Those within Twitter, and those watching from the sidelines, have previously argued that Twitter’s knowledge base is overly concentrated in the minds of a handful of programmers, some of whom have been fired.

i want you to imagine two other sentient beings seeing that rose and again this uh reflects an analogy that john gave us earlier in the day imagine that there's a bee looking at that rose 00:38:03 bees see um colors in the infrared and the ultraviolet spectrum they see all kinds of colors in that rose that we can't even see it probably looks speckled and striped to them in all kinds of really cool ways and they see it through 00:38:16 compound eyes my dog has got far less color sensitivity than we do and he probably sees the rose in a shade of gray now if we were to ask the question which of the three of us the bee 00:38:29 the dog or me sees the rose correctly sees it as it is does we understand immediately that that's a stupid question the only thing we can talk about is the 00:38:42 rose as it shows up for a human being the rose as it shows up for a bee the rose as it shows up for a dog but if you were to ask oh yeah yeah yeah but what does the rose look like in itself what does the rose itself look like 00:38:56 that is a really stupid question and that's what ultimate naturelessness is there is no way that things just are there are only ways that things show up for different kinds of sensory and 00:39:10 cognitive consciousness and that is ultimate naturelessness

objects of experience 00:36:36 are causally natureless the second kind of naturelessness naturelessness with respect to production is to say they arise only through causal interactions as we've been discussing we don't encounter them in an immediate way 00:36:48 and the second nature the dependent nature of things is the fact that they don't exist independently of us but rather all of the phenomena we ever experience all of the objects in our 00:37:00 world are constructed through complex and here i want to emphasize opaque causal processes none of us really understands exactly how our minds construct the world in which we live even though we know that they construct 00:37:13 them and that means that the objects of our experience because we are constructing them are fundamentally non-dually related to us they are not things we detect they are constructions 00:37:24 in which we participate

i want to begin by talking about the imagine nature which is the first of those three natures um it's really tempting when i look at a flower like a rose um a nice red rose 00:35:22 to think that the color the redness is right on the rose unless you are extremely accomplished when you look at a red rose you see the color right out there in the rose and 00:35:34 you assume that your eyes are simply detecting color that is in the rose actually that can't possibly be true color is something that emerges um as 00:35:45 john pointed out this morning through the interaction of our sense faculties and whatever is happening outside of them and the color emerges in our minds but we imagine things to exist outside of consciousness just as we perceive 00:35:58 them and that nature that we ascribe to the objects of our experience is their imagined nature it's an imagined nature because we project it out there even though on reflection we each know 00:36:11 that the redness can't possibly be painted out there in the rose footnote it's uh equally stupid to think that when we detect the redness we're detecting in inner red paint that 00:36:23 somehow um is just detected by an inner eye i assure you that when you look inside your brain you will find no such inner red paint

what yogachara does through its detailed analysis of the nature of consciousness through its detailed analysis of the three natures that all phenomena enjoy and through its 00:34:28 detailed analysis of the three respects in which things are natureless gives us a nice analysis of how it is that we come to represent what is in fact dependently originated as um as 00:34:42 independent and intrinsically real and how it is that we come to see our mediated access to the world as immediate

yogachara theory and i'm thinking here about three nature theory and three naturelessness theory suggests to us that we are simply wired for certain illusions and among them is 00:29:19 the illusion of immediacy um and we're wired to thematize our experience through the framework of subject object duality i often compare this to the way that we're wired for certain 00:29:31 optical illusions for instance you don't have to learn to see the mueller liar illusion as an illusion we all see it as an illusion and it's because of the way our visual system has evolved and there are lots of other optical illusions like 00:29:44 that the color five phenomenon for instance and so forth yogachara really takes very seriously the idea that from beginning with time we've evolved karmic predispositions to certain kinds of 00:29:55 illusions and these are some of them and of course a little bit of reflection shows that that duality has to be illusory um after all um we are 00:30:09 not subject pure subjects standing outside of the world of our experience confronting a world of objects some of them outer and some of them inner that's the vedanta position that ain't the buddhist position instead what we are is 00:30:24 organisms and again i will set aside all of the debates we might have about how those organisms are constituted but we are organisms embedded in an environment and our bodies our sense faculties are 00:30:37 part of the world in which we find ourselves as a consequence our subjectivity our own engagement with the world is constituted not by standing outside and detecting things but rather by being 00:30:51 embedded in the world and the only way that we could possibly become aware of any object whether it's a tree or an apple or a thought or a feeling is to construct that as an object in our field 00:31:04 of consciousness even if in doing so we manage to hide from ourselves the fact that we are constructing it

this is not to say that our inner life has some kind of a second grade um existence conventional reality is not 00:25:14 second level reality um because as the guardian and chandra kirti also emphasized we must remember that conventional reality dependent 00:25:26 origination is exactly the same as emptiness which is ultimate reality the only kind of reality anything that we ever encounter is going to have is conventional reality so when i'm talking 00:25:38 here about cognitive illusion i'm not arguing that the existence of our interstates um is illusory i'm arguing that the illusion is that we have immediate access to them as they are and 00:25:51 that their mode of existence um is um intrinsic existence so this allows us to understand the majority analysis of the most fundamental cognitive illusion 00:26:04 of all the illusion of the immediacy of our knowledge of our own minds and the givenness of our own interstates and processes our direct knowledge of them as the kinds of things they are independent of 00:26:18 any concepts that's the illusion that wittgenstein quine and sellers each in there worked so hard in the 20th century to diagnose and to cure but we can put this just as easily and maybe more 00:26:31 easily in the terms of second century indian madhyamaka the fundamental cognitive illusion is to take our mental states to exist intrinsically rather than conventionally and to take our knowledge of them to be 00:26:45 immediate independent of conventions this illusion is pervasive it is instinctive and it is profoundly self-alienating because it obscures the deeply conventional character of our own 00:26:57 existence and of our self-knowledge and this illusion is what according to buddhist philosophers lies at the root of our grasping of our attraction and diversion and hence at the root of the 00:27:09 pervasive suffering of existence

the reason is that a perception 00:10:38 is kind of perceptual in structure and the buddhist world encodes this by arguing that the internal um sense the the manus venana is a sense faculty just like external faculties 00:10:52 and so just as our external faculties present us with a world that just seems to us even though we know it's not to be just as it is that we see it just as it is 00:11:03 it's tempting to think that we've got this apparent object distinct from our sensory apprehension of it but is but an object that's presented by a completely veritable process 00:11:15 because as i say perception just feels like it presents the world to us as it is i look at a red apple and i think damn i know exactly what that apple smells like looks like tastes like and 00:11:27 feels like forgetting that all i have is the apple as it's mediated by the peculiar perceptual system that i have and by all of the conceptual resources through which i filtered my perception 00:11:41 so in the same way a perception or introspective awareness just feels like it presents our own cognitive affective and perceptual states to us just as they are 00:11:53 independent of that appreceptive system and those conceptual categories so just as external perception gives us the illusion that we're just detectors of the world as it is inner perception can give us the illusion that we are just 00:12:06 detectors of our inner um our inner world just as it is so even when we remind ourselves as i'm reminding you right now of this 00:12:18 extremely complex mediation of our perceptual encounter with external objects we find ourselves in constantly experiencing our own experience as though 00:12:31 we've got the world just as it is and then we sometimes say okay maybe we're not getting the world just as it is but at least i'm getting my sensory experiences just as they are the apple might not be red but the redness i 00:12:42 experience is exactly the redness that i think i experience the sweetness that i introspect must be the sweetness just as it is and so forth so even if we give up for a moment and it's hard to give it up 00:12:54 for more than that the notion of immediacy with regard to external perception we often retreat to thinking that that's mediated but my awareness of my own inner episodes is the immediate 00:13:06 awareness that mediates my knowledge of the external world and i think that in the sense of that perception that sense of immediacy is even greater it's really hard for us to be convinced that our inner experience 00:13:20 could possibly be deceptive we seem to think that if i think that i believe something i must believe it if i think that i'm feeling something i must be feeling it and that feeling and that believing grab my inner 00:13:33 reality just as it is and so part of the problem that arises is that the mediation of our introspective awareness by our introspective faculty becomes 00:13:46 cognitively invisible to us just as what i'm seeing the world my visual faculty is invisible and it just delivers a visible world to me and i have to really think to to understand 00:13:58 what my own visual faculty visual organ and visual consciousness are contributing i think i experience my introspective faculty as just giving me inner objects and i have to think and remind myself 00:14:11 that actually my inner sense faculty is also a fallible instrument and that i may be misusing that instrument or that instrument might be intrinsically deceptive and that's a hard thing to get one's mind around 00:14:25 as a consequence we've become seduced by this idea that even if our knowledge of some things is mediated that mediation can't go all the way down we get seduced by the idea that there's got to be a 00:14:38 basic foundational level of experience to which we can have some kind of immediate access and to which when we know it we know it absolutely veritically in the theory of knowledge that leads us to foundationalism in the 00:14:51 philosophy of mind it leads us to sense datum theory um and i find that in a lot of buddhist situations a lot of buddhist practitioners take it to be this idea of an infallibility of an immediate kind of 00:15:03 experience if i'm sitting on the cushion just right so with all of that in play um i want to move to exercising that myth of the given that i've been characterizing 00:15:16 and to show that buddhist philosophy offers us powerful ways of doing that and i'm going to begin by talking about first person knowledge through the lens of the madhyamaka tradition

there's a second kind of cognitive illusion this first cognitive illusion as i've suggested is thematized both in buddhist philosophy and in western philosophy but the second 00:07:06 kind of illusion i find not thematized so much in the west though in some quarters it is some but not all but very much stabilized in in buddhist philosophy and that is the superimposition of subject object 00:07:19 duality um and when we do that um we take the nature of our experience to be primordially structured as subject standing outside of the world viewing an 00:07:31 object now we always know we know that on the slightest bit of reflection that that's crazy that we are biological organisms embedded in a physical world and that 00:07:43 all of our experience is the result of that embodied embedded and embedded experience in the world it's still however almost irresistible to have that kind of image of ourselves as wittgenstein put it as like the eye 00:07:56 to the visual field that we stand outside of the world as pure subject with everything else taken as object and that reflexive taking of experience that way is a very profound kind of cognitive 00:08:09 illusion one that is extremely hard to shake to overcome illusion though we first have to come to know that illusion better you need to know your enemy in 00:08:21 order to defeat your enemy and so i'm going to spend a lot of time trying to acquaint us with the nature of these illusions that is to say if we want to avoid a pointless trek through the desert uh for 00:08:34 water we'd better know that what we're seeing is a mirage and not an oasis when we become aware of that fact then we're able to redirect ourselves in the right uh in the right direction

We have left it too late to tackle climate change incrementally. It now requires transformational change, and a dramatic acceleration of progress.

the richest 10 per cent take less than 40 per cent of national incomes. 

Student: Isn't there some problem of duality, with a mind that goes on and on and a body that stops?Rinpoche: It's not really a problem because when the body disintegrates then only the connection between the body and mind has been dissevered. The mind continues to a future lifetime and the physical body is left behind as matter, if burned as ashes that can be scattered on the ground to continue as a physical phenomenon.Question: Mind and body are different categories?Rinpoche: Yes, the body can be perceived with the physical sensory organs, whereas the mind cannot be touched, or heard, or seen, and the like. Right now body and mind occur simultaneously, but they are quite distinct.Question: How and when does the mind go from a dead body to a new one? Is it at the moment of conception?Rinpoche: What usually happens is that the body is afflicted with a disease, so that the mind no longer remains attached to it. Then the mind leaves the body, death occurs, and the body deteriorates. After either a short or longer period of time, the mind perceives another body, identifies with it as, "This is my body," and feels attached to it. The relationship that sets in when attachment arises is the time that mind and body become connected. According to the scriptures, semen cannot enter an ovum unless an attaching mind is present, so a mind is a necessary condition for conception to occur. Therefore it is logical that the moment of conception takes place when the mind becomes attached to the physical form of the semen entering the ovum, and a being is alive from the moment of conception.Question: It sounds as though the mind chooses the body.Rinpoche: In fact, there is no choice. When the mind is separated from its body at death, visions appear to that mind, and these visions are very disturbing and erratic. In that state, the mind actually has no possibility to choose.

Student: In the example of the travelling businessman, what is analogous to the homeland?Thrangu Rinpoche: The future lifetime is what corresponds to the homeland in the example. If a businessman were to go to a foreign country, neglect his business, and just have a good time, he would probably return home broke and may run in to trouble. Like this, if we are not concerned about our future lives now, we will find ourselves in very unfavourable circumstances later.

should we only understand the ultimate truth of emptiness and deny conventional appearances and experiences, we could mistakenly cling to the false belief in nihilism, thinking that everything is useless and that virtuous and unvirtuous actions, virtue and vice, are meaningless. Such an attitude leads an individual to turn his or her back on respecting the integral nature of conditioned existence and only shows an "emptiness of the mouth." The truth of emptiness does not contradict nor oppose conventional reality and it never interrupts or stops appearances from functioning according to causes and conditions when they prevail.

Should we only understand the first and not the latter, we could mistakenly cling to the false belief that things exist inherently and of their own accord.

If we acknowledge emptiness intellectually and gain a philosophical appreciation, then we can develop faith and trust that meditation on emptiness is beneficial and does lead to realization.

Examining the source of conditioned phenomena and understanding that existents successively arise in dependence upon causes and conditions, bare of any reality, enhance a deeper acknowledgement and appreciation for the truth of being-becoming and all this entails.

In the 7th century, the great Mahasiddha Chandrakirti explained Nagarjuna's book, entitled Madhyamakavatara, in order to clarify the four logical reasons that Nagarjuna composed to explain the first verse, which speaks of the fact that the essence of all things is beyond one and many. In the last century, Mipham Rinpoche wrote The Gateway to Knowledge and in the chapter on "The Four Analyses" brought together the essential points of the many expositions about these proofs that need to be studied so that we understand the selflessness of both apprehending subject and apprehended objects - shunyata in Sanskrit, tong-pa-nid in Tibetan, translated as "emptiness." We need to know that if there were a self-essence, then liberation would be impossible, the reason why these instructions on selflessness, shunyata, are so precious, indeed.

Examination of Cause, the "Diamond Slivers"

A Meditation on the Diamond Slivers

The World Economic Forum has estimated that "roughly half of global gross domestic product, or about $44 trillion worth of economic value, depends on the natural world in some way, meaning its destruction represents an enormous financial loss."Wowzers, an eye-watering 44 trillion. And yet, the true costs are far greater than that - there is no economy on a dead planet, so how can the cost only be 44 trillion?We must take every action possible now to avert collapse situations. Ways to take action in the comments, or feel free to add add your own suggestions..

As many groups and local governments work to expand urban forests, I would encourage all of them to incorporate the findings below into their buildout strategy.

"Embrace of Salvation".

picture of thousands of Volkswagen and Audi cars sitting idle in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Models manufactured from 2009 to 2015 were designed to cheat emissions tests mandated by the United States EPA. Following the scandal, Volkswagen had to recall millions of cars. (Credit:Jassen Tadorov/Reddit)How can we utilize these materials just wasting away in the desert and how can we stop this craziness to ever happen again?

Climate change is not the problem. We can get to net zero tomorrow and still be headed towards the collapse of life on Earth. Why?The problem is that our economy is a mega-machine that converts nature to waste. 

"Respondents across all countries were worried about climate change (59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried). More than 50% reported each of the following emotions: sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. More than 45% of respondents said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning, and many reported a high number of negative thoughts about climate change (eg, 75% said that they think the future is frightening and 83% said that they think people have failed to take care of the planet).

Rebecca Solnit ponders this in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost,

the ultimate purpose which the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates believed dialogue should serve: by being open to changing one’s view, a person could enter a state of 'aporia' – a profound realisation of the depths of one’s ignorance – which, if submitted to, could then allow one to experience a state of 'ekstasis' – literally a “stepping out of one’s self” – which was the first stage in the emergence of a more authentic self.

“It is only when we are able to appreciate the view of ‘another’, that we are truly able to step beyond the boundary of the self”

‘intentional conversations’

People feel increasingly uninvolved as if they no longer have any agency,while global problems continue to pile up.

As the financial system went global [in the 1980s], so competitionbetween financial centres – chiefly London and New York – took itscoercive toll . . . if the regulatory regime in London was less strict thanthat of the US, then the branches [of international banks] in the City ofLondon got the business rather than Wall Street. As lucrative businessnaturally flowed to wherever the regulatory regime was laxest, so thepolitical pressure on the regulators to look the other way mounted.3

Leaving aside those far-right doubts about the existence of a climateproblem, any government that wanted to cut carbon emissions substantiallycould not avoid implementing much tougher emissions regulations andhigher business taxes. But any government that did so in advance of othergovernments would only force its corporations to move production andthousands of jobs elsewhere.

The vicious circle of Destructive Global Competition (DGC) had gotgoing to such a point that it became self-sustaining. Once multinationalcorporations and global investors gained the ability to move capital andthousands of jobs seamlessly across national borders, the genie was outof the bottle and the vicious circle was set in train. Without realizing itgovernments were then caught in the endless pursuit of their ‘internationalcompetitiveness’ – caught in the game of forever outcompeting each otherat cutting taxes and regulations in a bid to retain jobs and inward invest-ment. From then on DGC drew politicians and governments into itsdestructive vortex, and it is now running beyond anyone’s control.

The problem is that if one player finds a way to undermine orcircumvent the rules and gets away with it then the others have no choicebut to follow. If they don’t they’ll lose out.

In acknowledging only one side of competition – the constructiveaspect – economic experts are actually making life harder for themselves,like driving with one arm in a sling.

Fail to stay competitive and you will lose out in ‘the global race’.9And the threat works. Competition and competitiveness have becomeas unquestionable in the modern world as God, His angels and the Devilwere in the medieval. Fear of damnation in the future is ubiquitous. Todaygovernment leaders universally see it as their duty to pursue their nation’sinternational competiveness as unrelentingly as the defence of the realmand far more enthusiastically than regulating business or collecting taxes.But if competition is really so beneficial, why do global problems seemto be getting worse rather than better? If the markets in which we’re allembedded are competitions, and if competition only produces benefits, asneoliberal ideology insists, you’d have thought that its ‘staggering powerto make things better’ would, by now, have caused many of our problemsto disappear.Clearly, something doesn’t quite stack up.

Our difficult journey ends in acceptance. Not an acceptance of hope-lessness but an acceptance that our familiar nationcentric way of thinking nolonger serves us and we can let it go. Acceptance, then, is not a capitulationbut a new liberation: we learn to see ourselves and the world with freshworldcentric eyes.

On this road we encounter the psychological obstacles to adoptingnew thinking as recognizable staging posts along the road: denial, anger,bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.

The problem is that adopting new thinking means first loosening andletting go of our existing way, and this involves a terrifying transition.Rather like the mythological bird the phoenix that first had to die andturn to ashes before being reborn, new life can only arise when somethinghas been let go. We have to go through a grieving process for what we arelosing, similar to the one we might experience if someone close to us dies.It can be thought of as a difficult journey – painful but necessary

This book takes an entirelyfresh approach by focusing on globalization’s inner aspects – the way wethink and feel about it as individuals and as cultures and how it impedesour ability to solve global problems.

tighter regulations and highercorporate taxes increase costs and make firms and nations less competitive.

This blindness, we explain, isbecause society as a whole only sees competition’s constructive side, whilewe expose its hidden destructive side.

Solving Global Problems CouldBe Easier Than We Think

they suggest that the use of symbols to model the world developed rapidly between about 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, and has the effect of giving emphasis to analytic thought as the dominant mode of human consciousness. Rather than seeing symbols as the impetus for human logic, they argue for presymbolic elements of logic in Peirce’s sign categories shared widely by humans and other animals.

The Evolution of Human Consciousness and Linguistic Behavior

they construct out of this event representations they they can understand for example the events that lead to a 00:04:49 change of power decline is an alpha male and a replacement by another or other types of things such as bonding relationships between individuals in the group the only thing they can do is they can't 00:05:00 express that knowledge you know to anyone else whereas a human child watching let's say a dog fight and represent that dog fight in action for example by taking two 00:05:12 models of dogs and having them fight even if they can't speak children can do this or they might get down on their hands and knees and act out the fight right but but no other creature can do this this is uniquely human they no one 00:05:26 else can as it were act out an event representation we call this event reenactment

the human brain I've argued for at least two million years has co-evolved with the emergence of these distributed networks and it can't realize its design 00:02:13 potential is to say we wouldn't even be speaking for example until it is immersed in such a network these networks themselves 00:02:24 generate complex cognitive structures which were connected to and which reformat our our brains and therefore the brains task is is very complex we have to assimilate the structures of 00:02:37 culture and manage them and I'm going to argue that a lot of our most complex thinking strategies are actually culturally imposed in the starting point 00:02:51 of the human journey

I'm going to just try to tell you as quickly as I can and in fairly straightforward way the story of how the human mind especially the modern mind 00:00:58 came into being it's a it's a it's a complex story but I think the the bare bones can be exposed rather rather straightforward matter rather quickly 00:01:09 my basic message is that what makes humans so different from other species from all the other species in the biosphere including our very close relatives the great apes is that we 00:01:21 build distributed cognitive networks

The Global Superorganism:an evolutionary-cybernetic model of theemerging network society

Emilio Gómez Milán

Maria Kozhevnikov, a neuroscientist at the National University of Singapore and Massachusetts General Hospital

Russ Pariseau

Herbert Benson

Can You Warm Yourself with Your Mind?The human body generates its own heat. Some people can adjust the thermostat.

we never 00:32:28 we never say all that we mean and we never mean all that we say you wouldn't be speaking human language if you did so when politicians tell you I say what I mean and I mean what they're lying already because language doesn't work 00:32:41 that way we we leave a lot of things unspecified and we let the cultural context fill it in so if I say she sat down Who am I talking about you only know who she is if you saw her 00:32:53 come in or I've referred to her earlier and you can follow it so actually why do divorces happen in modern societies because language doesn't really work 00:33:06 well I mean that's a you can tell that language of all because it doesn't work very well there just doesn't communicate as well as we would like it my wife and I have conversations sometimes and we 00:33:19 realized that we didn't know what the other one was talking about we clearly didn't know what the other was talking about we have different cultural assumptions and although if I do figure out what she's talking about then I pretended that's what I was talking 00:33:31 about

ow many sounds do you need to have a language well 00:30:33 think about a computer what can you say on a computer anything right I mean you can type anything that's why people get addicted to Facebook and everything but how many letters does a computer have it 00:30:44 has two zero and one you have a binary digit language and those I would like to call the sounds of the computer zero and one that's how it interprets everything or that's how it presents information 00:30:58 that is interpreted by the program that was created by a person with language you don't really need more than two sounds

let's just 00:29:52 talk a little bit about their vocal apparatus what kinds of sounds could they have made very often when linguists are talking about the evolution of speech they talk about sounds were they capable of making sounds Homo erectus 00:30:05 would have been roughly a talking gorilla they had the vocal apparatus that is much more similar to a gorilla they couldn't have made all the sounds we made the sounds they made would have sound more muffled does that mean they 00:30:19 couldn't have language no it doesn't mean that at all there are a lot of people today that have speech impediments that can't make the same range of sounds we make but they certainly have language

what is a symbol then this is the thing that really is the crucial question

most intriguing to me was the discovery which even today some 00:23:13 archaeologists deny but the evidence is actually overwhelming that oceans were no barriers to erectus they sailed across oceans so this is a quote from a 00:23:24 very good book on Paleolithic Stone Age seafarers Paleolithic books our ancestors have often been painted as unintelligent brutes however this simply is not the case evidence suggests that at least homo erectus and perhaps even 00:23:37 pre erectus hominids were early seafarers based on this evidence it seems that our early ancestors were successful seafarers biological studies suggest that considerable numbers of founder populations so when we find 00:23:50 evidence of erectus tools on an island there had to have been 2250 erectus arrived they're more or less the same time it's not just that one erectus got there we also know and I'll go into this 00:24:03 that they didn't just wash ashore it would have been almost impossible some archaeologists suggest that they got there by tsunamis but when I talked to friends of mine who are earth scientists they say that's not how 00:24:17 tsunamis work you know the tsunamis are pushing water to land and it is possible that afterwards some things flow out but most of the energy is towards the land and it is true that a few animals have 00:24:30 made it but we don't find regular systematic colonization by humans waiting to ride tsunamis most people don't try to do that

they were the smartest creature in the history of 00:16:32 the world when they came about no creature had ever been that smart think about gorillas and all the things that a gorilla can do or a chimpanzee they would have been far beyond any any other ape in their tech in their 00:16:44 intellectual abilities and their cognitive abilities they were more successful than we have been they lasted almost two million years they overlapped with sapiens for a hundred and forty 00:16:55 thousand years it could have been as much as three hundred and forty thousand years but we we appeared either two hundred thousand years ago or four hundred thousand years ago but whatever we're newcomers compared to Homo erectus

language is much more 00:12:18 complicated than is often presented it's to me the primary unit of language is not the sentence or the word it's the conversation I think that we didn't have language in the archaeological record 00:12:31 until we had a conversation symbols were the beginning but symbols would never have arisen outside of conversations they could have only come about in conversations so we have meaning and 00:12:44 lexical meaning phonetics the history of languages grammar psychology culture on top of all of that so language is quite a complicated thing which is one reason I'm not worried about robots learning 00:12:57 language anytime soon they would have to at least be able to learn culture at the same time

all creatures have indexes which are 00:05:21 physical connections between form and meanings so footprints are physical index of smells our physical index is smoke is a physical index of fire those 00:05:32 are recognized by every living creature icons are intentional and they're non arbitrary their physical resemblances so a painting is an icon a sculpture is an 00:05:45 icon they show the ability to represent something based on physical resemblance not physical connection and then finally the most complicated is a symbol which has a form and a meaning but more than 00:06:00 that I won't go into all the details but symbols are actually fairly complex but the most important thing to remember on a symbol is they arise by convention by culture they don't arise any other way 00:06:13 also duality of patterning that just means that we take meaningless items to make meaningful items so take CA TS I'll go into this Katz and English C means 00:06:25 nothing a means nothing T means nothing s means nothing Katz mean something so the ability to take things that don't mean anything make things that do mean something such as cymbals this is a crucial component 00:06:38 of language and I'm not the one who discovered that that's been known for a while compositionality is the ability to put things together and make larger meanings so the and boy and big and ran can go 00:06:53 together to get the big boy ran so so these are very important parts and there are different kinds of grammars

one of the reasons that people have thought that language 00:03:49 was much later is because they've been looking in the wrong places many are most archaeologists investigating the evidence for early language have been sold on the formalist idea that grammar is the defining 00:04:02 feature of language so you find archaeologists trying to find correlations between tool complexity and then assuming grammatical complexity or they believe that symbols are important 00:04:15 but they're only found in special locations like artwork I think those are both wrong grammar is insufficient because grammar just the fact that there's a grammar doesn't mean 00:04:27 there's a language because DNA has a grammar there are a lot of different domains that have grammars that have structural structural operations that are not language

the greatest technology ever invented was language

these are the metabolic pathways and and flux is passing through all of these things all this is what makes us alive and it's enormously complicated

Communitition

Integrative Lawyers are reflective.Integrative Lawyers are values and purpose-based.Integrative Lawyers are system and design thinkers.Integrative Lawyers are harbingers of evolutionary consciousness.

Find out what's happening in Community Meetup groups around the world and start meeting up with the ones near you.

Earlier this week, during a seminar at Schumacher College that included an exploration into what a Citizens Action Network might entail, a student wondered if we’d ever heard of South Africa’s CANs movement. No, we answered, we had not…

The innovation theorist Steven Johnson calls these “multiples” - like the simultaneous but separate discovery of sun-spots, oxygen, electrical batteries, the steam engine and telephone. In each case, the discovery rests on prior fundamental ideas that have already crossed borders. To isolate oxygen specifically, for example, there must be a general idea that air is made from gases. The specific innovation finds an “adjacent possible” - a possibility space opened up by the general body of thinking. That’s why these ideas can happen, in synchrony, even though far apart in geography.

one of the i guess stranger or slightly scarier conclusions proposed by the scientists in the study is that a lot of the signs we see in the geological history of the planet kind of resemble what we are now observing in 00:08:49 the anthropocene the period when humans started to dominate the globe or basically how the modern climate change to some extent actually resembles a lot of sudden changes that did happen in the last few millions of years with one 00:09:03 specific type of an event currently still unexplained by scientists often referred to as hyperthermals the sudden increase in temperature that usually lasts for a few thousand years but happens in a very short period of time 00:09:15 and currently doesn't have a very definitive explanation but one very well known example we explored in the past in one of the videos should be in the description known as p-e-t-m paleocene using thermal maximum the event that 00:09:28 happened approximately 55 million years ago when the global temperature suddenly increased by 5 to 8 degrees celsius or 9 to 14 degrees fahrenheit just to then drop suddenly within a few thousand years and there's been quite a lot of 00:09:41 explanations for what might have happened maybe an asteroid collision that released huge amounts of co2 gas or a lot of other gases that usually warm up the planet maybe volcanic eruptions doing the same but at the moment there's 00:09:53 just not enough clear evidence specifically craters or any volcanoes that were produced during this time to suggest any specific explanation on the other hand all of these observations kind of resemble what's happening to the planet right now as well and so trying 00:10:06 to figure out exactly what caused these warming conditions is one of the potential ways we could start assessing the hypothesis and try to answer these some of the difficult questions also likewise any kind of alloying industrial 00:10:17 civilization should maybe produce very similar effects on their planet as well at least that's what the modern science expects but what are some of the questions we can ask ourselves in regards to the history of our planet in 00:10:29 order to see how viable the hypothesis is well first of all generally speaking the geological record of our planet is usually very incomplete and it becomes even more difficult to study it as you go back in time for example today we 00:10:42 know that only about three percent of the entire surface of the planet has any kind of urban activity on the surface or basically anything that would potentially resemble modern technology and so the chance for a lot of these cities to survive for thousands or even 00:10:55 millions of years is exceptionally low which also means that within just a few thousand years the chance for discovering these techno fossils for some future humans living here is also going to be pretty low as well you can 00:11:08 kind of see that there are some bottles here and a lot of other leftovers but all this is going to disappear in time turning into nothing but almost completely indistinguishable sediment and for any major city to leave any mark 00:11:20 inside the sediment it really depends on where it's located if it's located on the subsiding plate it might eventually become sediment and get locked inside rock leaving behind certain marks but if 00:11:31 it's on the rising plate or if it's somewhere in the middle everything here might eventually be eroded with time by different types of rain and wind especially as the rain becomes more acidic leaving pretty much nothing 00:11:43 behind on the other hand when it comes to things like for example dinosaur fossils we usually discover one fossil for every 10 000 years with the footprints of dinosaurs being even more rare but even though humans have been on 00:11:56 the planet for at least 300 000 years the civilization that we're used to has only been around for just over a few hundred years and technically even less than that and so the chance for something from our modern civilization 00:12:09 to turn into a fossil that can be discovered in the future is actually super low and so right now there's a really big chance that after a few million years everything we take for granted is going to look like this and 00:12:21 so the natural question here is how do you then tell if any intelligent species ever existed on the planet like we do right now well we might be able to distinguish certain sedimentary anomalies even present in the sediment 00:12:34 today and then combine this with observations of various hyperthermals or any other major changes in the temperature that don't seem to have any other explanation for example all the technofossils are going to leave behind 00:12:46 a very specific isotopic ratio that's extremely difficult to find in nature including of course residues of carbon that doesn't exist in nature such as various microplastics these should linger for quite a while there should 00:13:00 also be geological record of a major extinction event that doesn't really have any good explanations also signs of unusual chemicals that are generally not produced in nature either for example things like cfcs or more 00:13:13 specifically various types of transuranic isotopes from nuclear fission which obviously all the chemical signs we're currently living on the planet by doing a regular stuff 00:13:24 by being ourselves and so we kind of expect something similar could have happened in the past there could have been another species that was basically exploiting the planet and as a result left some signs of this in the 00:13:37 geological record but that's of course assuming that any civilization is going to have a lot of very specific needs in terms of energy and a lot of civilizations are going to eventually result in similar types of pollution 00:13:49 naturally a pretty big assumption but it's really the only assumption we have right now in order to figure out if this hypothesis has any merit but even here there's still a major problem if this type of a civilization has not existed 00:14:02 for longer than let's just say a few hundred years the chance for it to even leave any kind of a mark and that includes the fossil mark is still pretty low and even things like microplastics or things like transuranium elements 00:14:15 might have already mixed with a lot of other stuff or disappeared completely especially if this happened a long time ago and so if these ancient civilizations ever existed and if they managed to somehow change the planet in the past the signs of their existence 00:14:28 would still be extremely difficult to discover with the only signs left after millions of years really just being various types of isotopes that could still be out there in the sediments on the planet

there's actually at least one other science fiction book from the 50s written by alice mary norton who used to 00:07:07 write under andre norton pseudonym who talked about a relatively similar concept in the time traders although the idea here was a little bit different here the author explained that pretty much all the signs of modern civilization are going to be completely 00:07:20 erased by the time the next glacial period begins in other words everything you see around you all the cities all the technology every major building every major structure we've ever built will basically be gone there will be no 00:07:33 signs of it left and within just a few million years there will be no one to tell the story and that's of course not really far from the truth as a matter of fact that's exactly what the scientists in this hypothesis propose and explain as well and that's of course why it 00:07:46 makes it so difficult to either prove or disprove this we currently have no idea if any of this is correct here i actually wanted to show you this beautiful illustration by one of the authors we basically have no idea if back in the 00:07:58 day when the dinosaurs were around they also had some kind of a super intelligent species that would drive their own versions of cars have their own versions of smartphones and eventually result in their own demise over time all of this would be gone to 00:08:11 history because of the way that geology works on our planet but in this paper the scientists decided to actually work out any potential ideas or experiments we can conduct on the planet to try to find out if this actually existed and if 00:08:25 it was possible in the past

the silurian hypothesis now this is actually a bit of a play on words it's actually based on the episode of doctor who that had a strange race known as sillurians 00:05:52 that evolved millions and millions of years ago from ancient reptiles that also possess intelligence but then because of the climatic changes on the planet essentially went into a prolonged state of hibernation in order to survive 00:06:04 the inhibitable earth waking up on modern earth and then interacting with the doctor and so because of this episode the scientists behind this paper decided to give it a kind of a tony chick name calling it the silverine hypothesis which by itself comes from a 00:06:17 geological period roughly around 440 million years ago and honestly for me personally this right here represents one of the more important papers or one of the more important propositions when it comes to 00:06:29 the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence because at the moment there's really only two possible answers either we're completely alone and we kind of evolved completely by accident and there's really no other intelligence anywhere out there which makes it a kind 00:06:41 of an evolutionary fluke and it's unlikely to repeat anywhere or anyone in the universe or extraterrestrial intelligence and any kind of intelligence is pretty common and we should be finding a lot of it here on 00:06:54 planet earth in the historical record

we can kind of make an assumption that 00:04:22 complex brains and by extension complex intelligence should also be somewhat common in terms of evolutionary success and assuming that it's evolutionary preferential or basically that evolves many times throughout the history of the 00:04:35 planet we can then make a conjecture that it should exist somewhere out there where life exists on other planets okay just to rephrase this if we truly believe that extraterrestrial intelligence exists out there and that 00:04:48 it kind of evolved in the same way that it evolved here on planet earth it's pretty safe to assume that it might have evolved several times on the planet because we're making an assumption here that this is an evolutionary advantage 00:05:00 that all planets that potentially have life on them are going to end up with some kind of a species that's going to become super intelligent and that's going to be self-aware able to use technology and essentially kind of communicate in the same way that we 00:05:13 communicate using for example radio waves

for some unknown reason nature tends to prefer crabs the idea of a crab or morphological crab has evolved on the planet several times in the last few hundreds of millions of years in other words for some unknown reason this right 00:03:07 here seems to be kind of successful so when we talk about crabs we don't just actually talk about one species in reality this particular morphology applies to a lot of different species so for example this kind of a crab that you see is kind of different in terms of a 00:03:20 lot of components including genetics from for example a hermit crab it just so happens that for some reason nature tends to re-evolve crabs over and over similarly we know that the idea of flight evolved in the panelists several 00:03:33 times as well and this of course includes the idea of wings they seem to exist in for example insects they also exist in reptiles they also exist in birds so this also seems to be an evolutionary advantage that repeats 00:03:45 itself many times and more recently there was actually a study from just a few days ago where the scientists discovered that well the idea of saline or the stuff that snails have but also the stuff that's in our mouth so basically our saliva is also 00:03:57 exceptionally successful in terms of evolution a lot of different species including mammals independently evolved all kinds of different slime because it just seems to work so well on the planet and it seems to serve so many different 00:04:09 purposes

the tragedy of the Commons is not so much that it's Commons per se but that it's a cooperation problem that he described I 00:01:48 think very clearly that environmental degradation is often a social dilemma is often a cooperation problem and be it a commons or not the regulatory structure 00:02:02 or the the social structure can vary but cooperation problems are are important however of course he said his famous line this paper is you know solution is mutual coercion mutually agreed upon and and so that's 00:02:18 institutions right so the solution is institutions and of course we have other people who have said that very clearly and with a lot of wonderful evidence to back it up Elinor Ostrom being at the 00:02:31 top of that list and and her work on common pool resources and contains this fantastic list of sort of key design 00:02:44 elements that have emerged from studying small-scale common pool resource communities and and these are these are factors that tend to make those communities more successful in managing 00:02:56 those resources sustainably so so that's great

what you're where you're sketching as per your presentation is working models and you're kind of exploring them there with 00:37:49 the audience and there are evidence-based models meaning that conversations today tend to become a string of anecdotes like oh I heard that and then you say well I will trust him because he's an authority figure or he 00:38:02 looks trustworthy or someone else said he was just worthy and there's this complex notion of trust which is hopefully going to be obsolete if I am up here building my models and you can 00:38:14 see the model I'm building you don't have to take my word for it you can see the model you can see the facts in knowledge I'm bringing it to support the not model you can see where those are coming from you can kind of see the provenance of everything I'm using to 00:38:25 support my argument and you teak the model you can like check the facts yourself and you make all that visible it leads to a very different notion of trust and integrity and this is I think 00:38:38 a really important part of the the empowering aspect is that trusting authority is disempowering giving people the ability to be independent is empowering

this medium that we're inventing the dynamic medium 00:25:10 has three very interesting properties

this is the cage that we have trapped ourselves in this is the way in which we have constrained our range of experience which we have created a tiny 00:23:03 subset of our intellectual capabilities and restrict ourselves to this tiny subset and have forbidden ourselves to use our full intellect

I mean something very precise by that so I'm going to try to explain with an analogy imagined imagine you adopt a puppy so 00:15:01 your Duff is puppy and your name um puddles you take puddles home and you give them a little snack and you stick puddles in the cage and you lock the door forever and never open it again and 00:15:14 puddle slips out the rest of his poor life trapped inside this little cage so that's wrong I think most of us would agree that's sadistic that obviously inhumane so well let's ask what exactly 00:15:27 is wrong about that you know what what is inhuman about sticking puddles in the cage well you know we kind of have a notion of what it means to live a full doggy life right dogs have to run around dogs run 00:15:40 around and they sniff other dogs and they pee on things and that's kind of what it means to be a dog they've inherited this the set of capabilities capabilities and traits from their wolf ancestors and we recognize that a dog 00:15:53 has to be allowed the full free expression of its entire range of capabilities by sticking the cage or constraining his range of experience you're not letting him do all the things that dogs can do and this is exactly 00:16:07 what we've done to ourselves we've invented media that severely constrained our range of intellectual experience that of all the many capabilities that 00:16:19 we have all the many ways of thinking that we have we have constrained ourselves to a tiny subset we're not allowed to use our full intellect

you can think about the invention of powerful representations and the invention of powerful media to host powerful 00:11:27 representations as being one of the big drivers of last 2,000 years of the intellectual progress of humanity because each representation allows us to think thoughts that we couldn't think before we kind of 00:11:39 continuously expand our think about territory so you can think of this as tied to you know the grand meta-narrative of the scent of humanity moving away from myth and superstition 00:11:51 and ignorance and towards a deeper understanding of ourselves in the world around us I bring this up explicitly because I think it's good for people to acknowledge the motivation for their 00:12:02 work and this is this story of the intellectual progress of humanity is something that I find very motivating inspiring and is something that I feel like I want to contribute to but I think 00:12:16 that if this if you take this as your motivation you kind of have to be honest with yourself that that there definitely has been ascent we have improved in many 00:12:27 ways but there are also other ways in which our history has not been ascent so we invent technology we media technology 00:12:39 to kind of help us make this this climb but every technology is a double-edged sword every technology enables us has a potential de navels in certain ways while debilitating us in other ways and 00:12:51 that's especially true for representations because the way the reputations work is they draw on certain capabilities that we have so if we go all in in a particular medium like we 00:13:03 did with print so the capabilities that are not well supported in that medium they get neglected in they atrophy and we atrophy I wish I knew who drew the picture 00:13:20 because it's it's a wonderful depiction of what I'm trying to express here and even a little misleading because the person the last stage they're kind of hunched over is tiny rectangle we reach 00:13:31 that stage accomplish that stage with the printing press and cheap paper book based knowledge the invention of paper-based bureaucracy paper-based 00:13:44 working we invented this lifestyle this way of working where to do knowledge work meant to sit at a desk and stare at your little tiny rectangle make a little motions of your hand you know started 00:13:56 out as sitting at a desk staring at papers or books and making little motions with a pen and now it's sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen making a little motions with your on a keyboard but it's basically the same 00:14:08 thing we've this is what it means to do knowledge work nowadays this is what it means to be a thinker it means to be sitting and working with symbols on a little tiny rectangle to the extent that 00:14:20 again it almost seems inseparable you can't separate the representation for what it actually is and and this is basically just an accident of history this is just the way that our media 00:14:32 technology happen to evolve and then we kind of designed a way of knowledge work for that media that we happen to have and I think so I'm going to make the claim that this style of knowledge work 00:14:47 this lifestyle is inhumane

Notably absent from the debris was plastic from nations with lots of plastic pollution in their rivers. This was surprising, says Egger, because rivers are thought to be the source of most ocean plastic. Instead, most of the garbage-patch plastic seemed to have been dumped into the ocean directly by passing ships.This suggests that “plastic emitted from land tends to accumulate along coastal areas, while plastic lost at sea has a high chance of accumulating in ocean garbage patches”, Egger says. The combination of the new results and the finding that fishing nets make up a large proportion of the debris indicates that fishing — spearheaded by the five countries and territories identified in the study — is the main source of plastic in the North Pacific garbage patch.

an increasing share of adaptive information is stored in culture compared with genes.

It follows, then, that humans are experiencing an evolutionary transition in individuality from single human to cultural group because culture is replacing genes as the primary human inheritance system, and cultural adaptations are heavily group structured.

culture is gradually replacing genetics as the primary human system of inheritance. This hypothesis helps clarify the human ETI.

The overall effect of cultural pre-emption is to reduce the fraction of adaptive information stored in genes and inherited genetically and to increase that fraction in culture.

if cultural evolution is sufficiently rapid, it may act to pre-empt and slow genetic evolution. That is, in solving adaptive challenges before genetic evolution takes place, cultural inheritance may reduce the opportunity for natural selection on genes and weaken the adaptive value of information stored in genetic inheritance in the long term. This process is the opposite of genetic assimilation, in which a plastic trait becomes genetically encoded. We call this mode of GCC cultural pre-emption.

Far beyond simply altering human evolution, this evidence suggests that human cultural inheritance is of global evolutionary significance.

Evidence [28] and theory [29] support the assertion that cultural evolution is more rapid than genetic evolution [27,28,30,31], even when measured on comparable scales [30,31]. One simple reason for this difference is that the ‘generation time’, G, of cultural transmission can be orders of magnitude shorter than that of genetic transmission [30]. In humans, the average time between the birth of parents and the birth of their offspring, genetic G, ranges from roughly 2 to 3 decades, while cultural G, the average time between learning a piece of information and transmitting it, ranges from seconds to decades. Thus, it is reasonable to presume that cultural inheritance may provide greater adaptive capacity than genetic inheritance.

The human species may be undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) [1–6]. The evolutionary transitions framework explains how new levels of biological organization (such as multicellularity, or eusociality) emerge from subsidiary units (such as cells or individuals) through the formation of cooperative groups [6–10]. First proposed by Maynard Smith & Szathmáry [3], evolutionary transitions are thought to unfold via a shift in the dominant level of selection from competitive individuals to well-integrated functional groups [8,11]. These transitions exhibit a common set of patterns, including new divisions of labour, the loss of full individual autonomy and reproductive control, and the rise of new routes of information transmission [6,7,10].

human long-term GCC is characterized by an evolutionary transition in inheritance (from genes to culture) which entails a transition in individuality (from genetic individual to cultural group).

“We have known as humans for thousands of years that it is critical to understand humankind’s place on this planet, even before we understand the essence of who we are, and we do this by looking at where we have come from. This fulfils an obligation of wisdom. You cannot hope to look at the rest of the world and understand it without understanding yourself. There is no more important question, especially in the light of some of the big questions which face us in relation to climate change. “We have floundered about observing the world without understanding truly that we are part of this system. We have an evolutionary history as complex as any other animal but likely no more so. That is the beauty that naledi brings to the table. It takes away this human arrogance which has been much of the cause of our destructive behaviour, this right to ownership, this right to destruction, the territorial nature of our behaviour towards this planet. “We have seen ourselves as superior, as special, we’ve told ourselves a special origins story that isn’t true. What can be more important than taking yourself off that pedestal and removing some of the destructive behaviours that manifest in humans?

Describing himself as a “messenger from the past”, Berger says that this discovery destroyed the preconceptions of a progressive, linear development of humans from apelike ancestors to what we are now. H. naledi is now dated at between 236,000 and 335,000 years old and was, therefore, a contemporary of Homo sapiens at that stage, which proves that a small-brained hominid was living side by side with its large-brained cousin, who is supposed to represent the apotheosis of sentient beings.

“Exactly at the moment when we need a resilient biosphere, we are losing it. If we get too far from planetary boundaries, feedbacks from Earth will start to amplify our trajectory irreversibly toward a four-, five- or six-degree world.” Long pause.

As arousal-based meditative practices are associated with a different autonomic state to mindfulness-related practices (PNS withdrawal vs. PNS dominance), they are likely to recruit a different type of alerting attention (selective or focused vs. sustained) and attentional control (modulated by arousal vs. regulated by monitoring continuous thought processes). In particular, my focus is on Vajrayana (Tantric Buddhism) practices, during which a sequence of generation (self-visualization as a deity - Yidam) or completion with sign (inner heat -Tummo) stages necessarily precedes non-dual awareness (NDA) Tantric Mahamudra. I conduct my studies with experienced monks and nuns in Eastern Tibet, Bhutan, and Nepal. I studied these practices using cognitive (visual working memory and attention) assessments as well as electrocardiographic (EKG) and (EEG) measures.

Fossil fuel combustion and growth in industrial and military power have gone hand with colonial conquest and control.In the 1990s, the idea of ‘contraction and convergence’, developed by the UK-based Global Commons Institute, gained a lot of traction in climate negotiations: ‘the Contraction and Convergence strategy consists of reducing overall emissions of greenhouse gases to a safe level (contraction), resulting from every country bringing its emissions per capita to a level which is equal for all countries (convergence)’.https://lnkd.in/eKq4vKep

The most recent 300 out of 300,000 years have been abnormal in the sense that a fever of 107 degrees Fahrenheit is abnormal when, for most of a person's life, her temperature has been at about 98.6 degrees. Until 10,000 years or so ago, the normal lifestyle for Homo sapiens was living in small groups (Schmidt and Zimmermann 2019), hunting and gathering. Humanity's fever started about ten millennia in our past and rapidly led to a highly febrile system of giant groups, which have increasingly industrialized. Humanity grew from scattered groups of 20 to cities of 20 million, from normal to abnormal, in an evolutionary instant.

Well, some of us tried to be unreasonable. But another thing he invented was what he called the type one and the "type two argument." So when a "type one argument" was verging towards the personal and towards this not making progress thing, he would say "type two argument," and everybody would groan. And a "type two argument" is when each of the arguers has to make the other person's argument to them.DEVON: Right. Steel man it, instead of straw man it.ALAN: Yeah, until they agree that they're making their argument.DEVON: Right.ALAN: Yes, that is the argument I'm making. And then the other person... And this takes for-fucking-ever.DEVON: Yeah.ALAN: But-DEVON: But it means that you actually understand where the other person is coming from before you try to tear it down.ALAN: Well, it's not even that. One way to think about it, took all the human drama out of it, in the end almost everything that we did at PARC, in the end we didn't vote. In the end we would usually pick somebody to make the decision.

We were a floor culture at PARC so we not only had the bean bags instead of chairs. Why bean bags? Well, you can't leap to your feet to denounce somebody from a bean bag.

So this is one of these things where the idea that you could make an internet is 100%, just from biology being so much more complex and working so well for decades.DEVON: And why is the decentralization of biological systems and of the internet so important for scalability?

the thing is about vision, same with the ear, you can only see a few at a time in detail, but you can be aware of 100 things at once. So one of the things we're really bad about is, because of our eyes, you can't get the visual point of view we want. Our eyes have a visual point of view of like 160 degrees. But what I've got here is about 25, and on a cellphone it's pathetic. So this is completely wrong. 100% wrong. Wrong in a really big way. If you look at the first description that Engelbart ever wrote about what he wanted, it was a display that was three feet on its side, built into a desk, because what is it that you design on? If anybody's ever looked at a drafting table, which they may not have for a long time, you need room to design, because there's all this bullshit that you do wrong, right?

The ARPA community was about, "Hey, we're in deep trouble and we're getting in deeper trouble. We need to get more enlightened and we need to do what Doug Engelbart called... we need to not just augment human beings, augment human intellect, but we have to augment the collective IQ of groups." Because most important things are done by groups of people. And so we have to think about what it means to have a group that's smarter than any member rather than a group that is less than the stupidest members.

Any curious person, I would think, at some point would say, "Well, wait a minute. 55 people. How could they draft this thing? How do they..." Well, you see it right there. The answer is that every night the annotated stuff was typeset. Remember, it was Philadelphia, which is the city of printers. So, it was typeset overnight. It was printed before breakfast. When they came into their meeting, everybody had a fresh copy that looked like the thing there, but without any handwriting on it. They debated about that. They each had their own copy. They wrote their own notes. Then, towards the end of the day, they'd assemble what was going to happen on the next draft. Isn't that great?

Right? You said... No, no, bullshit. Let's write it all down and we can go check it. Let's not argue about what was said. We've got this thing called writing. And once we do that, that means we can make an argument out of a much larger body of evidence than you can ever do in an oral society. It starts killing off stories, because stories don't refer back that much. And so anyway, a key book for people who are wary of McLuhan, to understand this, or one of the key books is by Elizabeth Eisenstein. It's a mighty tome. It's a two volume tome, called the "Printing Press as an Agent of Change." And this is kind of the way to think about it as a kind of catalyst. Because it happened. The printing press did not make the Renaissance happen. The Renaissance was already starting to happen, but it was a huge accelerant for what had already started happening and what Kenneth Clark called Big Thaw.

one of the 00:10:51 things is that our brains were set up for dealing with about a hundred people at a time living by our wits hunting and gathering and dying in the same world we 00:11:03 were born into for hundreds of thousands of years there's no concept of progress in our genes we just don't have it but like all animals we have an enormous set 00:11:17 of genetic apparatus to make us good copers anything happens to us we can find a way of being resilient about it and adapting to it we're copers and 00:11:29 adapters and so when we come up against difficulties our tendency is to cope with these difficulties it's like working for a company go into a company 00:11:42 and the company seems sort of screwed up maybe you can quit you can cope but your chances of actually changing the company are very low because nobody will listen 00:11:56 to reason right that is not what the company is there for they are there for their a task this is something that engelbart the inventor of the mouse pointed out years ago that companies are 00:12:10 devoted to their area a task which is what they think they were about most companies do not have a very good be process which is supposed to look at the 00:12:21 a tasks and make them more efficient but almost no companies have a see process which questions the tasks are our goals still reasonable our processes still reasonable that's the last thing it gets 00:12:35 question

here's an old model from the 19th century of memory which actually in the 21st century has come 00:13:03 back as a pretty good one as a metaphor anyway so the idea is that rain comes down on the ground and there's a little regularities randomly there and at some point those regularities will be a 00:13:17 little more responsive to the rain and a little channel will form the channel acts as an amplifier and so wherever that channel got started it starts funneling lots more water through it other water is draining into 00:13:31 it and all of a sudden it starts cutting deeper and you get these gullies and you get down into these gullies you have to remember to look up because everything 00:13:44 down there in this gully is kind of pink you can think that the world is pink and in fact if you get into a real gully one of my favorites is Grand Canyon by the 00:13:57 way that's only a hundred million years of erosion to get the Grand Canyon it's relatively recent get into one of these things and the enormity of what you see 00:14:08 outwards Dwarfs what you can see if you look up if you've ever been on one of these things you're just in a different world it's a pink world you don't think 00:14:23 about climbing out of it you think about moving along in it

one of the things that's worked the best the last three or 00:10:05 four hundred years is you get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of its when you go for a simple building block that anybody can 00:10:18 understand through common sense that is when you start screwing yourself right and left because it just might not be able to ramify through the degrees of freedom and scaling you have to go through and it's this 00:10:31 inability to fix the building blocks that is one of the largest problems that computing has today in large organizations people just won't do it

if you take it out 30 years the puck is going to be there thirty years and Moore's law is going to go like that she been well covered and 00:43:15 predicted in 1965 out to 1995 the answers yeah goddamnit no question 1995 there is no way we are not going to have a tablet computer no way it's just going to happen we don't even have to worry about 00:43:28 right now what we're going to do it because what we have to do is to figure out what it should be once you start thinking about it then the next interesting part of it is bring back a 00:43:42 more concrete version so out there you can do pie-in-the-sky what about 10 or 15 years out what can we do then and the answer is yeah we can do one then what would that be like

the good hockey players go to where the 00:40:58 puck is and great hockey players go to where the puck is going to be and he didn't mean tracking the puck he meant get to that place in the rink where somebody can pass you the puck that you 00:41:10 can shoot a goal he was better at anybody at knowing where that place would be and his teammates would feed him in bingo and so the thirty year Wayne Gretzky game is to have a glimmer 00:41:23 of an idea take it out thirty years where there is no possibility of incremental II think worrying about how am I going to get from where I am now to this idea right that is the the idea 00:41:38 killer of all time how is this incremental to the present and the answer is forget it don't worry about now the president is the least interesting time to live in

how many people have seen curves that look like these progress against time right everywhere reading 00:48:14 scores test scores people love these yay oh no yay oh no it's bad because our 00:48:32 nervous system is only set up for relative change and in fact there's cause for cheering if that's the threshold but in fact for reading 00:48:43 threshold is this this is all oh no doesn't matter whether it goes up or not because there are many many things that where you have to get to the real 00:48:58 version of the thing before you're doing it at all in the 21st century it doesn't have help to read just a little bit you have to be fluent at it so this is a 00:49:09 huge problem and once you draw the threshold in there immediately converts this thing that looked wonderful into a huge qualitative gap and the gap is 00:49:20 widening and we have two concepts that are enemies of what we need to do perfect and better right so better is a 00:49:36 way of getting fake success we had improvement see it all the time it's the ultimate quarterly report we had improvements here and perfect is 00:49:51 tough to get in this world so both of those are really bad so what you want is what's actually needed and the exquisite skill here which I'm going to use these 00:50:06 two geniuses Thakur and Engels to labor it I'm going to call that the sweet spot the way you make progress here is you pick the thing that is just over that threshold that is qualitatively better 00:50:21 than all the rest of the crap you can do you can spend billions turning around and once you do that you widen up you give yourself a little blue plane to 00:50:34 operate in and for a while everything you do in there is something that is actually going to be meaningful

what is 00:32:39 your ten year plan and the reaction I get is that right think about it the idea of a ten year plan that people are 00:32:50 serious about is just it's fake companies just don't have it they don't set themselves up to be able to deal with this thing which is really just to 00:33:04 find hope that they're going to be in business in ten years they have no idea

25 00:29:42 researchers did all of them 25 think about it cost about 12 million dollars a year in today's money every single company in this room every single 00:29:59 500 fortune company these are fingernail clippings on your IT budgets you waste more than this every other week and despite that there's not a single 00:30:11 company in America that until recently that has even taken the venture of doing a process like this you have to ask yourself why it's a question you really 00:30:25 wouldn't need to understand because we're not talking about money here return 30 plus trillion dollars in counting

once in a while you get a cop out at kerpow is out of that world it's actually an escape from that world

if we grow up in that world we don't know it's pink right because that's all there is that is the background color 00:15:17 it's the thing we are least interested in because it's the most constant thing

How Fast a Low Carbon Transition? Or: Is Vaclav Smil Wrong?

here are those same numbers compared 00:41:21 against reported global reserves so there's the amount of metal we need and there is the global reserves this column is the proportion of metals required to 00:41:33 phase out fossil fuels as a percentage that is of all the copper we need to make one generation of units current global reserves will get us 19.23 00:41:45 of the way there we don't have enough copper for one generation

we used to have 500 years ago a small human system a big pile of natural resources and a small pollution plume 00:46:47 an industrial ecosystem of unprecedented size and complexity that took more than a century to build with support of the highest calorifically dense source of cheap energy the world has ever known that would be oil 00:46:59 in abundant quantities with easily available credit and unlimited mineral resources and now we've got a system that's a human system that's really large 00:47:10 a depleted natural resources [Music] portfolio compared to what we had but we've now got a massive pollution stream so now we seek to build an even more complex system with very expensive 00:47:24 energy a fragile finance system saturated in debt not enough minerals with an unprecedented number of human population embedded in a deteriorating environment 00:47:35 so at this point i'm going to say this is probably not going to go as planned

it also is summed together so everything we need is summed together per metal and that gives us this column here total metal required to produce one generation of technology units to phase 00:40:15 out fossil fuels and so that the that we've got these numbers here the next column is global metal production as it was from mining in 2019 00:40:28 so this is all from the usgs and the bgo the final column is how many years of production at the 2019 rate um would be needed to hit the actual 00:40:42 volumes needed so 2019's the last year before covert is the last year of stable data that's why i've used it so you might notice some of these numbers are rather large 00:40:55 like we will need seven thousand one hundred and one years of production to produce the needed number of volume of vanadium that's your uh your redox batteries

the idea that we're going to do this in seven or eight years is very amusing so then the question is oh we'll just open more mines it's simple right

in south australia we've got the hornsdale power reserve which is a 00:32:43 100 megawatt capacity this is one that elon musk very famously uh put in so this is what the european union is now using as the standard to talk about you know it's 00:32:56 been done in australia we can do it here so in the global system we would need 15 million 635 and 478 such stations across the planet 00:33:08 in the power grid system just for that four week buffer so and that is actually about 30 times capacity uh compared to the entire global

if we want to deliver a thousand terawatt hours a year using these systems you could use 142 00:29:07 coal-fired power stations or 30 000 solar pv arrays or 12 309 wind turbine arrays of average size 00:29:18 where each array is like 10 win windows this is this is where we're getting the extra numbers from so each of these sites will have to be built and constructed and maintained and then when they wear out they need to 00:29:30 be decommissioned so renewables have a much lower energy return on energy invested ratio than fossil fuels and they and the the truth is they may not be strong enough to power the next industrial era 00:29:45 so gas and hydro power generation has to balance with demand supply and demand has to balance otherwise the grid will age

let's put the electrical power systems together these electrical power 00:22:29 systems that this is actually on the low side because most industrial action happens with the consumption of coal and gas on site and then it's converted to energy on site this is what's just been drawn off the power grid 00:22:42 so there's a vast amount of energy associated with manufacturing that is not included here and that is actually a huge piece of work to include that so these numbers i'm showing you are very much on the low side 00:22:55 so we're going to put it all together we need 36 000 terawatt hours all there abouts that's a that's a very low estimate

current plans are not large enough in scope the task before us is much larger than the current paradigm allows for

assessment of extra capacity required of alternative energy electrical power systems to completely replace fossil fuels

Mayer says time-restricted eating — a form of intermittent fasting that requires you to squeeze all your daily calories into a compressed feeding window — may be helpful. “The migrating motor complex is rarely mentioned in these articles on intermittent fasting, which is surprising because it’s so well-studied,” he says.To ensure the MMC has enough time to perform its duties, aiming for 14 hours without caloric foods or drinks is a good target, he says. For example, you could avoid all calories between 8 p.m. and 10 a.m. “The 14 hours without food intake would allow the MMC to kick in and not only cleanse your gut of any undigestible, unabsorbable food components, but also to reestablish the normal proximal-to-distal gradient of gut microbial density,” he says.

The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers.”

i'm going to simply turn our line drawing upside down and then draw from 00:04:20 the upside down reference what's going to happen here is it's going to force my mind to not think about what i'm drawing but instead focus on the lines and shapes that i actually 00:04:33 see so you can see it takes my left brain out of the process almost completely

Let us briefly discuss three specific examples of concepts that seem particularly promising for theprospect of ‘good enough world’ and could become synergistically interrelated: (a) the social policy ofunconditional basic income, (b) the development of blockchains and (c) the idea of the offer networks

he innovation must modulate the behaviour of the decision-produced socialorganization such that this will result in the realisation of the ‘good enough’ relationship betweenhumans and social systems, that is, it will secure the organic and psychological continuity of thehuman being unconditionally and specifically, irrespective to the continuity of their personware.

[Unconditionality.] The innovation must operate unconditionally: whatever will be offered tohuman beings cannot be enabled or disabled by specific features encoded in the personware.

AI systems replace the automated cognitive function of humans in maintaining importantsocial systems and augment the impact of such functions which are creative, singular and novel

We leave for now the issue that a realistic scenario towards such end must probablyinvolve limiting population growth

Whenever the parameters of survival are at stake,the human agent will choose according to what will increase the chances of its survival that is, thecontinuity of its own organic existence.

the mechanism ofdouble bind described by Gregory Bateson et al. [35 ] as a pattern of communication

All moral codes, all prescribed ways ofliving, all social arrangements do involve to a degree such targeting. Certain behaviours, desires, oreven thoughts are simply unacceptable, will be punished, or at least strongly discouraged. While someof such prohibitions are official and overt and thus can be related to and evaluated, others remainonly tacit and below the threshold of consciousness.

The human-symbolic merger into a single contour further consolidates once the locus of its controlshifts from the human to the social system.

When the assurance of a basic, organic continuity of the cognitive agent is perceived as hingedupon the continuity of the respective personware, it makes sense for that agent to fuse her physicalintegrity and personware into a single inseparable contour.

Should something new be experienced, it will be unexpected, may beoverwhelming and may not fit into any meaningful representation or expression at all. The new assuch, the possible source of transformation, regeneration and vision, does not submit to the orderimposed by the personware, it is naturally on a collision course with it and a source to various degreesof cognitive dissonance. As such, it poses a threat that a well-functioning cognitive system mustmediate.

select from its intrinsic desires, ideas and dispositions those that may fit into theperceivable societal contours—and to choose what to do with the remains that do not fit.

A Good Enough World

the Internet can potentially becomea backbone to a ‘global commons,’ an immense free space of information, products and services towhich everyone can contribute to and from which everyone can profit [51, 52 ].

The human takeover needs to be nonviolent and genuinely creative. It can augment the entirehuman social system not by resolving the gridlock of all the colliding identities and trajectoriesmentioned in Section 2 but by adding a lifeline for humans to hold on to whenever they considermaking a decision that challenges and disrupts; whenever they allow a new thought to take shape;whenever they genuinely feel the genuine need to say ‘no,’ or ‘yes,’ but today must say otherwise.

Instead, we focus on the relationship between the human mind and the mechanics underlying allsocial systems. The search for the locus where the distribution of governing powers can be shiftedhas brought us thus to the human mind itself. Only by affirming the human as different from thesocial persona it enacts can we see the golden thread along which the human takeover can and musthappen. This golden thread runs in the usually unperceived gaps between thoughts, communicationsand decisions that are preconditioned, preprogramed, prethought [5 ,43 ,44 ]. It brings to the light ofconsciousness the thinking, speaking and acting that are present and living. ‘What I propose, therefore,is very simple’—Hannah Arendt [ 45 ] wrote—‘it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.’To think, to voice, to enact each time anew, is the vehicle of the human takeover. To secure the continuityof this golden thread, of this very flow into the governance of society—is our existential challenge.

The ‘human takeover’ means that humans will reach a state where they will effectively be capableof shedding such programming, gaining control over social systems, so that they will start working inthe service of human well-being rather than for their own self-perpetuation.

ur major interest and challenge is to figure concrete steps towards aradical and possibly disruptive change of society by making accessible to all humans the idea that theyare subject to symbolically fabricated patterns of social continuity that inevitably program their mindsand subjugate their cognitive resources not for their well-being but rather for the purpose of furtheringtheir own perpetuation. Once humans collectively realize it, what we call the ‘human takeover’ eracan begin.

Later in life and irrespective to the character of the relationship held, the good enough approachinforms how communication between people can be practiced. One of the widest known formulasfor that is called Nonviolent Communication, subtitled as the ‘language of life’ [ 39]. The subtitle seemsparticularly appropriate to our case, as it describes a method of communication that does not servesocial programming and allow humans to author and own their speech. A nonviolent communicatordoes not reinforce the boundary cuts and refrains from installing the personware-shaping doublebinds.

The ‘ideal’ is nothing other thana representation of social conditioning and the installation of a personware module into the newbornhuman that tries to accord what is with what the social system projects. We acknowledge of course thatsome mediation is always needed. The baby sees the world and the social world in particular throughthe eyes of the parent and only afterwards autonomously. This mediation is crucial to the cognitivedevelopment of the person and cannot happen without a personware. But the personware can beconstructed such that it empowers the individual and does not subjugate it to the social demands.

Not only is such thought beyond representation (and therefore beyond personware) possible,Weaver suggests but its occurrence constitutes a fundamental encounter which brings forth into existenceboth the world and the thinker. As such, thought sans image is deeply disturbing the stability andcontinuity of whatever personware the individual thinker may have been led to identify with andopens wide horizons of cognitive development and transformation ([13]: p. 35).

though personwareis intrinsic to being a complete person it can be continuously modified, evolve or otherwise developed([5 ]: p. 201). More importantly, it can, to a significant extent, at least theoretically, be dynamicallygoverned and authored by the human individual. Hence, the human takeover.

The social sciences remain normally silent about what mental platform is initially there thatthe personware is ‘installed’ on. The humanity of humans can be hardly conceived apart from theirparticipation in and entanglement with social systems, since it is only by virtue of their interactionswith the social system and its corresponding personware that they start making use of language andother symbolic systems. When considered apart from that, humans are alinguistic and asymbolicanimals [20 ].

we term these individually constructed networks by the aggregate namepersonware. Serving as a medium between the individual and the social world, personware provides aself-reinforced and self-cohered narrative of the individual and its relationships with society. It is boththe sense-maker and the sense being made of social reality entangled into an interactive autopoieticconstruct. It maintains a personal line of continuity that interfaces with the broader societal threads bymeans of concrete intentional cognitive selections. These cognitive selections determine how individualminds represent (encode) the state of affairs of the world in language, how they communicate theserepresentations and how they further decode received communications into an understanding of thestate of affairs of the world that eventually trigger actions in the world and further cognitive selections.At moments of decision, that is, attempting to make a choice to affect the world, the human is thusmore often than not symbolically pre-situated. He enacts a personal narrative of which he is hardlythe author and to which almost every decision is knitted in.

responsible-hardworking-breadwinner and of the gifted-self-actualising-researcher are themselvessocial systems, fully realized and maintained within individual minds.

The notion of social identity highlights aspectswhich are descriptive of a person’s most stable links with some larger constructs within society [20 ,21 ].The Lacanian subject synthesizes how Hegel, Sartre and psychoanalysis situate the social person’sunique subjectivity within systems of relationships, which are psycholinguistically forged [22], just likethe whole of identity is.

However, since this pre-linguistic, pre-iconicthinking sans image, as discussed above, has no definite contour nor contents yet, it does not come withconsolidated mental forms representing such prospective desires in a manner that could be examined,processed and acted upon.

suitable intrinsic dispositions

processing of differences

We have already stated that all social forms come into existence out of the encoding and decodingof cognitive selections out of a symbolic medium.

The sharp boundary created by thesplitting of thoughts and disowning those which threaten to disrupt the personware seems thento be an intelligible choice.

The line of solution that we see is based on the possibility of decoupling between the continuityof one’s personware and one’s organic and psychological survival. If a state of affairs is somehowcreated where human individuals universally realize that their organic and psychological continuity issafeguarded unconditionally and does not depend anymore on the continuity of their symbolicallymaintained social persona—their personware, then new horizons will open for human individuals aswell as for social systems to cognitively coevolve.

FollowingSimondon’s social theory [37] and our previous work [10 ], social systems are themselves individualsthat harbour in them preindividual forces of transformation. Therefore we do not see in the currentorganization of personhood, inasmuch as it seems unassailable, a final unchangeable state of affairs.

we oppose the popular predictionof the upcoming, ‘dreadful AI takeover’

Our issuehere is not against social systems in principle but rather in understanding and perhaps modifying oreven entirely eliminating the adverse effects of personware on the inherent well-being, freedom andcreativity of human individuals.

From this perspective the loss of spirit in favour of personware isbut a natural evolutionary process. Obviously we do not subscribe to this theory and especially tothe idea that natural evolutionary processes logically deduce the demise of individuality.

Though we do not pursue this point here, it is logical to considerthat poor people will be found to experience a greater psychological pressure to identify with theirpersonware as this reduces the overwhelming cognitive load they are subject to.) The task is then onlyto take care that the personware remains consistent with the social roles available—and to steer clearof anything that reminds one of what has thus been lost

David Bohm [ 31 ]: “Thinking’ implies the present tense (...) ‘Thought’is the past participle of that. We have the idea that after we have been thinking something, it justevaporates. But thinking doesn’t disappear. It goes somehow into the brain and leaves something—atrace—which becomes thought. And thought then acts automatically.

While, as we propose, the symbolically constructed personware, seeking to reassert and reinforceitself, selects objects already recognized, thoughts already conceived and sentences already pronounced,the living human being can breathe and utter a voice that is new [5 ]. A human being can thus ‘take over’language. It can ‘take over’ thoughts—by thinking beyond the image of thought ([13 ]: chap.2).

Even though human existence in such a bare state may seem inconceivable, it is therenevertheless: every time a baby is born, a new, not yet programmed, prepersonal human is lookinginto somebody’s eyes ([27 ]: p. 133). This undeniable prepersonal presence we already call human leadsus to logically infer that humans do happen to exist prior to their personware [ 20 ,25 ,28 ]. It is thereforeour fundamental point of departure that humans are marvellous, intelligent, living cognitive agents inthemselves that can be said to exist prior to and independently of any particularly determined socialpersona. The point of acknowledging a prior prepersonal platform is not made towards arguing that ahuman can exist without any personware.

Can they reshape the contours and boundaries of their socialsituations instead of being shaped by them?

In searching for a configuration of intelligences in the world that would make possible for humansto govern, we want the exemplar human agents X, Y and Z to be able to impact the socio-econo-politicalsystem rather than be steered and moulded by it.

The structural constitution of governance thus characterised is that by definition governancerequires the involvement of two kinds of active structures coupled together [ 6,7 ]. The first kind, isthe cognitive agency performed (as of today) by human minds. It is necessary for the performance ofcognitive selections, for symbolic encoding and decoding of such selections and for recognising theobservations of the produced effectuality and continuity. The second kind of structure is the perceivedcontour (by cognitive agencies) of the social system as a whole. (This description is very similar todescribing chains of causes and effects and connecting events which are otherwise unconnected. Suchchains, Hume argued, cannot be logically grounded. They are but manifestations of habits (repetitionafter Deleuze). Apparently, this more fundamental causal chaining is performed by individualminds as well.) In summary, the ontological status of a social system is inherently circular andirreducible. It exists only by virtue of being perceived as actually impacting the state of affairs andits particular impacts are observable as such only by virtue of this perceived existence. Moreover, wewill further claim, that it is mostly the coherence of the emergent recurrent patterns, not the particulardeterminations performed by the participating human minds, that are the actual ‘governors’ of thehuman realm.

Consequently, theshape of the gridlock [9], in which further progression towards an ever-greater executive capacity givento a selected group of institutions has become nearly impossible, is not an anomaly to be overcome.The gridlock is the only configuration in which the global system could have settled. It isthe configuration any system is bound to adopt when it is composed of a multitude of differentlypositioned, differently oriented, heterogeneous decision-makers, operating in different dimensionsand scales, none of which universally dominant and all are co-dependent and constrained by others.

Approaching the two extremes of the ‘hierarchical versus collective’ axis as irreconcilablemodels and the two extremes of the ‘governor versus governed’ as distinct social locations seem to bemisleading rather than useful. These are just two opposite conceptual idealisations of an actual broadrepertoire of patterns of distribution of influence.

Socialsystems can organize humans into relationships that are sensible and relatively safe holding in checkmany destructive traits of individual humans. The question remains how to achieve a healthy andflexible balance of control that puts the human first. This balance, as will be argued is far from beingcurrently the case.

The Human Takeover: A Call for a Venture into anExistential Opportunity

is contoured by what the agent perceivesin the social context

Underneath whatever threads they have already identified with, there isalways a pregnant potentiality of thoughts yet to be shaped.

Human beings are different from what they seem to be thinking, perceiving, or saying asmediated by social symbolic systems [29 ]. They are different from how they are represented intheir own narratives, they are different from language itself. Interestingly, learning to consciouslybecome aware to that difference—the bare human spirit, the preindividual, or being as becoming asSimondon [30 ] puts it—appears to be the state of mind towards which many spiritual traditionsare guiding. David R. Weinbaum (Weaver) refers to this state as thought sans image [ 13], offering itscontemporary conceptualisation via the metaphysical theories of Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon andGilles Deleuze, in combination with the enactive theory of cognition [14 ] and inputs from complexityscience

In summary, X, Y and Z clearly occupy entirely different positions in the social fabric andeach experiences life entirely differently. They live with entirely different sets of constraints andopportunities and consequently face different challenges both psychologically and in their interactionswith the rest of the world. And yet, all three of them suffer from a cognitive dissonance between theirindividual drives and dispositions and the demands of the social roles they feel obliged to play.

examining the options available to individual persons weighing a decision vis-a-vis theirperceived socio-symbolically cohered contour. For that, let us look at a few concrete examples.

That is to say, he must live in a universewhere the sequences of events are such that his unconventional communicational habits will bein some sense appropriate.

What caused life's Major evolutionary transitions?