominance of the planet that is taken to be inevitable or “technologically manageable,” then I do not wish to be identified with the Anthropocene.

Moreover, the Earth’s distress has its correlates in human physical and mental distress. Solastalgia, the lived experience of negative environmental change, is one emergent form of mental distress.[2]

A rapidly heating climate puts things out of whack. Synchronicity and timing are all important; and when, for example, the instinctual migration of mammals and birds tied to “locked in” global rhythms and patterns fails to coincide (trophic mismatches) with the great warming-accelerated flourishing, flowering, and fruiting of once reliable food supplies, death and extinction follow.

Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene

in ecological economics and or environmental economics grandfathering is typically seen as the most unfair distribution and the reason why we do it also in a mission training system the first five 00:40:19 years I started with grandfathering because it's feasible as you start from where you are so it's realistic in a way and then you approach Industries or countries where they are so all the road maps start from 00:40:31 grandfathering because you start from where you are it doesn't mean that it's fair that some counters have very very high emissions per capita is it fair the United States had three times higher than Sweden per capita 00:40:43 and therefore they should have three times more allocation than Sweden well we can argue that so generally it's not fair but it's it might be feasible and the common budget differentiate 00:40:56 responsibility increases perspective capabilities principle there is no unique scientific answer to this it's an ethical issue that is worth a sincere public discussion and political 00:41:08 negotiation so we cannot really answer this in scientific way

argeting a climate resilient sustainable World involves fundamental changes to how Society functions including changes to our underlying values Our World Views ideologies social structures political economic systems 00:35:07 and power relationships I mean it's in other words throw it all up in the air and start again and that's in the ipcc which I'm amazed that ever got past the the lawyers um because it's very carefully checked when these things are published but 00:35:21 anyway that quote is in there from working group too and I think that captures the essence of the source the changes we're talking about

you're then talking about 15 to 25 cuts and Emissions a year on year for 00:33:27 developed countries which sounds impossible um but if we started earlier it would have been much simpler to do um but the equity part I think gives us real scope there because within our countries there are huge differences in 00:33:40 in our emissions um if we wanted to live on Paris we're going to need to reconsider what does growth mean what's progress what is development we have to ask these sorts of questions about our society and we don't have a long time to answer them

Isaac and I uh with another colleague we did a little bit of work trying to look at what would the Swedish policy or the UK policy indeed look like if it was carried out globally and it would look at something like two and a half degrees Centigrade of warming if 00:31:58 not more

it's a its strength is it's a policy framework for all um but for me actually that vagueness undermines it's its real purpose and allows us to expand the use of fossil fuels hence every scenario out there includes large amounts of fossil fuels 00:30:32 even in 2050. Net Zero 24 1.5 scenarios all clued large amounts of fossil fuels the International Energy agency scenario includes 25 of the energy still being fossil fuels in 2050 I mean there's no 00:30:45 way that can be reconciled with what the science tells us unless you rely on negative emissions but all of this lot of virtuous organizations all of these have Net Zero 2050 targets none of those are intended to stop producing gas and 00:30:56 oil in 2050. it's only scope one and two if you read their reports scope three burning the stuff is not included but presumably that's the purpose of exploiting of getting out of the ground is to burn it and this I'm just going to 00:31:08 store it somewhere for fun all of these countries are looking right now looking for more oil and gas and yet we know from the research we can't burn half the oiling gas we want if you want for one point a good chance of 1.5 you can burn about a third of 00:31:21 what we have so Net Zero is first it's not it's not zero fossil fuels nothing like it there's this whole framing that allows us to expand the carbon budget so we can all feel slightly happier in our homes 00:31:34 today because we haven't got to make these big changes

f you started in January 2022 the numbers in Brackets if you started January 2023 so look how much difference one year makes particularly under the 1.5 budget it's 00:25:55 just enormous you realize how rapidly each year we choose to fail how much that changes the following year and I think that's a really key message here that because we've left it so late every day of failure makes makes 00:26:09 tomorrow much much harder whichever way you look at this whether it's 1.5 or 2 degrees Centigrade whether it's Sweden the UK the US Australia Japan whatever this is profound 00:26:22 an immediate change in our system in so many respects in way above what governments are ever prepared to talk about and I say I don't particularly like these conclusions but that's what's what comes out of the arithmetic

if we take account of Aviation and shipping imports and 00:24:39 exports then you get a very different story so for Sweden somewhere it's five to ten percent down from what it was in 1990 um and that but that's similar for the UK for Denmark I think Denmark's not 00:24:50 come down at all actually France so there are no climate Progressive countries out there when you factor in aviation shipping and imports and exports there are no climate Progressive countries in the world so that's I think that's quite a worrying

Sweden showing leadership that's what we always hear is that the Sweden Australian leader at least we did here 00:24:14 until quite recently maybe we're still hearing it now I don't know um you know Sweden's emissions are down quite considerably from from their 1990 levels but we hear the same thing in the UK I mean what's interesting if you've got the cops you know every country in 00:24:26 the world is leading on climate change the emissions are still going up which is a little strange either the physics is lying or some of the leaders are lying one or the other um

we would argue this actually is too late from a purely mitigation point of view to um in terms of reduction using our 00:19:24 emissions to actually embed Equity it's we can't do that anymore we should have started earlier we didn't we chose not to it wasn't wasn't forced upon us we chose not to do it earlier and so what we would say now is that what we need to be doing is the least 00:19:37 unjust apportionment division of the budget but that needs to be accompanied with really major Financial transfers um and you know well beyond loss and damages but also technology transfers 00:19:50 but also recognize there are lots of things that we can learn from the global South about how to do things much better than we do in the global North but certainly from a financial and Technical point of view I think the transfers need to be headed in that direction and I don't mean this 100 billion pounds per 00:20:02 100 billion dollars per year I mean that's just peanuts that we argue over we're talking I think we're probably talking trillions per year but not you know it's not the small numbers particularly if we want the some of the parts of the world to Leap Forward over the fossil fuel era

so let's take the headline budgets and let's adjust them to today November 00:13:16 2022. so these are the the two probabilities that we're using um that's the budget that we have left for two degrees Centigrade that's the budget we've got for 1.5 and these are the years you have 00:13:29 so you know 1.5 nine and a half years of current emissions if the current emissions stayed static we'd have nine and a half years oh a bit worrying um that's about half a percent a bit 00:13:43 under half a percent every month for two degrees centigrade and one percent so every month we're using one percent of the 50 50 chance of 1.5 degrees Centigrade which is not anyway a safe 00:13:54 threshold every month one percent of the budget

the impacts are much worse at lower temperatures than we thought so we thought they would occur at high temperatures now at lower temperatures and this is one of the strong reasons why we've moved from this 00:07:14 sort of does it work on here no it doesn't from the two degree Centigrade framing to 1.5 and let's also be clear again that 1.5 is not safe and the 1.5 informed cop 26 so this idea 00:07:28 of this language rhetorical political rhetoric really but keep 1.5 alive um and that's I think that has also become a much more of a 00:07:39 um of a framework for thinking about some of the issues on mitigation as well so I think there is some genuine concern behind trying to stay at 1.5 because there are good reasons not to go above it um even though the chances of not going 00:07:51 above it look incredibly Slim and I think this is something that said to me quite a lot at the uh cop in um in Glasgow by other colleagues from other people from elsewhere outside the global 00:08:02 North typically climate change is not a threat it's a reality

our Focus isn't on temperature we're not really interested in temperature what we're really interested in is the rate of change of impacts 00:05:34 so if the impacts that we're seeing from climate change occurred over a million years so what if they came over 500 years becomes a bit more important if they curve over 20 years it becomes incredibly important so it's the time frame over which the impact's occurring that's really 00:05:47 important and this this language of temperature is just a proxy for the change in impacts

what do we really need to do for real zero for 1.5 degrees centigrade and very much I'm framing this around carbon budgets so if anyone's heard me speak before nothing 00:01:37 significantly changed other than another 40 billion tons of carbon Dockside has been put in the atmosphere

in 2005, the International Rice Research Institute used a radio soap opera called Homeland Story to persuade millions of rice farmers in Vietnam to stop spraying their crops with harmful insecticides. Farmers who listened to the series were 31 percent less likely to spray their crops than those simply told not to. 

Storytelling allows us to make sense of the world. Research from a multitude of fields suggests that story structures match human neural maps. What do a mother breastfeeding, a hug from a friend, and a story all have in common? They all release oxytocin, also known as the love drug. And it’s powerful: In a study by neuroscientist Paul Zak, participants who were given synthetic oxytocin donated 57 percent more to charity than participants given a placebo. Similarly, hearing information in narrative form results in a higher likelihood of pro-social behavior.

Unlike numbers or facts, stories can trigger an emotional response, harnessing the power of motivation, imagination, and personal values, which drive the most powerful and permanent forms of social change.

Now picture Timothy, who lives with his grandchildren in Walande Island, a small dot of land off the east coast of South Malaita Island, part of the Solomon Islands. Since 2002, the 1,200 inhabitants of Walande have abandoned their homes and moved away from the island. Only one house remains: Timothy’s. When his former neighbors are asked about Timothy’s motives they shrug indifferently. “He’s stubborn,” one says. “He won’t listen to us,” says another. Every morning his four young grandchildren take the canoe to the mainland, where they go to school, while Timothy spends the day adding rocks to the wall around his house, trying to hold off the water for a bit longer. “If I move to the mainland, I can’t see anything through the trees. I won’t even see the water. I want to have this spot where I can look around me. Because I’m part of this place,” he says. His is a story that powerfully conveys the loneliness and loss that 1.1 degrees of anthropogenic warming is already causing. 

The environmental crisis is one of overconsumption, carbon emissions, and corporate greed. But it’s also a crisis of miscommunication.

What that amounted to for Einstein, according to a 2006 paper, was a “cosmic religious feeling” that required no “anthropomorphic conception of God.” He explained this view in the New York Times Magazine: “The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.”

In 1929, Einstein received a telegram inquiring about his belief in God from a New York rabbi named Herbert S. Goldstein, who had heard a Boston cardinal say that the physicist’s theory of relativity implies “the ghastly apparition of atheism.” Einstein settled Goldstein down. “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world,” he told him, “not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvellously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.

1954 letter Einstein

How Einstein Reconciled Religion to Science

When I started working on the history of linguistics — which had been totally forgotten; nobody knew about it — I discovered all sorts of things. One of the things I came across was Wilhelm von Humboldt’s very interesting work. One part of it that has since become famous is his statement that language “makes infinite use of finite means.” It’s often thought that we have answered that question with Turing computability and generative grammar, but we haven’t. He was talking about infinite use, not the generative capacity. Yes, we can understand the generation of the expressions that we use, but we don’t understand how we use them. Why do we decide to say this and not something else? In our normal interactions, why do we convey the inner workings of our minds to others in a particular way? Nobody understands that. So, the infinite use of language remains a mystery, as it always has. Humboldt’s aphorism is constantly quoted, but the depth of the problem it formulates is not always recognized.

The miracle that so amazed Galileo and Arnauld — and still amazes me, I can’t understand it — is how can we, with a few symbols, convey to others the inner workings of our mind? That’s something to really be surprised about, and puzzled by. And we have some grasp of it, but not a lot.

What’s my feeling of red? You can describe what the sensory organs are doing, what’s going on in the brain, but it doesn’t capture the essence of seeing something red. Will we ever capture it? Maybe not. It’s just something that’s beyond our cognitive capacities. But that shouldn’t really surprise us; we are organic creatures. It’s a possibility.

David Hume, a great philosopher, in his “History of England” — he wrote a huge history of England — there’s a chapter devoted to Isaac Newton, a full chapter. He describes Newton as, you know, the greatest mind that ever existed, and so on and so forth. He said Newton’s great achievement was to draw the veil away from some of the mysteries of nature — namely, his theory of universal gravitation and so on — but to leave other mysteries hidden in ways we will never understand. Referring to: What’s the world like? We’ll never understand it. He left that as a permanent mystery. Well, as far as we know, he was right.

Descartes, and others, when they were considering that mind is separate from body — notice that that theory fell apart because the theory of body was wrong; but the theory of mind may well have been right. But one of the things that they were concerned with was voluntary action. You decide to lift your finger. Nobody knows how that is possible; to this day we haven’t a clue. The scientists who work on voluntary motion — one of them is Emilio Bizzi, he’s one of MIT’s great scientists, one of the leading scientists who works on voluntary motion — he and his associate Robert Ajemian recently wrote a state-of-the-art article for the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in which they describe what has been discovered about voluntary motion. They say they’ll put the outcome “fancifully.” It’s as if we’re coming to understand the puppet and the strings, but we know nothing about the puppeteer. That remains as much a mystery as it has been since classical Greece. Not an inch of progress; nothing. Well, maybe that’s another permanent mystery.

You can train a rat to run pretty complicated mazes. You’re never going to train a rat to run a prime number maze — a maze that says, “turn right at every prime number.” The reason is that the rat just doesn’t have that concept. And there’s no way to give it that concept. It’s out of the conceptual range of the rat. That’s true of every organism. Why shouldn’t it be true of us? I mean, are we some kind of angels? Why shouldn’t we have the same basic nature as other organisms? In fact, it’s very hard to think how we cannot be like them. Take our physical capacities. I mean, take our capacity to run 100 meters. We have that capacity because we cannot fly. The ability to do something entails the lack of ability to do something else. I mean, we have the ability because we are somehow constructed so that we can do it. But that same design that’s enabling us to do one thing is preventing us from doing something else. That’s true of every domain of existence. Why shouldn’t it be true of cognition?

The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

There is a fundamental distinction between simulating and comprehending the functioning (of a brain but also of any other organ or capacity).

Actually, certain simple facts can be visible to the mind’s eye rather than to our direct vision. Owen Gingerich once made me realize how Galileo reached the conclusion that all bodies fall to the Earth at the same speed even if they have different weight, besides the obvious restrictions due to their shape

In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind

The sudden awareness of something that calls for an explanation, once the fog of habit has lifted, seems to be the real stuff revolutions’ sparkles are made of

“It is important to learn to be surprised by simple facts.”

Noam Chomsky and Andrea Moro on the Limits of Our ComprehensionAn excerpt from Chomsky and Moro’s new book “The Secrets of Words.”

Does our most powerful force not come from the depths of our capacities to #love, #care for and #serve nature and all its beings, including ourselves?

the ultimate #guidance we need to heal Earth does not come from the #markets and our #technologies supporting them. What they are is tools, supporting a direction, facilitating transactions in a world where we do not yet speak a deep #common language of #unity, #stewardship and #coexistence but these markets and technologies should not dictate where we are headed, or else I'm afraid we are simply missing the whole point.

looking at it in another way too if we're thinking particularly of uh ecodharma or or engagement with the 00:04:30 ecological situation um i think it's really difficult to devote oneself to or or let me say it this way it's difficult to love something if you don't 00:04:43 have a relationship with it right so i think it's so important if if we're concerned about what's happening to the earth to to reconnect with it which we do up there i mean we are part of nature right maybe 00:04:56 that's the obvious thing to say but do you think we forget that sometimes and it's easy to forget when we're in cities and the whole point of you know coming to somewhere like the ecodharma center it 00:05:08 makes it so much easier to remember that yeah yeah one of i've spent a lot of time in nature too on retreats and one of my teachers said you know one of the reasons it's so good to be in nature is 00:05:20 because there's no objects of attachment so we i mean we can become attached right but yeah uh unless we're a forester you know who wants the tree for lumber or something it it it does kind 00:05:34 of disorient us away from our usual ends means kind of behavior

In downscaling the doughnut, citizen-led socialmovements may therefore be important to drive societaldebate towards self-limitation and embed values aroundsocial justice. Such movements offer potential for ‘dis-ruptive deliberation’ that makes space for alternativediscourse and action needed to address difficult deci-sions and trade-offs [71].

While local governance institutions have an importantrole in supporting political debate about the standardsand practices that are understood to be constitutive of a‘good life for all’, their potential to achieve a radical shiftin values may be limited by the growth imperative em-bedded in existing institutional practices and discourse[49] and the power held by elites who may be opposedto transformation [71].

Lit-erature on localising the SDGs highlights the risk thatglobal goals may not reflect the interests and concerns oflocal communities [47,48]. In downscaling the doughnut,this challenge may be exacerbated by the strong focus ofthe environmental ceiling on scientifically determinedlimits, raising the question of whether downscalingshould be a technocratic exercise (e.g. consulting expertsto inform decisions on what should be measured [18]) orwhether it needs to be supported by societal debateabout the ambitions of governance.

safe and just corridor

This analysis is intended to inform an in-ternational scientific assessment and the development ofassociated goals for downscaling, to be determined bythe Earth Commission with the ambition of mobilisingother actors [37]

To date, however, the governance challenges of suchlocal scale applications have received limited attention inacademic debate.

Critically, establishing subglobal limits alsoraises normative questions about tolerance to risk inapproaching biophysical thresholds, which may varyacross contexts, as well as historical justice issues relatingto inequities in past resource use [19,20].

Though planetaryboundaries were not designed to be downscaled [13],translating their meaning to subglobal scales is importantto align with decision-making processes [14]. I

This work is motivated by ourexperience of working with a local authority in Cornwall,UK, as they grappled with using the doughnut to informdecision-making and activity, and we use this case studyto illustrate the challenges identified.

In comparison to previous approaches suchas LA21 and the transition movement [12], however,advocates for the doughnut approach provide compara-tively little guidance on the types of governance ar-rangements best suited to realise their vision

Local Agenda 21 (LA21), emerging from the Rio EarthSummit in 1992, focused on the role of subnational ac-tion in achieving global goals, advocating that local au-thorities promote participatory, community based andinclusive initiatives

One of the things that actually is something that needs unpacking and hasn't been done yet is the role of coal. When we manufacture a solar panel, to get a solar cell, you've got to heat that silicon up to 2,200 degrees Celsius. 01:20:17 At the moment we use coke and coal. Now if we take away coke and coal, how do we do that? And there are options, but they're things like using biofuel, or hydrogen, or electric arc. And so scaling that problem up basically means it's not going to work. So when we lose coal, we lose manufacture. So what we could talk about next for example, is the true role of what the three fossil 01:20:43 fuels actually do for us. Oil, gas, and coal. Nate Hagens: Yeah, I think that's a good conversation. I just last week talked to Art Berman about what the products are in a barrel of oil. And the light things that our chemical inputs like butane and ethylene come off first, then gasoline, then diesel, then the asphalt and things. So if for some reason we don't need gasoline anymore, we still have to burn off the gasoline 01:21:13 to get to the heavy things that we absolutely do need, like the 10 trillion worth of diesel machinery in the world. So oil is going to be with us. Probably in smaller amounts, well definitely in smaller amounts. But we can't live without it at the present. So to have that broader conversation with you on the three main fossil fuels, that would 01:21:36 be a good conversation. Simon Michaux: What do they really do for us? Nate Hagens: Yeah, what do they really do for us? What do we really need? And what do we not need?

So to the people listening or watching this, what kind of closing thoughts do you have to summarize what we just talked about and to leave them to think about or apply to their own lives? 01:17:49 Simon Michaux: So I would say to them that they're in better shape than anyone before, even as scary as it is and the unknown we're walking into. And there is no one plan. So like diversity of species in a jungle environment is a strength for the long-term survival of that jungle, diversity of ideas have the same strengths. 01:18:13 So we need them all for our long-term survival. We can't face one consensus, it's just like a broad brush direction. So we've got to put these ideas out there and discuss amongst ourselves. And understand that this is very, very challenging, and none of us actually know what we need to do. 01:18:37 Even though our skills are not necessarily what we need. We're almost like a blank canvas in terms of skills. But in terms of our self knowledge and our ability to think, our opinions mean something. We believe in human rights. We have education. Men and women are educated now. So we are in better shape now than we've ever been. 01:19:04 Instead of banging on about the problems and our past failings, we should probably try to face the future with open hearts, and actually think positive with the understanding that this is going to be rough.

I'm actually talking to a group in Hawaii where they want to do the same thing that I did in Finland, as in what were six scenarios to phase it fossil fuels in Finland. Do the same thing in Hawaii. And that's actually now in progress. And the purpose of that work is to be a book in for Iceland, because when we approach Iceland. 01:16:11 How do we do that for Iceland? And so they become two sides to the planet, but you've got an isolated island, they both have geothermal. How would they approach that, and what are their respective problems? So this is the purpose of the global community. We could transfer information from one end of the world to the other. How did we do this? What were the problems? 01:16:35 What were the things that worked? How do we navigate our way out of this? What are the lon-term problems? That's the transfer that's actually happening. So I believe we are looking at the evolution of the human species, like you just said. But if the human species was modeled as a single individual, it'd be like an obese crack 01:17:00 addict that's been told to kick the habit and lose some weight. And it's going to be painful, but this is what we have to do for our survival. And on the other side of that, we're going to be much healthier. This happening at humanity at all scales.

you've got groups like Norway that have oil and gas. Even though it's declining, it's some oil and gas. So they could keep the local region going while we're actually constructing this system. But they've also got a lot of hydro, right? Hydro power, a lot. So all right, so we could actually attach industries, sectors to that. Sweden and Finland has a combination of nuclear but also combined heat and power from biomass, 01:13:50 which also is linked to industry. So how do we organize around that? So we are seeing an ordering across for example, several local nation states at the moment. So the size of the circular economy could span say Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland. And you'll have a circular economy-like structure going between them. 01:14:18 But it's actually the energy sources that will organize the industry, and the industry will organize everything else.

I put forward the idea that what might work in the future is alliance between industrial clusters. Not between political nations, industrial clusters. 01:12:58 And you might have a cluster around for example, in Iceland, they've got a lot of geothermal. So much that they can make aluminum, which is almost pure electricity, right? So geothermal makes heavy industries, things like aluminum. They could also make lots of ammonia or hydrogen using the heat. So that's a hub.

Current manufacturing at the moment is dependent on a very complex, six continent, just in 01:10:00 time supply grid. And when we build something like a computer, it's tough. Pulling stuff from all over the world, and it is like the transport of material goods is irrelevant. It's based on that assumption. I think it will become more regional. Now the current manufacturing system will start to fragment I believe, and we will see the components part of the value chain crash. 01:10:24 Like for example, microchips to go into cars are becoming a problem. Therefore cars are not being produced as much anymore. That's the example. But we'll start seeing that in other sectors. So I can see a situation where the value chain around the components will break down, but then before that, there'll be the ability for smelters to produce metals will start 01:10:49 to become difficult, because concentrate getting to them is no longer what they need to produce effectively. So the part on the end, the car on the showroom floor is the very end of the value chain. And they will become less available and less accessible because the value chain before them is starting to fragment. So when it fragments, we will develop a new technology that is more primitive, is more 01:11:18 robust, can be subject to change, and is more adaptable. And will be sourced within say a 500 kilometer radius around from where the final product winds up. Nate Hagens: So when you say we in this case, do you mean all of humanity, or do you mean those communities and 500 kilometer regions that are thinking 01:11:42 or working ahead? Or how did this come about? Because my challenge with all this is it all generally makes sense. And of course I have a probabilistic view of the future. So we could kick the can another decade maybe, or this could all be upon us by next summer. I don't know. But there will be these parallel things. There's a lot of people that are chomping at the bit to work on the future that you're 01:12:09 describing. But those people are still a tiny fraction of those riding shotgun on the super organism where we need growth, and economies and jobs are going to be the thing that dictate our elections and everything else. And energy security will trump lower carbon, etc. And so we will be pedal to the metal until we hit a wall. 01:12:34 What you're talking about is once we hit a wall, these are the things that need to be in motion.

Well, we're first going to have a frank discussion of what minerals we think we need versus what we've got. And then we're going to realize what we've got won't work with the existing plan. And we'll start doing things like making batteries out of sodium, or sand, silica, or fluoride, or zinc, or lead. Nate Hagens: Lower tech, scalable things that don't give us the dopamine return on investment, but they are cheap and functional. 01:07:52 Simon Michaux: And can be recycled. So we're going to first scale back our expectations and our requirements for complex technology. We'll develop a technology that is simpler, more robust, and can deal with poorer quality material inputs, and require less energy to produce. Nate Hagens: How much of this is happening now in this domain? Simon Michaux: So there's a lot of talk at the moment that 01:08:18 the current mining industry is driven by demand and it's driven by money and by profit. So at the moment, there is just a bit of talk. And we're starting to talk about alternatives, like batteries made of fluoride for example. But at the moment, it's not taken seriously. And the future is seen as lithium iron based chemistry, like LFP batteries for example. And that is the focus, 100% of the time. 01:08:44 And so they're giving it lip service now, whereas five, 10 years ago, they wouldn't concede it existed at all. So it is progress. So first of all, we're going to change what we are going think we're going to do. Then we're going to start sourcing our minerals from our waste products because it's all around us.

One of the things that concern me is copper. So we need about 4.3 billion tons of copper for the first generation of electrical, non-renewable technology systems. Including everything's stitched together. So 4.3 billion tons. 01:04:25 Nate Hagens: And if we relax your assumption of four weeks of buffer and that we have some hybrid system of depleting fossil fuels with some renewables, that 4.3 billion tons could be relaxed to 3.3 or 2.2 billion tons? Simon Michaux: I think it's 2.2 billion tons. It substantially does reduce. However, we are producing for copper say 24 million tons a year now. 01:04:53 So we've got to run at 180 years to hit that point. So existing at- Nate Hagens: It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. And here's the other thing, and I'm sorry to interrupt. But Olivia Lazard is going to be on this show in a few weeks and her work is the countries where this stuff comes from. 01:05:17 And not only are they war-torn and have inequality issues, but there are also many of the countries that are going to be influenced dramatically in the near term from higher wet bulb risk to humans climate impacts. And we won't even be able to extract in these countries because of social and environmental 01:05:45 reasons. I can send you some info on that. Simon Michaux: Yes, please. But these are the things we need to get our arms around. So our copper reserves at the moment are at 880 million tons. Now existing growth, that's according to the USGS, US Geological Survey. So prior to 2020, humanity mined 700 million tons of copper back to 4,000 BC. 01:06:10 And that sounds like a lot. But to keep up with copper growth, copper demand growth, just the way we are now without electrifying, we will do the same in the next 22 years. So the last 4,000 years will be compressed into 22 years to keep up with the economic growth as it's increasing. And so the first generation, let's say the 4.3 billion tons is correct. 01:06:33 That is 6.2 times the historical mining rate back to 4,000 BC. So if we are right and we can shrink that buffer down, we are still three times the historical rate. Nate Hagens: Not the historical rate. The historical total cumulative

this is part of the problem that we're having at the moment, where one part of society is not connected to other parts of society, and they just don't actually know what they're missing. So first of all, most of the non fossil fuel system has not been constructed yet. Less than 1% of vehicles are EV now, for example. 01:03:11 As as it has to be constructed, we can't recycle it. So the first generation at least must come from mining. But if it was all manufactured tomorrow or next year say, it's not for about 10 years that we've actually, when they all wear out the first generation of materials to come in, that's enough for recycling. And so recycling, if it is going to work... And I believe it will, but that's many years into the future.

Minerals are a thing at the moment where they're sort of seen as a side issue. And in fact in Europe in particular, we don't like the idea of mining at all. It's seen as dirty. And what's interesting is if the environmental movement not make friends with the mining industry, then its green transition will not happen. Right? That's the brutal truth. So I can see a situation where the environmental movement and the mining industry will join 01:01:21 hands, and both groups will evolve their practice to meet the other side halfway. And for example, every mine site will be rehabilitated when it's finished to the point where it can now be a natural biodiversity hub. All toxins are removed completely from the environment. That is possible.

Sewage sanitation. 00:54:26 Now again, this is not a very fashionable thing to talk about. But in the past, especially when a hurricane hits and devastates a town, if you don't get the ability for people to go to the toilet and wash their hands and sanitation disease starts rippling through the area and cripples everything. And it can corrupt food, it can corrupt water. And so it's a system that allows humans to live in dense population areas together safely 00:54:55 and healthily. Now at the moment we have these systems which are citywide, and they use electrical power to push things along. And the problem here is maintenance. This is talking to the complexity issue. How can we maintain such a complex system in a low energy world where we won't have the ease to go out and maintain such things easily? So we have whole sections of the network breaking down, and they'll be really hard to keep going. 00:55:23 So we're going to go from a big system, to a series of localized systems that can connect to each other if they chose, or disconnect if they need to, while one system goes down for maintenance. And again, we're going to have to use technology that may not necessarily use power. What if we used gravity again to try and push all these systems through? And instead of actually using chemicals to treat the water plant, what if we had these 00:55:50 big ponds that used different plants and animals to process human sewage and the bacteria out? In permaculture, there's a lot of discussion about gray water systems and black water systems. Start thinking in those terms, but on a larger scale.

A water potable water supply that is say for three or four suburbs in a city together, and there'll be a standalone system. So if that system needs maintenance and goes down for a bit, the systems around it keep going. Whereas at the moment, if you have one problem in a water plant, the whole city goes down.

So it's not just water. We need water that's not polluted. And so that there are drinking water standards that need to be adhered to. So traditionally we just get that out of a stream or a pond. But now we've got so much population in areas which the climate doesn't lend itself to supplying such a lot of water for so many people. So we need to seriously think about how do we actually provide clean drinking water. 00:52:16 And if we don't, and this is the problem with the next one, which is sanitation. If we don't have proper drinking water, we start having disease rippling through our society, which will cripple us, our ability to do certain things. And so we have to have the ability to filter water. And so we might move into a society where water will have to be filtered through, you can make a filter with things like charcoal and rock and gravel. 00:52:42 And water might have to go through that to remove its bacteria load. See at the moment, our water is purified in water purification plants, but they're done centrally and their water's pushed out along all these pipes all over the city. So what if that is no longer practical? For example, we can't maintain such a large network of pipes anymore easily. So we might have to go to a more localized way of managing water.

just wanted to have an overview of these categories to get people thinking and doing in this level. And the challenge of course is the cornucopias and the Vikings are distracting us from what really needs to be done. And so this whole conversation, we're thinking two or three steps ahead from something that 00:51:27 our culture is not giving us the status, reward, and emotional signals of yet.

in food, what it means is local communities will start to grow their own food. So all the food you eat will be grown completely in say a 50 kilometer radius radius or 100 kilometer radius.

f we can't get food services to them, it becomes easier to break those large cities up into smaller communities that are more decentralized.

So food will be re-engineered where a lot of our fertilizers and will be developed organically or partially organically, locally. Now we could use industry to do that, but it'll be done locally. And so what we call food will have to actually more mirror and work with the environment, not against it. Current industrial agriculture works against the environment. Our new systems will have to use biomimicry in a greater scale, and work with the local 00:50:38 environment. And so will we.

So food at the moment, five, 600 years ago, everyone grew their own food and they grew 00:46:07 it locally. And then we invented industrial agriculture, which is supported by petrochemicals. At the moment, our food is created in vast quantities causing enormous problems very far away. I can see a problem with petrochemicals because it's causing land degradation and it's overloading the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles on a global scale. So the food system's going to have to be radically engineered, and it will have to become more 00:46:32 local, and almost certainly have to become organic in some form. And so what that means is- Nate Hagens: Why? Simon Michaux: Okay, so at the moment we're using petrochemicals. And those petrochemicals, for every bushel of wheat that we send to the market, 0.8 cubic meters of soil is being sterilized. And you could argue it's improper use of those petrochemicals is making that happen. 00:46:55 But the reality is because there's a money profit to it, that's exactly what people are doing. And so it's not just the fact that it's made on things like phosphate rock and gas, which are non-renewable resources, but how we're actually applying it is interacting with the environment in a destructive fashion. And it's not just destructive in one sector. Multiple sectors across the environment are getting hammered by this. 00:47:20 And we are required to withdraw from those sectors, let those sectors heal naturally, and help that along, but then re-engineer our food systems. Now at the moment, the old school plans for this is GMO technology connected to more petrochemicals managed by AI systems, and most of the farming will be done by robots. 00:47:43 That's the vision for the future by groups like say BASF. I think that will be work in a short term, but it'll be disastrous in the long term. We actually create a worse problem. Nate Hagens: BASF doesn't make our food, they make the food- Simon Michaux: Chemical. They make the chemicals for the fertilizers and the petrochemicals, but this is their vision of the future. I attended one of their meetings. 00:48:07 Nate Hagens: So the future of food then, a conclusion echoed by many other of my podcast guests is we're going to have to have more human labor inputs relative to today. Simon Michaux: So every more people will have to be involved in the actual production of food. One thing we have lots of is humans. Now humans are an amazingly adaptive unit that can do work, and we have energy. 00:48:35 And so more people will be involved in more things. We have to work harder for a smaller outcome. At all levels, we're going to have less actions taken of higher quality. So we're going to go from quantity plus dopamine hit is going to transfer to quality plus much less of.

how would the energy systems be different in the new system under your Maslow hierarchy framing? 00:43:15 Simon Michaux: I've been giving some thought about what energy actually is and how does it serve us. At the moment, energy is used for transport a lot. So our energy systems will have to empower transport somehow differently. And so this is the whole electric vehicles and buses. So I think the electric system will happen, but at least substantially smaller. 00:43:42 Excuse me. So for example, we would see more buses, more communal transport, and less individual cars. We might have the idea of car sharing where instead of owning a car, we might book a car in. This is the idea of the self-driving car. That might happen in a small scale. It won't be enough to replace our existing systems. 00:44:05 So the form of energy comes when it comes. It will be different to what we have now. And everything around it, including our technology, will have to evolve. And part of that I can see for example, instead of one big giant seamless power grid that delivers sinusoidally pure power all the time, and our electronics cannot cope with anything else, I can see a situation where we will evolve an engineering electronics that can 00:44:29 cope with variable power. So if a power grid goes up or down, if we get power blackouts, it doesn't cook the electronics. So instead of seamless, we now have a non-linear production of power and its outcomes. So that means- Nate Hagens: There would be no demand for such a product now. Simon Michaux: No, no. Because no one thinks it's necessary. So if instead of one big grid, we had lots of micro grids that are connected together. 00:44:54 And they sometimes transfer power between them. And sometimes when things get difficult, they could shut down one or all of them without actually damaging themselves and they could start up at any time. And each of those micro power grids will be around an industrial activity of value. For example, a power grid will be around a hospital. And that hospital will then also be surrounded by a community of people who operate that 00:45:18 hospital. And the food systems for that hospital, but all comes off that one power grid. It's reason to be is that hospital. And we might attach schools to it, that sort of thing. And so our energy will be organized very differently. And so it may well be things like solar panels, wind turbines. But we should also consider unconventional stuff, like some of the really weird ones, like the kinetic kites are an unusual energy system. 00:45:43 I don't know if they're viable in the current environment. But if things get more difficult, we might try such things. All unconventional and unorthodox ideas must be looked at and taken seriously, and the alternative is we go without. That's how I sort of see energy going.

And so at the government's level, the local community... Let's start with federal first. The federal government doesn't actually own anything. They own the military and they run the finance side of things. They start wars and all that. So they do things at that level. The state governments don't own any infrastructure themselves. In Australia for example, the state government might own the highways. 00:40:21 But they don't own things like waste transfer systems. They don't own hospitals. They don't own schools. And that's all local council. So the local city council level is actually the people who own the assets that will hold society together. So it's the local city or shire council who will actually do the useful work.

So what you're trying to do is like in the movie Contact with Jodie Foster, where they built the contraption to go to outer space, and then it was sabotaged by some religious fanatics. Unbeknownst to everyone else, they had something also in Hokkaido, Japan, another version that 00:42:26 no one knew about. You're trying to build this parallel system, do the research and the thinking and the Overton window of this new system simultaneous as the super-organism tries to continue business as usual.

I don't know how this will look like. What I do think is it will come to cultural identity. What is the cultural identity? And that's what we will all gravitate to, and we'll gravitate.

the future I believe is communities where humans come together in groups and we start to cooperate. And the community itself takes on a life of its own. So this is the mentality I believe that we will evolve over time.

what I'm proposing it will look like is you have local decision making. Regional sourcing of stuff, see everything that we're actually going to produce industrially is sourced from a radio, say four or 500 kilometers. So two or 300 miles, whatever that is. And on a global scale, we've got a global transfer of information.

first thing's first is we reorder the vital industrial hubs. 00:38:13 Now yes, those industrial hubs will actually have to have decision makers what considers a vital hub. What's a vital activity? Then we need the people to actually operate those in industrial services. So you'll have a population inserted. Around that population, we have our food production and it all has to be local. So you have now a series of localized, decentralized networks that are actually, you'll have a 00:38:39 hub where everything balances, but in a local area.

what our work is showing is very soon it can't. And so it's going to go through a death throws and any organism it will fight to survive. And so yes, there will be pushback and resistance. And so what I'm proposing is a plan, whether that plan gets carried out or whether it's 00:37:22 allowed to be carried out, that's a different matter.

what would the super organism be within the four categories of... Would it be old school? Would it be a Viking? 00:36:32 Would it be a realist or an Arcadian? What would the super organism be? Nate Hagens: Well, certainly wouldn't be an Arcadian because the super organism cares about right now, just getting enough profits to keep the financial system going. And the profits are tethered to energy. So the super organism would be a blend of category one and category two, the cornucopia and the Vikings.

the risk that I see is the more people and the more countries and governments that recognize the logic of this, the sooner there's 00:36:07 a phase shift that actually mortally wounds the super organism, and then the complexity and financial supports that we have for all of our nations kind of unravel before we're able to do the important work.

there's an order to do things in. And so the first order of business was to reshuffle and reorder our industry sites around energy hubs. Where is their energy coming from? 00:35:16 And if we can't project it over such a long period of time, over a long distance anymore, how do we reorder our industry where each industrial site will be attached to other sites, where they function almost like an industrial version of an organic farm. The outputs of one industry unit and its waste plume inputs to another industrial unit, and 00:35:44 they're all attached to the same energy system.

let's probably just circle around your Maslow hierarchy of needs to get more people thinking about the direction we need to go. So I'm not sure how to proceed. 00:34:05 I think what maybe we could do is those six categories you mentioned earlier, maybe you give a five to 10 minute overview of how you think about energy, food, water, sewage, heating, manufacturing.

So it was always going to be this way. And we are the heroes that we've always wanted to. We just didn't know it. And now we have no choice anyway.

the Arcadians exist now for a reason. But I think a case can be made that this had to happen. We were never, ever, ever going to do this the easy way where we learned for example, we could have seen this back in the early 1900s. We didn't, right? We could have changed at the end of World War II. 00:31:27 We could have changed in 1970. We didn't. Why? We always took the easy way out. It's like a dopamine hit.

This is an internal and almost spiritual evolution. We let go of materialism. We learn the idea that we have to have a genuine and respectful relationship with the planetary environment. We understand the purpose of thinking for ourselves, taking responsibility for our actions, 00:30:16 and meaning what we say at all levels. If that is translated into society architecture

nd that brings us to the fourth group, which I believe you and I are part of or, would like to think so. I call them the Arcadians. Now the Arcadians think long term how do we build a new society that is genuinely wise?

is the prepper community. What are the short term needs of society? The next one to five years in a seasonal perspective. How do we get our food? How do we maintain our water? How do we manage our medical problems and disease? How do we manufacture our pharmaceuticals?

I was talking to a friend of ours Steve Keen and he actually pointed this out to me. The second group is the Vikings. The Vikings are the group of people who are not interested in doing the work to create a new system. They understand the old system's coming apart, but they will take what they want while they can.

what Marvin Harris said was the most important thing projecting the viability of a historical cultures is infrastructure, which is your expertise. But before we get into the infrastructure part, how do you envision society at the higher levels of belief, motivation, institutions? 00:25:09 Have you thought about that? Simon Michaux: Yes. So I believe society will shift into four parallel groups based on paradigm

So what I've done here is when we often talk about say the Maslow hierarchy of needs, this is about what do we absolutely need in order of priority? And usually that is for a human being or a human society. But what if we projected that thinking onto several sectors? Because at the moment, the Maslow hierarchy of needs was based around what happens in 00:21:27 an emergency. And they talk about things like food, water, security, and what have you. But all those things are industrially and technologically delivered to us now. We need for example our systems to deliver us our food and our water is piped to us. So Maslow's hierarchy of needs is now projected onto a couple of sectors.

So have you developed such a hierarchy of 00:20:37 the things that we're absolutely going to need? Simon Michaux: Yeah. So I started thinking about it. If I have a plan, that's okay. But we've got to put it in the arena, and we've all got to discuss it, rip it apart, and put it back together. So my plan becomes our plan. So I'm putting forward some ideas, but I see this as the start of the conversation, not the actual solution.

So these are the steps and hoops that we've got to jump through, not only as a species,

So we've got to establish our priorities. And then there's three levels if you will.

And we keep intervening to stop that change happening, and the system's trying to find a new equilibrium. Because we ideologically believe things should never change, but the rug's being pulled out from under our feet. Nate Hagens: But I totally agree with that. With the addition of that finance central bank guarantees, and quantitative easing, and more debt, and all that acts as a buffer so that we don't see the material and resource 00:17:17 disconnect. It is hidden from us because of this financial short term finger in the dike as it were

So the four social groups, they're all paradigms. Like when you go meet with like-minded people, so there's four groups. The first group is the group I call the old school

what is clear to me is a new social contractors coming where the human species is evolving both as a species, as a group, but also each of us individually.

think I would add complexity and the fragility of six continent supply chain. The inability of global leaders to actually say some of the things that you're saying, 00:09:30 because that would cause a phase shift in how we approach the resource situation. I would add that everything is optimized for growth, and we will kick any possible can forward. So the default would be to grow a bigger global system using more fossil fuels and more renewables, 00:09:54 even with renewables growing at a faster rate. And in the process of decarbonizing our energy source, as you pointed out, we will re-materialize our mineral product source on the manufacturing side.

what you and I just said compared to the global narratives like net zero by 00:11:29 2050 is maybe blasphemy. It's almost a completely different worldview. And so the net zero very common McKinsey sort of governmental forecast is very different than what we're saying. And I don't think both can be true.

So now we are in a situation where we want to build a new system. And that system is going to be built with really, really fragile and expensive energy. No sorry, ineffective and expensive energy using a fragile finance system. It's probably a better way to say it. So our finance sector is not in a fit state to engage in industrial reform. And now we're also finding because energy's becoming a problem, and natural resources 00:06:52 are decreasing in grade, and getting harder to get hold of. So our ability to bring more resources online are getting harder and harder. At the same time, we have a massive pollution stream that is historically unprecedented and an environment that is deteriorating, that's the only way to describe it. Deteriorating at all levels. And we've got an unprecedented number of human population embedded in this system.

over the last 150 years, we built an industrial ecosystem that is amazingly complex. And it was actually built using really, really dense energy and oil. 00:06:01 And it was built and optimized around cheap abundant energy like we'd never seen, but also free and easy available credit and capital. And also the idea that all mineral resources are abundant, it's just a matter of digging them up

our plan was not thought through in context of the time needed, our industrial capacity, and our ability to supply the raw materials needed. 00:09:04 And so a new plan is needed and a new paradigm is needed.

But 80% of the sector is already off fossil fuels. Our entire transport sector is fossil fuels. And that's actually the main challenge. But we've got a lot of heavy industry here like smelters and factories, and they're all 00:03:52 running on non fossils fuel energy. And so we can actually run an industrial sector without fossil fuels right now, which is amazing.

today what I'd like to do, if you're willing, is start to construct a framework for how we start to prepare for what's ahead. What is the hard work that's going to make need to be done? And what are the buckets that people and governments need to focus on?

Finland's a remarkable place where when something is said, especially when it's said with data 00:02:09 backed analysis, it is discussed. It is not ignored. And what has happened is the work has been passed around. And I've been invited to go and speak at multiple levels of the Finnish and Swedish government now. And they're taking it very seriously because Finland has committed to being fossil fuel free, or at least carbon neutral by 2035. 00:02:35 And they've now actually starting to get their arms around the mechanics of that plan. And they're realizing the scale of what they're undertaking. And so they're taking it very seriously. And I'm now presenting my work four and five times a week to someone.

Please welcome a return to this show my Australian colleague Simon Michaux. Simon currently works for the government of Finland in their mining geology division called GTK. Simon and I previously had a conversation called Minerals Blindness, which complimented the term often used on this podcast, energy blindness. 00:00:26 Simon Returns today to give an overview on given the biophysical constraints that we face, how do we think about solutions? And what would be a preliminary framework for research and societal interventions for what we face?

How to Produce Hundreds of World-Changing Ideas In 1 Hour

The Einstellung effect explains why solo idea generation underperforms. To comb the full spectrum of possibilities, we need others to push us out of the ruts we don't even know we're in.

Einstellung effect occurs when one possible solution prevents you from seeing any others. Simply thinking of one direction to approach a problem can blind you to the full range of alternatives.

When making decisions, people tend to latch on to an initial reference point, or anchor. For example, if you ask a group of people to estimate the size of an object, the remaining estimates will cluster around the first guess — even if that first guess is way off base. That initial number becomes a focal point, an event horizon that's cognitively difficult to escape for the other participants. The first few suggestions in a brainstorming session will inevitably steer what follows. Even experienced creators fall prey to anchoring, unconsciously positioning all their suggestions in relation to earlier suggestions instead of letting the development process diverge across the full spectrum of possibilities. That's why we need a process that systematically prevents anchors from forming in the first place.

Because of the creative cliff illusion, people don't persist in generating ideas for nearly as long as they could. In fact, they quit just as they're getting to their most interesting ideas. This isn't a talent thing. It's an expectations thing. Lucas and Nordgren found that people's beliefs about creativity — for example, whether they (incorrectly) believed that your best ideas arrive first — correlated with how long they persisted at creative tasks. In other words, understanding the creative cliff illusion helps dispel it.

How many ideas does it actually take to arrive at a great one? In our experience, the answer is something on the order of 2,000. Yes, that's a two with three zeros after it — 2,000-to-1. We call this the Idea Ratio.

The "equal-odds rule," put forward by psychology professor Dean Keith Simonton, states that the number of one's creative successes correlates to the total number of works created.

you are a person and not a self that's going to be a very important distinction

i've found that my reflection on no self and on personhood has made a difference in my life and so i hope that it makes a difference in yours so one of the things i like to do before i start is just to set motivation 00:11:31 um and i'd like us to have a common motivation that our motivation really is to understand who we are in order to become better people and able to more effectively um benefit others 00:11:44 and that's the motivation i'd like to go into this with sometimes there'll be sharp argument and debate but the goal should always be to make ourselves instruments for general welfare

Those within Twitter, and those watching from the sidelines, have previously argued that Twitter’s knowledge base is overly concentrated in the minds of a handful of programmers, some of whom have been fired.

i want you to imagine two other sentient beings seeing that rose and again this uh reflects an analogy that john gave us earlier in the day imagine that there's a bee looking at that rose 00:38:03 bees see um colors in the infrared and the ultraviolet spectrum they see all kinds of colors in that rose that we can't even see it probably looks speckled and striped to them in all kinds of really cool ways and they see it through 00:38:16 compound eyes my dog has got far less color sensitivity than we do and he probably sees the rose in a shade of gray now if we were to ask the question which of the three of us the bee 00:38:29 the dog or me sees the rose correctly sees it as it is does we understand immediately that that's a stupid question the only thing we can talk about is the 00:38:42 rose as it shows up for a human being the rose as it shows up for a bee the rose as it shows up for a dog but if you were to ask oh yeah yeah yeah but what does the rose look like in itself what does the rose itself look like 00:38:56 that is a really stupid question and that's what ultimate naturelessness is there is no way that things just are there are only ways that things show up for different kinds of sensory and 00:39:10 cognitive consciousness and that is ultimate naturelessness

objects of experience 00:36:36 are causally natureless the second kind of naturelessness naturelessness with respect to production is to say they arise only through causal interactions as we've been discussing we don't encounter them in an immediate way 00:36:48 and the second nature the dependent nature of things is the fact that they don't exist independently of us but rather all of the phenomena we ever experience all of the objects in our 00:37:00 world are constructed through complex and here i want to emphasize opaque causal processes none of us really understands exactly how our minds construct the world in which we live even though we know that they construct 00:37:13 them and that means that the objects of our experience because we are constructing them are fundamentally non-dually related to us they are not things we detect they are constructions 00:37:24 in which we participate

i want to begin by talking about the imagine nature which is the first of those three natures um it's really tempting when i look at a flower like a rose um a nice red rose 00:35:22 to think that the color the redness is right on the rose unless you are extremely accomplished when you look at a red rose you see the color right out there in the rose and 00:35:34 you assume that your eyes are simply detecting color that is in the rose actually that can't possibly be true color is something that emerges um as 00:35:45 john pointed out this morning through the interaction of our sense faculties and whatever is happening outside of them and the color emerges in our minds but we imagine things to exist outside of consciousness just as we perceive 00:35:58 them and that nature that we ascribe to the objects of our experience is their imagined nature it's an imagined nature because we project it out there even though on reflection we each know 00:36:11 that the redness can't possibly be painted out there in the rose footnote it's uh equally stupid to think that when we detect the redness we're detecting in inner red paint that 00:36:23 somehow um is just detected by an inner eye i assure you that when you look inside your brain you will find no such inner red paint

what yogachara does through its detailed analysis of the nature of consciousness through its detailed analysis of the three natures that all phenomena enjoy and through its 00:34:28 detailed analysis of the three respects in which things are natureless gives us a nice analysis of how it is that we come to represent what is in fact dependently originated as um as 00:34:42 independent and intrinsically real and how it is that we come to see our mediated access to the world as immediate

yogachara theory and i'm thinking here about three nature theory and three naturelessness theory suggests to us that we are simply wired for certain illusions and among them is 00:29:19 the illusion of immediacy um and we're wired to thematize our experience through the framework of subject object duality i often compare this to the way that we're wired for certain 00:29:31 optical illusions for instance you don't have to learn to see the mueller liar illusion as an illusion we all see it as an illusion and it's because of the way our visual system has evolved and there are lots of other optical illusions like 00:29:44 that the color five phenomenon for instance and so forth yogachara really takes very seriously the idea that from beginning with time we've evolved karmic predispositions to certain kinds of 00:29:55 illusions and these are some of them and of course a little bit of reflection shows that that duality has to be illusory um after all um we are 00:30:09 not subject pure subjects standing outside of the world of our experience confronting a world of objects some of them outer and some of them inner that's the vedanta position that ain't the buddhist position instead what we are is 00:30:24 organisms and again i will set aside all of the debates we might have about how those organisms are constituted but we are organisms embedded in an environment and our bodies our sense faculties are 00:30:37 part of the world in which we find ourselves as a consequence our subjectivity our own engagement with the world is constituted not by standing outside and detecting things but rather by being 00:30:51 embedded in the world and the only way that we could possibly become aware of any object whether it's a tree or an apple or a thought or a feeling is to construct that as an object in our field 00:31:04 of consciousness even if in doing so we manage to hide from ourselves the fact that we are constructing it

this is not to say that our inner life has some kind of a second grade um existence conventional reality is not 00:25:14 second level reality um because as the guardian and chandra kirti also emphasized we must remember that conventional reality dependent 00:25:26 origination is exactly the same as emptiness which is ultimate reality the only kind of reality anything that we ever encounter is going to have is conventional reality so when i'm talking 00:25:38 here about cognitive illusion i'm not arguing that the existence of our interstates um is illusory i'm arguing that the illusion is that we have immediate access to them as they are and 00:25:51 that their mode of existence um is um intrinsic existence so this allows us to understand the majority analysis of the most fundamental cognitive illusion 00:26:04 of all the illusion of the immediacy of our knowledge of our own minds and the givenness of our own interstates and processes our direct knowledge of them as the kinds of things they are independent of 00:26:18 any concepts that's the illusion that wittgenstein quine and sellers each in there worked so hard in the 20th century to diagnose and to cure but we can put this just as easily and maybe more 00:26:31 easily in the terms of second century indian madhyamaka the fundamental cognitive illusion is to take our mental states to exist intrinsically rather than conventionally and to take our knowledge of them to be 00:26:45 immediate independent of conventions this illusion is pervasive it is instinctive and it is profoundly self-alienating because it obscures the deeply conventional character of our own 00:26:57 existence and of our self-knowledge and this illusion is what according to buddhist philosophers lies at the root of our grasping of our attraction and diversion and hence at the root of the 00:27:09 pervasive suffering of existence

the reason is that a perception 00:10:38 is kind of perceptual in structure and the buddhist world encodes this by arguing that the internal um sense the the manus venana is a sense faculty just like external faculties 00:10:52 and so just as our external faculties present us with a world that just seems to us even though we know it's not to be just as it is that we see it just as it is 00:11:03 it's tempting to think that we've got this apparent object distinct from our sensory apprehension of it but is but an object that's presented by a completely veritable process 00:11:15 because as i say perception just feels like it presents the world to us as it is i look at a red apple and i think damn i know exactly what that apple smells like looks like tastes like and 00:11:27 feels like forgetting that all i have is the apple as it's mediated by the peculiar perceptual system that i have and by all of the conceptual resources through which i filtered my perception 00:11:41 so in the same way a perception or introspective awareness just feels like it presents our own cognitive affective and perceptual states to us just as they are 00:11:53 independent of that appreceptive system and those conceptual categories so just as external perception gives us the illusion that we're just detectors of the world as it is inner perception can give us the illusion that we are just 00:12:06 detectors of our inner um our inner world just as it is so even when we remind ourselves as i'm reminding you right now of this 00:12:18 extremely complex mediation of our perceptual encounter with external objects we find ourselves in constantly experiencing our own experience as though 00:12:31 we've got the world just as it is and then we sometimes say okay maybe we're not getting the world just as it is but at least i'm getting my sensory experiences just as they are the apple might not be red but the redness i 00:12:42 experience is exactly the redness that i think i experience the sweetness that i introspect must be the sweetness just as it is and so forth so even if we give up for a moment and it's hard to give it up 00:12:54 for more than that the notion of immediacy with regard to external perception we often retreat to thinking that that's mediated but my awareness of my own inner episodes is the immediate 00:13:06 awareness that mediates my knowledge of the external world and i think that in the sense of that perception that sense of immediacy is even greater it's really hard for us to be convinced that our inner experience 00:13:20 could possibly be deceptive we seem to think that if i think that i believe something i must believe it if i think that i'm feeling something i must be feeling it and that feeling and that believing grab my inner 00:13:33 reality just as it is and so part of the problem that arises is that the mediation of our introspective awareness by our introspective faculty becomes 00:13:46 cognitively invisible to us just as what i'm seeing the world my visual faculty is invisible and it just delivers a visible world to me and i have to really think to to understand 00:13:58 what my own visual faculty visual organ and visual consciousness are contributing i think i experience my introspective faculty as just giving me inner objects and i have to think and remind myself 00:14:11 that actually my inner sense faculty is also a fallible instrument and that i may be misusing that instrument or that instrument might be intrinsically deceptive and that's a hard thing to get one's mind around 00:14:25 as a consequence we've become seduced by this idea that even if our knowledge of some things is mediated that mediation can't go all the way down we get seduced by the idea that there's got to be a 00:14:38 basic foundational level of experience to which we can have some kind of immediate access and to which when we know it we know it absolutely veritically in the theory of knowledge that leads us to foundationalism in the 00:14:51 philosophy of mind it leads us to sense datum theory um and i find that in a lot of buddhist situations a lot of buddhist practitioners take it to be this idea of an infallibility of an immediate kind of 00:15:03 experience if i'm sitting on the cushion just right so with all of that in play um i want to move to exercising that myth of the given that i've been characterizing 00:15:16 and to show that buddhist philosophy offers us powerful ways of doing that and i'm going to begin by talking about first person knowledge through the lens of the madhyamaka tradition

there's a second kind of cognitive illusion this first cognitive illusion as i've suggested is thematized both in buddhist philosophy and in western philosophy but the second 00:07:06 kind of illusion i find not thematized so much in the west though in some quarters it is some but not all but very much stabilized in in buddhist philosophy and that is the superimposition of subject object 00:07:19 duality um and when we do that um we take the nature of our experience to be primordially structured as subject standing outside of the world viewing an 00:07:31 object now we always know we know that on the slightest bit of reflection that that's crazy that we are biological organisms embedded in a physical world and that 00:07:43 all of our experience is the result of that embodied embedded and embedded experience in the world it's still however almost irresistible to have that kind of image of ourselves as wittgenstein put it as like the eye 00:07:56 to the visual field that we stand outside of the world as pure subject with everything else taken as object and that reflexive taking of experience that way is a very profound kind of cognitive 00:08:09 illusion one that is extremely hard to shake to overcome illusion though we first have to come to know that illusion better you need to know your enemy in 00:08:21 order to defeat your enemy and so i'm going to spend a lot of time trying to acquaint us with the nature of these illusions that is to say if we want to avoid a pointless trek through the desert uh for 00:08:34 water we'd better know that what we're seeing is a mirage and not an oasis when we become aware of that fact then we're able to redirect ourselves in the right uh in the right direction

We have left it too late to tackle climate change incrementally. It now requires transformational change, and a dramatic acceleration of progress.

the richest 10 per cent take less than 40 per cent of national incomes. 

Student: Isn't there some problem of duality, with a mind that goes on and on and a body that stops?Rinpoche: It's not really a problem because when the body disintegrates then only the connection between the body and mind has been dissevered. The mind continues to a future lifetime and the physical body is left behind as matter, if burned as ashes that can be scattered on the ground to continue as a physical phenomenon.Question: Mind and body are different categories?Rinpoche: Yes, the body can be perceived with the physical sensory organs, whereas the mind cannot be touched, or heard, or seen, and the like. Right now body and mind occur simultaneously, but they are quite distinct.Question: How and when does the mind go from a dead body to a new one? Is it at the moment of conception?Rinpoche: What usually happens is that the body is afflicted with a disease, so that the mind no longer remains attached to it. Then the mind leaves the body, death occurs, and the body deteriorates. After either a short or longer period of time, the mind perceives another body, identifies with it as, "This is my body," and feels attached to it. The relationship that sets in when attachment arises is the time that mind and body become connected. According to the scriptures, semen cannot enter an ovum unless an attaching mind is present, so a mind is a necessary condition for conception to occur. Therefore it is logical that the moment of conception takes place when the mind becomes attached to the physical form of the semen entering the ovum, and a being is alive from the moment of conception.Question: It sounds as though the mind chooses the body.Rinpoche: In fact, there is no choice. When the mind is separated from its body at death, visions appear to that mind, and these visions are very disturbing and erratic. In that state, the mind actually has no possibility to choose.

Student: In the example of the travelling businessman, what is analogous to the homeland?Thrangu Rinpoche: The future lifetime is what corresponds to the homeland in the example. If a businessman were to go to a foreign country, neglect his business, and just have a good time, he would probably return home broke and may run in to trouble. Like this, if we are not concerned about our future lives now, we will find ourselves in very unfavourable circumstances later.

should we only understand the ultimate truth of emptiness and deny conventional appearances and experiences, we could mistakenly cling to the false belief in nihilism, thinking that everything is useless and that virtuous and unvirtuous actions, virtue and vice, are meaningless. Such an attitude leads an individual to turn his or her back on respecting the integral nature of conditioned existence and only shows an "emptiness of the mouth." The truth of emptiness does not contradict nor oppose conventional reality and it never interrupts or stops appearances from functioning according to causes and conditions when they prevail.

Should we only understand the first and not the latter, we could mistakenly cling to the false belief that things exist inherently and of their own accord.

If we acknowledge emptiness intellectually and gain a philosophical appreciation, then we can develop faith and trust that meditation on emptiness is beneficial and does lead to realization.

Examining the source of conditioned phenomena and understanding that existents successively arise in dependence upon causes and conditions, bare of any reality, enhance a deeper acknowledgement and appreciation for the truth of being-becoming and all this entails.

In the 7th century, the great Mahasiddha Chandrakirti explained Nagarjuna's book, entitled Madhyamakavatara, in order to clarify the four logical reasons that Nagarjuna composed to explain the first verse, which speaks of the fact that the essence of all things is beyond one and many. In the last century, Mipham Rinpoche wrote The Gateway to Knowledge and in the chapter on "The Four Analyses" brought together the essential points of the many expositions about these proofs that need to be studied so that we understand the selflessness of both apprehending subject and apprehended objects - shunyata in Sanskrit, tong-pa-nid in Tibetan, translated as "emptiness." We need to know that if there were a self-essence, then liberation would be impossible, the reason why these instructions on selflessness, shunyata, are so precious, indeed.

Examination of Cause, the "Diamond Slivers"

A Meditation on the Diamond Slivers

The World Economic Forum has estimated that "roughly half of global gross domestic product, or about $44 trillion worth of economic value, depends on the natural world in some way, meaning its destruction represents an enormous financial loss."Wowzers, an eye-watering 44 trillion. And yet, the true costs are far greater than that - there is no economy on a dead planet, so how can the cost only be 44 trillion?We must take every action possible now to avert collapse situations. Ways to take action in the comments, or feel free to add add your own suggestions..

As many groups and local governments work to expand urban forests, I would encourage all of them to incorporate the findings below into their buildout strategy.

picture of thousands of Volkswagen and Audi cars sitting idle in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Models manufactured from 2009 to 2015 were designed to cheat emissions tests mandated by the United States EPA. Following the scandal, Volkswagen had to recall millions of cars. (Credit:Jassen Tadorov/Reddit)How can we utilize these materials just wasting away in the desert and how can we stop this craziness to ever happen again?

Climate change is not the problem. We can get to net zero tomorrow and still be headed towards the collapse of life on Earth. Why?The problem is that our economy is a mega-machine that converts nature to waste. 

Rebecca Solnit ponders this in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost,

the ultimate purpose which the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates believed dialogue should serve: by being open to changing one’s view, a person could enter a state of 'aporia' – a profound realisation of the depths of one’s ignorance – which, if submitted to, could then allow one to experience a state of 'ekstasis' – literally a “stepping out of one’s self” – which was the first stage in the emergence of a more authentic self.

“It is only when we are able to appreciate the view of ‘another’, that we are truly able to step beyond the boundary of the self”

‘intentional conversations’

People feel increasingly uninvolved as if they no longer have any agency,while global problems continue to pile up.

As the financial system went global [in the 1980s], so competitionbetween financial centres – chiefly London and New York – took itscoercive toll . . . if the regulatory regime in London was less strict thanthat of the US, then the branches [of international banks] in the City ofLondon got the business rather than Wall Street. As lucrative businessnaturally flowed to wherever the regulatory regime was laxest, so thepolitical pressure on the regulators to look the other way mounted.3

Leaving aside those far-right doubts about the existence of a climateproblem, any government that wanted to cut carbon emissions substantiallycould not avoid implementing much tougher emissions regulations andhigher business taxes. But any government that did so in advance of othergovernments would only force its corporations to move production andthousands of jobs elsewhere.

The vicious circle of Destructive Global Competition (DGC) had gotgoing to such a point that it became self-sustaining. Once multinationalcorporations and global investors gained the ability to move capital andthousands of jobs seamlessly across national borders, the genie was outof the bottle and the vicious circle was set in train. Without realizing itgovernments were then caught in the endless pursuit of their ‘internationalcompetitiveness’ – caught in the game of forever outcompeting each otherat cutting taxes and regulations in a bid to retain jobs and inward invest-ment. From then on DGC drew politicians and governments into itsdestructive vortex, and it is now running beyond anyone’s control.

The problem is that if one player finds a way to undermine orcircumvent the rules and gets away with it then the others have no choicebut to follow. If they don’t they’ll lose out.

In acknowledging only one side of competition – the constructiveaspect – economic experts are actually making life harder for themselves,like driving with one arm in a sling.

Fail to stay competitive and you will lose out in ‘the global race’.9And the threat works. Competition and competitiveness have becomeas unquestionable in the modern world as God, His angels and the Devilwere in the medieval. Fear of damnation in the future is ubiquitous. Todaygovernment leaders universally see it as their duty to pursue their nation’sinternational competiveness as unrelentingly as the defence of the realmand far more enthusiastically than regulating business or collecting taxes.But if competition is really so beneficial, why do global problems seemto be getting worse rather than better? If the markets in which we’re allembedded are competitions, and if competition only produces benefits, asneoliberal ideology insists, you’d have thought that its ‘staggering powerto make things better’ would, by now, have caused many of our problemsto disappear.Clearly, something doesn’t quite stack up.

Our difficult journey ends in acceptance. Not an acceptance of hope-lessness but an acceptance that our familiar nationcentric way of thinking nolonger serves us and we can let it go. Acceptance, then, is not a capitulationbut a new liberation: we learn to see ourselves and the world with freshworldcentric eyes.

On this road we encounter the psychological obstacles to adoptingnew thinking as recognizable staging posts along the road: denial, anger,bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.

The problem is that adopting new thinking means first loosening andletting go of our existing way, and this involves a terrifying transition.Rather like the mythological bird the phoenix that first had to die andturn to ashes before being reborn, new life can only arise when somethinghas been let go. We have to go through a grieving process for what we arelosing, similar to the one we might experience if someone close to us dies.It can be thought of as a difficult journey – painful but necessary

This book takes an entirelyfresh approach by focusing on globalization’s inner aspects – the way wethink and feel about it as individuals and as cultures and how it impedesour ability to solve global problems.

tighter regulations and highercorporate taxes increase costs and make firms and nations less competitive.

This blindness, we explain, isbecause society as a whole only sees competition’s constructive side, whilewe expose its hidden destructive side.

Solving Global Problems CouldBe Easier Than We Think

they suggest that the use of symbols to model the world developed rapidly between about 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, and has the effect of giving emphasis to analytic thought as the dominant mode of human consciousness. Rather than seeing symbols as the impetus for human logic, they argue for presymbolic elements of logic in Peirce’s sign categories shared widely by humans and other animals.

The Evolution of Human Consciousness and Linguistic Behavior

they construct out of this event representations they they can understand for example the events that lead to a 00:04:49 change of power decline is an alpha male and a replacement by another or other types of things such as bonding relationships between individuals in the group the only thing they can do is they can't 00:05:00 express that knowledge you know to anyone else whereas a human child watching let's say a dog fight and represent that dog fight in action for example by taking two 00:05:12 models of dogs and having them fight even if they can't speak children can do this or they might get down on their hands and knees and act out the fight right but but no other creature can do this this is uniquely human they no one 00:05:26 else can as it were act out an event representation we call this event reenactment

the human brain I've argued for at least two million years has co-evolved with the emergence of these distributed networks and it can't realize its design 00:02:13 potential is to say we wouldn't even be speaking for example until it is immersed in such a network these networks themselves 00:02:24 generate complex cognitive structures which were connected to and which reformat our our brains and therefore the brains task is is very complex we have to assimilate the structures of 00:02:37 culture and manage them and I'm going to argue that a lot of our most complex thinking strategies are actually culturally imposed in the starting point 00:02:51 of the human journey

I'm going to just try to tell you as quickly as I can and in fairly straightforward way the story of how the human mind especially the modern mind 00:00:58 came into being it's a it's a it's a complex story but I think the the bare bones can be exposed rather rather straightforward matter rather quickly 00:01:09 my basic message is that what makes humans so different from other species from all the other species in the biosphere including our very close relatives the great apes is that we 00:01:21 build distributed cognitive networks

The Global Superorganism:an evolutionary-cybernetic model of theemerging network society

Emilio Gómez Milán

Maria Kozhevnikov, a neuroscientist at the National University of Singapore and Massachusetts General Hospital

Russ Pariseau

Herbert Benson

we never 00:32:28 we never say all that we mean and we never mean all that we say you wouldn't be speaking human language if you did so when politicians tell you I say what I mean and I mean what they're lying already because language doesn't work 00:32:41 that way we we leave a lot of things unspecified and we let the cultural context fill it in so if I say she sat down Who am I talking about you only know who she is if you saw her 00:32:53 come in or I've referred to her earlier and you can follow it so actually why do divorces happen in modern societies because language doesn't really work 00:33:06 well I mean that's a you can tell that language of all because it doesn't work very well there just doesn't communicate as well as we would like it my wife and I have conversations sometimes and we 00:33:19 realized that we didn't know what the other one was talking about we clearly didn't know what the other was talking about we have different cultural assumptions and although if I do figure out what she's talking about then I pretended that's what I was talking 00:33:31 about

ow many sounds do you need to have a language well 00:30:33 think about a computer what can you say on a computer anything right I mean you can type anything that's why people get addicted to Facebook and everything but how many letters does a computer have it 00:30:44 has two zero and one you have a binary digit language and those I would like to call the sounds of the computer zero and one that's how it interprets everything or that's how it presents information 00:30:58 that is interpreted by the program that was created by a person with language you don't really need more than two sounds

let's just 00:29:52 talk a little bit about their vocal apparatus what kinds of sounds could they have made very often when linguists are talking about the evolution of speech they talk about sounds were they capable of making sounds Homo erectus 00:30:05 would have been roughly a talking gorilla they had the vocal apparatus that is much more similar to a gorilla they couldn't have made all the sounds we made the sounds they made would have sound more muffled does that mean they 00:30:19 couldn't have language no it doesn't mean that at all there are a lot of people today that have speech impediments that can't make the same range of sounds we make but they certainly have language

what is a symbol then this is the thing that really is the crucial question

most intriguing to me was the discovery which even today some 00:23:13 archaeologists deny but the evidence is actually overwhelming that oceans were no barriers to erectus they sailed across oceans so this is a quote from a 00:23:24 very good book on Paleolithic Stone Age seafarers Paleolithic books our ancestors have often been painted as unintelligent brutes however this simply is not the case evidence suggests that at least homo erectus and perhaps even 00:23:37 pre erectus hominids were early seafarers based on this evidence it seems that our early ancestors were successful seafarers biological studies suggest that considerable numbers of founder populations so when we find 00:23:50 evidence of erectus tools on an island there had to have been 2250 erectus arrived they're more or less the same time it's not just that one erectus got there we also know and I'll go into this 00:24:03 that they didn't just wash ashore it would have been almost impossible some archaeologists suggest that they got there by tsunamis but when I talked to friends of mine who are earth scientists they say that's not how 00:24:17 tsunamis work you know the tsunamis are pushing water to land and it is possible that afterwards some things flow out but most of the energy is towards the land and it is true that a few animals have 00:24:30 made it but we don't find regular systematic colonization by humans waiting to ride tsunamis most people don't try to do that

they were the smartest creature in the history of 00:16:32 the world when they came about no creature had ever been that smart think about gorillas and all the things that a gorilla can do or a chimpanzee they would have been far beyond any any other ape in their tech in their 00:16:44 intellectual abilities and their cognitive abilities they were more successful than we have been they lasted almost two million years they overlapped with sapiens for a hundred and forty 00:16:55 thousand years it could have been as much as three hundred and forty thousand years but we we appeared either two hundred thousand years ago or four hundred thousand years ago but whatever we're newcomers compared to Homo erectus

language is much more 00:12:18 complicated than is often presented it's to me the primary unit of language is not the sentence or the word it's the conversation I think that we didn't have language in the archaeological record 00:12:31 until we had a conversation symbols were the beginning but symbols would never have arisen outside of conversations they could have only come about in conversations so we have meaning and 00:12:44 lexical meaning phonetics the history of languages grammar psychology culture on top of all of that so language is quite a complicated thing which is one reason I'm not worried about robots learning 00:12:57 language anytime soon they would have to at least be able to learn culture at the same time

all creatures have indexes which are 00:05:21 physical connections between form and meanings so footprints are physical index of smells our physical index is smoke is a physical index of fire those 00:05:32 are recognized by every living creature icons are intentional and they're non arbitrary their physical resemblances so a painting is an icon a sculpture is an 00:05:45 icon they show the ability to represent something based on physical resemblance not physical connection and then finally the most complicated is a symbol which has a form and a meaning but more than 00:06:00 that I won't go into all the details but symbols are actually fairly complex but the most important thing to remember on a symbol is they arise by convention by culture they don't arise any other way 00:06:13 also duality of patterning that just means that we take meaningless items to make meaningful items so take CA TS I'll go into this Katz and English C means 00:06:25 nothing a means nothing T means nothing s means nothing Katz mean something so the ability to take things that don't mean anything make things that do mean something such as cymbals this is a crucial component 00:06:38 of language and I'm not the one who discovered that that's been known for a while compositionality is the ability to put things together and make larger meanings so the and boy and big and ran can go 00:06:53 together to get the big boy ran so so these are very important parts and there are different kinds of grammars

one of the reasons that people have thought that language 00:03:49 was much later is because they've been looking in the wrong places many are most archaeologists investigating the evidence for early language have been sold on the formalist idea that grammar is the defining 00:04:02 feature of language so you find archaeologists trying to find correlations between tool complexity and then assuming grammatical complexity or they believe that symbols are important 00:04:15 but they're only found in special locations like artwork I think those are both wrong grammar is insufficient because grammar just the fact that there's a grammar doesn't mean 00:04:27 there's a language because DNA has a grammar there are a lot of different domains that have grammars that have structural structural operations that are not language

these are the metabolic pathways and and flux is passing through all of these things all this is what makes us alive and it's enormously complicated

Communitition

Integrative Lawyers are reflective.Integrative Lawyers are values and purpose-based.Integrative Lawyers are system and design thinkers.Integrative Lawyers are harbingers of evolutionary consciousness.

Find out what's happening in Community Meetup groups around the world and start meeting up with the ones near you.

Earlier this week, during a seminar at Schumacher College that included an exploration into what a Citizens Action Network might entail, a student wondered if we’d ever heard of South Africa’s CANs movement. No, we answered, we had not…

The innovation theorist Steven Johnson calls these “multiples” - like the simultaneous but separate discovery of sun-spots, oxygen, electrical batteries, the steam engine and telephone. In each case, the discovery rests on prior fundamental ideas that have already crossed borders. To isolate oxygen specifically, for example, there must be a general idea that air is made from gases. The specific innovation finds an “adjacent possible” - a possibility space opened up by the general body of thinking. That’s why these ideas can happen, in synchrony, even though far apart in geography.

one of the i guess stranger or slightly scarier conclusions proposed by the scientists in the study is that a lot of the signs we see in the geological history of the planet kind of resemble what we are now observing in 00:08:49 the anthropocene the period when humans started to dominate the globe or basically how the modern climate change to some extent actually resembles a lot of sudden changes that did happen in the last few millions of years with one 00:09:03 specific type of an event currently still unexplained by scientists often referred to as hyperthermals the sudden increase in temperature that usually lasts for a few thousand years but happens in a very short period of time 00:09:15 and currently doesn't have a very definitive explanation but one very well known example we explored in the past in one of the videos should be in the description known as p-e-t-m paleocene using thermal maximum the event that 00:09:28 happened approximately 55 million years ago when the global temperature suddenly increased by 5 to 8 degrees celsius or 9 to 14 degrees fahrenheit just to then drop suddenly within a few thousand years and there's been quite a lot of 00:09:41 explanations for what might have happened maybe an asteroid collision that released huge amounts of co2 gas or a lot of other gases that usually warm up the planet maybe volcanic eruptions doing the same but at the moment there's 00:09:53 just not enough clear evidence specifically craters or any volcanoes that were produced during this time to suggest any specific explanation on the other hand all of these observations kind of resemble what's happening to the planet right now as well and so trying 00:10:06 to figure out exactly what caused these warming conditions is one of the potential ways we could start assessing the hypothesis and try to answer these some of the difficult questions also likewise any kind of alloying industrial 00:10:17 civilization should maybe produce very similar effects on their planet as well at least that's what the modern science expects but what are some of the questions we can ask ourselves in regards to the history of our planet in 00:10:29 order to see how viable the hypothesis is well first of all generally speaking the geological record of our planet is usually very incomplete and it becomes even more difficult to study it as you go back in time for example today we 00:10:42 know that only about three percent of the entire surface of the planet has any kind of urban activity on the surface or basically anything that would potentially resemble modern technology and so the chance for a lot of these cities to survive for thousands or even 00:10:55 millions of years is exceptionally low which also means that within just a few thousand years the chance for discovering these techno fossils for some future humans living here is also going to be pretty low as well you can 00:11:08 kind of see that there are some bottles here and a lot of other leftovers but all this is going to disappear in time turning into nothing but almost completely indistinguishable sediment and for any major city to leave any mark 00:11:20 inside the sediment it really depends on where it's located if it's located on the subsiding plate it might eventually become sediment and get locked inside rock leaving behind certain marks but if 00:11:31 it's on the rising plate or if it's somewhere in the middle everything here might eventually be eroded with time by different types of rain and wind especially as the rain becomes more acidic leaving pretty much nothing 00:11:43 behind on the other hand when it comes to things like for example dinosaur fossils we usually discover one fossil for every 10 000 years with the footprints of dinosaurs being even more rare but even though humans have been on 00:11:56 the planet for at least 300 000 years the civilization that we're used to has only been around for just over a few hundred years and technically even less than that and so the chance for something from our modern civilization 00:12:09 to turn into a fossil that can be discovered in the future is actually super low and so right now there's a really big chance that after a few million years everything we take for granted is going to look like this and 00:12:21 so the natural question here is how do you then tell if any intelligent species ever existed on the planet like we do right now well we might be able to distinguish certain sedimentary anomalies even present in the sediment 00:12:34 today and then combine this with observations of various hyperthermals or any other major changes in the temperature that don't seem to have any other explanation for example all the technofossils are going to leave behind 00:12:46 a very specific isotopic ratio that's extremely difficult to find in nature including of course residues of carbon that doesn't exist in nature such as various microplastics these should linger for quite a while there should 00:13:00 also be geological record of a major extinction event that doesn't really have any good explanations also signs of unusual chemicals that are generally not produced in nature either for example things like cfcs or more 00:13:13 specifically various types of transuranic isotopes from nuclear fission which obviously all the chemical signs we're currently living on the planet by doing a regular stuff 00:13:24 by being ourselves and so we kind of expect something similar could have happened in the past there could have been another species that was basically exploiting the planet and as a result left some signs of this in the 00:13:37 geological record but that's of course assuming that any civilization is going to have a lot of very specific needs in terms of energy and a lot of civilizations are going to eventually result in similar types of pollution 00:13:49 naturally a pretty big assumption but it's really the only assumption we have right now in order to figure out if this hypothesis has any merit but even here there's still a major problem if this type of a civilization has not existed 00:14:02 for longer than let's just say a few hundred years the chance for it to even leave any kind of a mark and that includes the fossil mark is still pretty low and even things like microplastics or things like transuranium elements 00:14:15 might have already mixed with a lot of other stuff or disappeared completely especially if this happened a long time ago and so if these ancient civilizations ever existed and if they managed to somehow change the planet in the past the signs of their existence 00:14:28 would still be extremely difficult to discover with the only signs left after millions of years really just being various types of isotopes that could still be out there in the sediments on the planet

there's actually at least one other science fiction book from the 50s written by alice mary norton who used to 00:07:07 write under andre norton pseudonym who talked about a relatively similar concept in the time traders although the idea here was a little bit different here the author explained that pretty much all the signs of modern civilization are going to be completely 00:07:20 erased by the time the next glacial period begins in other words everything you see around you all the cities all the technology every major building every major structure we've ever built will basically be gone there will be no 00:07:33 signs of it left and within just a few million years there will be no one to tell the story and that's of course not really far from the truth as a matter of fact that's exactly what the scientists in this hypothesis propose and explain as well and that's of course why it 00:07:46 makes it so difficult to either prove or disprove this we currently have no idea if any of this is correct here i actually wanted to show you this beautiful illustration by one of the authors we basically have no idea if back in the 00:07:58 day when the dinosaurs were around they also had some kind of a super intelligent species that would drive their own versions of cars have their own versions of smartphones and eventually result in their own demise over time all of this would be gone to 00:08:11 history because of the way that geology works on our planet but in this paper the scientists decided to actually work out any potential ideas or experiments we can conduct on the planet to try to find out if this actually existed and if 00:08:25 it was possible in the past

the silurian hypothesis now this is actually a bit of a play on words it's actually based on the episode of doctor who that had a strange race known as sillurians 00:05:52 that evolved millions and millions of years ago from ancient reptiles that also possess intelligence but then because of the climatic changes on the planet essentially went into a prolonged state of hibernation in order to survive 00:06:04 the inhibitable earth waking up on modern earth and then interacting with the doctor and so because of this episode the scientists behind this paper decided to give it a kind of a tony chick name calling it the silverine hypothesis which by itself comes from a 00:06:17 geological period roughly around 440 million years ago and honestly for me personally this right here represents one of the more important papers or one of the more important propositions when it comes to 00:06:29 the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence because at the moment there's really only two possible answers either we're completely alone and we kind of evolved completely by accident and there's really no other intelligence anywhere out there which makes it a kind 00:06:41 of an evolutionary fluke and it's unlikely to repeat anywhere or anyone in the universe or extraterrestrial intelligence and any kind of intelligence is pretty common and we should be finding a lot of it here on 00:06:54 planet earth in the historical record