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exclusive58
illegal alien

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Radical Evolution
#4975359 - 11/24/05 05:58 AM (18 years, 2 months ago) |
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We live in remarkable times. Discussing the sort of change we are experiencing, however, can be hard.
Four interrelated technologies are cranking up to modify human nature; the GRIN technologies ? the genetic, robotic, information and nano processes. These four advances are intermingling and feeding on one another, and they are collectively creating a curve of change unlike anything humans have ever seen.
We are at an inflection point in history. We are riding a curve of exponential change, a change unprecedented in human history, and it is transforming no less than human nature. The next frontier is our own selves.
Human organization is always influenced by the technology of the time. "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us", as Churchill put it. But all the amazing technological innovations we've seen since the 90s have not had, as we could have expected, any huge social impacts, there hasn't been any kind of Reformation.
Take the fifties for example. The fifties were a period of great technological upheaval - missiles with nuclear warheads, mass produced suburban housing, mainframe computers. From television to Sputnik, the list is endless. And yet the fifties were the boring Eisenhower decade. The cultural upheaval of sex, drugs and rock n' roll ? enabled by the Pill, synthetic psychedelics and the transistor ? did not occur until the sixties. The twenties, too, were a frivolous decade, promptly followed by the social upheaval of the thirties.
So where is this social upheaval that history taught us to expect? If this is the way history works, then the cultural revolution for which we are due is just beginning to emerge.
This cultural revolution in which we are immersed is no more a tale of bits and bytes than the story of Galileo is about paired lenses. In the Renaissance, the big deal was not telescopes. It was about realizing that the Earth is a minor planet revolving around an unexceptional star in an unfashionable part of the universe. Today, the story is no less attitude-adjusting. It is about the defining cultural, social and political issue of our age. It is about human transformation.
So our world is experiencing exponential change. Its a transformation curve that goes straight up. You can see the effects all around you. You can see the Curve in human evolution too:
To get from the formation of Earth to the first multicellular organisms took perhaps 4 billion years. Getting from tiny organisms to the first mammals too 400 million years. Getting from mammals to the first primitive monkeys took 150 million years. Getting from monkeys to hominid species such as chimpanzees took something like 30 million years. Notice how the pace accelerates? Getting from hominids to walking erect took 16 million years. Getting from walking erect to humans painting on cave walls took 4 million years. Getting from cave painting to the first permanent settlements took some 10,000 years. Getting from settlements to the invention of writing took about 4,000 years. At that point, biological evolution was trumped by cultural evolution. We could now store, recall and widely share our thoughts and insights. Intelligence became less the property of isolated bands and more the sum of civilization. As humans increasingly became capable of acting collectively, they could make advances in the arts, sciences and economics far beyond the capabilities of any individual, and the Curve really started to take off. Four thousand years to the Roman Empire, 1,800 years to the Industrial Age, 169 years to the moon, and 20 more years to the Information Age. Where we now find ourselves. Thinking about whether we are about to enter another transition.
Vernor Vinge, best-seller novelist and professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at San Diego State, introduced in 1993 the idea of The Singularity to describe huge but unpredictable social change driven by The Curve. In a seminal academic paper delivered to a NASA colloquium he wrote "I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth" He's talking about some form of transcendence.
As a metaphor for mind boggling social change, The Singularity has been borrowed from math and physics. In those realms, singularities are the points where everything stops making sense. In math it is a point where you are dividing through zero for example. The result is so whacked out as to be meaningless. Physics has its blacks holes ? points in space so dense that even light cannot escape their horrible gravity, where even the laws of physics no longer seem to function. That's what a Singularity is like. "At this singularity", writes Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, "the laws of science and our ability to predict the future would break down." Another borrowed metaphor is "the event horizon", the point of no return as you approach a black hole. It is the place beyond which you cannot escape. It is also the point beyond which you cannot see.
The Net. The most amazing technological and informative tool humanity has ever seen. What role does it play in human evolution?
In just the fist 2,000 days after the Web was born, the world built some 3 billion Web pages readily available to the public. That's 1.5 million a day, one for every two humans on Earth, and the total is growing exponentially. If some government had tried to order this vast project into existence, what would it have cost?
The truth is that there is not enough money in the world to do it. It's an impossible thing we've done. It's a remarkable human achievement of Renaissance proportions in 2,000 days. It's unbelievable. Americans already send 600 billion e-mails a year. This is transformative, the scale and speed with which we have made this. This is called a "gift economy". This gift exchange is socializing us to a degree not seen before. It's amazing given the number of people involved.
The most influential thinker of the 20th century seeking to unify the truths of science and religion was the French Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In his 1940 magnum opus The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard argued that someday our technology would allow us to create a web of thought and action that would make the world more complex, diverse and alive, moving humankind to an ultimate evolution. He called it the Omega point. He propounded the notion that the Earth might be one big single living organism, with all the elements of it ? from the people to the birds ? connected like cells in a body. The goal of evolution, he suggested, is to link up individual human minds, bringing an explosion of intelligence and even global consciousness to this mammoth being, Earth.
The attention this notion received, especially in the sixties, was of an airy, hand-waving, late-night-dorm-session sort. It was hard for serious people to imagine how such a global consciousness would ever be wired up in any practical way, and even harder to observe any concrete evidence of its existence.
With the rise of the World Wide Web, however, some scientists, such as Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics, began to think they might be looking at the first evidence that Teilhard was right.
It is fascinating to think that this new age we might be entering could be compared to what the German philosopher of history Karl Jaspers referred to as the Axial Age ? a period of unique and fundamental focus on transcendence that is the "beginning of humanity as we know it".
The spiritual process which took place between 800 and 200 B.C. seems to constitute such an axis. It was then that the man with whom we live today came into being. Let us designate this period as the "axial age". Extraordinary events are crowded into this period. In China lived Confucius and Lao Tse, all the trends in Chinese philosophy arose, it was the era of Mo Tse, Chuang Tse, and countless others. In India it was the age of the Upanishads and of Buddha; as in China, all philosophical trends, including skepticism and materialism, sophistry and nihilism, were developed. In Iran Zarathustra put forward his challenging conception of the cosmic process as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine prophets arose; Greece produced Homer, the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, the tragic poets, Archimedes. All the vast development of which these names are mere intimation took place in these few centuries, independently and almost simultaneously in China, India and the West. The new element in this age is that man everywhere became aware of being as a whole, of himself and his limits. He experienced the horror of the world and his own helplessness. He raised radical questions, approached the abyss in his drive for liberation and redemption. And in consciously apprehending his limits, he set himself the highest aims. He experienced the absolute in the depth of selfhood and in the clarity of transcendence.
?Karl Jaspers
So all over the world, humans simultaneously began to wake up to a burning need to grapple with deep and cosmic questions. all the major religious beliefs are rooted in this period. "The search for spiritual breakthrough was no less intense and urgent than the pursuit of technological advance is in our own" says Karen Armstrong, writer of A History of God.
This raises the question of whether we are due for a new Axial Age. If our narratives of how the world the world works are not matching the facts, are we seeking a new era of sense, intelligibility, clarity, continuity and unity? If profound restatements of how the world works arose all over the planet the last time we had a transition on the scale of that from biological evolution to cultural evolution, will it happen again as we move from cultural evolution to technological evolution?
Betty Sue Flowers, of the University of Texas at Austin, notes it's been awhile since the Enlightenment and the Renaissance gave us a sense of coherence. "There was a benevolent God that invented the universe, even if it were a clockwork frame. That framework has been up for grabs ? it has fallen away. For a long time it didn't bother us. But now we are facing strong questions. Should we indeed ban the cloning of humans? For that you need a larger frame. We do not have that agreed-upon larger frame. This is a spiritual crisis. It's not about science."
Flowers sees coming a cultural revolution that seeks to address today's confusions about how things really do fit together. She says: "What's emerging is an interesting amalgam. It comes from our economic myths of globalization, that everything fits together. And that overlays our environmental work about the way things fit together. Even if it's a remote snail, it has intrinsic value. There is an interconnectedness of things. There is a value somehow in the way things are connected ? the web of life. That's the next Enlightenment."
The importance of creating such a commonly held framework, Flower believes, is "it synchronizes human activity. It distinguishes what 'outside the box' is. It gives you a way to move forward."
"Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire."
?Pierre Theilhard de Chardin

Note: This post was inspired by Radical Evolution, a book written by Joel Garreau.
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dorkus
don't look back
Registered: 04/12/04
Posts: 1,511
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Thank you.
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exclusive58
illegal alien

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Re: Radical Evolution [Re: dorkus]
#4975818 - 11/24/05 10:44 AM (18 years, 2 months ago) |
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You're very welcome
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justAkid
Member of myCulture

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Do these axial periods have to have a positive connotation to them? Because traditional tribal socities put emphasis on the good of the whole, the tribe. But our society today put's emphasis on the self, yet it is much more "developed".
-------------------- Trust thyself.
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exclusive58
illegal alien

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Re: Radical Evolution [Re: justAkid]
#4979142 - 11/25/05 04:03 AM (18 years, 2 months ago) |
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Well the axial age Karl Jaspers referred to certainly has a positive connotation to it, it represents a unique and simultaneous appearance of philosophical and spiritual masters all over the world. It kind of represents the birth of humanity's true spiritual quest and it marks an important step in Man's self-awareness.
The axial age that we are supposively entering can take a negative connotation as well as a positive one, it all depends on us, on what choices we make. We are the creators of our reality. If our thoughts are chaotic and hell-like, then the reality that we experience is exactly that.
But it seems that there is a big difference between Jasper's axial age, and the today's axial age: Jasper's was a period of time, but the axial age that is coming ahead doesn't seem to be a period at all, it seems that the true revolution, that our true spiritual evolution, will occur in an instant. I don't know what that means, but my guess is of something like a "global transcendance".
I'm not sure I answered your question...?
Either way, we're in for one crazy roller coaster ride!
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ajna
Hunter


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2012?
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Sclorch
Clyster


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Re: Radical Evolution [Re: ajna]
#4979288 - 11/25/05 06:38 AM (18 years, 2 months ago) |
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Chronocentrism.
-------------------- Note: In desperate need of a cure...
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redgreenvines
irregular verb


Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 37,526
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Re: Radical Evolution [Re: Sclorch]
#4979315 - 11/25/05 07:17 AM (18 years, 2 months ago) |
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as we come more into an association with GRIN tech, we need to press into PEACE like never before, and we must learn what that really stands for.
We understand that war leads to disruption of infrastructure, and GRIN is very very dependent on infra structure.
Consider what might be the smallest completely self sustaining and potentially self reliant center of GRIN tech? in evolutionary terms that must mature, mate, procreate and then the generations that follow may become a species.
so far it is fairly disorganized and spreads around the planet and has no defenses against its natural enemy (self hatred/war).
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TheGus
The Walrus

Registered: 09/07/05
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i think it be more important to connect with our souls and minds than with the internet...
but as i say this i realize, i would be literally nowhere without the internet, my spiritual growth would be almost nil, considering the people i am surrounded by.. it often seems like im the needle in the haystack..
i wonder if the haystack will get set on fire one day and ill be one of the few needles left to move on...
-------------------- "It is easier to teach a computer to play chess than to build a mudpie."Sherry Turkle Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"-Einstein
I pity the fool who break traffic laws with $870,000 of drugs in the car. -mo0nlite_sonata Psythos
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exclusive58
illegal alien

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Re: Radical Evolution [Re: TheGus]
#4980283 - 11/25/05 02:29 PM (18 years, 2 months ago) |
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But the internet results from the coming-together of millions upon millions of souls' and minds' creations. "Connecting" to the net IS connecting to humans' souls and minds. It is an interconnection of already interconnected things. 
oh, and i don't think the haystack will burn, i think it will change into needles.
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exclusive58
illegal alien

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BTW, to anyone, was the first post too long to read?
I'm wondering if the reason why there aren't many replies is that it was too long or because it was uninteresting...?
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redgreenvines
irregular verb


Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 37,526
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it would never fit on a bumper sticker can you fix that? the whole attention span thing.
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gratefulgere
Master of Appearance

Registered: 02/25/05
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I believe that human conscious needs to focus on more on culture awareness than on personal awareness. As a culture we have been engaged in all out war with the Earth. We decide what lives or dies, depending on its worth to humans. Everyone has there doubts and fears on how long this whole thing will last. We need prophets to tell us the "one right way to live" because we are not living in accordance with universal law. A law as real as the laws of gravity. A law that cannot be changed with a vote. If we don't wise up our species dies. Our culture tells us to run from the past. To move on as fast as possible. To survive as a species I feel we should look to the past to a time when we were living in the hands of god. Where we were living in harmony with the will of god not fighting it. We have taken our selves out of the biosphere, creating our own environment to live in, creating our own biosphere. Evolution does not end with Humans. All species are evolving and forever evolving. We have become Homo sapiens sapiens from this process. Who are we to believe we are the end result of billions of years of evolution, that nothing can top us. We have taken our selves out. The only evolution left is for our culture. Our technology. This things can't not save us.
-------------------- Encourage Critical Thinking
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dorkus
don't look back
Registered: 04/12/04
Posts: 1,511
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I believe universal law cannot be forced upon anybody, if there ever was one. All we could do is tune tune tune and aim for ripples.
Seek to remove the specks from our own eyes, sort of.
I have faith in Tao (on my good days). If the beginning is as the end then all ends good. In perfection.
Magnetic poles switches gradually accellerating, but at a certain point (point zero of no return) a giant leap is made. I have seen this playing with magnets.
I have no idea of course, but the magnetic fields of earth, noo-sphere and stuff like that might surprise us. It would be wonderful if that hundreth monkey really was important.
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exclusive58
illegal alien

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bump
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Simisu
taken by gravity


Registered: 08/08/03
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i think the next step is making use of information in ways we are still not capable of... for example being able to SEE your thoughts... having controlled visions when talking to people or even shared hallucinations but that's not going to emerge from the internet just imagin dreaming of information instead of watching TV all day how many new ideas will form in our minds?
we are subjected to SO much information all day but we have no way to implement it... i actualy think we're going to regress a while befor we can push forward! sit on our asses and make use of what's here for us...
as for grand social change and new prophets... it's going to be confusing and only big crashes/wars/conflicts will make space for better ideas as long as our current standerd is still this consumerism hell race people will continue getting brainwashed and lives will continue to be a collection of zeros a real change will follow the massiv distruction of the current paradigme (hopfully)
but what is that change going to be like?
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   Shr mery    Visit & Support Free Spore Ring Earth Please help spread live Salvia Divinorum
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Icelander
The Minstrel in the Gallery


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Quote:
"Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire."
Very beautiful and who knows?
Don't be too sure just yet. It might not be a human animal that completes this evolution.
-------------------- "Don't believe everything you think". -Anom. " All that lives was born to die"-Anom. With much wisdom comes much sorrow, The more knowledge, the more grief. Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
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Swami
Eggshell Walker

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Re: Radical Evolution [Re: Icelander]
#5075629 - 12/17/05 03:27 PM (18 years, 1 month ago) |
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It might not be a human animal that completes this evolution.

Chupacabras are the next stage.
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The proof is in the pudding.
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nakors_junk_bag
Lobster Bisque


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Re: Radical Evolution [Re: TheGus]
#5075774 - 12/17/05 04:22 PM (18 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
TheGus said: i think it be more important to connect with our souls and minds than with the internet...
but as i say this i realize, i would be literally nowhere without the internet, my spiritual growth would be almost nil, considering the people i am surrounded by.. it often seems like im the needle in the haystack..
i wonder if the haystack will get set on fire one day and ill be one of the few needles left to move on...
I prefer to be the needle in the needlestack. i so much harder to find and conversation is much better.
-------------------- Asshole
Edited by nakors_junk_bag (12/17/05 04:28 PM)
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nakors_junk_bag
Lobster Bisque


Registered: 11/23/04
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someone explain to me again why consumerism is going to be the bane of human evolution. utlimately everything will see an end. When the sun dies so will the planet. We need to find a way off this planet or we will perish. we are in a sinking ship and have no life boats. nothing does, it will all die and eventually stop evovling. we must build these life boats, then somewhere else we can continue to evolve.
-------------------- Asshole
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