I was so lucky that kids in my school could talk about Toynbee's World and the West, a book which asked important hard questions back in those years, and showed me a path to other work by Toynbee, Spegler, McNeill and others (yea unto Marx and Weber and Jefferson and more of Aristotle in college). "Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." And "those who assume dynamics without actually studying time-series data and facing up to their initiale rrors should change jobs."
I was delighted to hear of an open journal continuing that tradition, Cosmos and History, and published a paper recently in that journal. But where is the intellectual community continuing that analysis? We have lots of well-connected would-be dictators now in the US who revere Trajan, but where are the folks who know the REAL lessons from what Trajan did to the Romans (which many folks start to do to us)?
That being so, I was delighted to hear of a major new thrust based IN JAPAN which tries to fill in that very important gap, to help inform some very serious (even urgent) decisions in front of us now at the crossroads of history.
Here is the link I was sent today on that thrust:
========================================
On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 10:56 PM Bill Daul <bdaul@nextnow.net> wrote:
Big history helps understand today's issues
BY HARUAKI DEGUCHI
==================================================
My reply:
Thank you, Bill, for informing us of this very important strand of thinking. (See his post and newspaper story below.)
Recently, I had a paper published in the online journal Cosmos and History (I think),
but was deeply disappointed not to find an internet venue (google groups? special package?) to dig deeper into the issues which that journal talks about addressing.
DO YOU HAVE a URL to suggest to dig deeper into those basic questions?
i4j has another mission. It can help and linkup, but a more dedicated, more cross-cutting thread is needed.
I looked up NextNow, and it too seemed to have very different goals.
In the past, I was excited by the mandate of a Lifeboat discussion list: to discuss what are the most serious threats to the very existence (extinction) of the human species, and rational strategies to minimize the risk?
Learning from past history is one of the important starting points or resources for that discussion, but it has petered out in recent years. (People told me that David Brin built on that to create a viral blog, but is he into two-way asking of tough questions?) SO WHAT WOULD YOU RECOMMEND NOW TO GET DEEP INTO IT, EITHER THE BIG HISTORY TOPIC OR THE LINK TO SURVIVAL?
For what it's worth, I was invited by JS&T to fly to Japan myself this month, to give a talk on how we can avoid a kind of future history collapse due to misuse of AI and other internet technologies, already a pressing challenge to governments around the world as the dynamics of history actually change in a serious way. Rather than fly, I chose instead to record a video talk:
(They tell me it has been translated into Korean, and gotten some real circulation there.) TWO of the eight slides actually depict extinction challenges discussed at Lifeboat, with the kind of details and evidence to make it more than just the usual BS. I was also asked to give a talk in Seoul on worst case climate change, one of the four:
For my PhD at Harvard in crossdisciplinary applied mathematics, I was asked to defend two possible topics in an intense oral examination in 1971 or 1972. One was the coupling between biological evolution of humans and the rise and fall of civilizations, with lots of reference to Toynbee and Spengler as well as Eisenstadt, McNeill ( https://www.amazon.com/Rise-
==========
On the Millenniums Project list, someone recently asked "what future would YOU choose"?
I wish that were a real discussion list, but it has other purposes. If it were an open-ended discussion list, I might have started by mentioning how I started worrying a lot in high school "What are our realistic CHOICE?" We can fantasize til hell won't quit what kind of world we WANT to live in, but that is simply not realistic. I once said to a friend: " Try to design what you think is the BEST form of government, fitting your values. And then try to picture what will happen if the entire system is staffed by chimpanzees." (I have certainly seen hearings and trials which reminded me of that sentence.) Identifying what are realistic choices, informed by the empirical data of how history works over long times (for humans and also other species), is a key part of any honest, useful response to the question.
For the moment... as I look at how money and DNA once ruled humans, but computers are on track to ruling money, my gut feeling this morning is: The most accurate depiction of our real choices may be a lot like the deep, inspired science fiction series Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It starts out as something we don't understand, which turns out to be a war between a Terminator kind of AI (slightly gentler?) and a Matrix kind of AI, in which our best hope for now is to help the Matrix side win and more fully value human beings.(Of course, there is also a choice of new internet apps so primitive and devoid of real intelligence that we all fall apart like some folks' tax returns under an IRS audit. Current governments' policies actually look more like that one, a more Spenglerian possibility.)
I doubt the Terminators would even listen to talk about people-centered internet, but that fits well in the Spenglerian options for the future.
Please forgive if I close with a photo I took in Japan a few weeks ago, which somehow seems to fit here. It is a picture of the gateway to the future, entry to the highest and most sacred of Shinto (sanzan) shrines... with an icon of the macroscopic Schrodinger cat just past the gateway. We have CHOICES now about our future history, and this multifurcation point in that dynamical system, but physics has been more and more clear that many choices actually DO HAPPEN in the multiverse we live in. Deepak Chopra sent me a link yesterday, for example, to a new article MIT Tech Review, which appears to attack objective reality but describes yet another new experiment which proves that macroscopic Schrodinger cats actually exist. Meow.
Thanks again for your post... and I look forward to further discussion in another venue (unless others here want to dig in as well).
Paul
No comments:
Post a Comment