There are times when I work hard to try to frame my thoughts in a way which is socially acceptable, which won't seem totally crazy to folks who simply
don't have the same experience base or reference representations I do. But current world events drive me to wonder what I really make of them, struggling to find an orderly way to think about the challenges to humanity and to our souls, taking advantage of ANY clues.
The press and the journals are already overflowing with evaluations of the future and of the present situation, but almost all of them have the old problem of "not seeing the forests for the trees." Just a few years ago, two major futures organizations asked me to give a few slides on the BIG picture, the larger historical trends and choices, relevant to the IT industry but also to the rest of us:
Crudely, I ASSUMED that the dynamics we are living with now are a COMBINATION of the same KIND of historical dynamics which folks like Hegel, Marx, Spengler and Weber tried to make sense of -- ultimately based on flows of money and of biological selection (DNA) -- changed by one or two massive phase transitions in the dynamics, one due to IT technology and one (I hope) due to a higher level of consciousness in our noosphere. As in my previous post, I assume (90%?) that we humans are all a symbiosis of body and "soul," where "soul" is our personal part of the noosphere, the great living organism grounded in dark matter spanning life from worms beneath our feet all the way to the sun (the greatest center of energy in our solar system). That's way different from what most people assume; see werbos.com/religions.htm for 2019 papers explaining what brought me to this conclusion.
1. Spengler
But hey, Spengler is still there, and lots of folks who know about Spengler are becoming unnerved by developments all over the world which fit his model of cultures and civilizations growing, losing their cultural vitality, becoming hollowed out militarized corrupt systems, and then falling to pieces, NEVER TO RETURN EXCEPT AS PEOPLE OUTSIDE the old core start a new regime which conquers the old one.
That previous paragraph cries out for LOTS of explanation and citation. I hope someone will be interested enough to get me do more of that. Just a few quick thoughts:
1.1. I have been saddened by folks in the US who thought they follow the lessons of history, by trying to reinvent the conquests of Trajan. But I have seen what PERMANENT damage Trajan did to the social structure of his homeland (still frozen in many ways to this day!!), how he was replaced by the gay emperor Hadrian (who could be like Buttigig to Trump?) who actually built a wall, restored more market economics, but couldn't help a massive shift of power far to the east due to the damage Trajan etc did to the west. .
1.2. At scholar.google.com, you can see thousands of citations to my Harvard PhD thesis, which included the first explicit statement, proof and application of backpropagation, which underlies "the new AI" and the ongoing revolution in the software/algorithm/
1.3. This is a global situation, not just US. The EU, US, China and India all fit the model, though of course the details are complicated. Were it not for World War II, the powerful Tokyo Dynasty would be ruling a resurgent China, but China is now on a path more like that which India has followed, and IT is mainly just reinforcing the kinds of patterns Spengler described, ever stronger in both countries.
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About ten days ago, I was ever more worried about where we might find real hope of avoiding the obvious path of decline, corruption, and conflicts which, becoming nuclear, would point towards human extinction well before climate change could kill us. So MANY zingers! What jarred me most was when House Republicans refused to comply with Intelligence Committee efforts to prevent total disintegration of coming elections due to cybersecurity problems... problems which also threaten the viability of power grids and the global money system. Who is behind all the really massive screwups in so many sectors, getting in the way of any hope of sustainable AI and climate, among other things? Where is noosphere intelligence when we need it?
Most depressing to me was to see how more fundamental cybersecurity is an obvious necessity (at least if humans will still exist) and yet strange things happen to block it, things which would strain any ordinary types of conspiracy theory. Admittedly, one of the folks named in the well-researched book Dark Money has at times said that we do not need humans any more and has financed groups like Bannon (gently tweaking and using some of Sean's friends, just as KGB once funded some Black Panthers), but the barriers to things like the technology of unbreakable operating systems needed here and now go beyond what that suggests.
I am reminded that the noosphere itself DOES contain lots of crazy commitments which, as I see it, have real destructive "PSI" impacts beyond what mundane explanations can cope with.
Ten days ago or so, , at Quaker meeting, I thought of what Yeshua and Varadan both said -- in effect, "Don't just limit it to OUR noosphere. Try to tune into the Creator." As I explained in my previous post, I am more comfortable with Jesus's word "Father" than Creator, but I decided to try. Why not?
So I meditated on something like: "OK, I respect your existence. Please forgive my intrusion, but I am really worried that we humans really might all die, and most of noosphere with us. All of this really dangerous craziness, properly paralyzing to those of us on your side... who see how little we know about which way is up. Could you please give us a clue?"
What came back (somewhat simplified of course) was an appropriate message for the "afterthoughts" time at our local Meeting: "The thing is, this noosphere that you are part of is a teenager. you, Paul, know what it means to be father of a teenager. Yes, the teenager has wild and pre-sane pre-sapient emotional sturm and drang which can in fact be fatal in some cases. But as a father of a teenager what do you do? You DON'T just drug the kid into fuzzy bliss which blocks learning, maturity and intelligence. The teenager MUST feel the whole spectrum of surn and drang, and must struggle not to avoid it or repress it, but rather to experience and feel it with MORE intensity and MORE awareness of all the difficult choices and inner conflicts. [Of course, arguments between folks like us and folks like Sarfatti or Sean or Bannon or Sanders are all partly INTERNAL conflicts in the noosphere, though some of Bannon's folks are more like cancer cells joyfully devouring the body they inhabit.] I can give clues, but it is YOUR duty -- YOU collectively -- to figure it our yourselves, to learn to grow and understand at a higher level."
So maybe one urgent thing is to dispel our inner misunderstandings about what threatens our lives immediately and what doesn't -- and how serious grounded open access international cybersecurity is an answer to a threat. How the status quo WILL change, both for It and for energy, and our only hope is that better change emerges before lethal change does. How many of the old ways ARE DEAD (fortunately not including either the quest for truth or social feedback mechanisms ala democracy). But no, dreams of infinite abundance and lack of selection mechanisms are equally dangerous delusions.
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