January 2012
74 posts
December 2011
59 posts
“The “emergent” nature of reality is that all systems, whether it is knowledge, society, technology, philosophy, or any creation will when uninhibited undergo fluid perpetual change. What we consider commonplace today such as modern communication and transportation would have been unimaginable in ancient times. Likewise the future will contain will contain technologies, realizations, and social structures that we cannot even fathom in the present. We have gone from alchemy to chemistry, from a geocentric universe to a heliocentric, from believing that demons were the cause of illness to modern medicine. This development shows no sign of ending. And it is this awareness that aligns us and will lead on a continuous path to growth and progress. Static empirical knowledge does not exist, rather it is the insight of the emergence of all systems we must recognize. This means we must be open to new information at all times even if it threatens our current belief system and hence identities. Sadly, society today has failed to recognize this, and the established institutions continue to paralyze growth by preserving outdated social structures. Simultaneously, the population suffers from a fear of change - for their conditioning assumes a static identity, and challenging one’s belief system usually results in insult and apprehension - for being wrong is erroneously associated with failure; when in fact, to be proven wrong should be celebrated - for it is elevating someone to a new level of understanding, furthering awareness. The fact is there is no such thing as a “smart” human being - for it is merely a matter of time before their ideas are updated, change, or eradicated. And this tendency to blindly hold on to a belief system, sheltering it from new possibly transforming information is nothing less than a form of “Intellectual Materialism”.”
—
Peter Joseph - The Emergent & Symbiotic Aspects of Natural Law
Rich People Lack Empathy, Study Finds →
huffingtonpost.com
Social psychologists are making an argument that Occupy Wall Street protesters have been saying for months: Many rich people just aren’t in the habit of thinking of others. According to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley, people who grew up in economically comfortable circumstances are less attuned to the suffering of other people.
“And the people under the sky were also very much the same…everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same — people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”
—George Orwell, 1984
“…when will people understand that abundance renders ANY system of exchange pointless?”
—Douglas Mallette
The Robot Takeover of Work & the Rise of Online Learning →
readwriteweb.com
Tools provide leverage for people to get work done; in many cases they enable us to do new kinds of work. Now consider robots in the workplace. They seem like bad news but do they have to be? What if robots weren’t a threat to humanity, only intended to steal human jobs, but were tools that enabled all of us to do new things and live life differently? We may need to start seeing things that way, for our own sake.
Print me a Stradivarius | Economist.com →
economist.com
The industrial revolution of the late 18th century made possible the mass production of goods, thereby creating economies of scale which changed the economy—and society—in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time. Now a new manufacturing technology has emerged which does the opposite. Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did.
“It’s easy to be carried away by the sheer horror of what the daily press reveals and to lose sight of the fact that this is merely the brutal exterior of a deeper crime, of commitment to a social order that guarantees endless suffering and humiliation and denial of elementary human rights.”
—Noam Chomsky
