Considering this mindset, it should be no wonder why I recently came to the conclusion that we might all be manifestations of a single consciousness.  I was recently alerted that the philosopher Daniel Kolak wrote a book on this very concept called I Am You. This idea may not sound intuitive to most people, especially the rugged individualists of the West, but it is arguably just as valid as our usual working assumption that we are all separate entities.

Consciousness is sort of like a black hole, and we really have no idea what it is. Some speculate that black holes are really worm holes connecting two different points, and perhaps even other universes. If that is the case, we have no way of knowing that with our current evidence. However, let us assume we somehow found out that they were worm holes. We still wouldn’t know if they were all connecting to the same place or different places, since we cannot travel inside.

That is a good analogy, in my opinion, to this argument. By positing the I Am You argument, I am not necessarily saying this is True, but that it is equally valid (or equally invalid) as the hypothesis that there are separate consciousnesses, since we cannot penetrate the minds of others.

Considering the impenetrability of other minds, for all I know, everyone could be a p-zombie.  Likewise, considering our necessity to rely on sensory information to gain any knowledge about the physical world, it is possible that the universe is just a figment of my imagination.  I can’t say precisely how unlikely these possibilities are. Yet, I intuit that it is quite unlikely considering the apparent difficulty and irrationality in simulating an entire universe in fine detail simply for the purpose of tricking me. Thus, in all likelihood other beings exist and are indeed conscious, but whether they all share one consciousness or separate consciousnesses is equally unknowable.

Techies might like this analogy. If you are looking at two computers sitting side by side, without looking at the code there is no way to know if the applications running on them are locally hosted or are cloud applications. They could still be accessing the same cloud app even if the screens look different, because of customization.

So in my crude estimation under conditions of uncertainty, there is a 49.9 percent chance that I am You, a 49.9 percent chance that we are separate, and a fraction of a percent chance that the entire universe is fake or some other ludicrous thing. (Update: Though I recently heard good arguments for why the I Am You hypothesis is the most parsimonious)

Doug Hofstadter’s argument that we are all strange loops is a potential candidate for that low-level pattern which we all share. Recursion is a pretty simple concept. I could see the recursive pattern manifesting itself with varying degrees of intensity or even in crazy ways or non-human ways… but that recursivity is still there. If recursion creates this thing (consciousness) that is greater than the sum of its parts, it seems silly to claim that the consciousness exists only at a particular location in space. Since we can hardly even place a locality on it, why must we assume everyone’s consciousness is different?

Physics is strange with quantum particles being able to influence each other from across the universe through a process called Quantum Entanglement. Furthermore all matter exerts a gravitational pull on all other matter no matter far away it is. Why must we assume that this very mysterious thing, consciousness, must have a precise location in space? Quantum mechanics seems to indicate that what we think we know about space and time is not really accurate. Considering this, I can easily imagine us all being intimately connected, just as the stars, qubits, and all the matter are connected.

Here is a thought experiment. If the universe/multiverse is infinite and there is another organization of atoms somewhere out in the universe that is in the exact same organization as the atoms in your brain, then unless you reject the possibility of continuous consciousness, your consciousness could exist simultaneously in multiple places without being aware of one another… just as they could in the I Am You hypothesis.

Kolak gives another example that came up in a discussion with Derek Parfit. There are “split-brain” people who have a malfunctioning corpus callosum and thus have two streams of consciousness that are unaware of each other. Are they really two separate people if all that separates their awareness of one another is a malfunctioning corpus callosum? Perhaps all of us are in a similar predicament and we are all really the same person, we just don’t know it.

I had previously speculated that forming some sort of global brain would be the ultimate expression of the will to Embrace Unity, but if we are indeed all a single consciousness, then we are already a global brain, we just don’t know it. How then could we go about repairing our collective corpus callosum? I think the Unity of Consciousness argument has a beautiful aesthetic quality to it, and could have positive implications for bridging the egoist-utilitarian divide. If I Am You, then even the most selfish person would logically have to become a utilitarian.

Its conceptual beauty doesn’t make it true, clearly. But, at minimum, it casts some light on the unfounded nature of even our most basic assumptions by which we operate. Be it Time, Space, Free Will, Identity, we really haven’t a clue. To hedge your bets… be more compassionate.

If we shift the focus to not just prevention but an anti-aging paradigm, we can delay death, improve productivity, and enhance wellbeing. Unfortunately the short term bias of individuals, corporations, and the government collectively shifts the focus towards lucrative disease-specific research. Most diseases are merely a symptom of aging, which is the root problem. There is no excuse for the NIH to fund disease-specific research when the money could be spent so much better on fundamental aging research which the market is not already providing. The SENS Approach has already laid the roadmap for what needs to be studied, yet funding is grossly insufficient, and as with all things regarding aging, time is of the essence.

Setting aside genetic engineering for now, even simple things like vitamin deficiencies cause an inordinate amount of medical problems, and this is especially sad in a country like the US which, despite being the wealthiest in the world, still has vitamin D deficiency among the majority of the populace. Unfortunately this is part and parcel with our overall short-term bias.

Unintended consequences of current government policies are wreaking havok on us. Red meat, corn syrup, and many other American dietary staples are heavily subsidized by our government. Eliminating those subsidies, and maybe even taxing these to cover the externalities of their unsustainable production, would do as much to improve our health as just about anything that is being proposed. Additionally, banning the use of antibiotics on healthy farm animals, as the Obama Administration has openly supported, would prevent the outbreak of antibiotic-resistant diseases.  Furthermore, promoting local farmer’s markets would improve the quality of our food and our communities.

Libertarians often rail against the FDA,  as the Life Extension Foundation does effectively, and much of the complaints are absolutely justified, but what is often overlooked is the archaic patent system. Not only are patents granted too frequently, and there is actually much to be said for dismantling the patent system entirely, we have a sort of tragedy of the commons when it comes to corporate patents. Although having the freedom to grant your patent to someone else in theory seems like a good idea, in practice what happens is all the researchers end up ceding their patents to their employers and the end result is a sort of medical servitude and reduced incentive to innovate. Yet if corporations, which shouldn’t be legal persons anyways, were not legally entitled to hold patents, they would still have incentive to hire researchers who could use their facilities and license back the discoveries at fair rates (standardized to a certain percentage floor).

The NIH should not fund any research which will go toward patented research, ever. All research which is conducted with public money must go towards the commons or else it is corporatism plain and simple. Open Source Medicine would enhance innovation and reduce costs.

Also, as Kevin Carson argues, there is plenty of room for small low cost community clinics staffed by general practitioners or even the sort of “barefoot doctors” described in the article. Seriously, you don’t need to waste the time of an MD for a simple ear infection, and such things constitute a huge proportion of healthcare.

As Robin Hanson notes here, we simply spend too much on healthcare. True, a huge amount of that is a result of waste, fraud, abuse, and the problems mentioned above, but some of it is a result of simply spending too much money on ridiculous experimental treatments and so forth that we shouldn’t be doing at all since there really isn’t any evidence that they help. One way many countries deal with this issue is rationing, but in fairness, this article was mainly arguing for a reorientation of our priorities and an elimination of subsidies, tax breaks, etc for healthcare providers. While I disagree with the argument that the quantity of treatment itself is a problem, I think it is useful to think about just how much we value healthcare, and how effective each extra dollar really is, because too often this issue is ignored completely.

Lastly, one area in which significant gains could be made is via automation. If we could fund research of automated systems and robots to assist care-providers, we would be able to spend less on care-providers. More would be able to live at home without the need for medical supervision, and for those who live at the hospital, there would be less need for nurses and nurses’s aides to take care of the dirty details, and more time to look after their social and emotional wellbeing. I’m not just talking about robots like ASIMO or R2D2 to fetch you things, though there is certainly a place for that. I am also thinking on a very practical level. There are already motorized wheelchairs, machines which aid people in the bathroom, or help them up the stairs, or shift them around to prevent bedsores. There are even robotic exoskeletons being developed. These sorts of things which can not only maintain the health of the elderly and disabled, but actually give them back lives of relative normality, but most of the machines are patented and the designs are secret. Open innovation and government funding could speed this up immensely.

Please, think outside the box guys!

There is a long list of crises that we need to face and I won’t waste time boring you by listing them. As our brightest minds admit they were wrong, I hope that I can say, without qualification, that big changes in our thinking are required. Unfortunately, we haven’t made that “Change” even though we now have some new faces in power, and a bunch of old faces out of business or in prison.

There is still an unquestioned belief in the need for major public transportation projects, global supply chains, large scale social programs, and economies of scale. These have become so integral to our way of life, that they are hardly ever questioned. Granted, Wal-Mart is often used as a public target for venting our frustrations at these things, but virtually all business nowadays is conducted using global supply chains, economies of scale, and so forth.

Thus, our political discourse usually revolves around ways to prop up these very systems, since these are the only ones we know. We believe we require trillions in “infrastructure” funding. We believe that we must “create jobs.” We believe we must become “competitive” in the international marketplace. All of these assumptions are echoed in academia, merely using fancy jargon as a substitute for insight.

Let me first say that I accept the logic of comparative advantage and economies of scale as it applies to the capitalist mode of production, and it can truly be the most “efficient” allocation of resources in a quantitative sense, though not always. Yet, as Peter Drucker once said, there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. I do not accept that the inevitable centralization of power from this sort of production is a good thing. Centralized powers are able to create artificial scarcities, in order to inflate profits at the expense of everyone else. This invariably requires things like corporatism, regulatory capture, secrecy, and rent seeking.

None of these things are very amenable to true progress, which requires openness, peer review, constructive criticism, and creativity. The types of innovations that occur under these centralized systems, even if they take on a bourgeois bohemian quality and aren’t bland and soul-crushing, are incredibly stifling of progress. Open standards are shucked in favor of closed proprietary ones whenever a corporation can get away with it. Parts are never interchangeable. The production processes are so far removed from our daily lives that we have no idea about the processes involved in the creation of the product, and indeed breaking open the gizmo more likely than not voids the warranty…. though I’m not sure you’d even want to open it up considering the high density of toxic crap trapped inside.

All of this has had corrosive effects on our culture, as well as our environment. Our hyper-consumerist culture encourages us to get the latest and greatest stuff. We follow a sequence of fads specialized to our exact niche market (hipster, redneck, emo, rock, punk, goth, anime, whatever). We indulge in enormous quantities of unsustainable, non-renewable, and disposable products. Even more discouragingly, many companies use engineered obsolescence to artificially increase output at the expense of the environment.

We are now lamenting the fact that none of us have a clue about what it actually takes to produce tangible, concrete things which improve our lives. We are too busy answering phones, producing ad campaigns, and writing paperwork. Thus, instead of becoming active participants in the production of our culture and economy, or even informed consumers, we have become totally and completely dependent upon forces far beyond our control. As the market swings out of control, so do our jobs, our homes, and our very lives.

Yet, a revolution has occurred right under our noses whose effects have yet to be fully explored, and most of us are completely unaware. Digital communications technologies, especially the Internet, have enabled new modes of production and organization, such as Open Source and P2P, which have never before been possible. If we can learn to harness the power of these systems, we can escape the path our current world is on where each labor-saving device seems only to cause us to work longer hours. Where social programs seem only to foster dependence. Instead of innovating in accordance with the logic of centralized power and artificial scarcity, we can innovate in accordance with human needs and wants.

We can collaboratively build all the necessary life support systems needed, but have it be on a self-contained and local scale. It cannot be known whether the shape this takes will favor truly scale invariant systems, like the hyper-local RepRap project which is allowing production right in your living room, or whether it ends up fostering a new urbanism where production takes place in vertical farms, factories, and community hackerspaces. Talk about vertical integration! It also cannot be known how it will reshape our communities, since each community would be redesigned in a participatory fashion by the members of the community itself. Some may opt for small scale pedestrian-friendly towns in harmony with nature, while others may opt for sustainable urban metropolises, and others may ditch both for self-sufficient mobile homes and yachts.

In each of these cases, the means of production will likely have been placed in the hands of individuals, and drudgery will be automated away much like how open source software projects collaboratively eliminate bugs and expose flaws in wiki articles. Considering all of this, it may be useful to begin talking again about incentivizing local production. “Import substitution,” has long been a naughty word among economists. It is the process of breaking free of foreign dependence by incentivizing local production. Usually via tariffs and other measures. However, this would be a misguided way of going about this.

We don’t need to incentivize local production of just any type. We need to incentivize open and collaborative production. For example, creating prizes for contributing to the Commons. In 2007 there was a proposed bill called the Medical Innovation Prize Act which sought to incentivize patent-less medical inventions. If only it was this sort of mentality that guided us for the past few decades, then we wouldn’t have ever had such a monstrosity of a healthcare system. The same mentality could guide any industry. A useful exercise would be to think how it could guide the industry you are currently involved in. Finally, the creation of new local credit systems could also incentivize collaborative local production. There are lots of new concepts along these lines.

I also suggest you check out some of my previous work on decentralization. It is this sort of thinking which is required for a peaceful transition to a new era for our civilization. It will allow us to become resilient to the converging threats which face us from ecological destruction to market failure to terrorism. Global supply chains have shown themselves to be exceedingly vulnerable to these shocks. I hope we can overcome these by localizing production by utilizing global knowledge sharing so we can all enjoy the type of future some of the previous guest bloggers have been talking about.

For instance, as those who were immersed in the counterculture of the 70s made their way into the corporate ranks, they brought with them many of the anti-establishment values, and became the bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos, as David Brooks calls them. People like Richard Branson or Steve Jobs.

IEET fellow Douglas Rushkoff’s documentary, The Merchants of Cool, shows in great detail how corporate marketing executives are constantly looking for the next trendy thing, no matter how anti-establishment, in order to sell it back to the youth culture which conceived it.

A result of this process has been the emergence of the hipster subculture, the so-called dead end of Western civilization. Hipsters consciously take any and all cultural or political icons, strip them of their meaning, and appropriate them for purposes of self-glamorization. The more ironic and contradictory the better.

While hipsters are only one segment of this new generation, sometimes called Millenials, they are perhaps the most revealing. At first glance, it is a scary thought to extrapolate the consequences of this new generation entering the highest ranks of society. Yet, Millenials have an ethos which holds the promise of a better world: the belief that knowledge should be free.

This is the first generation to grow up with the Internet. Less than 5% believe that music “piracy” should be illegal. They spend staggering amounts of time on the computer and mobile communication devices, surfing social networks and wikis, gaming, texting, filesharing, blogging, making youtube videos, and building the new participatory panopticon.

They were extremely coddled. In our automated world, the traditional Work Ethic just seems silly to them. They never experienced a World War or a Cold War. Wars only happen on television. In this media and marketing-saturated society, where meaning is sucked from every noble pursuit within nanoseconds, this new generation has adapted by becoming functionally insane. ADD and constant sarcasm are practically coping mechanisms.

It is no wonder, then, why their entertainment choices include trolling, LOLcats, the Daily Show, South Park, and ridiculous sarcastic wikis. Yet, they are not nihilists. Beneath all this lies a belief in classical liberal ideals which is at least as sincere as that of previous generations, if not moreso.

The problem is that for as long as they can remember, all the institutions which they were told to look up to have only given them reasons to be cynical. Instead of honest journalism, we have demagogues. Instead of corner grocers, we have sterile megastores. Elections aren’t won, but stolen… not that it matters. Politics became a series of sex scandals. Religion too, only in a far more sinister sense. The economy is in crisis, but the Millenials are not surprised.

So Millenials aren’t exactly going to be receptive to allegations by megacorporations that they are pirates as they see the RIAA and MPAA launch a legal crusade against grandmothers everywhere. They aren’t going to place much faith in corporate culture as they watch AIG, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Jim Cramer, and the whole circus self-immolate.

As The Pirate Bay has become more popular, and as the Pirate Party grows in numbers throughout Europe, I think many are questioning who the real pirates are. At the University of Chicago, a new, and highly popular, class about pirates has been created. Indeed, one of the subjects will be Bernard Madoff.

What an opportune time for Open Source to surge ahead. The increasing maturity of open source software has won over many holdouts, and the recession has driven many towards open source software to cut costs. Yet, software is merely the vanguard of the immense Open Source movement. There are countless projects in the fields of music, art, food, electronics, beer, automobiles, sanitation, tractors, you name it.

If there is one thing which Millenials were born for, it is participation in the digital commons. Of course, the merchants of cool will take every opportunity to further commodify the Hacker Ethic, as we have seen with companies which promote Open Source business models and MAKE Magazine. This will create a new breed of hacker capitalists in the mold of Mark Shuttleworth and Jimmy Wales, who will replace the yuppies and bobos who are currently in power. This melding with capitalism isn’t likely to seriously endanger the movement, considering the incorruptible nature of copyleft licenses.

However, we musn’t underestimate the backlash which is likely to ensue. Monopolies are able to extract their high profit margins via the creation of artificial scarcities. This requires keeping knowledge secret, and is fundamentally at odds with the hacker ethic. I think it is likely that a sort of reverse piracy may occur in which corporations steal hacker innovations. However, this will require a means of evading legal restrictions.

Enter Peter Thiel and other techno-capitalist utopians who wish to build colonies in the ocean. This is known as the seasteading movement. Now, most of them may have peaceful, if kooky, intentions. My fear is that this could set the stage for corporations or other authoritarian entities to set up such colonies, and like the pirates they are, take to the seas. Since Google has already begun construction of a floating datacenter, it isn’t incredibly unrealistic to suggest that a company could be completely headquartered at sea.

Currently, if corporations want to influence governments, they need lobbyists. Seasteading could allow them to cut out the middlemen, and become corporatocracies. Talk about vertical integration! They could then proceed to use the methods of scientific management to exact control upon every aspect of life, and reduce their employees to something lower than serfs. This idea actually isn’t new. It would just be a floating, 21st century Pullman Town.

While I don’t think this will become a primary mode of social organization, considering the reproductive fitness of open source models, I wish I could say that such a dystopian scenario is unlikely to happen at all.

Luckily, if the techno-capitalists haven’t already lost most of their money to Madoff, it seems the economic climate in general will make it unlikely for such capital-intensive endeavors to succeed in the near future.

It is true that seasteading could offer some opportunities to hackers. The Pirate Bay had at one point tried to purchase SeaLand for the purpose of evading legal restrictions, and obviously not all seasteading would be inherently bad. Yet, the risks far outweigh the opportunities. We have more than we need within our current social systems to create open source communities from the ground up.

Now is a superb time for all you hackers, tinkerers, hobbyists, and DIYers to kick it into full gear. The political and economic cards are in our favor. Let’s make the most of it!

What is the efficiency paradox?

The proposition was first put forward by William Stanley Jevons in his 1865 book The Coal Question. In it, Jevons observed that England’s consumption of coal soared after James Watt introduced his coal-fired steam engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of Thomas Newcomen’s earlier design. Source: Wikipedia

Why is it that coal consumption soared after the efficiency improved? From an economic perspective, this should be perfectly obvious: as the efficiency of the coal engine increases, it becomes a cheaper option and is thus used at an increased rate.

The same is true with gasoline engines. The more efficient they become, the more likely it is that people will continue to use them. Even if the entire developed world spent tons of money to convert to electric cars and alternative energy, this would only make gasoline an even more viable option for countries which are still developing.

This summer, Tata Motors is releasing a $2,000 car in India called the Nano. It has taken a century for internal combustion automobiles to mature to a point where they can be produced at such low cost. The internal combustion engine is unhindered by patents and has been mass produced for almost 100 years. New electric engines are unlikely to hit that price point in the foreseeable future, and thus the fastest growing parts of the world are highly unlikely to choose them in an unregulated marketplace.

Energy efficiency will also decrease the price gap between the raising of livestock and the growing of plants. Considering the worst contributor of greenhouse gases is actually the livestock industry, this does not bode well for our planet.

Granted, in certain markets people’s habits do not greatly change as a result of efficiency gains. Hybrid car owners do not drive much more than regular motorists, and people who buy more efficient refrigerators are unlikely to use it more wastefully. Yet, the overall number of these machines purchased would likely increase and still cause any efficiency gains to evaporate.

If climate change is likely to cause significant problems for our civilization in the next century, we cannot expect the free market to correct the problem. If measures are not put in place to improve the competitiveness of carbon-neutral technologies, then drastic measures such as geo-engineering are inevitable.

The risks, moral hazards, and political implications brought forth by geo-engineering are going to be challenging indeed. Considering the overwhelming evidence pointing to humanity’s dangerous impact on the environment, we better prepare for this sooner rather than later. Geo-engineering must move closer to the center of the debate on climate change.

Other longer term options such as space colonization should also be considered. Interestingly, learning to live sustainably is a prerequisite for space colonization. Permaculture, recycling, vertical farming, energy efficiency, and the creation of harmonious ecosystems are key to living in space. NASA has known this for some time now, and it is time we start treating our situation here on Earth with as much foresight. Sustainability is key no matter what course we take.

With this background, I can now state the proposed solution: Reduce the return to holding money below zero. Imagine that the Fed were to announce that, one year from today, it would pick a digit from 0 to 9 out of a hat. All currency with a serial number ending in that digit would no longer be legal tender. Suddenly, the expected return to holding currency would become negative 10 percent.
 

It can’t be worse than this.

I find no inherent value in diversity. I only value it as a tool for achieving real progress and social justice. Being a humanist, I’m much more interested in celebrating our similarities than differences. This website’s slogan, “Embrace Unity,” is supposed to be a counter-point to the sometimes overzealous multi-culti people who like to “Embrace Diversity,” but let me state that I am not opposed to embracing diversity.

Usually embracing diversity is pretty harmless, like Black History Month, or La Raza’s latino themed cultural events on college campuses. There was a trend of liberal jews sporting keffiyehs in solidarity with Palestinians, and then it spread to wider “hipster” culture becoming a fashion statement and losing most of its meaning in the process, as fads tend to do generally. Those things are very cutesy and can promote tolerance and so anyone who scoffs at Mulit-Culturalism must obviously be some sort of hard-hearted meanie.

Yet, it can also lead down more sinister roads, and certainly presents many double standards. La Raza means “The Race” in Spanish. It would not be tolerable to start a white appreciation group on campus called The Race, so why should it be acceptable for anyone else? It has been argued that it is acceptable though because they have been marginalized and are in need of pride. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Plenty of extreme nationalist movements started out as small groups of excluded people banding together… like the Hutus of Rwanda, who went on to commit unspeakable acts even worse than those perpetrated upon them. Now, I’m not arguing that this will certainly be the outcome of La Raza or any other group, but it is simply a fact that nationalism has a very dark history.

To understand why Multi-Culturalism exists, one must understand how ideas spread generally. Memes are a very strong force in culture. The concept of a “meme” was coined by a very lovable inflammatory thinker named Richard Dawkins. It is simply a prima facie argument that ideas go through a sort of natural selection process. The ideas which hold characteristics which mandate their spreading are going to become predominant. Dawkins uses this idea often to explain how religions sprout up.

Why is the Roman Catholic Church the biggest church in the world? According to memetics, it is because it has characteristics which make it reproduce itself quickly. It is documented that medieval priests quickly recognized that the threat of Hell really boosted church attendance, and thus we saw more fire and brimstone rhetoric. The religion speaks of the need to save peoples’ immortal souls to ensure then Infinite Salvation instead of Infinite Damnation. Thus, we got Catholic missionaries taking trips to the most remote places on Earth. The Bible tells you to “be fruitful and multiply.” The Pope tells you contraceptives and abortion are sinful. See a pattern? Is it any wonder then why the Catholic Church has a billion people? Certainly Islam shares similar traits as well.

Compare this to the Shakers, who believed it was a sin to have sex even for procreation. Although they were able to briefly perpetuate themselves by massive adoption, I think it should be rather obvious why they quickly died out. The same could be said about suicide cults. Similarly, even just regular religions that are less obsessed with spreading the gospel to others are not likely to be very large… like Judaism, though in Judaism we are also now seeing a sort of fundamentalist and evangelical strain emerging via the forces of natural selection.

Multi-Culturalism and Political Correctness are successful memes, just like religious ideas are. I think the reason for that is rooted in capitalism’s reproductive fitness, which is considerable since it has encompassed nearly the entire globe. Capitalism, or more precisely Social Democracy since every economy is a mixed economy, necessitates peaceful relationships so that capital can flow. As you know, trade creates interdependence, and this means we cannot afford to severely offend, say, the Chinese, no matter how much certain people might like to.

Granted, when this Political Correctness is taken too far it can lead to infringements upon Freedom of Speech which nobody could refute, as was the case with Mark Steyn and Geert Wilders, both utterly repulsive figures who nevertheless deserve freedom of speech. Yet, that doesn’t take away from our personal responsibility to be truthful and loving, and yes, to even be Politically Correct most of the time. This needs no state enforcement, just regular ol’ peer-based enforcement. The Danish Cartoon scandal was another example. Clearly the riots in retaliation were far more despicable than the cartoons themselves. In fact, I’d go so far as to say there was nothing inherently despicable about the cartoons. It just showed poor judgment to publish something that is likely to be taken so offensively. It sort of reminds me of pushy vegans who often end up working against their own noble goal.

Obviously, I readily concede that there is a dark side to PC and overzealous multi-culti stuff. Yet, ideas don’t just pop into existence for no reason. Knowing this, it would be a good idea to be prudently open-armed towards muslims. That way, we can open up more and more trading links, and by extension cultural links and a mutual understanding of our interdependence. One of the things I would very much like to see is for projects like the One Laptop Per Child to successfully connect children from around the world to the Internet. There is talk by some on the left of horrible “Cultural Imperialism.” My hope is that is exactly what occurs, and they become infected with these horrible memetic viruses of Political Correctness and Multiculturalism which have the ability to temper the worst aspects of many cultures, such as terrorism, racism, female genital mutilation, etc. If Imperialism becomes the autonomous spread of ideas like PC and mulit-culturalism, or even more hopefully, humanism, then I guess I’m an imperialist.

Similarly, democratic modes of governance seem to foster a similar moderation of extremism. Look at Turkey as compared to the theocratic Iran. Turkey, a representative democracy, does have a relatively strong Islamist party, but even they realize that in order to get along in the world they can’t be incredibly Politically Incorrect, especially when they are at the mercy of a relatively secularized electorate. You can even see this shift in Hamas. Hamas’s charter might as well have been written by Hitler himself. Yet as they have become an actual political party, their rhetoric has changed dramatically. Look at this more recent quote:

“Our message to the Israelis is this: We do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion “the people of the book” who have a covenant from God and his messenger, Muhammad (peace be upon him), to be respected and protected… Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us – our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people.” Source here.

Compare that to their founding charter from 1988 which calls for the murder of all Jews and cites the Koran and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery to support this.

Furthermore, I hope we continue to maintain a slow stream of muslim immigrants who can eventually become assimilated. I can’t tell you how many muslim women I have seen in burkas carting around little girls with Nikes and without headscarves. The same was true when I visited Europe. How many of these children will grow up to be like Salman Rushdie? Hopefully many

The soft power wielded by Barack Obama, at least in comparison to the complete lack of it from before, should help make the goal of nonviolently resolving our cultural differences even more possible.

Perhaps just as important as the objective structure of our communities is our subjective experience. As Descartes proved, the existence of subjective experience is the one philosophical certainty. Cogito Ergo Sum, “I think therefore I am.” This is the rational basis for the scientific method and epistemology, and is thus the integral feature of the human condition. When we begin to take control of subjective experience, we will shake the very core of our world(s), and we will experience virtually unlimited types of consciousness. As we enter into a post-scarcity era, increasingly the universe will be at the mercy of our aesthetic preferences.

By “taking control of our subjective experience,” I mean implementing a wide variety of enhancements to our minds and bodies. On the simplest of levels, we will gain manual control of the senses we already have. We will be able to play back, turn off, or magnify our senses as we see fit. We will also gain new senses: Infrared, Heat vision, Echolocation, Magnetic, you name it. Furthermore, we will be able to induce synaesthesia between both our original senses and these new senses. We are already able to induce autistic states, giving us similar capabilities to autistic savants, but on demand.  We will likely gain control over our perception of time, and as our intelligence and working memories are upgraded, new possibilities open up.

We could gain new aesthetic intuitions. Imagine if in addition to a supercharged working memory, we were able to grok computer programming syntax and parse millions of lines with ease. This could allow computer code to be judged by its aesthetic quality, much like a poem is. It has been said Ruby programming is much like haiku. What if all the programming rules of thumb regarding such things as top-down design, parallelism, and avoiding premature optimization became as instinctive as our appreciation of rhyming or symmetrical artwork? Of course those who prefer prematurely optimized, bottom-up, serial programming can go the Jack Kerouac route if they so choose.

There are enormous ethical implications of customized realities. As discussed in an earlier post, the functions of our tools can deductively impact our value systems in ways we may have difficulty predicting beforehand.  When the mechanical clock was invented by Benedictine monks, they thought it would be a tool to help them regulate their prayer schedules, but they ended up enabling modern capitalism with its regular production cycles, hourly wages, and meticulous concern with efficiency. Perhaps people with an overabundance of appreciation for vibrations will end up enabling some sort of social structure which creates injustices that could not possibly be forseen. Nevertheless, humanity has always trudged onward to new uncertain horizons. We couldn’t ban new technology even if we wanted to, but we can take our time to critically reflect on potential consequences.

Also as discussed earlier, as our level of customization of reality grows, so does our ability to filter the information we see. When we begin to radically alter our subjective experience, we risk cyberbalkanization on a more fundamental level than ever before. With our current mental architectures we already have great difficulty communicating with one another, and often come to the conclusion that those we are debating with must be from another planet. In the famous debate between Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz, Dershowitz proclaimed that Noam must be from “Planet Chomsky.” Now, imagine what the disagreements may be like when we don’t even share the same perception of time, or if one person is harmonizing with cosmic vibrations while another is transfixed with stability. What will the outcome of such a situation look like? I believe I have a rough idea.

The forces of natural selection will work upon the different modes of consciousness, just as they do now with ideas in the form of memes. Those modes of consciousness which are good at crowding out others will become the dominant ones. Surely some of the most effective at replicating would be like the Borg, and demand assimilation. Yet, like our current world, the dominant type might not be totalitarian in nature, but merely demanding a standardized framework of communication. Tolerant empire-systems tend to fare better. The Roman Empire realized the futility of getting everyone to accept their one religion, and thus many religions thrived during most centuries of their reign. Even Ghengis Khan was noted for his tolerance of religious freedom. The modern capitalist world-system is exceedingly tolerant, and even the theocratic Saudi Arabia is now a member of the World Trade Organization. As long as one plays by the rules of the game of the dominant system, that system has no qualm, no matter what your beliefs.

In the case of Ghengis Khan, as long as you pay your taxes to the empire, you will be fine. In the case of the modern world-system, as long as your markets are open to foreign capital, you are fine. As Frederic Bastiat once remarked, “When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.” In the case of the consciousnesses of the future, I am assuming that the dominant mode of consciousness will just demand some minimal framework by which to interact with others. I am not saying that it is good that any particular consciousness framework will likely dominate, I’m just extrapolating what will likely be the case considering the law of natural selection.

Now, I would argue that in the interests of civilizational resiliency it is actually much better to allow a good deal of freedom in the modes of consciousness. This will keep us from becoming a homogeneous and vulnerable culture. While it makes the prospect for a universal utopia improbable, it also makes a universal dystopia improbable. What we will likely end up with is a multitude of weirdtopias. I look forward to the infinite variety of consciousnesses which await our species. It is the key to our long term survival, and these issues are likely more urgent than you think.

There are a few different ways to apply this in the real world. One way is to build communities which seek harmonious relationships between people and the environment. Based on similar thinking, thousands of “intentional communities” have sprung up. These include everything from eco-villages to religious communes to survivalist enclaves. There are even some more tech-based communities such as CyborgSociety.

Now, each of these communities believes that their mode of interacting with one another is the most sustainable and desirable, and perhaps there is room for all of these communities. Live and let live. Decentralized communities have a distinct advantage when it comes to resiliency. Much less information is needed to govern a small community than a large one, and having multiple models functioning simultaneously ensures all of our eggs aren’t in one basket. Nevertheless, it would be instructive to examine what a truly sustainable community would look like.

In the name of resiliency, clearly there must be some attention to self-sufficiency. Now, insular autarkies are notoriously unstable, but so are economies that are completely dependent upon foreign trade for basic necessities. The ideal situation is clearly somewhere in the middle between those extremes. What we need is largely self-sufficient communities which are at harmony with nature and engage in voluntary trade with neighbors.

This same way of living could be applied by individuals or families operating within the community, to further decentralize production. If individuals, including urbanites, were given the tools for automated growing of food and simple manufacturing, imagine the potential for automatic wealth generation. Not to mention the environmental benefits of local production.

RepRap is dedicated to building open source desktop fabrication machines which can make the majority of its own parts using local materials such as fermented organic matter. Their version 1.0, codenamed “Darwin,” is a working proof-of-concept, and version 2.0 is already in the works. As such machines become more mature and more efficient at self-replication, it could soon eliminate the necessity of wage labor for survival.

Using such techniques, communities are already forming. Factor e Farm is dedicated to building such communities for all sorts of productive purposes. They have already set up one self-sufficient community using alternative energy and processed rainwater, and they are interested in building many more decentralized communities with a high quality of life. On their website, they claim, “This quality of life is based on efficient operation, plus 100% voluntary lifestyle, based on transcendence of material constraints. When resource constraints become a non-issue through wise choice of technology, skill, and open source knowledge-enabled flexible production systems for self-sufficiency – then freedom and human creativity are unleashed.”

What is especially inspiring is the potential this has for eliminating poverty. As they say, give a man a fish and he can eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he can eat for the rest of his life. As the tools for local production continue to drop in price, we can likely enter into a post-scarcity world. As we speak, there is already more than enough food being produced to feed everyone on the planet. The problem is the logistics of distributing it to everyone. Capitalism as it is currently practiced distributes in an unequal fashion, and no matter how much philanthropy we do, it is not feasible to ship resources to remote regions. What we can do is provide the tools for people to produce locally.

We are just now witnessing the beginning of what is surely going to be a huge wave of self-sufficient communities, enabled by the new modes of production made possible by the Internet and communications technologies. The prospects for this are enormous for everyone, but especially those in poorest and most dependent places on Earth.

The notable thing about this pick is that he has spoken out about life extension research and the ultimate goal of biological immortality.

Could this mean we will see a shift of focus away from disease-specific cures and toward prevention and anti-aging research? Such a focus would be among the best long term investments we could possibly make. As that old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

150,000 people die per day. The economic and social consequences of this are enormous. If we can make even a little headway on this issue, it would be extraordinarily beneficial.