i really think this last one the coordination systems how do you get large groups of people to organize much better 00:16:44 that holds some of the most promise

to do our own work to develop our own teams to 00:13:48 grow our own networks so based on that we decided to organize a movement to build these kinds of new models to arrive at much more sustainable public goods funding not just sustainable ideally regenerative 00:14:01 systems with possible externalities they're not just sustaining themselves at some level but actually creating a lot more value around themselves and we hope to also create structures for much better value alignment within these networks 00:14:13 so we decided to throw an event uh last year uh so it's less than a year ago um there's probably a number of other people that helped put this on if um uh i in my memory yesterday i remembered a set of folks who are here uh which i 00:14:26 want to thank for for driving this and really creating this this event but it really takes a village to put this on especially the pl events team um uh and many others who have helped uh and since then we've now had uh three 00:14:37 events two virtual one and one in person and we're scaling the community in the size of the conversations the um systems that we're reviewing the mechanisms that we're exploring the studies that we're doing and so on uh so 00:14:50 in this conference we've gone from you know 11 18 talks and now 56 really encourage you to like attend all of them simultaneously of course you can do that of course you can later in time they're all recorded 00:15:02 and we're also very fortunate to be working with a whole bunch of other folks in the ecosystem building out the broader public goods movement in the blockchain space great uh 00:15:15 thanks to the github community and shelling point and many other manila groups that are very focused on building regenerative structures so all of this leaves me uh very hopeful um you know our impact so far has been 00:15:28 to explore a set of funding mechanisms here's a few uh that i pulled from the youtube uh channel a bunch of these mechanisms are explained explaining explored and so on some of them also have kind of experimental review still early days so 00:15:41 a lot of it is still kind of not very systematic not very well experimented upon and so on but i'd love to kind of crank that up and get to drastically better study to the point where we can like analyze these systems with the same 00:15:53 level of rigor that we analyze things like network protocols or like hardware devices and things like that we've also [Music] sort of revived the impact certificates um 00:16:05 idea and and field we've um gotten to explore a number of novel entity types i know that a few of these are actually getting booted up now which is really awesome impact for just a few months of talking about things um and we've 00:16:19 created some uh we've talked about some coordination systems that could be um extremely useful i think this is a very promising area but probably under under um understudied and an area that that is 00:16:31 maybe harder or seems um diffic much more difficult to get traction on so it doesn't get studied as much

just to give you a feel for how powerful these systems are just think of the bitcoin energy consumption and realize that that 00:09:48 just drops out of two components in bitcoin one is the block reward impact evaluator and two the price of bitcoin so those two things yield this tremendous energy 00:10:00 consum consuming system this was kind of an accident this was a an accident of nobody quite intended this this device to um consume this this amount of energy and waste this amount of energy uh but 00:10:13 this gives you a sense of the power of these these uh systems first off we should fix this and you know get out get to uh better systems that that actually uh make this this um energy use uh useful 00:10:25 uh but this i use as an example to give you a sense of like the level of power that comes from these incentive structures and their operation at scale in falcon we're very familiar with these kinds of structures we use the same component and we've gotten a feel for how powerful 00:10:38 this stuff is um in just a couple of years we ended up organizing the build out of a massive hardware infrastructure for providing storage to the world um with again just using one 00:10:51 core incentive structure a block reward uh so all of this makes me really really hopeful um that we'll be able to build um these kinds of incentive structures that can scale to solve extremely large planetary scale 00:11:03 problems um by designing incentive structures and structures warping the incentive fields and getting us to little by little problem by problem scale by scale um solve challenges 00:11:17 and so i think i greatly encourage you if you aren't already in this uh world to try it out to try creating some smart contracts and deploying them um to try uh working with other projects and so on 00:11:29 to get a feel for how powerful these these systems are um i i'm very hopeful that things like this will have a huge impact on planetary scale problems like uh climate change um i've become very hopeful that 00:11:41 these systems will let us coordinate massive action again millions of people billions of people whole industries by letting us have the full power of law and economics and so on in a fully 00:11:55 programmable environment i'm also very hopeful that we can get to accelerate science and technology development by using these kinds of structures to create instruments to incentivize areas of the innovation chasm that are 00:12:08 underserved areas where it's extremely difficult to get funding for certain projects or where it's extremely difficult to get long-term rewards or long-term success many of you have probably heard me talk 00:12:21 about this science and technology translation problem and the lack of incentive structures in that in that period in the castle in the middle and i think a lot of that just comes from the lack of reward structures there that make it impossible for 00:12:34 groups building groups building building projects there to raise capital um because there's no good incentive for capital uh to to deploy there so uh what brought us to so knowing all 00:12:46 of this knowing that this is a critical century knowing that um this critical decade and year um and knowing that crypticon is extremely powerful um why are we here why are we in funding commons so we thought about this problem last year and 00:12:59 we saw that the scale of problem of um of blockchains and the kind of rapid pace of development in industry and the emergence of things like defy and dials and nfts and so on 00:13:10 and especially the the broad adoption by hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people of these tools gave us a very promising um landscape to be able to solve these kinds of problems 00:13:23 and so we have the potential to solve all these massive coordination problems but we're lacking good mechanisms we need way better governance structures we need way better funding mechanisms and uh and so on we need to study these things with much 00:13:36 deeper theory and much deeper experimental analysis and so on

all kinds of regressions along the way um and there's many things that are getting worse um but for most um for most indicators of human well-being uh the world is in a 00:02:18 great trajectory and the last few centuries have been um a great direction uh however we're now confronted with a series of x-risks um or how uh david one of the 00:02:30 researchers in the um in our team likes to put public bads in extreme public baths that we have to have to really avoid and these especially the ones that are human caused um 00:02:44 present extreme challenges for us to get through and we we sort of control the speed at which we'll uh hit these uh but especially things like nuclear war and engineered pandemics and on ai 00:02:57 uh those kinds of risks

this is going to be a really critical year uh for public goods uh generation um and here at year i'm using 00:00:40 you know starting from now through the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. uh so what i'm going to go through is a case for why this year really matters and why this decade really matters in 00:00:53 the century

funding the commons

Understanding our situatedness, blowing up assumptionsWhat are the things your brain has been conditioned to believe as “true”? What should you re-examine, pull apart and re-assemble with intention?

Although several studies have documented theareas on Earth where unprecedented climates is likely to occur inresponse to ongoing greenhouse gas emissions24,25 , our understandingof climate change still lacks a precise indication of the time at which theclimate of a given location will shift wholly outside the range of his-torical precedents.To provide an indication of the projected timing of climate depar-ture under alternative greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, we havedeveloped an index that determines the year when the values of agiven climatic variable exceed the bounds of historical variabilityfor a particular location (Fig. 1a). We emphasize that although ourindex commonly identifies future dates, this does not imply thatclimate change is not already occurring. In fact, our index projectswhen ongoing climate change signals the start of a radically differentclimate.

Climate is a primary driver of biological processes, operating fromindividuals to ecosystems, and affects several aspects of human life.Therefore, climates without modern precedents could cause large andpotentially serious impacts on ecological and social systems 1–5 . Forinstance, species whose persistence is shaped by the climate canrespond by shifting their geographical ranges 4–7 , remaining in placeand adapting 5,8 , or becoming extinct 8–11 . Shifts in species distributionsand abundances can increase the risk of extinction 12 , alter communitystructure 3 and disrupt ecological interactions and the functioning ofecosystems. Changing climates could also affect the following: humanwelfare, through changes in the supply of food 13 and water 14,15 ; humanhealth 16, through wider spread of infectious vector-borne diseases 17,18,through heat stress19 and through mental illness20; the economy, throughchanges in goods and services21,22; and national security as a result ofpopulation shifts, heightened competition for natural resources, viol-ent conflict and geopolitical instability23. Although most ecological andsocial systems have the ability to adapt to a changing climate, themagnitude of disruption in both ecosystems and societies will bestrongly determined by the time frames in which the climate will reachunprecedented states1

Ecological and societal disruptions by modern climate change are critically determined by the time frame over whichclimates shift beyond historical analogues. Here we present a new index of the year when the projected mean climate ofa given location moves to a state continuously outside the bounds of historical variability under alternative greenhouse gasemissions scenarios. Using 1860 to 2005 as the historical period, this index has a global mean of 2069 (618 years s.d.) fornear-surface air temperature under an emissions stabilization scenario and 2047 (614 years s.d.) under a ‘business-as-usual’scenario. Unprecedented climates will occur earliest in the tropics and among low-income countries, highlighting thevulnerability of global biodiversity and the limited governmental capacity to respond to the impacts of climate change.Our findings shed light on the urgency of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions if climates potentially harmful to biodiversityand society are to be prevented.

the following eight leverage points yield dis-proportionately large effects: (i) enabling vi-sions of a good quality of life that do notentail ever-increasing material consumption;(ii) lowering total consumption and waste,including by addressing both populationgrowth and per capita consumption differ-ently in different contexts; (iii) unleashingexisting, widely held values of responsibil-ity to effect new social norms for sustain-ability, especially by extending notions ofresponsibility to include the impacts asso-ciated with consumption; (iv) addressing in-equalities, especially regarding income andgender, that undermine the capacity for sus-tainability; (v) ensuring inclusive decision-making and the fair and equitable sharing ofbenefits arising from the use of and adherenceto human rights in conservation decisions;(vi) accounting for nature’s deterioration fromboth local economic activities and telecouplings(70), including, for example, internationaltrade; (vii) ensuring environmentally friendlytechnological and social innovation, takinginto account potential rebound effects andinvestment regimes; and (viii) promotingeducation, knowledge generation, and themaintenance of different knowledge systems,including in the sciences and indigenous andlocal knowledge, especially regarding nature,conservation, and nature’s sustainable use.Although change at some of these levers andleverage points may encounter resistance indi-vidually, action at other levers and leveragepoints can enable such changes.The review also revealed that innovativegovernance approaches that are integrative,inclusive, informed, and adaptive (105, 106)are needed to effectively apply these levers toleverage points. Integrative approaches focuson the relationships between sectors and poli-cies and ensure policy coherence and effec-tiveness, and inclusive approaches, includingrights-based ones, reflect a plurality of valuesand thus promote equity. Informed govern-ance entails new strategies for knowledgeproduction and coproduction that are inclu-sive of diverse values and knowledge systems.Last, adaptive approaches—including learning,monitoring and feedback loops—help copingwith inevitable uncertainties and complexities.

A comprehensive set of five levers (95) forthis transformative change emerged from ourunprecedentedly broad and rigorous analysisof the many possible levers that have beenproposed previously: (i) developing incentivesand widespread capacity for environmentalresponsibility and eliminating perverse incen-tives; (ii) reforming sectoral and segmenteddecision-making to promote integration acrosssectors and jurisdictions; (iii) taking preemptiveand precautionary actions in regulatory andmanagement institutions and businesses toavoid, mitigate, and remedy the deteriorationof nature, and monitoring their outcomes;(iv) managing for resilient social and ecologicalsystems in the face of uncertainty and com-plexity to deliver decisions that are robust in awide range of scenarios; and (v) strengthen-ing environmental laws and policies and theirimplementation, and the rule of law moregenerally.

evers and leverage points fortransformative changeOur assessment—the most comprehensive car-ried out to date, including the nexus analysisof scenarios and an expert input process withliterature reviews—revealed clearly that re-versing nature’s ongoing decline (100) whilealso addressing inequality will require trans-formative change, namely a fundamental,system-wide reorganization across techno-logical, economic, and social factors, makingsustainability the norm rather than the altru-istic exception.

Our analysis suggests that it is possible toachieve many of the global biodiversity targetsand sustainability goals related to food, energy,climate, and water at local and global scales.The complexity of the challenges calls for anintegrative (nexus) approach (89) that simulta-neously examines interactions among multiplesectors along with synergies and tradeoffsamong goals. An example of a key nexus arethe simultaneous needs to mitigate climatechange, arrest biodiversity loss, and ensurethat all people have adequate nutrition onone hand, and the potentially negative con-sequences of large-scale land-based climatechange mitigation on the other. Even moder-ate warming will likely be detrimental forbiodiversity (90) and associated benefits topeople (91). However, most scenarios projectedto limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C by the end ofthe 21st century rely on large-scale mitigationmeasures on land, in the form of bioenergycrops, reforestation, and/or afforestation, neg-atively affecting biodiversity and also foodproduction and water demand (19, 92). At thesame time, expanding the amount of landdevoted to agriculture to ensure that all peoplehave adequate nutrition would negatively af-fect biodiversity as well (93) and would furtherexacerbate climate change (19, 92). Both land-based climate change mitigation and agricul-tural expansion, when deployed at the largescale, can undermine local livelihoods, createaccess problems, and intensify social conflict(94). A suite of possible actions could be ef-fective in navigating these tradeoffs (19, 95)—for example, focusing on regeneration andrestoration of high-carbon ecosystems (aswell as reducing waste and overconsump-tion) rather than massive bioenergy mono-culture plantations—to achieve climate changemitigation (19, 96, 97).

Projections also omitinterconnections among species, which maycause domino effects that amplify the loss ofdiversity (88).

We comprehensively reviewed both explor-atory and target-seeking scenarios (81) offuture change in direct and indirect drivers.These scenarios resulted in starkly differentimpacts on nature and its contributions topeople and, in combination, enabled syntheticconclusions about the need for transforma-tive change.

The vast area of the world managed by In-digenous Peoples (at least 25 to 28% of landsurface) (Fig. 4) under various property re-gimes is no exception to these trends. Becauseof their large extent, the fact that nature isoverall better preserved within them (60), andbecause of the diverse stewardship practicescarried within them around the world (Fig. 4,A to I), the fate of nature in these lands hasimportant consequences for wider societyas well as for local livelihoods, health, andknowledge transmission (67).

Many hotspots ofagrobiodiversity and of crop wild relatives arealso under threat or lack formal protection(58), jeopardizing the pool of genetic varia-tion that underpins the long-term resilienceof agricultural production and food systemsin the face of environmental change (59).

global biomass of largepredatory fish targeted by fisheries has fallenby two-thirds over the past 100 years (53)

The global biomass of wild mammalsis now less than 25% of that before the latePleistocene megafaunal extinction—and lessthan 10% that of the world’s current humanpopulation (52).

ests nowspan only 68% of their preindustrial extent

The biomass of the world’s vegetation (25)has halved over human history

On average, large terrestrialmammals have been extirpated from 75% oftheir natural ranges (40)

The results of this unprecedented appropri-ation of nature can now be seen much moreclearly than even 15 years ago (17), thanks torapid advances in data and tools for obser-vation, analysis, synthesis, and modeling ofmarine, freshwater, and especially terrestrialnature. These new data reveal that humanactions have directly altered at least 70% ofland surface (18, 19); 66% of ocean surface isexperiencing increasing cumulative impacts(20); around 85% of wetland area has beenlost since the 1700s (21), and 77% of riverslonger than 1000 km no longer flow freelyfrom source to sea (22).

Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earthpoints to the need for transformative change

t what is an individual 01:13:07 okay so why why the why in the world would i why would we ask this question and why would i spend you know multiple pages in this paper even discussing like of course we know what 01:13:20 an individual is right or or maybe not like like that actually turns out to be a difficult question what is an individual and it's important to this and it's important to this discussion of societal 01:13:33 systems because who are we who what you know what is the purpose of a societal system what is it what is it who is it supposed to serve you know so you have to ask really like 01:13:45 it's it's good to ask if we're going to build a societal system who wh who is it that it's supposed to service you know like who are we what do we want you know it's part of 01:13:57 figuring out what do we want what do we value who are we start there you know i would say so so we've already kind of touched on these themes but 01:14:09 this idea of rugged individualism you know like from a certain perspective and a certain you know from a limited sort of time frame perspective sure there's there's a rugged individualism that exists right and it can be useful in 01:14:22 certain certain situations but by and large that's not what life is doing you know that's not what the the they're um we are we are 01:14:36 it's really even difficult to say like where if i'm a rugged individual where do i actually start and where do i end you know like where is where is me this you know even physically it's hard to say 01:14:48 because this physical me is really i think more bacterial cells than it is um human cells right so so uh like i'm a sieve i'm a i'm a process through which things are 01:15:02 flowing through i'm a i'm an ecosystem myself with bacteria and viruses and human cells and all of those components are necessary for me to survive today and for for 01:15:14 humans to survive you know over eons were like a mix we're a bag of of human-like things and bacterial-like things and viral-like things and 01:15:26 and we're porous and we're part of the carbon cycle and we're part of the nitrogen cycle and then you and then when you say like okay well how could you be a rugged individual individual when you're really 01:15:38 this this porous smorgasbord of things right

the two questions that we hopefully would uh try to answer with with this r d program is and and one of this i already 00:56:53 mentioned but out of all conceivable designs for societal systems so so so this isn't about capitalism versus socialism or something like that there's like i would think there's an unlimited 00:57:05 potential we're creative we're creative people there would be a million varieties of of societal systems and integrated societal systems that we might come up with 00:57:17 and some of those probably would work very well and some of them probably would work very poorly um so among those what what might be among the best and not the the single best that's not the purpose either it's not just to find one thing that works is 00:57:30 to find like a you know more of a a variety a process of things a mix mishmash of things that community the communities can choose to implement that you know 00:57:43 works well for them and that suits them and that works well for their neighbors and works well forever it works well for the whole really

so now finally we get to active inference all this discussion and we're finally getting to the point here right for his lab so um i had and i had already touched on 01:47:35 some of this before but um it would you know today if you're going to develop a really good ai system you're and you're going to have a you have a robot saying the robot has to act 01:47:47 in some environment it is pretty well understood that that if you program that robot to you give it a you give it a i mean traditionally you'll give it a a a fitness function or some kind of 01:47:59 valuation function and it's for example it's good if it it you know you lose points if you fall through a trap door and is and you get points if you uh you know whatever 01:48:11 find find the piece of cake or something well that's uh that's fine for extremely simple universes that your robot might work in but as soon as you get beyond you know as soon as you get to any kind of more realistic uh 01:48:24 universe that your robot has to work in that pre-programming pre-programming concept just kind of falls apart it is you you it would require the the the practitioner to think ahead of all the 01:48:37 things that the robot might encounter and then how to value certain you know value those situations in certain ways uh and that is really uh what active inference 01:48:49 offers is a is a kind of a cognitive understanding or a mechanism by which an organism will uh uh where its 01:49:00 fitness score is in a sense involves both uh you know achieving goals and exploring its world to for for for epistemic gain so 01:49:16 um that's what we would like the that's how we would like to program the robot in a sense so that it can learn from it can learn on the fly from its experiences it can it can alter its actions and 01:49:30 goals as it be as it becomes clear as it gathers more information from its universe as it as it meets new situations that were never never conceived of by the by the 01:49:42 programmer that it through through an active inference or an active inference like uh you know mechanism it can learn and explore and and critically balance exploration with 01:49:54 exploitation and then we come right back to that whole concept of criticality so you know what you would really like your robot to do is remain at that critical uh phase between 01:50:06 exploring what's out there and making use and gold directed behavior of what's in front of it and um and uh you know that's how you could program this world this robot to act in the world and be pretty good at 01:50:20 it you know if you if you build it well so that's what the systems of a society can help a society to do you you don't you it's worth talking about building new systems i think it would not be wise to say 01:50:32 this checklist of like we wanted this level of education we want to want this you know to react this way in this situation react this way in this situation and this level of uh you know whatever money and this level of this and this 01:50:45 level of that while those kinds of preferences can be a useful start society has to be alive in its moment you know in the moment as society is alive it's cognating it's 01:50:57 it's it's it's actively uh you know comparing what it's the result of its actions to the model that is in its head and uh so active inference offers this way 01:51:09 to uh to balance uh exploration and and uh and uh exploitation and remain critical and remain optimally cognitive right so that's part of it 01:51:24 uh and then part of it i mean and for me this the the the idea of the embodied uh you know the three four e's uh this is what i really am attracted to in 01:51:46 active inference is in a sense it's kind of a simple concept it's not really very complicated you know if you've studied bayesian uh theory it all it's kind of straight you know in a way it's kind of straightforward 01:51:58 but the the you know the way fristen has connected the dots and and and and uh extended that into the bigger picture of life kind of it it to me it is uh it is rich 01:52:11 there's a there's a lot yet to be learned and gained and explored in this umbrella of active inference

we'll go into an example here with self-organized criticality so the idea 01:40:03 there is that was coined by back back bak in 87 the term self-organized criticality and it's it's really not a controversial that that living systems and 01:40:16 and many most systems in life complex systems organize in some way but the idea of self-organized criticality is that the organism itself is adjusting is is keeping some kind of adjustment 01:40:28 uh to uh to maintain a critical state and by critical state i mean a state on the ver like you can think of a saddle point so if you drop a model on us on a saddle it's going to not stay there it's going to you know 01:40:41 it's going to change it's going to change one way or the other right so a critical state is like that that threshold where things are about to change from one way to another way and uh 01:40:55 it turns out with you know work and information theory and other other fields of recent in recent years it turns out that uh processing uh whether it's we're talking about a computer or some other 01:41:07 you know machine or or a brain turns out that processing is kind of optimal in a sense when this when the system is at a this this this this critical state and 01:41:21 some people call it on the edge of chaos because things are things can easily change and sometimes it's you can think of that threshold as a 01:41:33 as a as a threshold of a critical state you can think of it as a threshold of the threshold we say between exploration and exploitation like should i should i go should i go 01:41:45 find a new planet for humans to live on or should i fix the planet that you know should i fix the systems on this planet first you know how do we balance exploration of the new versus using the information we have to improve 01:41:59 what we already have so you can think of that as exploration exploitation trade-offs stability agility trade-off do we do we remain stable and use ideas from the old in the past or do we are we more agile and we're more 01:42:13 flexible and we bring in new new ideas so it's like you can call it old new trade old new trade-off but whatever whatever trade-off you want to call it it's this sitting at the edge of going one way or the other 01:42:26 maximally flexible of going one way or the other and it's at that threshold that level that point the kind of that region of criticality that information processing seems to be 01:42:39 maximal so if uh it's no wonder then that the human brain is is organized in such a way to be living on this threshold between agility and stability 01:42:52 and uh now here's an example of that from like a real world example so a a system that is at a critical state is going to be maximally 01:43:03 sensitive to input so that means that there could you know when just when that marble is sitting on the saddle just a little bump to that saddle from one little corner of its universe and right like just one 01:43:16 little organism bumps it and maybe that marble rolls one way or the other right so that one one little input had a major impact on how the whole thing moves 01:43:29 its trajectory into the future right but isn't that what we isn't that kind of what we have in mind for democracy i mean don't we want everyone to have access of engaging into the decision-making processes 01:43:43 of a society and have every voice heard in at least in the sense that there's the possibility that just my voice just me doing my participation in this system might actually 01:43:56 ripple through the system and have a uh you know a real effect a useful effect i mean i think like maybe maybe self-organized criticality can help to inform us the concept of 01:44:10 self-organized criticality can help to inform us of what do we want from democracy or a decision-making process right you know that just makes me think about different like landslides 01:44:22 and that's something that criticality theory and catastrophe theory has been used to study and instead of cascading failure we can think about like cascading neighborhood cleanups so a bunch of people just say 01:44:34 today just for an hour i feel like doing a little cleanup and all of a sudden one person puts up the flag and then it's cascading locally in some just you know unspecified way but all of a sudden you're getting this this distribution with a ton of small 01:44:48 little meetups and then several really large sweeping changes but the total number of people cleaning up is higher because you offered the affordance and the ability for the affordance to sort of propagate 01:44:59 that's right that's right we're talking about a propagation of of a propagation of information a propagation of action and the possibility that even uh you know just one or a few individuals could start a 01:45:12 little chain chain reaction that actually does affect in a positive way society now it's a little too it's almost too bad that sand piles were the original uh you know topic of 01:45:23 of this of self-organized criticality because as you point out it's not really about things falling apart it's about it's about if you think of again if you think of a complex system as a system more capable of solving more 01:45:37 challenging problems then more often you can think of self-organized criticality as a way to propagate information when it is really needed when the system needs to change 01:45:51 uh then information is you know it ingests information from its world from its senses and can act accordingly we we just um submitted an abstract with criticality and active inference and one 01:46:04 of the points was actually the existence of self-organized criticality implies a far from equilibrium system that's actively pumping energy in that's because it's a passive system that's not 01:46:15 locked and loaded

now we talk i talk about a few ideas good regulators requisite variety self-organized criticality and then the 01:35:04 free energy principle from active inference um and uh maybe i'll just try to briefly talk mention what's what those means for what those ideas mean for people who 01:35:15 aren't familiar so good regulator really came from the good regular theorem or whatever it's called really came from cybernetics ash ashby yeah a lot his law of requisite 01:35:33 variety and uh the it's the concept is that a organism or a you know a system must be must be a model of that which it but 01:35:47 that needs to control

there's a lot of discussion about complex systems you know we've been discussing complex systems and i just want to make a couple of points here because uh 01:31:28 commonly some it is not uncommon that someone will say a complex system well that just means that it's liable to fall apart at any moment you know it's just too complex it's going to crash uh but and that that obviously can 01:31:41 happen you know systems can collapse quite quite true but obviously life would not be doing very well if the if if the evolution builds complexity 01:31:53 in species and you know in organisms and ecosystems if life would be have a rough go of it if it was so fragile that uh complexity became a 01:32:07 burden and and uh you know come and then you know you reach a certain level of complexity and then you fall apart that's not really i don't think i mean that can happen but that's but but complex useful complexity 01:32:19 doesn't make you fall apart it actually just does the opposite it serves what we've been talking about all along and that's problem solving so we are anticipatory organisms we are problem 01:32:31 solving organisms it's our nature most of what the human brain does is to solve problems of one kind or another social problems physical problems whatever and maneuver in the world you 01:32:43 know in a useful way and complexity is what allows that there's a number of studies that i cite here that show that as an organism even as a robot you know 01:32:56 faces uh more difficult pressures from its environment it complexifies and complexifies by complexity then it's it's it implies 01:33:08 a greater number of parts coordinating or cooperating in some way uh to you know solve this new challenge and obviously as a human we're very complex we have 01:33:22 we have complex needs we have we can think not just what's going to happen in the next millisecond but what's going to happen we can think about what's going to happen in 100 years i mean part of this project is to think about what might be 01:33:36 happening over the next hundred years or even a thousand years so as an organism complexifies it become it at least potentially becomes a better adapted to solving more complex 01:33:49 problems so you could and from that sense you could almost ex equate complexity with problem-solving capacity you know at least in a uh you know in a 01:34:01 general sense and then i talked about well that just reminds me of in the free energy calculations that we um have gone over in various papers it's like accuracy is the modeling imperative and 01:34:14 then complexity is tolerated to the extent it facilitates accurate modeling so if you get the one parameter model and you got 99 and it's adequate and it's good then you're good to go and you're gonna go for simplicity 01:34:26 but then what you're saying is actually the um appearance and the hallmark of complexity in the world it means that that organism has the need to solve problems at a given 01:34:40 level of counterfactual depth or inference skill or temporal depth temporal thickness

society by you know by uh uh you know it's just that's necessarily shares a similar related intrinsic 01:29:58 purpose which is to achieve and maintain vitality maintain and maintain and by maintain i mean anticipate into the future maintain vitality which is accomplished through 01:30:11 cognition and cooperation so the self that we must keep vital is the extended self and it follows that the intrinsic purpose of societal systems like financial systems and other is to serve the intrinsic purpose of society

a biological i call it an intrinsic purpose but like from evolution by being the fact that we are a part of life we have a purpose because 01:28:53 all organisms making capability casual power causal powers and the intrinsic purpose of an organism is to achieve and maintain vitality a sustainable flourishing of self which 01:29:09 can include that extended self and we do that by sensing and evaluating states of the world and ourselves and implementing appropriate actions that that are based on anticipation we 01:29:21 we anticipate what will happen if we do or don't take an action and we choose if we're for functional we choose those actions that can serve our intrinsic intrinsic purpose of of 01:29:33 remaining vital into the future so anticipating vitality and that obviously implies some kind of modeling of the world anticipation implies some kind of modeling in the world so that's an organism's intrinsic 01:29:45 purpose

what is our purpose so so so over on the right there i just want to reemphasize we are anticipatory we are cognitive we are problem solvers 01:25:44 we are a we and then i have below that i am a we you know like i i am i can i am i'm intimately connected with this i'm i'm everyone in that sense you know 01:25:57 yep yeah the whitman um you know i contain multitudes and also gilbert at all i have a paper called um we were never individuals kind of on that wavelength that you were talking about with the sort of distributed systems all the way down 01:26:09 approach and also dennis noble no privilege level of biological causality similar uh basically realization that multi-scale perspective complexity science basically entails 01:26:22 either the choice of a priori level like saying it is multi-scale and humans are the best scale or gaia is the scale or quantum is the right scale that's a claim as well as it being a claim 01:26:35 actually there's no privileged level of causality so that's the sort of table as it's said right right right right right and you know what it's not that really 01:26:46 this this entire project you could say in like a sentence you could say this whole project is to help us be who we are more be more uh honestly who we are more real 01:27:01 to who we are right it's not the it's not to to have people behave in some unusual way or some altruistic way or anything like that it is it is to have 01:27:12 it is to be more more ourselves more fully ourselves more completely ourselves and then all of these pages all these things we're talking about is who that self is who who are we really and it's about the 01:27:25 adjacent possible for who we are who we are is not an essence that is uh there's uh seven seals and it's being unlocked it's actually something that's being drawn out through 01:27:36 inactive realization in the niche through niche modification through stigma through becoming and and then the adjacent possible is where the imagination and the planning comes into play and if people are hesitant to talk about 01:27:49 the adjacent possible for who we could be just think about chess it's the adjacent possible with the strategy on the board and we're talking about the adjacent strategy possible for who we could be in terms of our strategy 01:28:02 for you know all these recursive layers our strategy for how we think of ourselves and all these other things you're talking about absolutely absolutely and then and then ultimately serving the 01:28:13 serving the kind of fitness purpose of you know if we take action a is that going to reduce our uncertainty about those things that we that really matter you know that are that are the the 01:28:27 the key variables

what is our worldview what do we value and what is our purpose and then we've come to this question then okay so who the heck are we then you know we're we're and it and not only who are we but 01:22:42 who are we building these systems for you know what what what is what should societal system serve who or what should societal systems serve and the only reasonable answer that you 01:22:55 can come up with is that societal systems should serve the the extended self like not just the body not just the family not just the 01:23:07 you know the thousand people in a society or the ten thousand or a million or whatever but their environment the the society next door that they're engaged with and cooperating with and coordinating with 01:23:18 the society across the planet that they're sharing information with and learning together with and so it's the whole that we are metrics as we as leaders who 01:23:30 come to metrics those metrics have to represent both the cognitive process how good how are we cogniting how well are we cogniting are we functionally cogniting and are we 01:23:43 achieving through that cognition are we achieving the kinds of aims that is serving the whole is the environment improving is the you know quality of air improving is the quality of life 01:23:56 improving for individuals right um yes so uh we are so this in a nutshell we this is the world view in a way we are in intimate with our greater world we are individuals but of the nested overlapping variety 01:24:12 individual cells bodies groups communities ecologies nations and all of civilization we're not separate in any absolute sense and there's no privileged level or scale to any of that nor are we passive bystanders in this 01:24:25 unfolding this is not this evolution is not it's just a chance thing like by chance somebody does this one day and then evolution goes on another another avenue no there there are 01:24:38 there are opportunities in the environment uh that we can react to that lend themselves to to to providing 01:24:50 information or providing gain of benefit of some kind and and you know we are driven we are are we are consciously creating and you know 01:25:03 even a really great societal system that integrated societal systems would be consciously creating acting cognitive acting cognitive and consciously creating and it towards some 01:25:15 towards some goal and that goal then has to be you know the maintaining of vitality being the in the for the extended sel

that's something that insect with a six-legged version is now it's the whole super organism oh well the ant colony is society that whole frame is actually the shadow of 01:18:52 what the evolutionary reality is which is that the ant colony is an organism not a super organism and the ants are tissues and so which level we prioritize or do we say no there's no a priori level ant is just i'm not even 01:19:05 gonna say there's anything out there called ants it's it's you how you're thinking about it or do we get lost or are we going to find a ladder in that multi-scale yeah well the latter is you know the 01:19:17 latter is active inference because it doesn't say active inference doesn't say make a make an internal model of the world that is accurate that actually accurately captures all the all the 01:19:30 details of the world of the universe that's not the point that's not what the mind does that's not the point the point is to act under uncertainty 01:19:41 given some useful model of the world act under uncertainty so that your fitness score improves and by fitness score here we essentially mean you know and anticipated uncertainty so i i would 01:19:55 very much like to be have some certainty that i'm going to be alive tomorrow and if it's freezing outside and i don't have a coat on uh you know that that becomes iffy so uh i'm going to be happy 01:20:06 if i'm going to be i'm going to go find a coat because it is going to reduce my uncertainty about survival over the next 24 hours but you can expand that you know outward right we we need to act the all organisms are acting under 01:20:19 uncertainty and and we can think about that as we can think about that um we can think from that perspective as a society of what are we doing and how do we measure 01:20:31 success well we're measuring success by acting under uncertainty and then re and then paying attention to what happens and then acting the same or differently or you know some other way or somehow some were 01:20:45 then choosing to act again in this cycle of act uh you know act uh process act process act process you know model act model act model that reminds me of course of the ooda 01:20:57 observe orient side act model and other sort of cyclic models of action and perception and then i would say that active inference provides a few nice little benefits over other phrasings of action and perception 01:21:10 qualitative and philosophical ones like inactivism as well as quantitative ones like cybernetics and other kinds of control theories so i totally agree this

the 1911 paper by william morton wheeler is called the ant colony as an organism not a super organism because superorganism implies that nest mate would be the true organism

so society is an individual and we are part of society and we're talking about societal systems and so at that level that seems to be our level of focus here at that level we can talk about society as an organism as a cognitive organism 01:18:02 that is propagating information from the past into the future and from an active inference standpoint we can say uh under the you know under the fitness score 01:18:15 whatever word you might want to use for that of reducing uncertainty so we act to reduce uncertainty

there was an interesting paper that came out i cited in the in my in my in paper number one that uh was 01:15:53 looking at this question of what is an individual and they were looking at it from an information theory standpoint you know so they came up with this they came up with this uh uh theory uh and i think do they have a name for 01:16:09 it yeah uh information theory of individuality and they say base it's done at the bottom of the slide there and they say basically that uh you know an individual is a process just what's 01:16:20 what we've been talking about before that propagates information from the past into the future so that you know implies uh information flow and implies a cognitive process uh it implies anticipation of 01:16:33 the future uh and it probably implies action and this thing that is an individual it is not like it is a layered hierarchical individual it's like you can draw a circle around 01:16:45 anything you know in a certain sense and call it an individual under you know with certain uh definitions you know if you want to define what its markov blanket is 01:16:57 but uh but you know we are we are we are our cells are individuals our tissues liver say is an individual um a human is an individual a family is an 01:17:12 individual you know and it just keeps expanding outward from there the society is an individual so it really it's none of those are have you know any kind of inherent preference 01:17:24 levels there's no preference to any of those levels everything's an individual layered interacting overlapping individuals and it's just it's just a it's really just a the idea of an individual is just where 01:17:36 do you want to draw your circle and then you can you know then you can talk about an individual at whatever level you want so so that's all about information so it's all about processing information right

anticipations is key to 01:08:38 everything and attention is key to everything so every organism does that plants and everything else and it doesn't require a central nervous system 01:08:51 and and you i might add to this that not only is every organism cognitive but essentially every organism organism is cooperative to those cooperation and cognition 01:09:03 go hand in hand because any intelligent organism any organism that can act to better its you know viability is going to cooperate in 01:09:17 meaningful ways with other organisms and you know other species and things like that nice point because um there's cost to communication whether it's exactly whether it's the cost of making the pheromone 01:09:30 or just the time which is super finite or attention fundamentally and so costly interactions through time the game theory are either to exploit and stabilize which is fragile 01:09:42 or to succeed together yeah exactly and and and succeeding together cooperation is is is like everywhere once you once you understand what you're looking 01:09:54 for it's in the biologic world it's like everywhere so this idea that we're you know one one one person against all or you know we're a dog eat dog universe i mean it's you 01:10:08 know in a certain sense it's true obviously tigers eat you know whatever they eat zebras or whatever i mean that happens yes of course but in the larger picture 01:10:19 over and over multiple time scales not just uh you know in five minutes but over evolutionary time scales and uh you know developmental time scales and everything the cooperation is really the rule 01:10:33 for the most part and if you need if any listener needs proof of that just think of who you think of your body i mean there's about a trillion some trillion some cells 01:10:45 that are enormously harmonious like your blood pumps every day or you know this is a this is like a miracle i don't want to use the word miracle because i want to get into 01:10:59 whatever that might imply but uh it is amazing aw inspiring the the depth of cooperation just in our own bodies is like that's that's like 01:11:12 evolution must prefer cooperation or else there would never be such a complex uh pattern of cooperation as we see just in one human body 01:11:26 just to give one example from the bees so from a species i study it's almost like a sparring type of cooperation because when it was discovered that there were some workers with developed ovaries 01:11:38 there was a whole story about cheating and policing and about altruism and this equation says this and that equation says that and then when you take a step back it's like the colony having a distribution of over-reactivation 01:11:51 may be more ecologically resilient so um i as an evolutionary biologist never think well my interpretation of what would be lovey-dovey in this system must be how it works because that's so 01:12:05 clearly not true it's just to say that there are interesting dynamics within and between levels and in the long run cooperation and stable cooperation and like learning to adapt 01:12:17 to your niche is a winning strategy in a way that locking down just isn't but unfortunately under high um stress and 01:12:29 uh high uncertainty conditions simple strategies can become rife so that's sort of a failure mode of the population

in you know the main theme of this first paper is i've tried to lay out a world view that is cognizant of that reflects some of the latest developments 01:03:14 in in science and in a variety of fields and sciences in those fields would be like complex system science cognitive science evolutionary biology 01:03:28 uh in a you know a few fields like that information theory and a few things like that i i've tried to to outline a a a world view that makes sense 01:03:42 from that leading edge of science and i would say too that that science has gone through really kind of a revolution you know there was like it's kind of like there's the pre-1950s 60s science and then there's 01:03:56 what we have today and there's enormous jumps enormous leaps in understanding that have happened just in the last say 50 years or so and and and some of those leaps the 01:04:09 ramifications are only now being you know the they're now being felt right the the the the some of the concepts are a a distinct shift 01:04:20 from where we were in the you know the pre-1960s or pre-1970s or so and um obviously we there's also you know we we see the changes in our 01:04:34 lifetime you know like we i was watching an old show on tv the other day and somebody put money in a pay phone you know like they put a quarter and a pay phone to make telephone call and it's like okay well that's that's that's that's history you know so 01:04:48 there's all these technologies that have that are that are that i grew up with that are not they don't even exist anymore they've been replaced by entirely new frameworks and that's the speed of those of the speed of that 01:05:00 evolution is is exponential so it's tremendous changes happening very quickly and the task of the program oh yeah which one put on that would be 01:05:12 um potentially because you're taking such a broad perspective with complex system science and evolutionary bio you might say that society has always been a cognitive architecture but if you had asked in 01:05:25 1500 is society a cognitive architecture be like well no i mean you have agriculture you have this you have this you have that whereas now if you tell people hey telecoms are they run through everything and the internet of 01:05:38 things the internet people you know like all this sort of stuff you tell people actually it's a multi-scale cognitive architecture humans are in the loop and our algorithms are never independent from us they're in feedback with us it's like 01:05:50 yeah that was what the mainstream was telling me so actually it's a total alignment point because it reflects how rapidly things are changing that it's just undeniably obvious that the 01:06:02 communication infrastructure is the system that we're engineering right right absolutely yeah yeah communications have mind-blowing changes and communications and and that brings mind-blowing changes and 01:06:14 outlook but but i want to emphasize a few points to this worldview that that you know it's not it's not just that everything is connected like you know you go like i know what a complex system is it just means everything is connected and we're 01:06:27 all kind of whole and blah blah okay fine but but even for people who are in that ilk you know who understand the the basic concept there there's ideas 01:06:40 that are that have come out in the last decade or so that that are there that are even pushing that boundary you know right and and i just want to highlight a few concepts here and i think active inference really is 01:06:52 playing a you know is is like a in a sense a culmination of some of some of these ideas or an embodiment of some of these ideas the main thing i want to say is that life is intelligent 01:07:06 and whole so it's not just that everything's connected it's that everything is intelligent everything is a lot you know life is an intelligent information processing 01:07:20 thing everything is is is adapting learning deciding whether we're talking about everything is cognitive 01:07:33 you know and cognition really implies information and information processing so whether we're talking about a slime mold or a human you know there's there's in in everything in plants in 01:07:46 bacteria in mold and anything that has any life at all that can be considered alive is intelligent and is learning and reacting not just reacting but learning 01:07:58 reacting and also deciding and acting and remembering and all those things and you might ask well you know that's impossible bacteria doesn't have a brain you know it can't be it can't be cognitive but it is 01:08:14 cognitive but we just have to relax what we how we define cognition you know and when on the slide i have a little thing there that every organism 01:08:25 is cognitive in the sense that it displays capacities typically associated with human cognition such as sensing learning problem solving memory storage and recall

so let's suppose let's suppose your listeners are with me and you know we kind of agree like okay yes transformation's necessary and uh again i want to emphasize i'm not talking about reform i'm not talking 00:58:59 about a softer better capitalism i'm not talking about you know improved voter registration or like any of those things i'm talking about de novo starting over from scratch what might be 00:59:13 best and if it turns out that the old systems were better than anything that humanity can come up with well then you know that's the answer but i can't imagine that's true because the old systems were never designed in any kind of 00:59:25 you know thoughtful science driven [Music] you know process to to to test to explore and to come up with fitness like what is the you know we don't even have a fitness for our current society 00:59:39 much less of fitness for societal designs i mean we have the gdp but that's a terrible terrible limited fitness metric 00:59:51 okay so suppose you're with me suppose we're we're on board we we want to do this de novo design thing where do we start what's the what's what where do we even get off the 01:00:03 ground on this and i suggest that the way to do it is through first address worldview from world view once we understand what the world view is 01:00:15 what a reasonable useful world view will be for this project then then purpose derives worldview begets purpose once you understand what it is you want 01:00:28 what you value what do you value once you understand what you value then you can say well i value a and therefore the purpose is to 01:00:39 have a manifest in society for example so once you have purpose then you can think about what metrics how would you measure whether are you so 01:00:53 here's a new design is it fit for purpose does it do does it fulfill its purpose you know that's the question and then metrics go with some kind of fitness evaluation 01:01:05 and then finally last of all of those would be the design okay we know what we know what we value we know what this thing is supposed to do we know what the purpose is we know that attractor is supposed to you know plow the ground or something we 01:01:18 know what this is supposed to do we know how to measure success and uh now finally then let's talk about design what are the what are the you know the specifics and mechanics and 01:01:31 how does that happen and the the series is really kind of laid out this way the first paper really talks about world view and purpose the second paper talks about the you know the more the mechanics of things 01:01:44 like viability how would you make this thing viable things like that and then the very last paper that's titled the subtitle design okay so uh that's how we uh and 01:01:56 and maybe i will just mention here that i put metrics before design because we might have some ideas uh getting back to that preference factor we might have some ideas like we would like people not to die at 01:02:08 30 you know we'd like people to mostly live to a ripe old age and have you know enough water water to drink and food to eat and all that kind of stuff so uh you know what kind of design once 01:02:20 now that we have metrics to measure that kind of stuff longevity and nutrition and things what kind of designs would help us to reach those targets you know so that's one reason why design 01:02:31 why metrics comes before design okay

second question is uh by what and this is as of course the the 00:57:57 kicker is not only what systems might be best but what how would you possibly uh implement them what viable way is there to implement new system designs you know 00:58:09 like otherwise what's the purpose you know this isn't this isn't an academic this isn't just an academic uh you know excursion this is like let's change the world and that has to be practical in some you 00:58:21 know in some has to be viable so those are the two questions what what what might be best and how do we get there

the six 00:48:41 six big systems i've mentioned can be viewed as a cognitive architecture it's the it's the means by which the society learns decides adapts and 00:48:54 and this society's efforts this is the third underlying position the society's efforts to learn decide and adapt and be viewed as being driven by an intrinsic purpose and that's really key also 00:49:08 because it's not just that we're learning deciding and adapting willy-nilly i mean i mean maybe it seems that way in the world you know in the sense we're so dysfunctional it kind of is billy nilly but 00:49:20 but what really matters is that we learn decide and adapt in relation to whatever intrinsic purpose we actually have as as a society as individuals in a 00:49:34 society it's that it's it's it's it's as i will use the the term uh maybe several times today it's solving problems that matter that really that really 00:49:45 matter that's what we're after

maybe i should say having a having a checkoff list like you know there should be this level of education there should be this level of 00:52:40 [Music] health people should live this long and so we have our fitness and we're gonna uh we've decided in advance even before the system is running we've 00:52:53 now have a list of things we're gonna check off we're gonna score each one we're gonna come up with some kind of integrated fitness score from that and that's how we're going to move forward we're always going to refer to this fit this you know this fitness model and 00:53:07 the fitness vector and these and these kind of hard-coded values for what's good and what's bad so so in the world of artificial intelligence and in the world of active inference you know that 00:53:19 really doesn't go very far that doesn't work that doesn't work very well because what happens is we didn't you didn't think ahead you like you some something happens tomorrow and whoever came up with that list of 00:53:32 uh you know those values or that model didn't really include the fact that maybe spaceships from mars were gonna land and cause a new disruption and then we have to deal with that problem now too before we deal with 00:53:45 anything else so that wasn't in the you know that wasn't in the plan and now what do we do you know so there's right so so this is you know this is really where active inference plays into 00:53:58 that's one way that active inference plays into this is how do you evaluate and act in a world that is full of uncertainties right 00:54:10 the unknown unknown the unknown unknown is the temperature dynamics but you know it's going to be temperature and so how can you plan for what you know it will be in a distributional sense 00:54:23 right and make stabilization on that awesome right right so so yeah so you so you realize you know already you realize maybe that this is not a proposal to build a say like a model of uh of uh you know 00:54:37 like how society makes decisions you know that's that's not that's not it it is what is the process by which society cognates 00:54:50 and you know what kind of what kind of infrastructure and tools and and and you know mechanics can we use that would facilitate that but it's not to build a thing 00:55:01 it's to build it's to realize that we are in we are engaged moment to moment in a cognitive process society as individuals are and how can we 00:55:14 do that together as a society so that we're you know we we balance exploration with exploitation um you know so that we we learn about our environment we grow we learn 00:55:27 we explore we we make good decisions based on available evidence and based on knowledge based on cultural knowledge you know like all those things right so so this is a this is 00:55:39 the the the you know i think organisms are a process they're not a thing anyway right cognition is a process and societal decision making is a process 00:55:54 and really society is a process you know there's there's not too many things in this world there's mostly processes living processes intelligent processes so that's that's the that's the hope 00:56:05 that's where this is trying to go is to like with that in mind with that with that broad understanding or broad concept in mind how do we uh how do we 00:56:16 think about you know how we how we come together as society how we cooperate how we coordinate how we make decisions how we how we learn how we explore what do we what do we monitor what kind 00:56:29 of information do we seek you know what kind of experiments do we do all that kind of stuff great

first is that uh a society of any scale and and i don't mean society is in bill millions or billions of people i mean society as in a thousand people you know like a sub 00:47:23 sub city a community that is not even a whole city just a a group of like-minded people uh who are willing to give this a give this you know 00:47:35 a field trial ago a society of any scale can be viewed as a super organism so that's kind of fundamental everything really really works from there we are together we 00:47:49 are not just individuals connected we are a whole society is a whole and it's a and it's a whole with the environment and it's wider you know 00:48:03 sphere so as we'll talk about today you know this even the idea of an individual is it's okay to talk about individuals it's fine but it's kind of like an arbitrary thing an 00:48:15 individual could be an individual cell or an individual person or an individual uh species or an individual ecosystem but it's all with all deeply embedded and enmeshed 00:48:28 entwined with the whole so uh uh a society can be viewed as a super organism

the whole project is based on three underlying propositions

we're going to talk in this series 00:01:10 about a series of papers that i just published in the in the journal sustainability that that series is titled science driven societal transformation

A key point I make is that that the boundary between knowledge and ignorance is not impermeable. It is open to political appropriation by less powerful groups. In other words, calling attention to the problem of strategic ignorance by elite actors – and demanding more accountability from those actors – can lead to a new "war of position", in a Gramscian sense. In my book, I term this argument the Lorde principle, after Audre Lorde, in homage to earlier academic and activist work that my argument builds upon. I suggest that the Lorde principle encompasses the way that unknowing can be a revolutionary force for good.

I define micro-ignorance as individual acts of ignoring, and macro-ignorance as the sedimentation of micro-ignoring into structural blind-spots that obscure uncomfortable truths from being more widely known. So, Blair shutting down the BAE Systems investigation is an example of micro-ignorance. But it’s not an isolated act – it has epistemological ripple effects. The halting of the investigation compounds the pretence that no corruption took place, and this contributes to a persistent and quite insidious form of macro-ignorance, which is the debatable belief that western governments are less corrupt than developing countries. Of course they’re just as corrupt, they’re just better at hiding it.

So, my specific definition of "strategic ignorance" is new, but the reality it speaks to is old: the fact that the power of any dominant group typically functions through strategic ignorance, through the ability to select which voices and forms of evidence to acknowledge and which evidence to dismiss.

Strategic ignorance is effective because it is hard to detect; hard to point out without seeming conspiratorial; and hard to prosecute because perpetrators successfully efface the evidence that could indict them, or, importantly, they thwart inconvenient evidence from emerging in the first place, like Blair’s halting of the BAE Systems inquiry. Most troublingly, we don’t empirically know how often strategic ignorance works and just how effective it is, because the most "successful" examples of strategic ignorance are, quite literally, the tactics that work so well that they can never be detected.

What is the "ostrich instruction"? It’s an informal way to refer to an important legal principle, which is that deliberate avoidance of knowledge about one’s own illegal actions should not be a valid defence in law. It’s one of the reasons why, just over 15 years ago, American executives at the energy company Enron were found guilty even though their direct role in malfeasance at Enron wasn’t clear. They should and could have known about fraud, and they were found guilty. Enron has been pointed to as proof that wilful ignorance does not pay. But in my book I stress that that Enron is a fairly isolated case. As a number of other people have pointed out, from journalists Matt Taibbi and Jesse Eisenger to legal scholar Rena Steinzor, US authorities have had an abysmal record of successful prosecution of white-collar crime in recent decades. An American legal scholar based in the UK, Alexander Sarch, is doing important work on this topic. But he is an exception, and I’m a little critical of mainstream legal scholarship in my book. I suggest that legal scholars themselves have been acting ostrich-like about recent shifts in the law. For example, the old adage "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is increasingly waived in US courts when it comes to complex financial and tax crimes. This shift is one of the reasons why I argue that for many powerful and rich people, ignorance really is legal bliss.

I suggest that the very term "free market" is a type of micro-ignorance because it conceals more than it reveals by purporting to reflect a phenomenon that has never existed and can never exist in actual economic reality. Of course we have never had a "free market", and more importantly, the largest imperialist super-powers of the modern age, and especially the US and UK, did not get rich through a "free market", but through different types of government interventionism and protectionism that have long benefited society’s richest groups, often at the expense of exploited workers across the world. This fact is both widely known and oddly ignored even today in economic theory and economic policy-making. In the book, I explore the history of economic thought over a 200-year period, from late enlightenment figures including Burke and Wollstonecraft in the 18th century, through classical liberals such as Tocqueville and Bastiat in the 19th century, through to 20th century figures such as Friedrich Hayek, to understand the ways that dominant economic theories of economic growth have obscured wider recognition of the role of governments in creating economic markets over modern history.

But I’m also glad that you highlight the "political" in your question, because politics gets left out a lot of the time. People have tended to focus more on how corporate actors such as big tobacco, big pharma and big food have all engaged in the strategic production of ignorance. This can sideline the problem of strategic ignorance by governments or the judiciary. It’s one of the reasons why I argue that it is important not to treat strategic ignorance as simply a psychological problem at the individual level. I think it’s better to suggest that different groups in society have enhanced political power to make the deliberate avoidance of inconvenient truths appear more legitimate or defensible than it really is. To give one example, when he was prime minister, Tony Blair put pressure on the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith to halt an investigation into bribery at BAE Systems. Blair didn’t want the embarrassment of having corruption at a major British firm exposed, and his effort to shut down the legal investigation is a type of strategic ignorance.

Since then, I’ve been one of a group of scholars developing a new academic field known as "ignorance studies". Seriously, the field does exist, even though people sometimes chuckle at the phrase.

ociologists and historians, on the other hand, usually view it more in line with my definition above. They view strategic ignorance as both an individual and a collective phenomenon. This helps to underscore the role of institutional power and institutional actors in preventing inconvenient facts from becoming more widely known or accepted.

Behavioural economists and psychologists, on the one hand, tend to define strategic ignorance in a psychological way. They see it as the personal avoidance of inconvenient or uncomfortable facts.

"Ignorance really is blissful, especially for the powerful" Q&A with Linsey McGoey, author of "The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World".

The lesson of fallen societies is that civilization is a vulnerable organism, especially when it seems almighty. We are the world’s top predator, and predators crash suddenly when they outgrow their prey. If the resulting chaos unleashes nuclear war, it could bring mass extinction in a heartbeat, with Homo sapiens among the noted dead.

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its October 2018 report, keeping global warming below 1.5 C “is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics” but will require “unprecedented changes” before 2030.

Back in Classical Greece, Plato suggested that in a just society there should be no more than a 5:1 spread in income between richest and poorest. That was a hard sell then, and still would be. But what might be reasonable today? Where should the balance be struck to help the weakest while still rewarding effort and achievement? Given the seriousness of what we face, this is a conversation we must have. The wealth already wrenched from nature might just be enough to buy us a lasting future if it were shared, managed, and ploughed into solutions.

One of the sad ironies of our time is that we have become very good at studying nature just as it begins to sicken and die under our weight. “Weight” is no mere metaphor: of all land mammals and birds alive today, humans and their livestock make up 96 per cent of the biomass; wildlife has dwindled to four per cent. This has no precedent. Not so far back in history the proportions were the other way round. As recently as 1970, humans were only half and wildlife more than twice their present numbers. These closely linked figures are milestones along our rush towards a trashed and looted planet, stripped of diversity, wildness, and resilience; strewn with waste. Such is the measure of our success.

First, our numbers have risen by 1.4 billion, nearly a hundred million per year. In other words, we’ve added another China or 40 more Canadas to the world. The growth rate has fallen slightly, but consumption of resources — from fossil fuel to water, from rare earths to good earth — has risen twice as steeply, roughly doubling our impact on nature. This outrunning of population by economic growth has lifted perhaps a billion of the poorest into the outskirts of the working class, mainly in China and India. Yet those in extreme poverty and hunger still number at least a billion. Meanwhile, the wealthiest billion — to which most North Americans and Europeans and many Asians now belong — devour an ever-growing share of natural capital. The commanding heights of this group, the billionaires’ club, has more than 2,200 members with a combined known worth nearing $10 trillion; this super-elite not only consumes at a rate never seen before but also deploys its wealth to influence government policy, media content, and key elections. Such, in a few words, is the shape of the human pyramid today.

In the deep past these setbacks were local. The overall experiment of civilization kept going, often by moving from an exhausted ecology to one with untapped potential. Human numbers were still quite small. At the height of the Roman Empire there are thought to have been only 200 million people on Earth. Compare that with the height of the British Empire a century ago, when there were two billion. And with today, when there are nearly eight. Clearly, things have moved very quickly since the Industrial Revolution took hold around the world. In A Short History of Progress, I suggested that worldwide civilization was our greatest experiment; and I asked whether this might also prove to be the greatest progress trap. That was 15 years ago.

Yet there were still many traps along the way. In what is now Iraq, the Sumerian civilization (one of the world’s first) withered and died as the irrigation systems it invented turned the fields into salty desert. Some two thousand years later, in the Mediterranean basin, chronic soil erosion steadily undermined the Classical World: first the Greeks, then the Romans at the height of their power. And a few centuries after Rome’s fall, the Classic Maya, one of only two high civilizations to thrive in tropical rainforest (the other being the Khmer), eventually wore out nature’s welcome at the heart of Central America.

Most survivors of that progress trap became farmers — a largely unconscious revolution during which all the staple foods we eat today were developed from wild roots and seeds (yes, all: no new staples have been produced from scratch since prehistoric times). Farming brought dense human populations and centralized control, the defining ingredients of full-blown civilization for the last five thousand years.

The first trap was hunting, the main way of life for about two million years in Palaeolithic times. As Stone Age people perfected the art of hunting, they began to kill the game more quickly than it could breed. They lived high for a while, then starved.

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

Prof. Meiri: "Our study tracked changes at a much higher resolution over a considerably longer period of time compared to previous research. The results were illuminating: we found a continual, and very significant, decline in the size of animals hunted by humans over 1.5 million years. For example, a third of the bones left behind by Homo erectus at sites dated to about a million years ago, belonged to elephants that weighed up to 13 tons (more than twice the weight of the modern African elephant) and provided humans with 90% of their food. The mean weight of all animals hunted by humans at that time was 3 tons, and elephant bones were found at nearly all sites up to 500,000 years ago. "Starting about 400,000 years ago, the humans who lived in our region -- early ancestors of the Neandertals and Homo sapiens, appear to have hunted mainly deer, along with some larger animals weighing almost a ton, such as wild cattle and horses. Finally, in sites inhabited by modern humans, from about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately 70% of the bones belong to gazelles -- an animal that weighs no more than 20-30kg. Other remains found at these later sites came mostly from fallow deer (about 20%), as well as smaller animals such as hares and turtles."

Dr. Ben-Dor: "Our findings enable us to propose a fascinating hypothesis on the development of humankind: humans always preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their environment, until these became very rare or extinct, forcing the prehistoric hunters to seek the next in size. As a result, to obtain the same amount of food, every human species appearing in the Southern Levant was compelled to hunt smaller animals than its predecessor, and consequently had to develop more advanced and effective technologies. Thus, for example, while spears were sufficient for Homo erectus to kill elephants at close range, modern humans developed the bow and arrow to kill fast-running gazelles from a distance." Prof. Barkai concludes: "We believe that our model is relevant to human cultures everywhere. Moreover, for the first time, we argue that the driving force behind the constant improvement in human technology is the continual decline in the size of game. Ultimately, it may well be that 10,000 years ago in the Southern Levant, animals became too small or too rare to provide humans with sufficient food, and this could be related to the advent of agriculture. In addition, we confirmed the hypothesis that the extinction of large animals was caused by humans -- who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting. We may therefore conclude that humans have always ravaged their environment but were usually clever enough to find solutions for the problems they had created -- from the bow and arrow to the agricultural revolution. The environment, however, always paid a devastating price."

Prof. Barkai: "In light of previous studies, our team proposed an original hypothesis that links the two questions: We think that large animals went extinct due to overhunting by humans, and that the change in diet and the need to hunt progressively smaller animals may have propelled the changes in humankind. In this study we tested our hypotheses in light of data from excavations in the Southern Levant covering several human species over a period of 1.5 million years." Jacob Dembitzer adds: "We considered the Southern Levant (Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Southwest Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) to be an 'archaeological laboratory' due to the density and continuity of prehistoric findings covering such a long period of time over a relatively small area -- a unique database unavailable anywhere else in the world. Excavations, which began 150 years ago, have produced evidence for the presence of humans, beginning with Homo erectus who arrived 1.5 million years ago, through the neandertals who lived here from an unknown time until they disappeared about 45,000 years ago, to modern humans (namely, ourselves) who came from Africa in several waves, starting around 180,000 years ago."

Findings indicate a continual decline in the size of game hunted by humans as their main food source -- from giant elephants 1-1.5 million years ago down to gazelles 10,000 years ago. According to the researchers, these findings paint an illuminating picture of the interaction between humans and the animals around them over the last 1.5 million years.

In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction (or until they became so rare that they disappeared from the archaeological record) and then went on to the next in size -- improving their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge. The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs, and this may be why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant at precisely that time.

A groundbreaking study by researchers from Tel Aviv University tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years -- as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

A new study tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years -- as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

From giant elephants to nimble gazelles: Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years, study finds

Multiple large-bodied species went extinct during the Pleistocene. Changing climates and/or human hunting are the main hypotheses used to explain these extinctions. We studied the causes of Pleistocene extinctions in the Southern Levant, and their subsequent effect on local hominin food spectra, by examining faunal remains in archaeological sites across the last 1.5 million years. We examined whether climate and climate changes, and/or human cultures, are associated with these declines. We recorded animal abundances published in the literature from 133 stratigraphic layers, across 58 Pleistocene and Early Holocene archaeological sites, in the Southern Levant. We used linear regressions and mixed models to assess the weighted mean mass of faunal assemblages through time and whether it was associated with temperature, paleorainfall, or paleoenvironment (C3 vs. C4 vegetation). We found that weighted mean body mass declined log-linearly through time. Mean hunted animal masses 10,500 years ago, were only 1.7% of those 1.5 million years ago. Neither body size at any period, nor size change from one layer to the next, were related to global temperature or to temperature changes. Throughout the Pleistocene, new human lineages hunted significantly smaller prey than the preceding ones. This suggests that humans extirpated megafauna throughout the Pleistocene, and when the largest species were depleted the next-largest were targeted. Technological advancements likely enabled subsequent human lineages to effectively hunt smaller prey replacing larger species that were hunted to extinction or until they became exceedingly rare.

We did not find strong evidence to suggest that climate, climatic fluctuations, rainfall, or vegetation over the last 1.5 million years, influenced the size of animals hunted and consumed by humans. Rather, mean body size declined linearly on a backdrop of multiple glacial-interglacial cycles. New human lineages subsisted on smaller prey than their predecessors and used more advanced tools to cope with hunting smaller prey. We suggest that hominins were likely the leading cause of Pleistocene

The Southern Levant, situated between modern day southern Syria via Israel to Sinai, has a spatiotemporally dense and continuous Paleolithic archaeological record offering a unique opportunity to detect faunal changes, including those predating the appearance of Homo sapiens (Bar-Yosef, 1980; Stutz, 2014). It is thus a suitable model to test long-term changes in the body mass of mammalian assemblages, in view of paleoclimates and changing human lineages, to decipher whether climate and/or humans are responsible for animal body size declines. The excellent archaeological record can further illuminate whether size declines are observed since hominins first colonized the region, or whether they start with the emergence of Homo sapiens (Louys et al., 2021), or are concentrated in the last glacial and its aftermath. We tested whether the size, and size changes, in hominin prey through the Pleistocene and early Holocene were related to time, the prevailing human lineages and cultures, paleoenvironment, and temperatures.

Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distributionAuthor links open overlay panelJacobDembitzeraRanBarkaibMikiBen-DorbShaiMeiriac

Each of the transitions has been a progress trap, and every escape into a new way of life has relied on more energy and more information. The authors note that civilizations can collapse, but not into a previous way of life. Farmers don’t go back to hunting and gathering; they desert their kings, priests, and cities and go back to small-scale farming. When the first global society of the early 1900s collapsed after the First World War, countries reverted to tariffs and relatively small-scale capitalism — and large-scale wars. If the Trump regime has its way, we’ll see a similar reversion. But Lewis and Maslin note that each transition arrives faster than the previous one, and a fifth transition could be upon us very soon. The Great Acceleration is accelerating. In the past 40 years, we have digitized 500 times the information coded biologically in the human species. We consume more energy than ever before, and our demand for it will increase by 48 per cent between 2012 and 2040. More people are travelling and exchanging more information. Accelerating into a wall? The authors argue that “The simultaneous rapid increases in the number of people, level of energy provision and quantity of information being generated, driven by the positive feedback loops of reinvestment of profit, and ever-growing scientific knowledge, suggest that our current mode of living is the least probable of our three future options. Such rapid, radical changes suggest that a collapse or a switch to a new mode of living is more likely.” If We Can’t Stop Hothouse Earth, We’d Better Learn to Live on It read more Climate change, Lewis and Maslin say, makes collapse look likely. Violent weather events create food shortages, population displacements, rebuilding costs, and economic dislocation as global supply chains break down. The problem for the Anthropocene, they argue, is “how to equalize resource consumption across the world within sustainable environmental limits.” This involves moving much faster to renewable energy sources and leaving the damn fossil fuels in the ground. It also involves carbon capture and sequestration, on a far greater scale than was accomplished by the destruction of the American indigenous civilizations. So we might plant new forests and burn their wood for energy while trapping and burying the carbon dioxide emissions.

Since 1945 this “Great Acceleration” has permitted the tripling of the human population and the crowding-out of the rest of the planet’s biosphere. Lewis and Maslin tell us: “Populations of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have declined by an average of 58 percent over the last forty years… On land, if you weighed all the large mammals on the planet today, just 3 percent of that mass is living in the wild. The rest is made up of human flesh, some 30 percent of the total, with domesticated animals that feed us contributing the remaining 67 percent.”

That led to the third transition: Europeans no longer needed on the farm became mill workers and coal miners. Scientific progress encouraged coal-fuelled industries and the telegraph spread information worldwide.

the conquest of the Americas was also a second human transition: an escape from agriculture to profit-driven enterprise: “Western Europeans began colonizing large areas of the rest of the world, creating the first globalized economy.” Lewis and Maslin call this the “Columbian exchange,” when humans, animals, plants, and microbes established themselves in places they had never been before. Energy from new foods, and information from printing, helped drive this new transition. Farming resumed in the Americas to feed and clothe the Europeans, using the labour of African slaves.

So the first transition, they say, was about 10,500 years ago with the beginning of agriculture. Some have said farming was our biggest mistake: it supported more of us, but at the cost of more disease, poor nutrition, grinding labour, and hierarchical societies that turned into warring empires. But we gained more energy from domesticating animals, and more information by the invention of writing. “Serendipitously,” the authors write, “farming created environmental conditions across our home planet that were unusually stable. This gave time for large-scale civilizations to develop.” That is, humans launched global warming not in the 1800s but with the first agriculture. By burning off forests to make farmland, we began to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — coincidentally, just as the earth was moving on schedule back into another glacial period. Over the next few thousand years farming spread across Asia, Africa, Europe, and much of the Americas, keeping the planet just a little too warm for a return of the glaciers.

The authors argue that the Europeans accidentally triggered the Little Ice Age by marching into Mexico and South America with guns, germs, and steel — especially germs. Diseases like smallpox and measles travelled on Indigenous trade routes far ahead of the Spanish and Portuguese. In the century after the conquest of Mexico, Lewis and Maslin claim, 50 million Indigenous people died of disease or slavery. In that truly genocidal century, farming civilizations collapsed from Brazil to North America. The survivors left the cities and temples they’d built and reverted to village-level farming. Forest and jungle took over the old empires before the Iberians rode in to take over the villages. Lewis and Maslin argue that as forests reoccupied the farmlands that had fed 50 million people, they absorbed enough carbon dioxide to trigger the Little Ice Age. Antarctic ice cores show a drop in global carbon dioxide starting in 1520 that did not begin to rise again until 1610.

We emerged from the apelike human phase thanks to fire and language. Together, those advantages made us apex predators: we could learn to hunt and forage from our elders and then gain more energy by cooking the food we gathered. After 200,000 years some of us still live that way, but it was what Lewis and Maslin call a “progress trap.” After modern humans left Africa, they effectively exterminated most of the larger mammals they encountered: the mammoths, giant sloths, sabre-tooth tigers, and countless others. In effect, they overshot their resources.

Lewis and Maslin argue that humanity has gone through four major transitions since we left 200,000 years of hunting and gathering. Each transition has been marked by a dramatic access to energy and an equally dramatic increase in information.

The debate might seem too trivial to care about, but as authors Simon Lewis and Mark A. Maslin demonstrate, the stakes are very high indeed. They show that scientists since the 18th century have recognized human influence on the face of the earth. What we have learned since then, and especially in the past 50 years, shows our influence has grown only greater; we just don’t want to admit it, because then we’d have to try to clean up the mess we’ve made.

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

Non-uniform tropical forest responses to the ‘Columbian Exchange’ in the Neotropics and Asia-Pacific

Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation

Realisable service level efficiency improvements could38reduce upstream energy demand by 45% in 2050.

To enhance well-being, people demand5services and not primary energy and physical resources per se. Focusing on demand for services and6the different social and political roles people play broadens the participation in climate action.

The richest 10 percent accounted for over half (52 percent) of the emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015. The richest one percent were responsible for 15 percent of emissions during this time – more than all the citizens of the EU and more than twice that of the poorest half of humanity (7 percent).

And with hope, we can change the world.

Maybe it’s time we talk about it?

Gandhi once said, “Anything that exists is possible.

It’s as if we need the gravitational pull of both worlds to keep us on track, locked on a good and righteous path. Without both worlds pulling on us, we would crash into one, or simply lose our way, hurtling through the universe on our own, intersecting nothing, helping no one.

biophilia

It is now impossible for the world’s leaders to say that they “didn’t know” that this was going on, and that we didn’t have the power to prevent it all along. We scientists have been working hard, collecting evidence, writing reports, and presenting it all to the world’s leaders and the broader public. No one can honestly say that we haven’t been warning the world for decades.

feelings of gloom, and serious bouts of anxiety and depression, are common and becoming more serious.

The Space Between Two Worlds

Milkoreit et al. (23) propose a common definition of social tipping points (STPs) as points “within an SES at which a small quantitative change inevitably triggers a non-linear change in the social component of the SES, driven by self-reinforcing positive-feedback mechanisms, that inevitably and often irreversibly lead to a qualitatively different state of the social system.” There are historical examples of dynamic social spreading effects leading to a large self-amplification of small interventions: For example, the writings of one man, Martin Luther, injected through newly available printing technology into a public ready for such change, triggered the worldwide establishment of Protestant churches (24). An example in the field of climate policy is the introduction of tariffs, subsidies, and mandates to incentivize the growth of renewable energy production. This has led to a substantial system response in the form of mutually reinforcing market growth and exponential technology cost improvement (25, 26).In this paper, we examine a number of potential “social tipping elements” (STEs) for decarbonization (27, 28) that represent specific subdomains of the planetary social-economic system. Tipping of these subsystems could be triggered by “social tipping interventions” (STIs) that could contribute to rapid transition of the world system into a state of net zero anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050

In the dead end It is just as nonsensical To speak of being totally interconnected As it is To speak of being totally separate . Neither is possible In this world as it is Each is an expression of psychological attachment To an unrealistic ideal A rock or a hard place Egoic fortitude or collective concrete Where all is at standstill . To let go of one To hold on to the other Is no way to go . Each needs to be loosened With infinite grace If life is to flow And love is to grow

TogetherNeither one or otherNor all oneAlone

IN SUMMARY:- we will have NO HOPE of release from the iniquities, paradoxes, inconsistencies and falsities of objective rationalisation until and unless we recognise the receptive influence of omnipresent space and the responsive flow of energetic information around every body. ONLY THEN will a truly compassionate and regenerative way of life become possible.

A love triangle in the making of heartfelt experienceAt the seat of all knowingIn the wisdom of not knowingThe natural inclusion of being in becomingThe in-breath in out-breathIn common passion

This is why becoming aware of natural inclusion matters:- http://www.spanglefish.com/exploringnaturalinclusion/index.asp?pageid=701959Core Values & Principles of Natural Inclusion(ality) — the mutual inclusion of intangible spatial stillness and energetic motion in all material forms (Watercolour on paper by Alan Rayner, 30/11/2021)See this simple illustration:- https://youtu.be/3Xu0lg0vz5c

Abandonment of the abandonment of life’s purpose

Abandonment of the abandonment of mechanistic focus

That cuts what is in here apart from what is out there

Now all I had learned on my travelsFell into a new kind of placeEven maths and hard sciencesNo longer at oddsWith Art or HumanityBut serving to showA side of the storyInsufficient to stand on its own

You ask me who you are; To tell a story you can live your life by; A tail that has some point; That you can see; So that you no longer; Have to feel so pointless; Because what you see is what you get; If you don’t get the meaning of my silence; Because you ain’t seen nothing yet

Intangible, invisibleYet here, there and everywhereEternallyWithout limit

Burning in the Endless Freedom of Space

Within a cage of fixed boundaries

For a change of career

which often come into my mind ‘out of the blue’ rather than deliberate intent.

contaminating interference

Between selfish genetic survival machines

But, there was a problem. To study biology as a ‘science’ was not the same as experiencing ‘life in the wild’ in the caring companionship of others. If anything, it was wild life’s antithesis:- a competition to be first or best while following strict codes of practice designed to eliminate subjective human ‘error’ and conform to an unquestionable norm prescribed by prior authority.

When I was around eight years old, having recently made the trip with my family back ‘home’ to London from where I was born and lived my earliest years in Nairobi, Kenya, I contracted measles, the first of many childhood illnesses that confined me to bed and disrupted my schooling. My father sat by my bedside and read stories to me about the planets and outer space, infecting me with his love of scientific exploration. I was given books to read about natural history and I learned to identify the garden birds in the tree that grew outside my bedroom window. I made watercolour paintings of these and others that I had never seen from illustrations on the pages of ‘Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds’. Then, whenever I was well enough, I was taken out into the countryside and spent many happy days bird-spotting for myself. I was taken on my first ‘fungus foray’ to a place called Burnham Beeches, west of London. It was led by the redoubtable figure of a man called Bayard Hora and I was awestruck by what I many years later described as ‘The Fountains of the Forest’ as they erupted from ground and trees in manifold shapes and colours, not least the legendary ‘fly agaric’ (Amanita muscaria), the ‘parasol’ (Macrolepiota procera) and numerous ‘brittle gills’ (Russula spp). I found that their Latin names came easily to me and I delighted in showing off my recall to peers and teachers.

but suppressed through a series of abandonments made in a vain effort to conform with societal expectations.

Within 2 years, I became explicitly aware, in a visionary moment, of what I now call ‘natural inclusion’. I

I came to feel that either something was foundationally wrong with the culture or something was foundationally wrong with me. It was and is a very insecure feeling. Sensing that I had voyaged very far from home, I abandoned ship in mid-ocean. And drifted.

But didn’t know how to express

Perhaps three major transitions

first i think it's important to remember that net zero is a new phrase it's it's nothing we haven't had newton this language of net zero this framing of net zero is is something just appeared just in 00:11:54 the last few years if you look at the sr 1.5 report 2018 in the summary for policy makers then um it's mentioned 16 times if you look at the ar-5 the previous report from the ipcc and their synthesis report 00:12:06 for the summary for policy makers it's not mentioned once you look in the the committee on climate uk committee on climate change's sixth budget report and it's it's a long report 427 pages 00:12:18 it's on numerous times on every page it's somewhere between it's referred to somewhere between three thousand and five thousand times they use the expression net zero look at the previous fifth budget report from the committee on 00:12:31 climate change in 2015 it's not mentioned once now it is true to say that the language of net cumulative missions in various ways has been referred to if you like within the science but the appealing translation and the 00:12:44 ubiquitous use of net zero by everyone is a very new phenomena and one i think that we've taken on board unproblematically because it allows us to to basically um avoid near-term action on climate 00:12:57 change and we can hide all sorts behind it so it's important to recognize that net zero net zero 2050 net zero 20 20 45 for sweden firstly this is not based on the concept of a total carbon budget 00:13:10 and it's interesting note that the uk previously had legislation that was based on the total carbon budget for the uk as i mean i think the budget was too large but it was deemed to be an appropriate contribution to staying below 2 degrees centigrade but now 00:13:24 that's gone now we simply have this net zero 2050 framing so this whole language it moves the debate from what we need to do today which is what carbon budgets force us to 00:13:36 face it moves it off to some far-off point 2045 or 2050 which we have to think about that in which which policymakers in sweden and the uk will still be policymakers in 2045 and 50 they'll either be dead 00:13:49 or retired as indeed with the scientists that are behind a lot of this net zero language so it's in that sense it's we are passing that net zero is a is a generational passing of the challenge of the buck um to our children and our children's 00:14:02 children it's also worth bearing in mind that net zero typically assumes some sort of multi-layered form of substitution between different greenhouse gases so carbon dioxide for me thing between different sources 00:14:15 carbon dioxide from a car can be compared with agricultural fertilizer and nitrous oxide emissions but these these are very different things but across decades a flight carbon dioxide 00:14:27 from a flight we take today can be considered in relation to carbon capture in a tree that's planted in 2050 that's growing in 2070. this assumption within net zero that a ton is a ton is a ton regardless of different 00:14:40 chemistries different atmospheric lifetimes of the gases in the atmosphere and and different levels of certainty and indeed levels of risk and hugely different things this is this is incredibly dangerous and again it's another 00:14:52 it's another thing that makes net zero attractive and appealing in a machiavellian way because it allows us to hide all sorts of things behind this language of net zero the other thing about net zero is that 00:15:07 perhaps with no exceptions but typically anyway it relies on huge planetary scale carbon dioxide removal cdrs often well that's the latest acronym i'm sure there'll be another one out in the next year or two 00:15:20 um carbon dioxide removal captures two important elements first negative emission technologies nets as they're often referred to and second nature-based solutions um nbs so these two approaches one is sort of 00:15:32 using technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the other one is using various nature-based approaches like planting trees or peat bog restoration and things like this that are claimed to absorb carbon dioxide 00:15:45 and just to get a sense of the scale of negative emissions that's assumed in almost every single 1.5 and 2 degree scenario at the global level but indeed at national levels as well we're typically assuming hundreds of 00:15:57 billions of tons of carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere most of it is post 2050 and quite a lot of it is beyond 2100 again look at those dates who in the scientific community that's 00:16:09 promoting these who in the policy realm that's promoting these is going to be still at work working in 2015 and 2100 some of the early career researchers possibly some of the younger policymakers but most of us will 00:16:21 will say be dead or um or retired by them and just have another flavor if those numbers don't mean a lot to you what we're assuming here is that technologies that are today at best small pilot schemes will be 00:16:34 ramped up in virtually every single scenario to something that's that's akin to the current um global oil and gas industry that sort of size now that would be fine if it's one in ten scenarios or you know five and a 00:16:47 hundred scenarios but when virtually every scenario is doing that it demonstrates the deep level of systemic bias that we've got now that we've all bought into this language of net zero so it's not to outline my position on 00:16:59 carbon dioxide removal because it's often said that i'm opposed to it and that's simply wrong um i i would like just to see a well-funded research and development programs into negative emission technologies nature-based solutions and so forth 00:17:12 and potentially deploy them if they meet stringent sustainability criteria and i'll just reiterate that stringent sustainability criteria but we should mitigate we should cut our emissions today assuming that these carbon dioxide removal techniques of one 00:17:25 sort or another do not work at scale and another important factor to bear in mind here and there's a lot of double counting that gotham goes on here as far as i can tell anyway is that we're going to require some level of carbon 00:17:36 dioxide removal because there's going to be a lot of residual greenhouse gas emissions not you know not co2 principally methane and n2o nitroxites and fertilizer use um we're going to come from agriculture anyway if you're going to feed 9 billion 00:17:49 people now quite what those numbers are there's a lot of uncertainty but somewhere probably around 6 to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent every single year so we'll have to find some way of compensating for the warming from feeding the world's population and certainly there are plenty of things we 00:18:01 can do with our food eating habits and with our agricultural practices but nonetheless it still looks like there will be a lot of emissions from the agricultural sector and therefore we need to have real zero emissions 00:18:14 from energy we cannot be using all of these other techniques nets mbs and so forth to allow us to carry on with our high energy use net zero has become if you like a policy 00:18:28 framework for all and some argue and there's been some question discussion in some of the um journalist papers around climate change recently saying well actually that's what it's one of its real strengths is it brings everyone together 00:18:40 but in my view it it's so vague that it seriously undermines the need for immediate and deep cuts and emissions so i can see some merit in a in an approach that does bring people together but if it sells everything out in that process then i think it's actually more 00:18:53 dangerous than it is of benefit and i think net zero very much falls into that category i just like to use the uk now as an example of why i come to that conclusion

it's really worth reading some of the things 00:18:00 that they're saying on climate change now and so what about 2 degrees C that's the 46th pathway that's the thousand Gigaton pathway the two degrees so you 00:18:13 look at the gap but between those two just an enormous that's where where no English edding we're all part of this and that's where we know we have to go from the science and that's where we keep telling other parts of the world begun to try to achieve the problem with 00:18:26 that and there's an engineer this is quite depressing in some respects is that this part at the beginning where we are now is too early for low-carbon supply you cannot build your way out of this with bits of engineering kit and 00:18:39 that is quite depressing because that leaves us with the social implications of what you have to do otherwise but I just want to test that assumption just think about this there's been a lot of discussion I don't know about within Iceland but in the UK quite a lot me 00:18:51 environmentalist have swapped over saying they think nuclear power is the answer or these one of the major answers to this and I'm I remain agnostic about nuclear power yeah it's very low carbon five to 15 grams of carbon dioxide per 00:19:03 kilowatt hour so it's it's similar to renewables and five to ten times lower than carbon capture and storage so nuclear power is very low carbon it has lots of other issues but it's a very low carbon but let's put a bit of 00:19:15 perspective on this we totally we consume in total about a hundred thousand ten watts hours of energy around the globe so just a very large amount of energy lots of energy for those of you I'm not familiar with these units global electricity consumption is 00:19:30 about 20,000 tarantella patelliday hours so 20% of lots of energy so that's our electricity nuclear provides about 11 a half percent of the electricity around the globe of what we consume of our 00:19:42 final energy consumption so that means nuclear provides about two-and-a-half percent of the global energy demand about two and a half percent that's from 435 nuclear power stations provide two 00:19:56 and a half percent of the world's energy demand if you wanted to provide 25% of the world's energy demand you'd probably need something in the region of three or four thousand new nuclear power stations to be built in the next 30 00:20:08 years three or four thousand new nuclear power stations to make a decent dent in our energy consumption and that assumes our energy consumptions remain static and it's not it's going up we're building 70 so just to put some sense 00:20:21 honest you hear this with every technology whether it's wind wave tidal CCS all these big bits of it technology these are going to solve the problem you cannot build them fast enough to get away from the fact that we're going to 00:20:34 blow our carbon budget and that's a really uncomfortable message because no one wants to hear that because the repercussions of that are that we have to reduce our energy demand so we have to reduce demand now now it is really 00:20:48 important the supply side I'm not saying it's not important it is essential but if we do not do something about the men we will not be able to hold to to probably even three degrees C and that's a global analysis and the iron would be 00:21:00 well we have signed up repeatedly on the basis of equity and when we say that we normally mean the poorer parts of the world would be allowed to we'll be able to peak their emissions later than we will be able to in the West that seems a 00:21:13 quite a fair thing that probably but no one would really argue I think against the idea of poor parts the world having a bit more time and space before they move off fossil fuels because there that links to their welfare to their improvements that use of energy now 00:21:27 let's imagine that the poor parts the world the non-oecd countries and I usually use the language of non annex 1 countries for those people who are familiar with that sort of IPCC language let's imagine that those parts of the 00:21:39 world including Indian China could peak their emissions by 2025 that is hugely challenging I think is just about doable if we show some examples in the West but I think it's just about past possible as 00:21:51 the emissions are going up significantly they could peak by 2025 before coming down and if we then started to get a reduction by say 2028 2029 2030 of 6 to 8 percent per annum which again is a 00:22:02 massive reduction rate that is a big challenge for poor parts of the world so I'm not letting them get away with anything here that's saying if they did all of that you can work out what carbon budget they would use up over the century and then you know what total carbon budget is for two degree 00:22:16 centigrade and you can say what's left for us the wealthy parts of the world that seems quite a fair way of looking at this and if you do it like that what's that mean for us that means we'd have to have and I'm redoing this it now 00:22:28 and I think it's really well above 10% because this is based on a paper in 2011 which was using data from 2009 to 10 so I think this number is probably been nearly 13 to 15 percent mark now but about 10 percent per annum reduction 00:22:40 rate in emissions year on year starting preferably yesterday that's a 40 percent reduction in our total emissions by 2018 just think their own lives could we reduce our emissions by 40 percent by 00:22:52 2018 I'm sure we could I'm sure we'll choose not to but sure we could do that but at 70 percent reduction by 2020 for 20-25 and basically would have to be pretty much zero carbon emissions not just from electricity from everything by 00:23:06 2030 or 2035 that sort of timeframe that just this that's just the simple blunt maths that comes out of the carbon budgets and very demanding reduction rates from poorer parts of the world now 00:23:19 these are radical emission reduction rates that we cannot you say you cannot build your way out or you have to do it with with how we consume our energy in the short term now that looks too difficult well what about four degrees six that's what you hear all the time that's too difficult so what about four 00:23:31 degrees C because actually the two degrees C we're heading towards is probably nearer three now anyway so I'm betting on your probabilities so let's think about four degrees C well what it gives you as a larger carbon budget and we all like that because it means I can 00:23:43 attend more fancy international conferences and we can come on going on rock climbing colleges in my case you know we can all count on doing than living the lives that we like so we quite like a larger carbon budget low rates of mitigation but what are the 00:23:54 impacts this is not my area so I'm taking some work here from the Hadley Centre in the UK who did some some analysis with the phone and Commonwealth Office but you're all probably familiar with these sorts of things and there's a range of these impacts that are out there a four degree C global average 00:24:07 means you're going to much larger averages on land because mostly over most of the planet is covered in oceans and they take longer to warm up but think during the heat waves what that might play out to mean so during times 00:24:18 when we're already under stress in our societies think of the European heat wave I don't know whether it got to Iceland or not and in 2003 well it was it was quite warm in the West Europe too warm it's probably much nicer 00:24:31 in Iceland and there were twenty to thirty thousand people died across Europe during that period now add eight degrees on top of that heat wave and it could be a longer heat wave and you start to think that our infrastructure start to break down the 00:24:45 cables that were used to bring power to our homes to our fridges to our water pumps those cables are underground and they're cooled by soil moisture as the soil moisture evaporates during a prolonged heatwave those cables cannot 00:24:56 carry as much power to our fridges and our water pumps so our fridges and water pumps can no longer work some of them will be now starting to break down so the food and our fridges will be perishing at the same time that our neighbors food is perishing so you live 00:25:08 in London eight million people three days of food in the whole city and it's got a heat wave and the food is anybody perishing in the fridges so you think you know bring the food from the ports but the similar problems might be happening in Europe and anyway the tarmac for the roads that we have in the 00:25:19 UK can't deal with those temperatures so it's melting so you can't bring the food up from the ports and the train lines that we put in place aren't designed for those temperatures and they're buckling so you can't bring the trains up so you've got 8 million people in London 00:25:31 you know in an advanced nation that is start to struggle with those sorts of temperature changes so even in industrialized countries you can imagine is playing out quite negatively a whole sequence of events not looking particulate 'iv in China look at the 00:25:44 building's they're putting up there and some of this Shanghai and Beijing and so forth they've got no thermal mass these buildings are not going to be good with high temperatures and the absolutely big increases there and in some parts of the states could be as high as 10 or 12 00:25:56 degrees temperature rises these are all a product of a 4 degree C average temperature

The world's demand for noble gases will likely concentrate on China, Sundqvist added, and the county will "get a good price for [its] product."

Moscow began restricting exports of inert, or "noble" gases, including neon, argon and helium to "unfriendly" countries at the end of May, according to a report by Russian state news agency TASS. All three gases are used to produce the tiny electronic chips found in a raft of consumer products, from smartphones to washing machines to cars, and which have been in critically short supply for months.

Chipmakers brace for more trouble as Russia limits exports of rare gases

The experts were asked to independently provide a comprehensive list of levers and leverage points for global sustainability, based on the potential for disproportionate effects to address and reverse the deterioration of nature while meeting societal needs. They were asked to consider actions by the full range of possible actors, and both top-down and bottom-up effects across various sectors. The collection of all responses became our initial set of levers and leverage points. Ensuing processes were then informed by five linked conceptualizations of transformative change identified by the experts (Chan et al., 2019): ● Complexity theory and leverage points of transformation (Levin et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2007; Meadows, 2009); ● Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2003; Folke et al., 2010); ● A multi-level perspective for transformative change (Geels, 2002); ● System innovations and their dynamics (Smits, Kuhlmann, & Teubal, 2010; OECD, 2015) and ● Learning sustainability through ‘real-world experiments’ (Geels, Berkhout, & van Vuuren, 2016; Gross & Krohn, 2005; Hajer, 2011).

(a) What are the key levers and leverage points in social systems that might drive transformative change towards sustainability? (b) How are these derived from and perceived within and across academic literatures and in practice? (c) How might the levers and leverage points work together?

An important step towards such widespread changes in action would be to unleash latent capabilities and relational values (including virtues and principles regarding human relationships involving nature, such as responsibility, stewardship and care

In contrast to the unhelpful but common argument about whether ‘the problem’ is population growth or consumption, it is not novel to argue that the problem is both—plus waste. Because of ongoing need for progress on all three, this point of intervention is nonetheless key. Unlike research on impact as a function of population, affluence and technology (1 = PAT), we point to strong opportunities to decouple affluence from material consumption [leverage point 1]. We also side with those who argue that more efficient production is insufficient, and that volumes of production and consumption are key variables

need for transformative changes in consumption patterns is particularly pertinent for wealthier nations and the rising global middle-class, given higher per capita levels of material consumption and aspirational effects on others. In contrast, for the most disadvantaged people in the world, material consumption must increase to meet multiple SDGs including eradicating poverty and hunger (McMichael et al., 2007); this may also help reduce unsustainably high rates of population growth in many regions if coupled with education and empowerment of women

Embracing visions of a good life that go beyond those entailing high levels of material consumption is central to many pathways. Key drivers of the overexploitation of nature are the currently popular vision that a good life involves happiness generated through material consumption [leverage point 2] and the widely accepted notion that economic growth is the most important goal of society, with success based largely on income and demonstrated purchasing power (Brand & Wissen, 2012). However, as communities around the world show, a good quality of life can be achieved with significantly lower environmental impacts than is normal for many affluent social strata (Jackson, 2011; Røpke, 1999). Alternative relational conceptions of a good life with a lower material impact (i.e. those focusing on the quality and characteristics of human relationships, and harmonious relationships with non-human nature) might be promoted and sustained by political settings that provide the personal, material and social (interpersonal) conditions for a good life (such as infrastructure, access to health or anti-discrimination policies), while leaving to individuals the choice about their actual way of living (Jackson, 2011; Nussbaum, 2001, 2003). In particular, status or social recognition need not require high levels of consumption, even though in some societies, status is currently related to consumption (Røpke, 1999).

trust in neighbours, access to care, opportunities for creative expression, recognition

In this respect, relational notions of a good quality of life, such as ‘buen vivir’ from Latin America (D'Alisa, Demaria, & Kallis, 2014; Gudynas, 2011; Hopkins, 2008), may be key to achieving long-term sustainable outcomes

pathways examined here addressed a nexus with six foci of analysis, which were chosen to represent important nature-related challenges to sustainable development and to reflect the underlying bodies of literature (e.g. food production is split between the land and the oceans). These six were considered separately while attending to interdependencies: ● Feeding humanity without deteriorating nature on land; ● Meeting climate goals while maintaining nature and nature's contributions to people; ● Conserving and restoring nature on land while contributing positively to human well-being; ● Maintaining freshwater for nature and humanity; ● Balancing food provision from oceans and coasts with nature protection; and ● Resourcing growing cities while maintaining the nature that underpins them.

nexus analysis

hese levers and leverage points emerged from consideration of six linked focal issues, including producing food, protecting biodiversity (both on land and in the water), maintaining freshwater supplies and mitigating climate change, all while providing for our growing cities (Aguiar et al., in review; Chan et al., 2019). It thus draws upon a comprehensive ‘nexus’ analysis

Two linked concepts are relevant to prioritizing indirect drivers: leverage points (where to intervene to change social–ecological systems) and levers (the means of realizing these changes, such as governance approaches and interventions). Both concepts are intended to identify which changes, for which social variables, are likely to have disproportionately large positive effects on social–ecological systems

Given that the fate of nature and humanity depends on transformative change of the human enterprise (IPBES, 2019a, 2019b), indirect drivers clearly play a central role.

Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability

indirect drivers have yet to receive comprehensive directed attention in the context of their impacts on nature and its contributions to people, despite recognition of their importance in some literature oriented towards sustainability transitions or transformations

a safe climate and a healthy biosphere require profound changes to direct drivers, such as phasing out fossil fuels or halting deforestation. However, direct drivers resist intervention because they underpin our current economies and governance institutions (Ehrlich & Pringle, 2008). Thus, interventions often spark considerable opposition from vested interests who benefit from the status quo, including its prevalent externalization of costs.

To address these complex social–ecological problems, our focus must expand beyond the direct drivers of change (i.e. processes directly affecting nature, land/sea-use change, direct exploitation, climate change, pollution, invasive species, etc., Brondízio et al., 2019; Díaz et al., 2015). In particular, our focus must include indirect drivers (including formal and informal institutions, such as norms, values, rules and governance systems, demographic and sociocultural factors, and economic and technological factors

It is also clear that interventions in pursuit of just a few goals risk having negative effects on others and missing opportunities to realize synergies and manage trade-offs (Palomo et al., 2019; Singh et al., 2018; Tallis et al., 2018). Examples abound: mitigating climate change via geoengineering could threaten other sustainability targets via unequal distribution of costs and international conflict (Gregory, Satterfield, & Hasell, 2016; Keith, 2000). Similarly, intensive food production poses risks to biodiversity (Beckmann et al., 2019), fuels nutrient run-off that can trigger marine hypoxic zones and associated fisheries losses (Donner & Kucharik, 2008) and demands so much water that hydrological cycles and freshwater ecosystems can be undermined (Davis et al., 2015). Given such interacting effects, how might interventions address a broader suite of sustainability goals?

New insights on infant word learning

"The idea is that over long periods of time, traces of memory for visual objects are being built up slowly in the neocortex," Clerkin said. "When a word is spoken at a specific moment and the memory trace is also reactivated close in time to the name, this mechanism allows the infants to make a connection rapidly." The researchers said their work also has significant implications for machine learning researchers who are designing and building artificial intelligence to recognize object categories. That work, which focuses on how names teach categories, requires massive amounts of training for machine learning systems to even approach human object recognition. The implication of the infant pathway in this study suggests a new approach to machine learning, in which training is structured more like the natural environment, and object categories are learned first without labels, after which they are linked to labels.

"If you are held up at gunpoint, your brain secretes a bunch of the stress neurotransmitter norepinephrine, akin to an adrenaline rush," he said. "This changes the electrical discharge pattern in specific circuits in your emotional brain, centered in the amygdala, which in turn transitions the brain to a state of heightened arousal that facilitates memory formation, fear memory, since it's scary. This is the same process, we think, that goes awry in PTSD and makes it so you cannot forget traumatic experiences."

So, if some of you are still feeling a bit too certain, I'd like to do this one. So, if we have the lights down. And what we have here -- Can everyone see 25 purple surfaces on your left, 00:15:03 and 25, call it yellowish, surfaces on your right? So now, what I want to do, I'm going to put the middle nine surfaces here under yellow illumination, by simply putting a filter behind them. Now you can see that changes the light that's coming through there, right? Because now the light is going through a yellowish filter and then a purplish filter. I'm going to do the opposite on the left here. 00:15:31 I'm going to put the middle nine under a purplish light. Now, some of you will have noticed that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right, or your left, is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right. Agreed? Yes? Okay. So they are physically the same. 00:15:56 Let's pull the covers off. Now remember -- you know that the middle nine are exactly the same. Do they look the sa

the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is. We can't. Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past. 00:11:53 And how we see is by continually redefining normality. So, how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently? Well, one of the ways we do it in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound, and we enable people to hear their visual world. And they can navigate the world using their ears. 00:12:22 Here's David on the right, and he's holding a camera. On the left is what his camera sees. And you'll see there's a faint line going across that image. That line is broken up into 32 squares. In each square, we calculate the average color. And then we just simply translate that into sound. And now he's going to turn around, close his eyes, and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed. 00:12:47 (Continuous sound) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) Beau Lotto: He finds it. Amazing, right? So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired, but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world. But we can also do something else. We can also make music with color. 00:13:20 So, working with kids, they created images, thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them. And then we translated these images. And this is one of those images. And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra. And this is what it sounds like. (Electronic representation of orchestral music) 00:14:06 So, a six-year-old child. Okay? Now, what does all this mean? What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature, okay? We're not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up. We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment, by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical.

Even the beautiful bumblebee, with its mere one million brain cells, which is 250 times fewer cells than you have in one retina, sees illusions

also true for complex perceptions of motion. So, here we have -- let's turn this around -- a diamond. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold it here, 00:08:53 and I'm going to spin it. And for all of you, you'll see it probably spinning this direction. Now I want you to keep looking at it. Move your eyes around, blink, maybe close one eye. And suddenly it will flip, and start spinning the opposite direction. Yes? Raise your hand if you got that. Yes? Keep blinking. Every time you blink, it will switch. So I can ask you, which direction is it rotating? 00:09:20 How do you know? Your brain doesn't know, because both are equally likely. So depending on where it looks, it flips between the two possibilities

What is color for?" And instead of telling you, I'll just show you. What you see here is a jungle scene, 00:02:08 and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect. Now, can any of you see the predator that's about to jump out at you? And if you haven't seen it yet, you're dead, right? (Laughter) Can anyone see it? Anyone? No? Now let's see the surfaces according to the quality of light that they reflect. And now you see it. So, color enables us to see 00:02:32 the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect. But what you've just done is in many respects mathematically impossible. Why? Because, as Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world, not only the color of objects, 00:02:56 but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. You vary any one of those parameters, and you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye. This is a huge problem, because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources

Here we have that exact same illusion. We have two identical tiles on the left, one in a dark surround, one in a light surround. And the same thing over on the right. Now, I'll reveal those two scenes, but I'm not going to change anything within those boxes, except their meaning. 00:07:11 And see what happens to your perception. Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark, right? Whereas on the right, the two tiles look nearly the same. And yet there is still one on a dark surround, and one on a light surround. Why? Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye 00:07:35 as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective -- just the laws of physics. So you see it that way. Whereas on the right, the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light. If they're under the same light reflecting the same amount of light to your eye, then they must be equally reflective. So you see it that way. Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions.

let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality, even at the simplest thing the brain does, which is color. 00:05:29 So if I could have the lights down up here. I want you to first notice that those two desert scenes are physically the same. One is simply the flipping of the other. Now I want you to look at that dot between the green and the red. And I want you to stare at that dot. Don't look anywhere else. We're going to look at it for about 30 seconds, which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk. (Laughter) But I really want you to learn. 00:05:55 And I'll tell you -- don't look anywhere else -- I'll tell you what's happening in your head. Your brain is learning, and it's learning that the right side of its visual field is under red illumination; the left side of its visual field is under green illumination. That's what it's learning. Okay? Now, when I tell you, I want you to look at the dot between the two desert scenes. So why don't you do that now? (Laughter) 00:06:21 Can I have the lights up again? I take it from your response they don't look the same anymore, right? (Applause) Why? Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light, and the left one is still under green light. That's your new normal. Okay? So, what does this mean for context? It means I can take two identical squares, put them in light and dark surrounds, and the one on the dark surround looks lighter than on the light surround. 00:06:47 What's significant is not simply the light and dark surrounds that matter. It's what those light and dark surrounds meant for your behavior in the past.

we see by learning to see. The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information, 00:04:38 and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world. We're very aware of this in the form of more cognitive attributes, like language. I'm going to give you some letter strings, and I want you to read them out for me, if you can. Audience: "Can you read this?" "You are not reading this." "What are you reading?" Beau Lotto: "What are you reading?" Half the letters are missing, right? 00:05:04 There's no a priori reason why an "H" has to go between that "W" and "A." But you put one there. Why? Because in the statistics of your past experience, it would have been useful to do so. So you do so again. And yet you don't put a letter after that first "T." Why? Because it wouldn't have been useful in the past. So you don't do it again.

There's no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters.

Imagine that this is the back of your eye, okay? And these are two projections from the world. 00:03:22 They're identical in every single way. Identical in shape, size, spectral content. They are the same, as far as your eye is concerned. And yet they come from completely different sources. The one on the right comes from a yellow surface, in shadow, oriented facing the left, viewed through a pinkish medium. 00:03:48 The one on the left comes from an orange surface, under direct light, facing to the right, viewed through sort of a bluish medium. Completely different meanings, giving rise to the exact same retinal information. And yet it's only the retinal information that we get. So how on Earth do we even see? So if you remember anything in this next 18 minutes, remember this: 00:04:13 that the light that falls onto your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything. And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally.

(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) 00:07:16 (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) Beau Lotto: Ah, how wonderful, right? So right now, you're probably all feeling, at some level or another, awe.

one of the best ways to diversify complexify your search space your assumptions is through experience and one of the great ways to 00:01:18 do that is actually through technology so we think about technology and most of our technologies are good technologies but what defines a great technology what is a transformative technology 00:01:30 the good technologies are the ones that enable us to do what we can already do faster easier more efficient and that's because so much of our society focuses on efficiency it's about maximizing performance right 00:01:42 we're great engineers but we're crap philosophers right we're very good at making things more efficient but that's only one side of innovation we also need the other side of innovation which is creativity 00:01:55 right and so the best technologies are the ones in my view that make the invisible visible they enable us to see things that we can never have seen before 00:02:06 they create assumptions they expand our space of assumptions

if the process of seeing differently is the process of first and foremost having awareness of the fact that everything you do has an assumption 00:00:14 figure out what those are and by the way the best person to reveal your own assumptions to you is not yourself it's usually someone else hence the power of diversity the importance of diversity 00:00:26 because not only does that diversity reveal your own assumptions to you but it can also complexify your assumptions right because we know from complex systems theory that the best solution is most likely to 00:00:40 exist within a complex search space not a simple search space simply because of statistics right so whereas a simple search space is more adaptable it's more easily to adapt it's 00:00:52 less likely to contain the best solution so what we really want is a diversity of possibilities a diversity of assumptions which diverse groups for instance enable

Some of the more plausible specifications of parameters and functional formsconcerning damages, technologies and distribution can generate results more akin to thoseof the international consensus than to those of Nordhaus. But such sensitivity make theresults of very limited usefulness.

esults over the past two decades have increasinglyshown that the “optimal” trajectory and the SCC are extraordinarily sensitive3 to the precisespecification of the model (Neelin et al., 2010; Budolfson et al., 2017; Gillingham et al.,2018).

Efforts to incorporate, even in a limited way, some of these issues and introduce moresevere damage functions and different assumptions on technology or distribution generatemarkedly different conclusions about the optimum trajectories.

the world has been much morefocused than the IAMs on a different set of issues, the risks of catastrophic consequences.These potentially catastrophic risks are in large measure assumed away in the IAMs.

Designing policy for climate change requires analyses which integrate the interrelationshipbetween the economy and the environment. We argue that, despite their dominance in theeconomics literature and influence in public discussion and policymaking, the methodologyemployed by Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) rests on flawed foundations, which becomeparticularly relevant in relation to the realities of the immense risks and challenges of climatechange, and the radical changes in our economies that a sound and effective response require. Weidentify a set of critical methodological problems with the IAMs which limit their usefulness anddiscuss the analytic foundations of an alternative approach that is more capable of providinginsights into how best to manage the transition to net-zero emissions

THE ECONOMICS OF IMMENSE RISK, URGENT ACTION AND RADICAL CHANGE:TOWARDS NEW APPROACHES TO THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

2020 Economic State of British Columbia'sForest Sector

Before Maslow’s Hierarchy: The Whitewashing of Indigenous Knowledge

Why is it nearly invisible?

Those communities that reject business as usual and cut their energy spending and all the materialist values that go with it, just might survive the long emergency and write a different ending to this story.

What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds.”

Moreover, civilization has used renewables not to reduce fossil fuel demand but to augment energy consumption.

“a sustainable retreat.”

This promise does not correspond with reality either. Even if the global fleet of internal combustion vehicles (about 1.5 billion) were to stop growing, “decarbonizing 50 per cent of it by 2030 would require that we manufacture about 600 million new electric passenger vehicles in nine years — that’s about 66 million a year, more than the total global production of all cars in 2019. In addition, the electricity to run those cars would have to come from zero-carbon sources. What are the chances of that?”

An in-depth 2021 study by Simon Michaux at the Geological Survey of Finland illustrated this inconvenient reality. It calculated that to replace a single coal-fired powered plant of average size producing seven terawatt-hours per year of energy would require the construction of 213 average sized solar farms or 87 wind turbine array facilities. Renewables just have to work harder. The global economy currently operates 46,423 power stations running on all types of energy, but mostly fossil fuels noted Michaux. To green the sector up and still keep the lights on will require the construction of 221,594 new power plants within the next 30 years.

Although “renewable energy promoters claim that we can replace our current energy needs without fossil fuels,” adds Berman, the truth is this: “The triumph of technology may allow that but it will do little to end the ongoing ecosystem disaster.”

They also ignore that it took 160 years to build the current energy system at a time when petroleum and minerals were abundant and cheap. Now they propose to “electrify the Titantic” as ecologist William Ophuls puts it, at a time of expensive fossil fuels, indebted financial systems and mineral shortages.

In basic English, “it takes two coal workers, 169 solar workers and 1,100 wind workers to equal the work of one natural gas worker.”

techno-greens

right now we're not being honest with each other about our values and if that's happening then we cannot form norms you can't design norms they happen 00:47:46 out of human action not human design but they only emerge when there is a real consensus about our shared values and so we've got to get back to that i mean it seems almost like like self-evident and we'll duh but like 00:47:59 if if we're going to continue to self-silence or even lie about our beliefs like the result are going to be collective illusions at scale and whole societies can be taken down by those and listen it 00:48:11 would something like a free society living in a democracy like we take that for granted that is a blip in human history the idea that it can't disappear overnight is silly it can and it will 00:48:23 and it would be one thing if it disappeared because privately we collectively gave up on that experiment right but it's a tragedy if it disappears not because of 00:48:34 private change in values but because of collective illusions and that's that's what for me felt like the urgency to write the book right like that it just felt like things were spinning out of control 00:48:46 and yet we have more data on private opinion in america than probably anybody else i would argue um and i can tell you it's just not true right so i think that's both there's both a dangerous aspect to 00:48:58 illusions but also a hopeful one you know because history has shown us that if you recognize the illusion and you take an effort to dismantle it social change can happen at a scale and pace that would seem unimaginable 00:49:10 otherwise well i can't think of any other way to end in that message so thank you todd so much for this marathon you did with me and two parts thank you we obviously have so much shared values and we're not 00:49:22 as divided as people tell us we are [Laughter] but but now we know why right now we know why it feels that way and if we if we can recognize that we really can no longer trust our brain to accurately 00:49:36 read group consensus then we can get back to this it never really mattered right be who you are learn to be authentic um discover your real self and and work really hard to be congruent between your 00:49:48 private self and your public self the rest takes care of itself

it's essential and i just love the idea of setting an example for others you know 00:44:40 that's that's that's the way out of this trap is you start doing that and then other people in your group start doing it and then all of a sudden your group's the whole illusion breaks down the emperor has no clothes 00:44:53 or the emperor has clothes the effort does have clothes eventually eventually guess what i'm trying to say eventually yeah what's great about illusions is that they're powerful when they're enforced but they're fragile because 00:45:04 they're social lies right like like you don't want it to be true you wish it weren't true and so what you're really looking for is is wait a minute like so for some of us we just need one 00:45:15 other person to speak up to give us the the the strength to do the same other people need more but what you see is once you start getting the crack in the illusion it affects what we call like bandwagon 00:45:28 change right like it'll just swerve quickly and suddenly it looks like almost overnight the group has shifted its view so whenever you see stuff um it's funny in politics they call it momentum there's no such thing as momentum that's not what that is that is 00:45:41 that is that is an illusion where people's private behavior is like oh wait a minute this is like i can now say what i really think right i feel comfortable saying what i really think um so when you see like sort of exponential change 00:45:53 in public opinion like that's usually the that's usually that there's an illusion underneath there um because if people privately believe something it is very hard to change that and so you know doing that is like one off right i have 00:46:05 to change your mind or change someone else's mind and so you'll usually see slow linear growth or change in in public opinion when you see it change really quickly like it did with marriage equality marriage equality the public 00:46:17 approval for that i mean it's unreal since what since 2003 to today it's basically flipped in terms of its its acceptance like that doesn't happen if privately most people were against it it just doesn't 00:46:30 such a good point so much the reason why it's so hard is because like the oxytocin bonding mechanism is run so deep in our dna and our biology and and overriding that is not easy 00:46:42 because once we feel this social trust we we can lie you know we can we'll do anything well i cheat steal for our in group

congruence was a big notion from one of my favorite psychologist carl rogers the humanistic 00:43:52 psychologist i don't know if you made that link yeah i did and i i got a little bit of a reference to him and it was fun with the publisher because i was like i i feel like rogers doesn't get the credit i 00:44:04 agree in the same way i i think it's like he's one of the most uh under explored um sort of insights but yeah the congruence was central to roger's view of things and like when you like think 00:44:16 about and rogers then swerves right into all the areas that you're the leading expert in and so that's why for me i felt like you would like this which is this congruence part of uh our ability 00:44:28 to get to self-actualization it doesn't guarantee it but i don't know how you live a self-actualized life if you're incongruent

most people are dying to do 00:42:37 this like there's just something hollow to living someone else's life right and if i could impress anything on listeners or viewers like a lot of reasons why we're doing this 00:42:49 right now to ourselves is because we believe the group is against us but just think how would you behave if you knew that most people in your groups that matter to you we're in agreement with you like 00:43:02 think about what that changes about your behavior and and your your potential for happiness and flourishing and i'm telling you it's just where we are right now in this society and like i think social media has a lot of 00:43:14 upside but with respect to collective illusions it is a fun house of mirrors it is almost a guarantee to distort uh what you think the group consensus really is so we just got to be thoughtful about the ways not just the 00:43:26 ways we engage on online because that's just always going to be there but learning about collective illusions and getting some skill and not letting those distortions affect how we treat one another in real life because that's where it really really 00:43:39 becomes a problem

authentic responsibility

we need to treat one another with respect despite our differences like this is like an aspiration for people 00:41:01 right except for they thought it was in the bottom quarter of stuff for everybody else so what happens if i'm like i i would like to get back to treating other people's respect but i don't think 00:41:12 they care about that for me back to that ambiguous interactions that we have all the time i'm gonna read disrespect into most everything i see right and so i i think it's really critical like 00:41:25 like i talked about this as like congruence right this need for our private selves and our public selves to be as as closely aligned as possible we've known for a long time that that's that's a critical part of fulfillment 00:41:37 and self-actualization i mean how how do you get there you're the expert on that like how do you how do you get there if you have a divided self like my private self is different than my public self like so we know that at an individual 00:41:48 level but given the the fact of collective illusions i believe this idea of congruence may be the most important thing you can do for other people right because it doesn't help anyone when we misread each 00:42:00 other so profoundly

those social or cultural norms are actually what helped move a lot of people from like essentially 00:37:52 if i want to belong if the norms of my group are be honest about what you believe then a whole bunch of people who would otherwise do whatever else the group wants them to are now being honest about themselves and essentially protected against the biggest downsides 00:38:06 of these illusions and when people either because of their need for self-expression or their adherence to to help the social norms that promote that when we're all being honest and 00:38:17 respectful about what we really think illusions have nowhere to go right like they're really hard to form in the first place

not all of us are going to have super 00:37:28 high need for self-expression you know most of us are probably like me i'm more of a people pleaser than i would even want to be

evolution works on a much longer time scale right than than 00:35:09 any given life and so we need to we rely pretty heavily on helpful social norms right these cultural norms that actually teach us the right way to engage with each other and that can transcend any 00:35:22 one generation um and you know we worked really hard um in the west you know not just i mean this has happened everywhere but it you know we're where we're from um to acquire norms from from that we would 00:35:35 have called you know liberal democracy right that tolerance and respect and and these things and individual rights and you know it you see those things start to erode now and you start to see some of that base 00:35:48 nature taking back over the tribalism and the seeing the other as the enemy um the outgrouping of people and it we know from history it doesn't end well there right like the erosion of these norms 00:36:02 not only will continue to exacerbate collective illusions they i i think they're the biggest threat to free society that we face in a very long time yeah yeah you made a very convincing case for that

et's say i identify as a republican and i'm like because i believe in free markets and free people and i'm like well i actually don't mind people should love who they want to love but now i 00:33:02 feel like if i say that i might be ostracized from the thing for which i identify right and so you're going to lead a lot of people to stay silent or lie about what they believe what timber kern calls preference falsification um 00:33:14 just in the name of belonging so i'm always very leery of groups that aggregate that difference right like like why do i need a party that is here's our 20 things that you have to swallow wholesale or you're not a 00:33:26 republican or you're not a democrat to me that's always a sign that someone's trying to manipulate you

politicians were especially sensitive to collective illusions even more so because if you think about it all they want to do is get reelected right like that's like the job of a politician is to get reelected so they are exquisitely sensitive to 00:30:57 what they think their constituents believe right and so it makes them susceptible to this and so like and you probably know this like if i don't know about you but like the number of at the national level the number of 00:31:09 of republican elected officials who will tell me privately of course i know this wasn't rigged right but then they'll tell you but but i think most of my constituents do now they're not going out and lying about it 00:31:21 they'll just say nothing right thinking that their silence isn't causing any harm but in fact it's causing great harm this is so um eye-opening because i'm thinking about other domains now i'm just curious like how many 00:31:34 christians actually believe in an afterlife like if you actually privately ask them like go down the standard beliefs of like christianity or i don't mean to pick on christianity by the way any any any religion any religion 00:31:47 i'm so curious have you done that study i'm curious oh but that's that'd be a great study because here's one of the tricky parts with with group belonging is that you know you think about groups whether especially like political 00:31:59 parties whatever they aggregate a bunch of different dimensions of things right like like if so it's funny like why do i with our two-party system why do i have to be why do i have to hate gay people to believe in free markets 00:32:12 right like it doesn't make any sense but they they so you know groups that that pull together you know a lot of different things um it's almost what we do find is it's the same kind of jagged profile thing we talked about last time 00:32:25 which is we know for sure there's no like average democrat or republican in terms of their own beliefs against the party's stated platform um and so like i would be shocked if that's not the case when it comes to religious 00:32:37 identity right but it's certainly something we could do be good research

one of the things that we found in our own data right now is 00:29:30 the after effects of 2020 right well you have one candidate who continues to say that it was stolen right and the way the media reports that is so public opinion if you call 00:29:42 republicans just do a traditional poll we just we just did this um we found 57 we'll say oh yeah it was definitely stolen right uh that number in private is closer to 00:29:55 14