for - similar to - quote - Ronald Wright - progress trap - computer metaphor

similar to - quote - Ronald Wright - progress trap - computer metaphor - Ronald Wright's famous quote on the computer metaphor really gets to the essence of things - how much of the meta-poly-perma-crisis can be explained by the unprecedented mismatch between the rate of - biological evolution of our species - cultural evolution of our species - Culture is the major and possibly most signficant differentiator between the person alive 50,000 years ago and the one alive today.

reference - quote - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com%2Fwork%2Fquotes%2F321797-a-short-history-of-progress&group=world

for - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor - quote - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor

for - rapid whole system change - need for a new religion - Ronald Wright reflections

comment - Deep Humanity is not a religion, but a deeper understanding of our own humanity, what is it to be human? - but just as important, to understand the distinction between - human nature and - nature - For if human nature is a subset of nature, - which the adjective-noun "human nature" implies - then there is something within humans that is of nature herself - Is it possible that the many fragmented spiritual paths that have emerged in different parts of the world merely reflect the different environs from which they developed, and that in fact, they all are searching for the same essence? - If so, then in perhaps the times we are in are calling us for a global recognition of our common denominators that make us ALL human, - and then the even deeper common denominator with nature herself - So what are those qualities we all have in common as human beings? - and also, what are the qualities our species has in common with nature herself? - neuroscientist David Eagleman coined the term "possibileanism". Perhaps it is that?

for - rapid whole system change - need for something that will create a new form of altruism - Ronald Wright - transition - requires an experience of re-awakening transition - need for a new religion? Deep Humanity?

comment 10 July 2024 - Deep Humanity is our attempt at this. It is not a religion, however. It is humanity, but in the deepest sense, so it is accessible to anyone in our species. Our tagline has been - Rekindling wonder in an age of crisis - However, this morning an adjacency occurred:

adjacency - between - familiarity - wonder - adjacency relationship - Familiarity hides wonder - Richard Dawkins said: - There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, - a sedative of ordinariness - which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. - For those of us not gifted in poetry, - it is at least worth while from time to time - making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. - What is the best way of countering the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? - We can't actually fly to another planet. - But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world - by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways. - That is, when a type of experience becomes familiar through repeated sensory episodes, - we lose the feeling of wonder we had when we initially experienced it - It's much like visiting a place for the very first time. We are struck with a sense of wonder because everything is unpredictable, in a safe way. We have no idea what's around the next corner. It's a surprise. - However, once we live there, and have traced that route hundreds of times, we have transformed that first magical experience into mundane experience. - So it is with everything that makes us human, with all the foundational things about reality that we learned from the moment we were born. - They have all become jaded. We've forgotten the awe of those first experiences in this reality: - our first experience of our basic senses - our first breath of air, instead of amniotic fluid - our first integration of multiple sensory experiences into a cohesive whole - the birth of objectification - the very first application of objectification to form the object we called mOTHER - the Most significant OTHER - our first encounter with the integration of multiple sensory stimuli associated with each object we construct - our first encounter with auditory human, speech symbols - our first experience with object continuity - how objects still exist even if they disappear from view momentarily - do we remember freaking out when mOTHER disappeared from view momentarily? - our first ability to communicate with mOTHER through speech symbols - our first encounter with ability to control our bodies through our own volition - our first encounter with gravity, the pull towards the ground - our first encounter with a large bright sphere suspended in the sky - our first encounter with perspective, how objects change size in our field of view as they get nearer or farer - etc... - What's missing now, is that we have repeated all these experiences so many times, that the feeling of awe no longer emerges with life - To generate awe, the repertoire of existing experiences is insufficient - now we have to create NEW experiences, we have to create novelty - Mortality Salience can help jolt us out of this fixation on novelty, and remind us of the sacred that is already here all the time - For, what happens at the time of death? All the constructions we have taken for granted in life disappear all at once, or perhaps some before others - Hence, we begin to re-experience them as relative, as constructions, and not absolutes - All living organisms have their own unique umwelt - These umwelts are all expressions of the sacred, sensing itself in different ways

• What is required is a kind of awakening, or re-awakening
• When religions do their job, it gives us a framework to engage in a shared sense of the sacred, of wonder in the mundane
• In a sense, Deep Humanity is identifying that most vital commonality in all religions and seeing all their diverse intersectionalities in simply being deeply human
• We awakened once, when we were born into the world
  • then we fell asleep through the dream of familiarity
• Now, we have to collectively re-awaken to the wonder we all experienced in that initial awakening experience as newborns

for - quote - unfortunately, I think we need a near miss to wake us up - Ronald Wright

comment - But the problem is that we can't count on that because it may very well be too late by then - Is the extreme weather events now happening regularly enough to wake us up?

for - rapid whole system change - a new form of asceticism - Ronald Wright - Give me liberty or give me death - degrowth challenges

rapid whole system change - a new form of asceticism - We need something that can be higher than stripping away many of the liberties we take for granted? - This will be challenging because the American dream is based on the feeling and phrase "Give me liberty or give me death!"

for - progress trap - Agriculture appears to be a progress trap - Ronald Wright

argument - progress trap - Agriculture appears to be a progress trap - Ronald Wright - The early progress traps have been comparatively small in scale - During the stone age, there were no more than a few million people alive (3 to 5 million?) and - they destroyed all the big game where humans lived - The Sumerians, with a population of around one million people salted up and destroyed the fertile land of Southern Iraq - Now we have 8 billion people and a third of them are starving - Our continuous technology development is what enables us to stave off the day of reckoning but - we are losing a Scotland-size worth of topsoil every year to - soil erosion - urban sprawl - We still face the possibility of collapse - Our species has existed for 5 to 6 million years and - civilization is an experiment that has only emerged about 10,000 years ago - It's still very possible for the experiment to fail

for - progress trap - dangerous mythology

progress trap - dangerous mythology - We subscribe to a dangerous myth that: - progress will go on forever and - everything will get bigger and better and - we don't have to control our numbers - or our demand on nature - because we will always find a way to make it work

• We have to break out of that mindset

for - writer's motivation - Ronald Wright

for - progress traps - interview - Ronald Wright

summary - In this more recent interview, Ronald Wright, author of "A Short History of Progress" and advocate of the idea of "progress traps", offers his cogent take on the world today, as refracted and reflected through an archeological lens - Wright sheds light on the relevance of history and especially archeology on our contemporary polycrisis, illustrating how, while different in details, are very similiar to the same mistakes our ancestors of every age have made - The archeology lessons of Sumeria, Stone age humans, Easter Island and more illustrate that it is dangerous to romanticize our ancestors as their mistakes cost them their civilizations, as much as the current mistakes we are now making may cost ours - I would add that our own Stop Reset Go and Deep Humanity research compliments Wright's superb work on Progress Traps with ideas borrowed from the East - specifically, Shunyata or Emptiness - Complimenting progress traps with Emptiness reveals another dimension of the perennial problem our species face since time immemorial, and in every generation henceforth - Deep Humanity integrates Progress with Emptiness, the individual with the collective, friends with enemies and proposes that we are approaching a singularity in our species, - in which all past civilizations are converging in one heterogenous entity in modernity - and the future of our species will depend on whether we can culturally adapt quickly enough to the multiple existential risks we now face - Our future as a viable evolutionary species may depend on the collective direction we move in in the next few years, of resolving the age-old quagmire of the holographic unnamable present in every one of us born into a living and dying body, continually fractures itself into violently polarized pieces. - Do we have the collective foresight to penetrate our own ignorance?

for - comparison - history vs archeology - Ronald Wright

comparison - history vs archeology - Ronald Wright - Written history is very recent but archeology can go back hundreds of millions of years

for - quote - metaphor - progress trap - live off the interest, not the principal of nature - Ronald Wright

for - history - agriculture - Holocene required

history - agriculture - Holocene required - Ronald Wright makes a good point, without a long stable climate period such as the Holocene, agricultural experimentation would not have succeeded

for - definition - progress trap - Ronald Wright

definition - progress trap - A seductive trail of successes that leads to a catastrophic end - Ronald Wright - defined in his book "A Short History of Progress"

for - meme - from gathering to gardening - Ronald Wright

meme - from gsthering to gardening - Ronald Wright - (quote - see below) - As the last ice age ended, - where a lot of people were trying to find a new way to make a living and - were reaping wild grasses and other wild plants - and gradually realized that - if they put some of the best seed back - they could go back to the same place and get more the next year and - over many thousands of years, they went - from gathering to gardening and then - full-scale agriculture - Anf they were doing the same thing with animals - they were finding that they started by following wild goats and donkeys around and - later on, realized that you could keep these things in a pen and then eventually you could domesticate them - and that area had a particularly wide range of wild species that were suitable for domestication

for - quote - Humans drive themselves out of Eden - Ronald Wright

quote - humans drive themselves out of Eden - (see below) - Human beings drove themselves out of eden and - they have done it again and again - by fouling their own nests

for - quote - myth of progress - Ronald Wright

quote - myth of progress - Ronald Wright - (see below) - although the idea that this can go on forever is where the myth of progress gets dangerous - because there have been many times and places in the human past, - not even necessarily in our own cultural tradition - among other civilizations where there have been great periods of - expansion and - prosperity - and everybody started to get the idea that life was getting better and better - but usually those those periods of rapid expansion are done and nature pays the bills for that

Comment - history repeats when we forget the lessons of that part. - Historians are so important right now to remind us of past lessons

for - quote - myths - Ronald Wright - adjacency - myths - perspectival knowing - emptiness - progress trap

Quote - Myths - Ronald Wright - (see below) - Myths are not necessarily untrue. They're usually partly true. The danger lies in the part that isn't true.

Comment. - What a great little sentence! - From this perspective, so many things that people claim as "true" are actually myths.

adjacency - between - myths - progress traps - perspectival knowing - emptiness - adjacency relationship - Myths emerge out of perspectival knowing of reality (Vervaeke) - The emptiness of reality is in stark contrast to reductionist thinking which is always relatively incomplete in comparison - This leads to the emergence of progress traps

for - progress trap - achieving narrowly defined goals with externalities

progress trap - achieving narrowly defined goals with externalities - Within the field of progress traps, - progress is the focus on intended consequences and - progress traps are the unintended consequences reference - Ronald Wright - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Ronald+Wright

Progress Trap - Ronald Wright - 2004 Massey Lecture Series - A Short History of Progress

• for: stone age code, similar to - Ronald Wright - computer metaphor, evolutionary psychology - examples, evolutionary paradox of modernity, evolution - last mile link, major evolutionary transition - full spectrum in modern humans, example - MET - full spectrum embedded in modern humans

• comment

• insights

  • evolutionary paradox of modernity
    • modern humans , like all the living species we share the world with, are the last mile link of the evolution of life we've made it to the present, so all species of the present are, in an evolutionary sense, winners of their respective evolutionary game
    • this means that all our present behaviors contain the full spectrum of the evolutionary history of 4 billion years of life
    • the modern human embodies all major evolutionary transitions of the past
    • so our behavior, at all levels of our being is a complex and heterogenous mixture of evolutionary adaptations from different time periods of the 4 billion years that life has taken to evolve.
    • Some behaviors may have originated billions of years ago, and others hundred thousand years ago.

• Examples: humans embody full spectrum of METs in our evolutionary past

  • fight and flight response
    • early hominids on African Savannah hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago when hominids were predated upon by wild predators
  • cancer
    • normative intercell communication breaks down and reverts to individual cell behavior from billions of years ago
      • see Michael Levin's research on how to make metastatic cancer cells return to normative collective, cooperative behavior
  • children afraid to sleep in the dark
    • evolutionary adaptation against dangerous animals that might have hid in the dark - dangerous insiects, snakes, etc, which in the past may have resulted in human fatalities
  • obesity
    • hunter gatherer hominid attraction to rich sources of fruit. Eating as much of it as we can and maybe harvesting as much as we can and carrying that with us.
      • like squirrels storing away for the winter.

• Title
  • One Billion Happy

• Author

  • Mo Gawdat

• Description

  • Mo Gawdat was former chief business officer at Google X, Google's innovation center.
  • Mo left Google after seeing the rapid pace of AI development was going to lead to a progress trap in which
    • the risk of AI destroying human civilization is becoming real because AI will be learning from too many unhappy people whose trauma AI will learn and incorporate into its algorithms
  • Hence, human happiness becomes paramount to prevent this catastrophe from happening
• See Ronald Wright's prescient quote
  • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com%2Fwork%2Fquotes%2F321797-a-short-history-of-progress&group=Q2X5j1pR

• "if we reverse this

  • if we have the best of us take charge
  • the best of us will tell AI
    • don't try to kill the the enemy,
      • try to reconcile with the enemy
    • don't try to create a competitive product
      • that allows me to lead with electric cars,
        • create something that helps all of us overcome global climate change
    • that's the interesting bit
      • the actual threat ahead of us is
        • not the machines at all
          • the machines are pure potential pure potential
        • the threat is how we're going to use them"

• comment

  • again, see Ronald Wright's quote above
  • it's very salient to this context

• comment
  • the machines are only coded to do what we tell them to do
  • Ronald' Wright's quote is very salient here
    • https://hyp.is/6Lb6Uv5NEe2ZerOrftOHfA/www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/321797-a-short-history-of-progress

• Comment
  • Mary echos Ronald Wright's progress traps

• Comment

  • Elise says
    • "there is this growing Chasm between
      • our Paleolithic brains and
      • what we're designed for and
        • the niches we're built to inhabit and this new technologically infused world that we're living in
    • We have changed our environment so rapidly and so radically and we have not kept pace with that change
      • so either we keep changing the environment or
      • we change ourselves to fit the environment and
      • I think the fact that we're consistently making these commodified decisions in which
        • we do expunge more and more of our of our Humanity in favor of profit
        • in favor of short-term decisions i
        • n favor of such abysmal thinking when it comes to complex systems like the human body
      • it is a testament to the fact that these brains are not built for this world and
      • we are not going to be adequate stewards of this system
        • that is now so complex that to keep it held together
      • you actually need a new form of intelligence beyond what we are"
  • Elise Bohan' statements perfectly echo Ronald Wright's famous quote on the nature of progress traps
    • “To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.”
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.goodreads.com%2Fwork%2Fquotes%2F321797-a-short-history-of-progress&group=world

• comment

  • I think, however, that Wright would agree more with Mary and less with Elise in Elise's contention that
    • we need a new form of intelligence beyond what we are
    • applying progress to our own cognitive abilities
      • may create the biggest progress trap of all

• quote worthy
  • “To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.”
  • Ronald Wright

• Quote

Paul Gauguin's painting: - Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Do_We_Come_From%3F_What_Are_We%3F_Where_Are_We_Going%3F#:~:text=Que%20sommes%2Dnous%20%3F,the%20themes%20of%20the%20Gospels%22. - Wright uses this painting as a appropriate introduction to his work tracing human progress because to answer the third question - where are we going? - requires answering the first two - where do we come from? - what are we?

• Ronald Wright gives his famous Massey talk on = progress traps
• The book
  • A Short History of Progress
• is based on a series of 5 talks he gave at the Massey Lectures
• All five talks are recorded here

= Ronald Wright quote - "we're running 21st century software on hardware last upgraded fifty thousand years ago or more "

Progress quote -" progress creates problems that are or seem to be soluble only by further progress".

Ronald Wright - definition of - = myth - an arrangement of the past - whether real or imagined - in patterns that reinforce a culture's deepest values and aspirations

Quotes: - myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them - myths are the maps by which cultures navigate through time - the myth of progress - progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe - a seductive trail of successes may end in a trap

• Victorian definition of progress
• historian Sydney Pollard, 1968

• Ronald Wright puts what is at stake into perspective.
• Our entire evolutionary history as ca species is at stake.

Yes, in servitude of humanity, but that must be done so carefully to avoid another progress trap. Indeed, progress traps need to be advanced as an urgent new explicit field of scientific enquiry to develop a systematic process for avoiding and mitigating unintended consequences as a result of (technological) progress.

https://hyp.is/IhS3BvotEeylDq8MXFT9xQ/thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/09/20/Ronald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap/

We have to mitigate progress traps

https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetyee.ca%2FAnalysis%2F2019%2F09%2F20%2FRonald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap%2F&group=world

Progress traps will certainly occur.

Ronald Wright asks: Can we still dodge progress traps? https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthetyee.ca%2FAnalysis%2F2019%2F09%2F20%2FRonald-Wright-Can-We-Dodge-Progress-Trap%2F&group=world

Indeed, Wright is right to ask: Is our modern human civilization the greatest progress trap of all?

Exponential technological progress has shortened the time for dangerous levels of resource extraction and pollution loads to the extent that we face the potential of cascading global tipping points and enter a "hothouse earth" state: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1810141115

Were this to happen, there is no place on earth that would be immune.

In hindsight, the unfortunate but predictable trend is one of every increasing size of progress traps, and ever shorter time windows when serious impacts occur. Today, it appears we have reached the largest size progress trap possible on a finite planet.

Title: Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

Ronald Wright is the author of the 2004 "A Short History of Progress" and popularized the term "Progress Trap" in the Martin Scroses 2011 documentary based on Wright's book, called "Surviving Progress". Earlier Reesarcher's such as Dan O'Leary investigated this idea in earlier works such as "Escaping the Progress Trap http://www.progresstrap.org/content/escaping-progress-trap-book

Title: Can Humanity Get Out of Its Latest ‘Progress Trap’? A review of ‘The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene.’