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

the greatest technology ever invented was language

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

we can kind of make an assumption that 00:04:22 complex brains and by extension complex intelligence should also be somewhat common in terms of evolutionary success and assuming that it's evolutionary preferential or basically that evolves many times throughout the history of the 00:04:35 planet we can then make a conjecture that it should exist somewhere out there where life exists on other planets okay just to rephrase this if we truly believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists out there and that 00:04:48 it kind of evolved in the same way that it evolved here on planet earth it's pretty safe to assume that it might have evolved several times on the planet because we're making an assumption here that this is an evolutionary advantage 00:05:00 that all planets that potentially have life on them are going to end up with some kind of a species that's going to become super intelligent and that's going to be self-aware able to use technology and essentially kind of communicate in the same way that we 00:05:13 communicate using for example radio waves

for some unknown reason nature tends to prefer crabs the idea of a crab or morphological crab has evolved on the planet several times in the last few hundreds of millions of years in other words for some unknown reason this right 00:03:07 here seems to be kind of successful so when we talk about crabs we don't just actually talk about one species in reality this particular morphology applies to a lot of different species so for example this kind of a crab that you see is kind of different in terms of a 00:03:20 lot of components including genetics from for example a hermit crab it just so happens that for some reason nature tends to re-evolve crabs over and over similarly we know that the idea of flight evolved in the panelists several 00:03:33 times as well and this of course includes the idea of wings they seem to exist in for example insects they also exist in reptiles they also exist in birds so this also seems to be an evolutionary advantage that repeats 00:03:45 itself many times and more recently there was actually a study from just a few days ago where the scientists discovered that well the idea of saline or the stuff that snails have but also the stuff that's in our mouth so basically our saliva is also 00:03:57 exceptionally successful in terms of evolution a lot of different species including mammals independently evolved all kinds of different slime because it just seems to work so well on the planet and it seems to serve so many different 00:04:09 purposes

what you're where you're sketching as per your presentation is working models and you're kind of exploring them there with 00:37:49 the audience and there are evidence-based models meaning that conversations today tend to become a string of anecdotes like oh I heard that and then you say well I will trust him because he's an authority figure or he 00:38:02 looks trustworthy or someone else said he was just worthy and there's this complex notion of trust which is hopefully going to be obsolete if I am up here building my models and you can 00:38:14 see the model I'm building you don't have to take my word for it you can see the model you can see the facts in knowledge I'm bringing it to support the not model you can see where those are coming from you can kind of see the provenance of everything I'm using to 00:38:25 support my argument and you teak the model you can like check the facts yourself and you make all that visible it leads to a very different notion of trust and integrity and this is I think 00:38:38 a really important part of the the empowering aspect is that trusting authority is disempowering giving people the ability to be independent is empowering

this medium that we're inventing the dynamic medium 00:25:10 has three very interesting properties

this is the cage that we have trapped ourselves in this is the way in which we have constrained our range of experience which we have created a tiny 00:23:03 subset of our intellectual capabilities and restrict ourselves to this tiny subset and have forbidden ourselves to use our full intellect

I mean something very precise by that so I'm going to try to explain with an analogy imagined imagine you adopt a puppy so 00:15:01 your Duff is puppy and your name um puddles you take puddles home and you give them a little snack and you stick puddles in the cage and you lock the door forever and never open it again and 00:15:14 puddle slips out the rest of his poor life trapped inside this little cage so that's wrong I think most of us would agree that's sadistic that obviously inhumane so well let's ask what exactly 00:15:27 is wrong about that you know what what is inhuman about sticking puddles in the cage well you know we kind of have a notion of what it means to live a full doggy life right dogs have to run around dogs run 00:15:40 around and they sniff other dogs and they pee on things and that's kind of what it means to be a dog they've inherited this the set of capabilities capabilities and traits from their wolf ancestors and we recognize that a dog 00:15:53 has to be allowed the full free expression of its entire range of capabilities by sticking the cage or constraining his range of experience you're not letting him do all the things that dogs can do and this is exactly 00:16:07 what we've done to ourselves we've invented media that severely constrained our range of intellectual experience that of all the many capabilities that 00:16:19 we have all the many ways of thinking that we have we have constrained ourselves to a tiny subset we're not allowed to use our full intellect

you can think about the invention of powerful representations and the invention of powerful media to host powerful 00:11:27 representations as being one of the big drivers of last 2,000 years of the intellectual progress of humanity because each representation allows us to think thoughts that we couldn't think before we kind of 00:11:39 continuously expand our think about territory so you can think of this as tied to you know the grand meta-narrative of the scent of humanity moving away from myth and superstition 00:11:51 and ignorance and towards a deeper understanding of ourselves in the world around us I bring this up explicitly because I think it's good for people to acknowledge the motivation for their 00:12:02 work and this is this story of the intellectual progress of humanity is something that I find very motivating inspiring and is something that I feel like I want to contribute to but I think 00:12:16 that if this if you take this as your motivation you kind of have to be honest with yourself that that there definitely has been ascent we have improved in many 00:12:27 ways but there are also other ways in which our history has not been ascent so we invent technology we media technology 00:12:39 to kind of help us make this this climb but every technology is a double-edged sword every technology enables us has a potential de navels in certain ways while debilitating us in other ways and 00:12:51 that's especially true for representations because the way the reputations work is they draw on certain capabilities that we have so if we go all in in a particular medium like we 00:13:03 did with print so the capabilities that are not well supported in that medium they get neglected in they atrophy and we atrophy I wish I knew who drew the picture 00:13:20 because it's it's a wonderful depiction of what I'm trying to express here and even a little misleading because the person the last stage they're kind of hunched over is tiny rectangle we reach 00:13:31 that stage accomplish that stage with the printing press and cheap paper book based knowledge the invention of paper-based bureaucracy paper-based 00:13:44 working we invented this lifestyle this way of working where to do knowledge work meant to sit at a desk and stare at your little tiny rectangle make a little motions of your hand you know started 00:13:56 out as sitting at a desk staring at papers or books and making little motions with a pen and now it's sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen making a little motions with your on a keyboard but it's basically the same 00:14:08 thing we've this is what it means to do knowledge work nowadays this is what it means to be a thinker it means to be sitting and working with symbols on a little tiny rectangle to the extent that 00:14:20 again it almost seems inseparable you can't separate the representation for what it actually is and and this is basically just an accident of history this is just the way that our media 00:14:32 technology happen to evolve and then we kind of designed a way of knowledge work for that media that we happen to have and I think so I'm going to make the claim that this style of knowledge work 00:14:47 this lifestyle is inhumane

Notably absent from the debris was plastic from nations with lots of plastic pollution in their rivers. This was surprising, says Egger, because rivers are thought to be the source of most ocean plastic. Instead, most of the garbage-patch plastic seemed to have been dumped into the ocean directly by passing ships.This suggests that “plastic emitted from land tends to accumulate along coastal areas, while plastic lost at sea has a high chance of accumulating in ocean garbage patches”, Egger says. The combination of the new results and the finding that fishing nets make up a large proportion of the debris indicates that fishing — spearheaded by the five countries and territories identified in the study — is the main source of plastic in the North Pacific garbage patch.

an increasing share of adaptive information is stored in culture compared with genes.

It follows, then, that humans are experiencing an evolutionary transition in individuality from single human to cultural group because culture is replacing genes as the primary human inheritance system, and cultural adaptations are heavily group structured.

culture is gradually replacing genetics as the primary human system of inheritance. This hypothesis helps clarify the human ETI.

The overall effect of cultural pre-emption is to reduce the fraction of adaptive information stored in genes and inherited genetically and to increase that fraction in culture.

if cultural evolution is sufficiently rapid, it may act to pre-empt and slow genetic evolution. That is, in solving adaptive challenges before genetic evolution takes place, cultural inheritance may reduce the opportunity for natural selection on genes and weaken the adaptive value of information stored in genetic inheritance in the long term. This process is the opposite of genetic assimilation, in which a plastic trait becomes genetically encoded. We call this mode of GCC cultural pre-emption.

Far beyond simply altering human evolution, this evidence suggests that human cultural inheritance is of global evolutionary significance.

Evidence [28] and theory [29] support the assertion that cultural evolution is more rapid than genetic evolution [27,28,30,31], even when measured on comparable scales [30,31]. One simple reason for this difference is that the ‘generation time’, G, of cultural transmission can be orders of magnitude shorter than that of genetic transmission [30]. In humans, the average time between the birth of parents and the birth of their offspring, genetic G, ranges from roughly 2 to 3 decades, while cultural G, the average time between learning a piece of information and transmitting it, ranges from seconds to decades. Thus, it is reasonable to presume that cultural inheritance may provide greater adaptive capacity than genetic inheritance.

human long-term GCC is characterized by an evolutionary transition in inheritance (from genes to culture) which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group).

“We have known as humans for thousands of years that it is critical to understand humankind’s place on this planet, even before we understand the essence of who we are, and we do this by looking at where we have come from. This fulfils an obligation of wisdom. You cannot hope to look at the rest of the world and understand it without understanding yourself. There is no more important question, especially in the light of some of the big questions which face us in relation to climate change. “We have floundered about observing the world without understanding truly that we are part of this system. We have an evolutionary history as complex as any other animal but likely no more so. That is the beauty that naledi brings to the table. It takes away this human arrogance which has been much of the cause of our destructive behaviour, this right to ownership, this right to destruction, the territorial nature of our behaviour towards this planet. “We have seen ourselves as superior, as special, we’ve told ourselves a special origins story that isn’t true. What can be more important than taking yourself off that pedestal and removing some of the destructive behaviours that manifest in humans?

Describing himself as a “messenger from the past”, Berger says that this discovery destroyed the preconceptions of a progressive, linear development of humans from apelike ancestors to what we are now. H. naledi is now dated at between 236,000 and 335,000 years old and was, therefore, a contemporary of Homo sapiens at that stage, which proves that a small-brained hominid was living side by side with its large-brained cousin, who is supposed to represent the apotheosis of sentient beings.

“Exactly at the moment when we need a resilient biosphere, we are losing it. If we get too far from planetary boundaries, feedbacks from Earth will start to amplify our trajectory irreversibly toward a four-, five- or six-degree world.” Long pause.

As arousal-based meditative practices are associated with a different autonomic state to mindfulness-related practices (PNS withdrawal vs. PNS dominance), they are likely to recruit a different type of alerting attention (selective or focused vs. sustained) and attentional control (modulated by arousal vs. regulated by monitoring continuous thought processes). In particular, my focus is on Vajrayana (Tantric Buddhism) practices, during which a sequence of generation (self-visualization as a deity - Yidam) or completion with sign (inner heat -Tummo) stages necessarily precedes non-dual awareness (NDA) Tantric Mahamudra. I conduct my studies with experienced monks and nuns in Eastern Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal. I studied these practices using cognitive (visual working memory and attention) assessments as well as electrocardiographic (EKG) and (EEG) measures.

Can You Warm Yourself with Your Mind?The human body generates its own heat. Some people can adjust the thermostat.

Fossil fuel combustion and growth in industrial and military power have gone hand with colonial conquest and control.In the 1990s, the idea of ‘contraction and convergence’, developed by the UK-based Global Commons Institute, gained a lot of traction in climate negotiations: ‘the Contraction and Convergence strategy consists of reducing overall emissions of greenhouse gases to a safe level (contraction), resulting from every country bringing its emissions per capita to a level which is equal for all countries (convergence)’.https://lnkd.in/eKq4vKep

"Respondents across all countries were worried about climate change (59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried). More than 50% reported each of the following emotions: sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. More than 45% of respondents said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change (eg, 75% said that they think the future is frightening and 83% said that they think people have failed to take care of the planet).

The most recent 300 out of 300,000 years have been abnormal in the sense that a fever of 107 degrees Fahrenheit is abnormal when, for most of a person's life, her temperature has been at about 98.6 degrees. Until 10,000 years or so ago, the normal lifestyle for Homo sapiens was living in small groups (Schmidt and Zimmermann 2019), hunting and gathering. Humanity's fever started about ten millennia in our past and rapidly led to a highly febrile system of giant groups, which have increasingly industrialized. Humanity grew from scattered groups of 20 to cities of 20 million, from normal to abnormal, in an evolutionary instant.

Well, some of us tried to be unreasonable. But another thing he invented was what he called the type one and the "type two argument." So when a "type one argument" was verging towards the personal and towards this not making progress thing, he would say "type two argument," and everybody would groan. And a "type two argument" is when each of the arguers has to make the other person's argument to them.DEVON: Right. Steel man it, instead of straw man it.ALAN: Yeah, until they agree that they're making their argument.DEVON: Right.ALAN: Yes, that is the argument I'm making. And then the other person... And this takes for-fucking-ever.DEVON: Yeah.ALAN: But-DEVON: But it means that you actually understand where the other person is coming from before you try to tear it down.ALAN: Well, it's not even that. One way to think about it, took all the human drama out of it, in the end almost everything that we did at PARC, in the end we didn't vote. In the end we would usually pick somebody to make the decision.

We were a floor culture at PARC so we not only had the bean bags instead of chairs. Why bean bags? Well, you can't leap to your feet to denounce somebody from a bean bag.

So this is one of these things where the idea that you could make an internet is 100%, just from biology being so much more complex and working so well for decades.DEVON: And why is the decentralization of biological systems and of the internet so important for scalability?

the thing is about vision, same with the ear, you can only see a few at a time in detail, but you can be aware of 100 things at once. So one of the things we're really bad about is, because of our eyes, you can't get the visual point of view we want. Our eyes have a visual point of view of like 160 degrees. But what I've got here is about 25, and on a cellphone it's pathetic. So this is completely wrong. 100% wrong. Wrong in a really big way. If you look at the first description that Engelbart ever wrote about what he wanted, it was a display that was three feet on its side, built into a desk, because what is it that you design on? If anybody's ever looked at a drafting table, which they may not have for a long time, you need room to design, because there's all this bullshit that you do wrong, right?

The ARPA community was about, "Hey, we're in deep trouble and we're getting in deeper trouble. We need to get more enlightened and we need to do what Doug Engelbart called... we need to not just augment human beings, augment human intellect, but we have to augment the collective IQ of groups." Because most important things are done by groups of people. And so we have to think about what it means to have a group that's smarter than any member rather than a group that is less than the stupidest members.

Any curious person, I would think, at some point would say, "Well, wait a minute. 55 people. How could they draft this thing? How do they..." Well, you see it right there. The answer is that every night the annotated stuff was typeset. Remember, it was Philadelphia, which is the city of printers. So, it was typeset overnight. It was printed before breakfast. When they came into their meeting, everybody had a fresh copy that looked like the thing there, but without any handwriting on it. They debated about that. They each had their own copy. They wrote their own notes. Then, towards the end of the day, they'd assemble what was going to happen on the next draft. Isn't that great?

Right? You said... No, no, bullshit. Let's write it all down and we can go check it. Let's not argue about what was said. We've got this thing called writing. And once we do that, that means we can make an argument out of a much larger body of evidence than you can ever do in an oral society. It starts killing off stories, because stories don't refer back that much. And so anyway, a key book for people who are wary of McLuhan, to understand this, or one of the key books is by Elizabeth Eisenstein. It's a mighty tome. It's a two volume tome, called the "Printing Press as an Agent of Change." And this is kind of the way to think about it as a kind of catalyst. Because it happened. The printing press did not make the Renaissance happen. The Renaissance was already starting to happen, but it was a huge accelerant for what had already started happening and what Kenneth Clark called Big Thaw.

one of the 00:10:51 things is that our brains were set up for dealing with about a hundred people at a time living by our wits hunting and gathering and dying in the same world we 00:11:03 were born into for hundreds of thousands of years there's no concept of progress in our genes we just don't have it but like all animals we have an enormous set 00:11:17 of genetic apparatus to make us good copers anything happens to us we can find a way of being resilient about it and adapting to it we're copers and 00:11:29 adapters and so when we come up against difficulties our tendency is to cope with these difficulties it's like working for a company go into a company 00:11:42 and the company seems sort of screwed up maybe you can quit you can cope but your chances of actually changing the company are very low because nobody will listen 00:11:56 to reason right that is not what the company is there for they are there for their a task this is something that engelbart the inventor of the mouse pointed out years ago that companies are 00:12:10 devoted to their area a task which is what they think they were about most companies do not have a very good be process which is supposed to look at the 00:12:21 a tasks and make them more efficient but almost no companies have a see process which questions the tasks are our goals still reasonable our processes still reasonable that's the last thing it gets 00:12:35 question

here's an old model from the 19th century of memory which actually in the 21st century has come 00:13:03 back as a pretty good one as a metaphor anyway so the idea is that rain comes down on the ground and there's a little regularities randomly there and at some point those regularities will be a 00:13:17 little more responsive to the rain and a little channel will form the channel acts as an amplifier and so wherever that channel got started it starts funneling lots more water through it other water is draining into 00:13:31 it and all of a sudden it starts cutting deeper and you get these gullies and you get down into these gullies you have to remember to look up because everything 00:13:44 down there in this gully is kind of pink you can think that the world is pink and in fact if you get into a real gully one of my favorites is Grand Canyon by the 00:13:57 way that's only a hundred million years of erosion to get the Grand Canyon it's relatively recent get into one of these things and the enormity of what you see 00:14:08 outwards Dwarfs what you can see if you look up if you've ever been on one of these things you're just in a different world it's a pink world you don't think 00:14:23 about climbing out of it you think about moving along in it

one of the things that's worked the best the last three or 00:10:05 four hundred years is you get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of its when you go for a simple building block that anybody can 00:10:18 understand through common sense that is when you start screwing yourself right and left because it just might not be able to ramify through the degrees of freedom and scaling you have to go through and it's this 00:10:31 inability to fix the building blocks that is one of the largest problems that computing has today in large organizations people just won't do it

if you take it out 30 years the puck is going to be there thirty years and Moore's law is going to go like that she been well covered and 00:43:15 predicted in 1965 out to 1995 the answers yeah goddamnit no question 1995 there is no way we are not going to have a tablet computer no way it's just going to happen we don't even have to worry about 00:43:28 right now what we're going to do it because what we have to do is to figure out what it should be once you start thinking about it then the next interesting part of it is bring back a 00:43:42 more concrete version so out there you can do pie-in-the-sky what about 10 or 15 years out what can we do then and the answer is yeah we can do one then what would that be like

the good hockey players go to where the 00:40:58 puck is and great hockey players go to where the puck is going to be and he didn't mean tracking the puck he meant get to that place in the rink where somebody can pass you the puck that you 00:41:10 can shoot a goal he was better at anybody at knowing where that place would be and his teammates would feed him in bingo and so the thirty year Wayne Gretzky game is to have a glimmer 00:41:23 of an idea take it out thirty years where there is no possibility of incremental II think worrying about how am I going to get from where I am now to this idea right that is the the idea 00:41:38 killer of all time how is this incremental to the present and the answer is forget it don't worry about now the president is the least interesting time to live in

how many people have seen curves that look like these progress against time right everywhere reading 00:48:14 scores test scores people love these yay oh no yay oh no it's bad because our 00:48:32 nervous system is only set up for relative change and in fact there's cause for cheering if that's the threshold but in fact for reading 00:48:43 threshold is this this is all oh no doesn't matter whether it goes up or not because there are many many things that where you have to get to the real 00:48:58 version of the thing before you're doing it at all in the 21st century it doesn't have help to read just a little bit you have to be fluent at it so this is a 00:49:09 huge problem and once you draw the threshold in there immediately converts this thing that looked wonderful into a huge qualitative gap and the gap is 00:49:20 widening and we have two concepts that are enemies of what we need to do perfect and better right so better is a 00:49:36 way of getting fake success we had improvement see it all the time it's the ultimate quarterly report we had improvements here and perfect is 00:49:51 tough to get in this world so both of those are really bad so what you want is what's actually needed and the exquisite skill here which I'm going to use these 00:50:06 two geniuses Thakur and Engels to labor it I'm going to call that the sweet spot the way you make progress here is you pick the thing that is just over that threshold that is qualitatively better 00:50:21 than all the rest of the crap you can do you can spend billions turning around and once you do that you widen up you give yourself a little blue plane to 00:50:34 operate in and for a while everything you do in there is something that is actually going to be meaningful

what is 00:32:39 your ten year plan and the reaction I get is that right think about it the idea of a ten year plan that people are 00:32:50 serious about is just it's fake companies just don't have it they don't set themselves up to be able to deal with this thing which is really just to 00:33:04 find hope that they're going to be in business in ten years they have no idea

25 00:29:42 researchers did all of them 25 think about it cost about 12 million dollars a year in today's money every single company in this room every single 00:29:59 500 fortune company these are fingernail clippings on your IT budgets you waste more than this every other week and despite that there's not a single 00:30:11 company in America that until recently that has even taken the venture of doing a process like this you have to ask yourself why it's a question you really 00:30:25 wouldn't need to understand because we're not talking about money here return 30 plus trillion dollars in counting

once in a while you get a cop out at kerpow is out of that world it's actually an escape from that world

if we grow up in that world we don't know it's pink right because that's all there is that is the background color 00:15:17 it's the thing we are least interested in because it's the most constant thing

How Fast a Low Carbon Transition? Or: Is Vaclav Smil Wrong?

here are those same numbers compared 00:41:21 against reported global reserves so there's the amount of metal we need and there is the global reserves this column is the proportion of metals required to 00:41:33 phase out fossil fuels as a percentage that is of all the copper we need to make one generation of units current global reserves will get us 19.23 00:41:45 of the way there we don't have enough copper for one generation

we used to have 500 years ago a small human system a big pile of natural resources and a small pollution plume 00:46:47 an industrial ecosystem of unprecedented size and complexity that took more than a century to build with support of the highest calorifically dense source of cheap energy the world has ever known that would be oil 00:46:59 in abundant quantities with easily available credit and unlimited mineral resources and now we've got a system that's a human system that's really large 00:47:10 a depleted natural resources [Music] portfolio compared to what we had but we've now got a massive pollution stream so now we seek to build an even more complex system with very expensive 00:47:24 energy a fragile finance system saturated in debt not enough minerals with an unprecedented number of human population embedded in a deteriorating environment 00:47:35 so at this point i'm going to say this is probably not going to go as planned

it also is summed together so everything we need is summed together per metal and that gives us this column here total metal required to produce one generation of technology units to phase 00:40:15 out fossil fuels and so that the that we've got these numbers here the next column is global metal production as it was from mining in 2019 00:40:28 so this is all from the usgs and the bgo the final column is how many years of production at the 2019 rate um would be needed to hit the actual 00:40:42 volumes needed so 2019's the last year before covert is the last year of stable data that's why i've used it so you might notice some of these numbers are rather large 00:40:55 like we will need seven thousand one hundred and one years of production to produce the needed number of volume of vanadium that's your uh your redox batteries

the idea that we're going to do this in seven or eight years is very amusing so then the question is oh we'll just open more mines it's simple right

in south australia we've got the hornsdale power reserve which is a 00:32:43 100 megawatt capacity this is one that elon musk very famously uh put in so this is what the european union is now using as the standard to talk about you know it's 00:32:56 been done in australia we can do it here so in the global system we would need 15 million 635 and 478 such stations across the planet 00:33:08 in the power grid system just for that four week buffer so and that is actually about 30 times capacity uh compared to the entire global

if we want to deliver a thousand terawatt hours a year using these systems you could use 142 00:29:07 coal-fired power stations or 30 000 solar pv arrays or 12 309 wind turbine arrays of average size 00:29:18 where each array is like 10 win windows this is this is where we're getting the extra numbers from so each of these sites will have to be built and constructed and maintained and then when they wear out they need to 00:29:30 be decommissioned so renewables have a much lower energy return on energy invested ratio than fossil fuels and they and the the truth is they may not be strong enough to power the next industrial era 00:29:45 so gas and hydro power generation has to balance with demand supply and demand has to balance otherwise the grid will age

let's put the electrical power systems together these electrical power 00:22:29 systems that this is actually on the low side because most industrial action happens with the consumption of coal and gas on site and then it's converted to energy on site this is what's just been drawn off the power grid 00:22:42 so there's a vast amount of energy associated with manufacturing that is not included here and that is actually a huge piece of work to include that so these numbers i'm showing you are very much on the low side 00:22:55 so we're going to put it all together we need 36 000 terawatt hours all there abouts that's a that's a very low estimate

current plans are not large enough in scope the task before us is much larger than the current paradigm allows for

assessment of extra capacity required of alternative energy electrical power systems to completely replace fossil fuels

Mayer says time-restricted eating — a form of intermittent fasting that requires you to squeeze all your daily calories into a compressed feeding window — may be helpful. “The migrating motor complex is rarely mentioned in these articles on intermittent fasting, which is surprising because it’s so well-studied,” he says.To ensure the MMC has enough time to perform its duties, aiming for 14 hours without caloric foods or drinks is a good target, he says. For example, you could avoid all calories between 8 p.m. and 10 a.m. “The 14 hours without food intake would allow the MMC to kick in and not only cleanse your gut of any undigestible, unabsorbable food components, but also to reestablish the normal proximal-to-distal gradient of gut microbial density,” he says.

The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers.”

i'm going to simply turn our line drawing upside down and then draw from 00:04:20 the upside down reference what's going to happen here is it's going to force my mind to not think about what i'm drawing but instead focus on the lines and shapes that i actually 00:04:33 see so you can see it takes my left brain out of the process almost completely

Let us briefly discuss three specific examples of concepts that seem particularly promising for theprospect of ‘good enough world’ and could become synergistically interrelated: (a) the social policy ofunconditional basic income, (b) the development of blockchains and (c) the idea of the offer networks

he innovation must modulate the behaviour of the decision-produced socialorganization such that this will result in the realisation of the ‘good enough’ relationship betweenhumans and social systems, that is, it will secure the organic and psychological continuity of thehuman being unconditionally and specifically, irrespective to the continuity of their personware.

[Unconditionality.] The innovation must operate unconditionally: whatever will be offered tohuman beings cannot be enabled or disabled by specific features encoded in the personware.

AI systems replace the automated cognitive function of humans in maintaining importantsocial systems and augment the impact of such functions which are creative, singular and novel

We leave for now the issue that a realistic scenario towards such end must probablyinvolve limiting population growth

Whenever the parameters of survival are at stake,the human agent will choose according to what will increase the chances of its survival that is, thecontinuity of its own organic existence.

the mechanism ofdouble bind described by Gregory Bateson et al. [35 ] as a pattern of communication

All moral codes, all prescribed ways ofliving, all social arrangements do involve to a degree such targeting. Certain behaviours, desires, oreven thoughts are simply unacceptable, will be punished, or at least strongly discouraged. While someof such prohibitions are official and overt and thus can be related to and evaluated, others remainonly tacit and below the threshold of consciousness.

The human-symbolic merger into a single contour further consolidates once the locus of its controlshifts from the human to the social system.

When the assurance of a basic, organic continuity of the cognitive agent is perceived as hingedupon the continuity of the respective personware, it makes sense for that agent to fuse her physicalintegrity and personware into a single inseparable contour.

Should something new be experienced, it will be unexpected, may beoverwhelming and may not fit into any meaningful representation or expression at all. The new assuch, the possible source of transformation, regeneration and vision, does not submit to the orderimposed by the personware, it is naturally on a collision course with it and a source to various degreesof cognitive dissonance. As such, it poses a threat that a well-functioning cognitive system mustmediate.

select from its intrinsic desires, ideas and dispositions those that may fit into theperceivable societal contours—and to choose what to do with the remains that do not fit.

A Good Enough World

the Internet can potentially becomea backbone to a ‘global commons,’ an immense free space of information, products and services towhich everyone can contribute to and from which everyone can profit [51, 52 ].

The human takeover needs to be nonviolent and genuinely creative. It can augment the entirehuman social system not by resolving the gridlock of all the colliding identities and trajectoriesmentioned in Section 2 but by adding a lifeline for humans to hold on to whenever they considermaking a decision that challenges and disrupts; whenever they allow a new thought to take shape;whenever they genuinely feel the genuine need to say ‘no,’ or ‘yes,’ but today must say otherwise.

Instead, we focus on the relationship between the human mind and the mechanics underlying allsocial systems. The search for the locus where the distribution of governing powers can be shiftedhas brought us thus to the human mind itself. Only by affirming the human as different from thesocial persona it enacts can we see the golden thread along which the human takeover can and musthappen. This golden thread runs in the usually unperceived gaps between thoughts, communicationsand decisions that are preconditioned, preprogramed, prethought [5 ,43 ,44 ]. It brings to the light ofconsciousness the thinking, speaking and acting that are present and living. ‘What I propose, therefore,is very simple’—Hannah Arendt [ 45 ] wrote—‘it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.’To think, to voice, to enact each time anew, is the vehicle of the human takeover. To secure the continuityof this golden thread, of this very flow into the governance of society—is our existential challenge.

The ‘human takeover’ means that humans will reach a state where they will effectively be capableof shedding such programming, gaining control over social systems, so that they will start working inthe service of human well-being rather than for their own self-perpetuation.

ur major interest and challenge is to figure concrete steps towards aradical and possibly disruptive change of society by making accessible to all humans the idea that theyare subject to symbolically fabricated patterns of social continuity that inevitably program their mindsand subjugate their cognitive resources not for their well-being but rather for the purpose of furtheringtheir own perpetuation. Once humans collectively realize it, what we call the ‘human takeover’ eracan begin.

Later in life and irrespective to the character of the relationship held, the good enough approachinforms how communication between people can be practiced. One of the widest known formulasfor that is called Nonviolent Communication, subtitled as the ‘language of life’ [ 39]. The subtitle seemsparticularly appropriate to our case, as it describes a method of communication that does not servesocial programming and allow humans to author and own their speech. A nonviolent communicatordoes not reinforce the boundary cuts and refrains from installing the personware-shaping doublebinds.

The ‘ideal’ is nothing other thana representation of social conditioning and the installation of a personware module into the newbornhuman that tries to accord what is with what the social system projects. We acknowledge of course thatsome mediation is always needed. The baby sees the world and the social world in particular throughthe eyes of the parent and only afterwards autonomously. This mediation is crucial to the cognitivedevelopment of the person and cannot happen without a personware. But the personware can beconstructed such that it empowers the individual and does not subjugate it to the social demands.

Not only is such thought beyond representation (and therefore beyond personware) possible,Weaver suggests but its occurrence constitutes a fundamental encounter which brings forth into existenceboth the world and the thinker. As such, thought sans image is deeply disturbing the stability andcontinuity of whatever personware the individual thinker may have been led to identify with andopens wide horizons of cognitive development and transformation ([13]: p. 35).

though personwareis intrinsic to being a complete person it can be continuously modified, evolve or otherwise developed([5 ]: p. 201). More importantly, it can, to a significant extent, at least theoretically, be dynamicallygoverned and authored by the human individual. Hence, the human takeover.

The social sciences remain normally silent about what mental platform is initially there thatthe personware is ‘installed’ on. The humanity of humans can be hardly conceived apart from theirparticipation in and entanglement with social systems, since it is only by virtue of their interactionswith the social system and its corresponding personware that they start making use of language andother symbolic systems. When considered apart from that, humans are alinguistic and asymbolicanimals [20 ].

we term these individually constructed networks by the aggregate namepersonware. Serving as a medium between the individual and the social world, personware provides aself-reinforced and self-cohered narrative of the individual and its relationships with society. It is boththe sense-maker and the sense being made of social reality entangled into an interactive autopoieticconstruct. It maintains a personal line of continuity that interfaces with the broader societal threads bymeans of concrete intentional cognitive selections. These cognitive selections determine how individualminds represent (encode) the state of affairs of the world in language, how they communicate theserepresentations and how they further decode received communications into an understanding of thestate of affairs of the world that eventually trigger actions in the world and further cognitive selections.At moments of decision, that is, attempting to make a choice to affect the world, the human is thusmore often than not symbolically pre-situated. He enacts a personal narrative of which he is hardlythe author and to which almost every decision is knitted in.

responsible-hardworking-breadwinner and of the gifted-self-actualising-researcher are themselvessocial systems, fully realized and maintained within individual minds.

The notion of social identity highlights aspectswhich are descriptive of a person’s most stable links with some larger constructs within society [20 ,21 ].The Lacanian subject synthesizes how Hegel, Sartre and psychoanalysis situate the social person’sunique subjectivity within systems of relationships, which are psycholinguistically forged [22], just likethe whole of identity is.

However, since this pre-linguistic, pre-iconicthinking sans image, as discussed above, has no definite contour nor contents yet, it does not come withconsolidated mental forms representing such prospective desires in a manner that could be examined,processed and acted upon.

suitable intrinsic dispositions

processing of differences

We have already stated that all social forms come into existence out of the encoding and decodingof cognitive selections out of a symbolic medium.

The sharp boundary created by thesplitting of thoughts and disowning those which threaten to disrupt the personware seems thento be an intelligible choice.

The line of solution that we see is based on the possibility of decoupling between the continuityof one’s personware and one’s organic and psychological survival. If a state of affairs is somehowcreated where human individuals universally realize that their organic and psychological continuity issafeguarded unconditionally and does not depend anymore on the continuity of their symbolicallymaintained social persona—their personware, then new horizons will open for human individuals aswell as for social systems to cognitively coevolve.

FollowingSimondon’s social theory [37] and our previous work [10 ], social systems are themselves individualsthat harbour in them preindividual forces of transformation. Therefore we do not see in the currentorganization of personhood, inasmuch as it seems unassailable, a final unchangeable state of affairs.

we oppose the popular predictionof the upcoming, ‘dreadful AI takeover’

Our issuehere is not against social systems in principle but rather in understanding and perhaps modifying oreven entirely eliminating the adverse effects of personware on the inherent well-being, freedom andcreativity of human individuals.

From this perspective the loss of spirit in favour of personware isbut a natural evolutionary process. Obviously we do not subscribe to this theory and especially tothe idea that natural evolutionary processes logically deduce the demise of individuality.

Though we do not pursue this point here, it is logical to considerthat poor people will be found to experience a greater psychological pressure to identify with theirpersonware as this reduces the overwhelming cognitive load they are subject to.) The task is then onlyto take care that the personware remains consistent with the social roles available—and to steer clearof anything that reminds one of what has thus been lost

David Bohm [ 31 ]: “Thinking’ implies the present tense (...) ‘Thought’is the past participle of that. We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it justevaporates. But thinking doesn’t disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something—atrace—which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically.

While, as we propose, the symbolically constructed personware, seeking to reassert and reinforceitself, selects objects already recognized, thoughts already conceived and sentences already pronounced,the living human being can breathe and utter a voice that is new [5 ]. A human being can thus ‘take over’language. It can ‘take over’ thoughts—by thinking beyond the image of thought ([13 ]: chap.2).

Even though human existence in such a bare state may seem inconceivable, it is therenevertheless: every time a baby is born, a new, not yet programmed, prepersonal human is lookinginto somebody’s eyes ([27 ]: p. 133). This undeniable prepersonal presence we already call human leadsus to logically infer that humans do happen to exist prior to their personware [ 20 ,25 ,28 ]. It is thereforeour fundamental point of departure that humans are marvellous, intelligent, living cognitive agents inthemselves that can be said to exist prior to and independently of any particularly determined socialpersona. The point of acknowledging a prior prepersonal platform is not made towards arguing that ahuman can exist without any personware.

Can they reshape the contours and boundaries of their socialsituations instead of being shaped by them?

In searching for a configuration of intelligences in the world that would make possible for humansto govern, we want the exemplar human agents X, Y and Z to be able to impact the socio-econo-politicalsystem rather than be steered and moulded by it.

The structural constitution of governance thus characterised is that by definition governancerequires the involvement of two kinds of active structures coupled together [ 6,7 ]. The first kind, isthe cognitive agency performed (as of today) by human minds. It is necessary for the performance ofcognitive selections, for symbolic encoding and decoding of such selections and for recognising theobservations of the produced effectuality and continuity. The second kind of structure is the perceivedcontour (by cognitive agencies) of the social system as a whole. (This description is very similar todescribing chains of causes and effects and connecting events which are otherwise unconnected. Suchchains, Hume argued, cannot be logically grounded. They are but manifestations of habits (repetitionafter Deleuze). Apparently, this more fundamental causal chaining is performed by individualminds as well.) In summary, the ontological status of a social system is inherently circular andirreducible. It exists only by virtue of being perceived as actually impacting the state of affairs andits particular impacts are observable as such only by virtue of this perceived existence. Moreover, wewill further claim, that it is mostly the coherence of the emergent recurrent patterns, not the particulardeterminations performed by the participating human minds, that are the actual ‘governors’ of thehuman realm.

Consequently, theshape of the gridlock [9], in which further progression towards an ever-greater executive capacity givento a selected group of institutions has become nearly impossible, is not an anomaly to be overcome.The gridlock is the only configuration in which the global system could have settled. It isthe configuration any system is bound to adopt when it is composed of a multitude of differentlypositioned, differently oriented, heterogeneous decision-makers, operating in different dimensionsand scales, none of which universally dominant and all are co-dependent and constrained by others.

Approaching the two extremes of the ‘hierarchical versus collective’ axis as irreconcilablemodels and the two extremes of the ‘governor versus governed’ as distinct social locations seem to bemisleading rather than useful. These are just two opposite conceptual idealisations of an actual broadrepertoire of patterns of distribution of influence.

Socialsystems can organize humans into relationships that are sensible and relatively safe holding in checkmany destructive traits of individual humans. The question remains how to achieve a healthy andflexible balance of control that puts the human first. This balance, as will be argued is far from beingcurrently the case.

The Human Takeover: A Call for a Venture into anExistential Opportunity

is contoured by what the agent perceivesin the social context

Underneath whatever threads they have already identified with, there isalways a pregnant potentiality of thoughts yet to be shaped.

Human beings are different from what they seem to be thinking, perceiving, or saying asmediated by social symbolic systems [29 ]. They are different from how they are represented intheir own narratives, they are different from language itself. Interestingly, learning to consciouslybecome aware to that difference—the bare human spirit, the preindividual, or being as becoming asSimondon [30 ] puts it—appears to be the state of mind towards which many spiritual traditionsare guiding. David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) refers to this state as thought sans image [ 13], offering itscontemporary conceptualisation via the metaphysical theories of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon andGilles Deleuze, in combination with the enactive theory of cognition [14 ] and inputs from complexityscience

In summary, X, Y and Z clearly occupy entirely different positions in the social fabric andeach experiences life entirely differently. They live with entirely different sets of constraints andopportunities and consequently face different challenges both psychologically and in their interactionswith the rest of the world. And yet, all three of them suffer from a cognitive dissonance between theirindividual drives and dispositions and the demands of the social roles they feel obliged to play.

examining the options available to individual persons weighing a decision vis-a-vis theirperceived socio-symbolically cohered contour. For that, let us look at a few concrete examples.

A cognitiveagent is needed to perform this very action (that needs to be recurrent)—and another agent is neededto further build on that (again recurrently and irrespective to the particular agents involved).

Only if an event of communication triggers a change and thischange is observed as being causally connected to that same event, the communication event can betreated as a decision. In this sense, a decision is a special category of actions that is, the exercising ofintentionality—doing something in order to change the state of affairs. This is how intentional mentaloperations of humans become functional in the context of a social system.

A decision takes place when the encoding of a cognitive selection triggers, upondecoding, an occurrence of a difference that is, a state change within the system [11 ].

the socio-symbolic locusversus the human locus of governance

At first sight, it might seem that no one but humans (even though in actuality only a few of them)hold positions of influence and power over social systems. We wish, however, to challenge this view.We argue that while human-driven governance is conceivable and in principle possible—and it is thegoal of our research to draw the path towards such future—for now, it is not human beings but ratherthe social system which governs itself [6, 7].

This understanding of governance makes apparent that, for any particular challenge considered byany particular designated ‘governor,’ there is, typically, a considerable number of impactful selectionsthat are made elsewhere

governance rather encompasses all localdecision-makers as well, as it is actually almost entirely within their own respective dominions ofcontrol where the overall success or failure is determined.

For example, in respect to the goal of reducing the global emissions of carbon dioxide, the relevantsystem of governance is not limited to those who conclude that there is a global risk, those whoaccept or reject the conclusion, those who formulate objectives, those who choose to adhere to or toignore them, who conceive of regulations, who choose to implement them or not, who determineprogress, decline or failures, those who select means by which to influence the desired local industrialinvestment, or consumption choices and so on.

we posit that there is no need to define the global system as a configurationof only such social forms (e.g., international organisations) that remain after the presupposed unitsof their respective environments (e.g., nation states) have first been excluded

Could artificial intelligencebe an ally in this venture?

What configuration would make the system flexibly support people and authenticallynourish their unique idiosyncrasies as well as their universal human need

Could social systems be finally reprogrammed, at long last, ‘as if peoplemattered’ [ 8]?

A short interaction with any bureaucratic system wouldbe overwhelmingly convincing in this respect. Symbol-mediated systems that excel at objectifyingsome preselected outcomes, isolating and de-contextualising them, harnessing everything else for theircontinuous self-promotion, putting the production loop on a perpetual repeat and failing to makesense of the fact that the results are not what people originally had in mind—are they not ubiquitous?

In this paper, we propose and analyse a potential power triangle between three kinds of mutuallydependent, mutually threatening and co-evolving cognitive systems—the human being, the socialsystem and the emerging synthetic intelligence. The question we address is what configuration betweenthese powers would enable humans to start governing the global socio-econo-political system

it would then be present social systemsand not the future AI the most proper context of considering and understanding the notion of takeover.

Niklas Luhmann’s [ 6,7 ] terminology, we refer to these dominant symbolic networks associal systems. When approached not as aggregations of people but rather as patterns of communicationssustained among people, social systems can be observed to have enormous powers over humanbeings.

In spite of the Anthropocene being the grandiose name attributed to the current geologicalera, it should be clear that this is far from being the case. This era is governed not by autonomoushuman beings but rather by semiotically forged networks of distinctions and rules, whose patternsand logics orchestrate people’s actions, speech, emotions and desires [ 2, 4, 5]. Perhaps naming this erathe ‘Semiocene,’ rather than the Anthropocene, would do it more justice [4].

instead of worrying that ArtificialIntelligence will soon come to dominate and govern the human world, let us think of how it couldhelp the human being to finally be able to do it.

e moment of transition of the Internet—from mediating information to mediating distributeddirect governance in the sense of self-organization.

That is to say, he must live in a universewhere the sequences of events are such that his unconventional communicational habits will bein some sense appropriate.

What caused life's Major evolutionary transitions?

There are temperature ceilings that humans and mammals (and many other animals) cannot survive, if breached. What those limits are, and what happens when they are crossed, will have profound implications for agriculture and biodiversity in a warming world.

What happens if the world gets too hot for animals to survive? By Matthew Huber | July 20, 2022 

The projected timing of climate departurefrom recent variability

. It is clear that inorder to achieve certain scientific results complex phenomena must be simplifiedand put in a kind of a straitjacket that deprives them of many if not most of thecharacteristics that make them complex in the first place.

This eventof cognition, or better yet the event of making sense – the primal mental event, allencompassing, both forming and dissolving boundaries, multiple4 and affirming, Ifind to be the proper stage to present my research

The very shift from bounded objects to boundary-forming processes became a new playground and my whole perspective gained anextra dimension of freedom.

e. I found it tricky to try to shed lighton the processes that constitute what can be termed unsupported thought, becausethere is no straightforward way to reflect on these processes without conceptualiz-ing and objectifying them and by that making them supported.

thought when making itself its own object remains, atleast in part, intrinsically unsupported, which affirms its incompleteness and open-ended nature. These two inseparable problems constitute together the problem ofthe freedom of the mind.

The very notion of thinking aboutlife (or evolution for that matter) as having a definite purpose or goal is already asymptom of a deeply rooted bias in favour of the constant and against change. Thereare voices that will immediately attack this view, blaming it for insinuating that lifehas no purpose at all. But a dialectic of such kind is empty of any credence if notentirely absurd. The view I propose here does not indeed accept that life is sub-jugated to a single purpose or principle but instead affirms life as having not onepurpose but infinitely multiple ones, not one goal but multiple goals and, moreover,the vast majority of these purposes and goals cannot be known a priori because theyare subject to continuous formative processes of becoming. This is why life as suchis open-ended.

worldview as a complex mental object makes sense onlyin the light of evolution – as the work in progress that it is; both fluid and firm at thesame time.

My interest goes yet further, to the metaphysical ground of cognition andmental processes and how they reflect on existence, meaning and value. There is anobvious and unavoidable strange loop (Hofstadter, 2013) here: the cognitive think-ing agent trying to make sense of these same sense-making processes that bring forthboth her as a subject and the objects of her observation while these are being broughtforth.

Iwill show that cognition can be understood as a fundamental concept that extendsevolution and can be applied to general systems, both natural and artificial, at di-verse domains and scales

This thesis is but a humble and partial attempt to tell the story ofthis journey, always at its first step it seems, to draw some maps and point towardspossible horizons. It is both a philosophical and a scientific exploration but firstand foremost it is a personal research trying to understand my own mind, to makesense of sense itself – to get a glimpse of the knowledge through which “cognition isproduced in me”.

Open-Ended Intelligence

From my own perspective, the conclusion is important that human structural development issubject to a categorical double bond: On the one hand, a person’s lifeworld is his or her ownsubjective construction. On the other hand, this construction is not arbitrary. In spite of allsubjectivity – because of the human’s structural coupling to its environment, this constructionis influenced and limited by the framework of this very environment (Kraus, 2013, p. 65ff.).

Accordingly, the life conditions describe a person’s material and immaterial conditions,whereas the lifeworld describes the subjective perspective pertaining to these conditions

The life conditions term, which was borrowed fromKarl Marx, was introduced to the social scientific discourse mainly by Otto Neurath (1931)and Gerhard Weisser (1956)

The Life We Live and the Life We Experience: Introducing theEpistemological Difference between “Lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) and “LifeConditions” (Lebenslage)

Eventhough the lifeworld term is not precisely defined, neither by Husserl nor by Schütz (seeFelten, 2000, p. 75; Bergmann, 1981, p. 50ff.; Welter, 1986, p. 77, 170), the relevance of thesubjective perspective can be identified as a crucial characteristic. Coming from aphenomenological perspective, lifeworld is regarded as the result of a subjective appropriationof the world. This process is based on previous experiences as well as on the usage ofindividual mental and physical characteristics. Accordingly, the phenomenological alignmentto the lifeworld implies much more than a simple orientation towards a person’s life situation.Speaking phenomenologically, not only differences in the life conditions have to beconsidered, but also differences in the individual’s perceptual conditions (Hitzler, 1999, S.232)4.

The subject of this article is theintroduction of a lifeworld-concept, that is based on an epistemological distinction between“lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) and “life conditions” (Lebenslage).

von neumann was furious at him furious that he would waste precious machine time 00:04:20 doing the assembly that was clerical work that was supposed to be for people right and so we saw the same story happened just a little bit later when john backus and friends came up with us idea they called fortran this is so call high-level language where you could write out your formulas as if your writing mathmatical notation you could write out loops and this was shown to the assembly programmers and once again they just 00:04:46 they weren't interested they don't see any value in that they just didn't get it so um I want you to keep this in mind as I talk about the four big ideas that I'm going to talk about today that it's easy to think that technology technology is always getting better because Moore's law because computers are getting always more capable but ideas that require people to unlearn what they've learned and think in new ways there's often 00:05:10 enormous amount of resistance people over here they think they know what they're doing they think they know a programming is this programming that's not programming and so there's going to be a lot of resistance to adopting new ideas

Is our planet doubly alive? Gaia, globalization, and the Anthropocene’s planetary superorganisms

A special case is when the content is program code, and the environment becomes an intelligent IDE

interactive documents that capture more richly what the user is trying to accomplish.

The environment can operate on these intentions and assist the user to create semantically richer documents that can be processed and executed, similar to a spreadsheet.

In computer programming, Intentional Programming is a programming paradigm developed by Charles Simonyi that encodes in software source code the precise intention which programmers (or users) have in mind when conceiving their work. By using the appropriate level of abstraction at which the programmer is thinking, creating and maintaining computer programs become easier. By separating the concerns for intentions and how they are being operated upon, the software becomes more modular and allows for more reusable software code

Intentional programming

e first present the updated socio-economic trends in Figure 1 as global aggregates as in theoriginal set of 12 socio-economic graphs. We have also now, where the data permit, split ten of thesocio-economic graphs into trends for the OECD countries, for the so-called BRICS countries(Brazil, Russia, India, China (including Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan where applicable) andSouth Africa), and for the rest of the world (Figure 2). OECD members are here defined as coun-tries that were members in 2010 and their membership status was applied to the whole data set,which in some cases goes as far back as 1750.

The post-1950 acceleration of the human imprint on the Earth System, particularly the 12 graphsthat show changes in Earth System structure and functioning, have played a central role in thediscussion around the formalisation of the Anthropocene as the next epoch in Earth history.Although there has been much debate around the proposed start date for the Anthropocene, thebeginning of the Great Acceleration has been a leading candidate (Zalasiewicz et al., 2012).

The ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs, originally published in 2004 to show socio-economic andEarth System trends from 1750 to 2000, have now been updated to 2010.

However, the differentiatedgraphs clearly show that strong equity issues are masked by considering global aggregates only

The trajectory of theAnthropocene: The GreatAcceleration

16:15 - Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

08:58 - Migrant gene DRD4-7R* Allele and correlation with the pursuit of novelty

04:04 - American Mania: When More is Not Enough

42:28 - Perception-action cycle

39:38 - Issues with current U.S. education system

37:35 - Evolutionary benefits of habits

36:10 - Waste from electric cars

35:41 - The problem with infinite economic growth

34:11 - Rats and cocaine experiment

31:15 - The importance of trust and empathy for human societies and self-constraint

30:15 - Why it’s so difficult for us to constrain ourselves

28:19 - We try to compete for status with our peers

25:32 - We have no social constraints anymore

24:40 - The proximate vs the ultimate

23:45 - The neurology of chemical addiction can also apply to things like gambling and shopping

22:23 - People are addicted to “more”

21:27 - We are just as smart now as we were in the ice age

20:19 - Loss aversion

18:07 - Adam Smith - The Theory of Moral Sentiments

If this notion of human existence as a unity of participation in both perishing and non-perishing reality sounds odd to modern ears, it is mainly because philosophical and scientific–and consequently popular–thought during the last few centuries has been busy constructing a very different image of the human person. The image of participation has been changed and simplified into an image of two entities: a body, and a mind inside the body that has intelligence and ideas. This is the image that eventually came out of Descartes and Hobbes and other early modem thinkers, and wound up as a portrayal of human beings as mental entities encased in physical entities: a mind-thing imprisoned in a body–thing. Now a mind-thing imprisoned in a body-thing cannot experience participation in the ground of reality. Why not? Because it is imprisoned, isolated in the head. It can only have ideas about it and “project” them out onto reality. What becomes, then of the non-perishing dimension of meaning? Accepting the modem image, we could have faith that we have a relation to non-perishing reality only through first conceiving of a non-perishing reality–let us call it “God”–in the isolation of our bodily-encased minds, and then projecting that conception onto a “beyond” of things, and finally engaging in the desperate procedure of believing that it is real and that we have a connection with it in spite of not knowing anything of the kind. In other words, as long as self-understanding is dominated by this modem image, human consciousness cannot make sense of its own experience of immediate participation in a non-perishing ground of reality. And therefore, it cannot really make sense of its moral striving–since what is the point of the struggle for goodness if goodness is nothing more than temporary private opinion? Thus the modem image of human nature short-circuits the Socratic and Kierkegaardian understanding of existence, and leaves us with the familiar contemporary mess of radical moral relativism. This modern image of human existence is tenacious, though–partly because it is so closely connected to the modem view of what real knowing is, a view that enjoys an almost unassailable status. It might be summarized with extreme brevity as follows. If the mind is a thing encased in the physical body that only knows reality through the mediation, through the channeling, of the physical senses, any valid knowing has to validate itself through the presence of the relevant sense data. And this means that all true knowing is the type of knowing involved in the natural sciences, where empirical verification must take place through quantifiable data. Data that cannot be mathematically measured, such as the data consciousness discovers in its own activity and awareness–for example moral insight–can never be a matter of knowing, merely of opinion. How could the Socratic experience of discovering that the moral autonomy of the soul involves a non-perishing dimension of meaning ever be verified, if the data of sense, quantifiable data, are the only relevant data for affirming truth? The life of Socrates–an exemplary model for over two millennia of the moral liberation of the soul through the catharsis of practicing death–is, in this view, a life based on nothing more substantial than a private irrational belief. So to sum up: what has happened is that the enthronement by modem philosophy and science of an image of human nature as a thingly mind entrapped in a thingly body, has made all symbolizations of a non-perishing dimension of reality non-credible to many people–particularly to the intelligentsia, who emphasize their modem credentials by presenting themselves as the cultured despisers of religion. And, of course, one of the reasons why this modem image is so popular and so resistant to critique is what it appears to promise. If we go back to the founding texts of modernity, to the writings of Descartes, of Bacon, of Hobbes, we find a great optimism. If there is no participation in a mysterious origin of non-perishing meaning, there is no mystery essential to human existence. If there is no such participation, then all knowledge originates only in human consciousness itself. And if there is no primal mystery, and if all meaning is of human creation, we can hope one day to bring nature, human society, and history fully under human control. In his last book, Escape from Evil, Becker wrote: “Hubris means forgetting where the real source of power lies and imagining that it is in oneself (37).” I would suggest that imagining that notions of a non-perishing dimension of meaning are the pure creations of an isolated human consciousness, entails a forgetting of where the real source of consciousness lies: in the experienced mysterious ground of consciousness, which grants us the quite rational opportunity of a free and loving commitment to an enduring dimension of meaning. Of course, in some sense, human awareness of the non-perishing mystery in which it participates remains alive and well, because people keep striving to be moral, and they keep asking questions about that experience. Human questioning will always keep uncovering the eternal dimension of meaning, keep introducing people to the Socratic catharsis, and keep leading people to what Becker called a life of courageous self-realization. But they can be helped to do so by promoting insights like those of Becker on the choice between denying death or facing up to mortality. Like Becker in his chapter on Kierkegaard in The Denial Of Death, what I’ve tried to show is that the problem does not lie in the notion of human participation in imperishable reality. Rather, where the problem lies is in the self-comforting delusion that one possesses eternal meaning, and especially in the measures people take to defend their feeling of righteous invulnerability, especially through aggression. Authentic faith, by contrast, affirms enduring meaning in the context of an open if anxious acceptance of mortality. And so one must conclude that there are two opposites to authentic faith. One is the dogmatic clinging to an immortality project; and the other is the equally dogmatic insistence that enduring meaning is an illusion. Both of these are denials of our real human situation, making up two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

Both types of inauthentic existence involve running away from the awareness of death, not allowing the fact of death to penetrate into consciousness, not facing up to the human situation, and not undergoing the crucial moral catharsis. So Kierkegaard, Becker, and Socrates all agree: the denial of death is indeed at the center of human inauthenticity. Kierkegaard and Socrates would further insist that authentic human living–the open embrace of life structured by death–can only be rejected or embraced to begin with, because perishing meaning and non-perishing meaning co-constitute conscious existence.

Kierkegaard has essentially this same view of human existence, a view that Becker praises in The Denial of Death. Because we are this tension of opposites, says Kierkegaard, in order to be authentically human we need to accept the mystery and responsibility of participation in both of these dimensions of reality that constitute life structured by death. Most people fall short of this authenticity, he declares. They flee its difficulties. And there are two basic ways of doing this. People either (1) immerse themselves in the dimension of things that perish, the things and pleasures of the world, which allows them to evade the awareness of death: the attitude summed up in the advice to “eat, drink, and be merry.” Or they (2) cling to some false certainty about immortality, imagining that some kind of immortality is their assured possession, and this too allows them to evade the awareness of death.

As Eric Voegelin puts it, “The life of Socrates was the great model of the liberation of the soul through the invasion of death into earthly existence” (Plato, 43). And we come across one of the most memorable formulations of this liberating catharsis in the dialogue Phaedo, where Socrates describes it as “practicing death.” Socrates says that this is what the true philosopher does: practices death. Of course all kinds of people call themselves philosophers. But a real philosopher is easily defined: it is someone who truly loves wisdom. And since wisdom is the ever-deepening understanding of how to live a truly good life, no one can be a lover of wisdom except by continually dying to the perishable and focusing on what is truly lasting, letting the fact and possibilities of death penetrate the soul. True philosophers, Socrates says, “make dying their profession,” and so to them of all people death is least upsetting. And if someone is distressed at the prospect of dying, Socrates concludes, it is “proof enough that he is a lover not of wisdom but of the body (Phaedo, 67d-68c).”

So we have come to the crucial point. The Socratic catharsis is a matter of letting death penetrate the self. It is the acceptance of the perishing of everything that will perish. In this acceptance a person imaginatively experiences the death of the body and the possibility of complete annihilation. This is “to ‘taste” death with the lips of your living body [so] that you … know emotionally that you are a creature who will die; “it is the passage into nothing” in which “a corner is turned within one.” And it is this very experience, and no other, that enables a person to act with genuine moral freedom and autonomy, guided by morals and not just attraction and impulses.

full acknowledgement of mortality and perishability can only take place through a kind of psychological re-orientation, in which trusting affirmation of a non-perishing ground of goodness becomes the ordering principle of one’s life. This is the only way we can break free of the power of those bodily and social distractions which otherwise keep us enslaved and turned away from the good.

Kierkegaard puts this same point in his book Either/Or: To choose the ethical is to “choose the eternal”–however clear or not this is to the person deciding to be ethical. Does this mean that, if you decide to really commit yourself to being ethical, suddenly you are claiming to be in possession of absolute truth and eternal meaning? No—it means that you trustingly affirm that the ultimate basis of your moral decisions and actions is an enduring dimension of meaning, and not like the latest fashions, the things that come and go

when a person does take goodness seriously, he or she finds that this is only possible on the assumption that goodness is not ephemeral–not an illusion, not just a reality constituted by personal opinion. To orient one’s life by the compass of a real commitment to knowing and doing what is good only happens through assuming that goodness is really real, enduringly real: that there is a moral dimension of meaning that does not come and go like flesh, or reputation, or money, or power.

What are the main distractions that keep us from making ourselves morally better? Socrates lists the obvious: material prosperity (i.e., money and possessions and clothes); status and reputation (looking good in the eyes of others); bodily pleasures; and all the emotions that keep us bound to these things. Naturally, Socrates observes, we love these things when we are children. But to cling to them as the highest priorities once we become morally conscious adults is sad–in fact, this is what is a truly shameful way of life. So Socrates chastises the Athenians at his trial: “Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honour, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the perfection of your soul?” (Apology, 29d-e). In order to morally improve one’s soul, according to Socrates, it is necessary to purify it from such distractions. In the dialogue Phaedo, he tells his friends: “The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything (Phaedo, 66c).” It is simply impossible to steadily deepen one’s understanding of how to become a better person without a sustained effort to break free from these distractions. And this effort, says Socrates, is the true struggle, the true agon, of human existence. People think the real problem in life is to escape harm and death. “But I suggest,” Socrates says at his trial, “that the difficulty is not so much to escape death; the real difficulty is to escape from doing wrong (Apology, 39a).”

Death is a mystery. Maybe it is annihilation. One simply can’t know otherwise. Socrates is psychologically open to his physical death and possible utter annihilation. But still this does not unnerve him. And if we pursue the question: why not?–we do not have to look far in Plato’s portrait of Socrates for some answers. Plato understood, and captured in his Dialogues, a crucial element in the shaping of Socrates’ character: his willingness to let the fact of death fully penetrate his consciousness. This experience of being fully open to death is so important to Socrates that he makes a point of using it to define his way of life, the life of a philosophos–a “lover of wisdom.” Let us consider this life of the philosophos as Socrates understands it. It is – famously – “the examined” life. Meaning? That it is a life committed to the ongoing search for how best to live. Now in every society there are plenty of people–like the character Callicles in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias–who would say that the best life is having as much power and pleasure as possible, which of course means always being able to successfully protect oneself and one’s friends from any encroachment on their privileges, from discomfort, from pain, and of course from death. In the Gorgias Plato makes the character Callicles a wonderfully eloquent spokesman for this outlook. Callicles says: any way of life is shameful that doesn’t make its highest priority the ability to save oneself frorn suffering pain or death at the hands of other people. Plato has Socrates replying to Callicles: “My good sir, just reflect whether what is good and noble is not something more than saving and being saved. Perhaps the true man should ignore this question of living for a certain span of years and should not be so enamored of life. . . ” (Gorgias, 512d-e). Socrates is indicating to Callicles that really caring about goodness–genuinely desiring to do what is good, as one understands it—inevitably shifts the value of physical comfort and even physical survival, demoting them somewhat. Too much concern with avoiding pain or with physical survival gets in the way of doing the right thing. A real effort to become good means: keeping attention focused on the things that help one to be good, and learning to avoid distractions.

it will be worthwhile to develop his idea of a courageous breaking away from culturally-supported immortality systems by looking back in history to a character who many people have thought of as an epitome of a self-realized person, someone who neither accepts his culture’s standardized hero-systems, nor fears death: the philosopher Socrates. When Socrates was brought to trial in 399 BC before a jury of 501 Athenian citizens on charges that included impiety and corrupting the youth, he disappointed most of the jurors (and irritated many of them) by not petitioning for leniency, or appearing intimidated by the penalties he might face if found guilty. And when the jury condemned him to death, he remained composed, and spoke carefully about the consequences of the judgment first for himself, and then for Athens. Through Plato we understand that Socrates’s typical tranquility and self-control never left him throughout his month in prison and up through the final minutes of drinking the hemlock. The eyewitness report has it that he drank the cup of hemlock “calmly and easily,” and had to chastise his friends for their weeping. Combined with other testimony about Socrates’s bravery as a soldier–and the record of his dangerous refusal to obey what he considered to be immoral orders from the leaders of a temporary govemment-all this adds up to the portrait of someone very much at ease with his mortality. What accounts for it? Did Socrates’ courage come from a psychological denial of mortality through embrace of some “immortality system?” Let us look at what he had to say about death to the jurors at his trial immediately after his condemnation. “Death,” he said to them, “is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or … it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another (Plato, Apology, 40c-d).” Those are in fact the only alternatives: maybe its nothingness; maybe it isn’t. Socrates shows himself prepared for either eventuality. Note well: there is no dogmatic assertion of an immortal afterlife here. An assertion like that would, after all, contradict Socrates’ first principle of conduct, which is to never assume that one knows what one doesn’t know. Earlier in his defense speech Socrates had stated the matter about death carefully: “To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; it is to think that one knows what one does not know …. [Not] possessing any real knowledge of what comes after death, I am also conscious that I do not possess it (29a-b).”

For what purpose? So that the process of what Becker calls “self-transcendence” may begin. And he describes the process of self-transcendence this way: Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism …. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness … to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance. …This invisible mystery at the heart of [the] creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. “This,” he concludes, “is the meaning of faith.” Faith is the belief that despite one’s “insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force (90, 9 1).” This, then, is what we might call good faith, not a flight into some immortality system. And clearly, some Christians, some Buddhists–at least the Zen Buddhists Becker himself mentions!–have faith in this sense, a faith that Becker characterizes as growing out of tasting one’s own death, embracing one’s own nothingness, and affirming–not a known ultimate meaningful–but an “invisible mystery” of ultimate meaning.

Above all, Becker says, adopting a phrase from Luther, you must be able to “…taste death with the lips of your living body [so] that you can know emotionally that you are a creature who will die (88).” Then quoting William James (who is himself quoting the mystic Jacob Boehme), Becker further describes this “tasting” of death as a “passage into nothing, [a passage in which] a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one (88).” Thus in this process of self-realization, Becker writes, the self is “brought down to nothing.”

We all want out lives to have meaning, and death suggests that life adds up to nothing. People want desperately for their lives to really count, to be finally real. If you think about it, most all of us try to found our identities on something whose meaning seems permanent or enduring: the nation, the race, the revolutionary vision; the timelessness of art, the truths of science, immutable philosophical verities, the law of self-interest, the pursuit of happiness, the law of survival; cosmic energy, the rhythms of nature, the gods, Gaia, the Tao, Brahman, Krishna, Buddha-consciousness, the Torah, Jesus. And all of these, Becker says, function as “immortality systems,” because they all promise to connect our lives with what endures, with a meaning that does not perish. So let’s accept Becker’s thesis: that fear of death and meaninglessness, and a self–deluding denial of mortality, leads many people to these “immortality systems.”

as members of society, we tend to identify with one or another “immortality system” (as Becker calls it). That is, we identify with a religious group, or a political group, or engage in some kind of cultural activity, or adopt a certain culturally sanctioned viewpoint, that we invest with ultimate meaning, and to which we ascribe absolute and permanent truth. This inflates us with a sense of invulnerable righteousness. And then, we have to protect ourselves against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others, which we can only do by insisting that all other absolute truths are false. So we attack and degrade–preferably kill–the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute-truth systems. So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice versa; upholders of the American way of life denounce Communists; the Communist Khmer Rouge slaughters all the intellectuals in Cambodia; the Spanish Inquisition tortures heretics; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil. The list could go on and on.

Human beings are mortal, and we know it. Our sense of vulnerability and mortality gives rise to a basic anxiety, even a terror, about our situation. So we devise all sorts of strategies to escape awareness of our mortality and vulnerability, as well as our anxious awareness of it. This psychological denial of death, Becker claims, is one of the most basic drives in individual behavior, and is reflected throughout human culture. Indeed, one of the main functions of culture, according to Becker, is to help us successfully avoid awareness of our mortality. That suppression of awareness plays a crucial role in keeping people functioning–if we were constantly aware of our fragility, of the nothingness we are a split second away from at all times, we’d go nuts. And how does culture perform this crucial function? By making us feel certain that we, or realities we are part of, are permanent, invulnerable, eternal. And in Becker’s view, some of the personal and social consequences of this are disastrous.

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