A quest for meaning, a search for answers, the pursuit of life, beauty and humanity in an inhumane world. *Edit* Do no Harm.
I'm sorry about the lack of updates, these last few weeks have been pretty busy for me. Along with trying to get to bed a little earlier I've been furiously practicing for an upcoming pool tournament. I wish I could say I was preparing to go school some players but the reality of the situation is that my team and I aren't the best, in fact we're second from the bottom. My personal record started off well but I've lost many games in the last while so I've been pushing myself to go out more. So I have been. Did it do the trick? Very doubtful.
Some links to consume:
Make sure you read get your war on if you haven't already. If you're bored you can go through the archives to get a brief reminder of the peaks of U.S. politics over the last year or two. Trust me, it comes right back.
Apparently religious intolerance goes both ways. Say the magic word though and get a free pass out of the media spotlight.
This guy Spade at Hammerdown details some of the frustration I feel with the state of American politics. I mean really, is this just some joke down there that the rest of the world doesn't get?
My del.icio.us is a link of all the sites I've been to that I found noteworthy. This database is courtesy of Spurl who shares his data (and conversely my data) with del.icio.us, however, I like the layout of my links with del.icio.us better. Enjoy! There's lots of good reading in there (like this goodie :P ), categorized and everything.
I'm going to start working on another piece. Another bit of light fluff I'm sure, something to brighten your day with. Man I don't know how I can spend so much time laughing and having a good time with my friends and be so dour and gloomy online. I guess when I'm with my friends the worries of the world are washed away, but when I get connected all the signs are pointing to more and more hurt in the world. It scares me, it really does, but then there are friends, there are socials, there are lazy evenings on the deck and it's hard to care so much.
There's not much that can be said of Winnipeg that's different from the rest of the world. Personally, I feel that Winnipeg spends most of it's time absorbing other traditions fom cities and countries afar. There are though a few activities which remain unique to Winnnipegers. For example, do any of you attend socials of families to be? This is what I have been doing the last two nights: participating in a uniquely Winnipegan activity - the wedding social.
The wedding social is generally thrown by the groom and bride with heavy participation from the parental units. Entry is usually $10 and drink prices are below the bar average. Friends and family of the bride and groom are the 'core' invitees, however the 'inner sect' is encouraged to sell tickets to their friends in order to raise as much money for the wedding as possible. A chinese aution is held with 10-20 gift packages, ranging from collections of movies and popcorn to a basket of 'pampering products' including nick-nacks and chocolates. Sometimes there is a 'grand prize' - be it an xbox plus games or a dvd player and TV combo. Tickets are cheap and prizes are drawn at around midnight. Everyone goes with the intention of purchasing a fair amount of tickets in order to support the upcoming wedding.
Weddings can be expensive, and eveyone attending knows that the next one could be for their own, so they contribute a lot. Most socials are in a hall or gym, the odd one is held at a bar. Friday's social was situated in a gym, tonights was in a bar. Needless to say this weekend has been a bit boozy for me, so I'll cut this short and head to my comforting bed. If ever there was an idea that the rest of the world should adopt, this is it. It's small, it's fun and it brings people together. There is nothing quite as productive at bringing old friends back in contact then a wedding social. It's harmless and fun, and it helps fund the already expensive weddings. Why don't you think about it next time you or someone you know gets married?
Life is a strange phenomenon. We are born in this Universe, we exist in this Universe, we perceive this Universe, we die in this Universe. Many accept this as a certainty and give it no more thought. Some question the nature of our reality as they learn more about the world around us. A few understand that our current path is leading us to the eventual destruction of our society. In my mind that is not even a questionable fact, the evidence of global and social catastrophe loom in the horizon like a fork in a river. The choice has to be made or the current will lead us to a waterfall and our eventual doom. Many have given up, seeing the prophesized Armageddon and the ensuing 'Rapture' as an easy out from the problems of the world - "Why worry about the destruction of Mother Earth if I'm not going to be here?" The problem is that it's not that easy. In the end we're all human and we all have to deal with our choices; I just wish that more people would realize that their choices have profound ramifications on future generations.
In many ways it's hard to disassociate oneself from the static value patterns that have been ingrained into us since our youth. The ideas and values that we grow up with are easily imprinted because our young brains are basically undeveloped neural networks. The first ideas that are introduced become the ones that are most strongly associated and the hardest to dislodge. The power to modify our mindset is the absolute power of our consciousness - we can 'will-to-power' our current perception to align with a new set of ideals, however it takes a certain type of individual to evoke that kind of drastic change to our 'core' being. Nonetheless, the resilience of the brain is our greatest asset as it continues to adapt with our every changing environmental situation.
Ultimately I have faith in humanity because no matter what happens to this world, I believe in our skills of adaptation. This is a fundamental trait that has allowed us to evolve in many ways. From turning a stone and a stick into a weapon all the way to turning logical math into functional computers, we're a pretty impressive species.
We've done a lot since our brief journey into consciousness began. We've established societies that (somewhat) represent the needs of the majority. We've developed medicine and surgery that allow us a greater chance of surviving the hardships of living. We've discovered some of the fundamentals of the Universe around us; how vast and near infinite it is in both space and time. We've discovered things about our brains and bodies that would have astounded Victorian physicians. We have made a lot of progress yet we are still doing many things the wrong way. We have endless potential but we are endlessly making the wrong choices on some fundamental questions in our collective lives. Most of the time we forget that there are so many other people with their own perception of the world. Much has been done to bring these perceptions into alignment, but much work is still ahead of us. We've got a long way to go as a species.
Too few of us are concerned with the fate of our grandchildren’s children. We know that there is little chance that we'll ever see them so how can one truly care about this abstract future generation of your DNA? If we did care, we might do a little more to make sure that our grandchildren's children had a world to grow up in, a world that wasn't drained and spoiled, abused and used and then thrown away. You may think I'm an extremist but in reality our current course of action is only leading us to more consumption, less conservation and an always-greater division between the haves and the have-nots. That's not the way it should be. We should be able to see the connection between over consumption, lack of balance, and backlash. Our current lifestyle will eventually destroy us because it's not in check with anything, and will eventually be rejected by the ecosystem that is Earth. Humanity is a tumour that's spreading over this world exponentially with time.
All is not lost however. Humanity is an interesting species because we've evolved with the notion that we've been guided by a greater being, a presence that is more powerful than us and will lead us on the proper path. This belief has been held true by people of all different religions for millennia; it is a BLUE meme that infects us at an early age and in the majority of cases it is never questioned. "Why bother questioning when all of my 'big questions' are answered?" It is the Truth, a bastion of stability in a turbulent existence, a trusty paddle when you're cruising down shit creek. I guess all of us really just need to find the right paddle.
I found my paddle, and it is complexity. It is global consciousness.
Right around the time I started my blog Wally posted an interesting link to a Wired article entitled A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain. A Jesuit priest named Pierre Teillhard De Chardin was the main contributor of this idea; the basics revolving around the concept of increasing complexity leading to increasing awareness. From this assumption he realized that we ourselves, as humans, can view our interactions with each other as creating another order of complexity. What emerges from this new connectivity is in fact the Noosphere, or 'God'.
What I believe is that we have been doing this since we started interacting with each other more explicitly than other animals. This interaction was rooted in communication, the passing of ideas back and forth while learning from the experiences others have endured to enrich our own lives. This interaction leads to the formation of our societies, to our struggles with our existence and to our invention of Gods to explain the unexplainable. Perhaps these Gods were reflections of the temperament of society. An angry wrathful God emerges when our society was cruel and harsh; a more benevolent God when possibilities for peace emerge through avenues like philosophy and science. I'd say these were echoes of a mass sentiment, and that the touch of that mindset still lives with us today.
Here in the 21st century, however, we have new technologies to affect our lives in profound ways. Communication with anyone who has the means has never been so easy. This root, this founding idea of the communication of Memes, is where the start of societal evolution took off from. Now, once again, we have 'upped the ante' with technology. The Internet allows us a sharper blade against the struggles of survival as well as giving us a bigger hammer in which to build and learn as much about our Universe as we can. As a result of this inflation of self-enrichment and the increase in person-to-person interaction we have increased the complexity of the Noosphere. The Noosphere is thus becoming more self-aware.
We are creating a new God and its Morals will be the Morals that we hold. If our morals and value judgements are questionable, then what kind of higher entity are we creating? A monster, conquering all it sees, or a saint, learning and experiencing to its fullest potential?
The concept of the Noosphere is also rooted in some observable science. There are scientific experiements being conducted that show some interesting results, mostly surrounding the statistics of randomly generated numbers. Consider a computer that uses a device to create many successive 'true' random numbers, which are then processed to find the average of the data. Given a generator that creates numbers between 0 and 1, the average over time should be 0.5. The experimenters found that if a person were to concentrate on the computer performing this operation (or more specifically the random number generator) the subjects could skew the results to produces averages like 0.6. This is a small deviation, but a statistically verifiable one as well. The good people at Princeton then decided to extend this concept further by placing computers all around the world, generating and analysing these figures. Statistically significant deviations have occurred since they started, from sports events in the vicinity generating off random results, to global crises (of the past) like Y2K, and then of course the aftermath of 9/11.
Why are we able to affect random number generators? That is a very metaphysical question because it presumes an underlying connection and an individual focus that allows us to alter the nature of randomness. When we all focus on the same Meme then I believe this ability is magnified and the result is the creation of a global consciousness that perceives on a global scale the events around us. How does it affect us? Think of mob mentality. Why is it that a mob can go from peaceful to violent in a matter of minutes? Perhaps when a certain threshold is broken the mini-Noosphere envelopes all of those who are receptive to such subtle influences and the violent Meme is propagated throughout the group. Maybe some people are 'sheep' and some are 'shephards'. At this point, I don't know. What I do know is that we have all felt this influence at certain times in our lives. Think back to the last sports game or concert you attended - was that feeling of vitality purely because of the event taking place, or was it because everyone in the vicinity was concentrating on the same event and thus raising the group awareness to that of a singular consciousness?
At the end of the day most people will have trouble swallowing this concept. It's too foreign, too outside the framework of our theistical upbringings. Rare is the individual who is willing to question the fundamental questions, that of our existence, our life, and our death. When an answer to these tough questions is provided, it seems as if the brain locks it in and throws away the key. Changing this answer requires such a will-to-power and confidence in the new concept that few will bother. It's too much effort and can lead to personal instability. The mere act of questioning those answers is unthinkable in most. To question is to doubt, and to doubt the various religions' answers is to throw their own 'eternal afterlife' into damnation. Why risk it? Safe and secure, we await our death and the ensuing afterlife.
Most will go about their day to day existence while the cyclically infecting religious Meme remains a part of their fundamental core. Every action is guided by the Morals laid out in their respective religion. This would be fine in most cases if people actually upheld some of the principals that their religions preached. What happened to love thy neighbour? How is it that the whole of Christianity is still standing while this fundamental tenet is ignored by most of its followers? But I digress.
The most interesting thing about this concept of global consciousness is that no matter what faith you hold, no matter what you do with your life, you are still influencing and being influenced by the Noosphere. If we view our society as a vast interconnected web of people, then every action we take ripples through this network in ways that we may never fully understand. Choices we make may be reflected back to us in the form of new opportunities arising or favoured paths disappearing. Is it too much of a stretch to see that if we make Good choices that affect us (and the others around us) positively, then Good things will come back to us, likewise for Bad decisions. If you believe (like me) that our collective actions affect the shape of the Global Consciousness, then it's logical to say that if the majority of people are making Good decisions, the core Morals of the 'higher entity' we are creating will be Good as well.
Like I said, it really doesn't matter if you personally believe in this entity or not, because it is still being generated in part by your interactions with others around you. At the same time, I believe the manifestation of its awareness will be more obvious if we all thought as one in this regard. Almost like the molecules aligning in a magnet, if our thoughts are aligned on the same path we can make a force-of-will that is ephemeral, yet able to alter the world around us. Until that time this will lies dormant, its capabilities never reaching its potential and the confusion and anxiety in our own individual lives growing. When the world believes together we will have reached a new level, but until that time the problems in the world continue to become more apparent, more traumatic. Like it or not, we're all in this together. Welcome to the Noosphere.
These are some quotes I've come across since I've started my philosophical voyage that reinforce some of the concepts of perceptionalism. (The emphasis in the quotes is mine).
I'm working on a longer entry and I've forsaken frequent updates as a result. There's much to talk about, much to discuss, though not on this site at this time. ;) I will however point you in the direction of a high quality piece on the Israel / Palestine conflict courtesy of Blogamy. She lays it all out in a very logical fashion, but leaves the question of how we're going to fix this situation. That of course is the big question, what to do about the middle east.
At any rate, I have not disappeared, I'm just working on something of a larger piece that I want to make sure is also of higher quality. I'll be back soon enough!
As you may or may not be aware, Google has recently announced it's entrance into the free email market, most likely a direct response to the increasing competition from Internet portal giant Yahoo and Software behemoth Microsoft. While Yahoo offers 10 megs with it's free account and Microsoft's Hotmail offers a measely 2 megs, Google has promised one Gig (1024 megs) of space to retain emails online. Along with what will probably be an inovative and intuitive user interface, Google will serve up advertisements based on keywords in your messages. This move, of course, has privacy advocates in an uproar. Accusations of Big Brother and 1984 have been bandied about the internet faster than links to Janet Jackson's nipplegate.
What a load of bullshit.
First of all, this is a FREE service. Nobody at Google is holding a gun to your head demanding that you sign up or you'll be forced to endure your worst fears. You're perfectly entitled to continue using your Yahoo or crappy Hotmail (2 megs! Goddamn!), and if you're so incensed about the whole affair you can use their patently inferior search engines as well. Myself, I've always been a fan of Google, pretty much since it came out. In the software and system administration industry there is nothing like being able to enter an error message or a search string of keywords and being able to find a solution in a matter of minutes. Google allows people to learn faster and to attain a higher level of Quality in their work. Their corporate motto of 'Do no evil' is beautiful in it's simplicity - they know the power at their disposal and how easy it would be to taint their wonderful database and reap huge profits. Yet they don't. Things like this are what make me trust Google.
Secondly, we're not talking about some egghead at Google's headquarters sniffing through your personal emails finding ads to correlate with keywords, we're talking about software here. This is rudimentary AI which has absolutely no interest in your interest in advanced dildonics or who you think is going to win the Stanley Cup. It's going to put up ads that are context sensitive to keywords in your email, but it is just an 'it'. It's not a person. It's not your mother. It's not the government. It's Google. Google hasn't failed me yet, so why would I start doubting now?
At the end of the day, it's YOUR choice to sign up or NOT to sign up. For me, the thought of having a gig of email space online at my disposal is titillating. Now I have a 'deep storage' for all my really important emails, a place where I can send something and not have to worry about my account expiring after a month (hopefully!). My only question is why aren't the foraying into the IM market? When will that happen?
I do have one fear, and it is something I've been mulling for about a year now. With all of the rumours over the last while about Google going public, what will that do to their corporate motto? Will it be modified to 'Do no evil unless it interferes with shareholder profits'? Going public is a dangerous thing. At once they become responsible not just for themselves, but also for sustained economic growth in order to satisfy the needs of the mutual funds, the day traders and all the others who want their little piece of Google. What happens when times are tight? If Google is private, hopefully they'll be able to restructure and weather the storm, possibly with some layoffs. If they're public, shareholder panic will force massive selloffs and a rapid deflation in stock value. In order to prevent this 'financial catastrophe', Google will probably bend the rules, tell little white lies, everything that we've come to know and love about corporate America. What then becomes of Google?
Taking care of Google is something that we should all really be concerned with. Why is that? Well let me ask you this - why does this company need over a hundred PhD's? You may think I'm a conspiracy theorist, but with basically most of the knowledge of the world as it's nursery what better place is there to grow the worlds first true AI? AI will be powerful. It will be scary. It will be wonderful. One thing I know is that I'd rather have AI working to find me better answers in life than to try and skin as much money out of me as possible.
Well I've delayed and procrastinated, two of my best skills. I wield these tools with the razor accuracy of a sushi chef, I wittle away time and put off my internal deadlines with impressive accuracy. I wanted to do a big post about any one of numerous topics but I couldn't settle on a particular thread, so I come to you, my faithful readers with my hat in my hand and ask this simple question:
What do you want to read here?
I've enjoyed talking about a wide variety of topics over the last six months, but is there any particular topic or subject that you guys have really appreciated, that you would like to see more of? Now's your chance, this is a request for comments. I want feedback, negative or positive, a little progress report if you will. Do you want me to talk more about my philosophy, or dip into a more spiritual realm? (Eventually those two seem to merge...) Do you want me to talk about the environment and the damage we're doing to it? Do you want me to add my voice to the political pundits and give my perception of the current events? Do you want me to throw out a few new ideas? (I've still got a few!) Future societies, possibly technologies? Thoughts on evolution and our eventual destiny? Predictions of doom and end-of-times? What do you guys want to read, because at the end of the day I am but your humble servant and I always have something to talk about. I guess I need a bit of direction, right now I seem to be blowing all over the place.
Let me know, and tell a friend! Hah, I am the biggest blog whore out there.