The following essay reposted from The Other Side.

“We have passed beyond the imaginable limits of violence. Can we pass equally beyond the imaginable limits of nonviolence?”

Nonviolence or Nonexistence

Jim Douglass

It almost looks like a nuclear bomb.” That was the comparison many of us made when we saw the carnage and destruction from the attacks on the World Trade Center. Was there something prophetic in the comparison?

The explosion of a single nuclear weapon in Manhattan would be a quantum leap of violence. This inconceivable event would make even the enormous tragedy of September 11 seem tiny by comparison. Yet it is the logical next step in response to the policy of retaliation we are unthinkingly pursuing.

Nuclear weapons–which represent the end not only of New York City and Washington, D.C., but of our entire world–are already accessible to small groups of people. No billion-dollar “missile shield” will stop a suitcase holocaust weapon from being carried into downtown Manhattan. We are living literally at the end of the world. Will we recognize that? Or will our talking heads take us blindly to Armageddon?

Martin Luther King, Jr., understood our situation profoundly. He summed it up in his contingent prophecy for the rest of human history: “Nonviolence or nonexistence.” King knew humanity had passed beyond the imaginable limits of violence at Hiroshima. Today, God and history challenge us to pass equally beyond the imaginable limits of nonviolence. King, like Gandhi and Jesus, felt there were in truth no limits to nonviolence.

Like the prophets before him, King was a realist. By “nonviolence” he did not mean a world without conflict. He meant a deepening, widening commitment to meet every conflict with unflinching compassion, noncooperation with evil, and an effort to see through the eyes of one’s opponent. “Love your enemies,” Jesus said; see through their eyes while resisting all evil, Gandhi and King interpreted. In the nuclear age, this is not a counsel of perfection, but a ground rule of survival.

So what do we do when our opponents are willing to advance their cause by the suffering and deaths of tens of thousands, and millions once they possess that nuclear weapon?

Jesus, a realist if there ever was one, said that we had better settle our conflicts. As a Jew in a corner of the Roman Empire, Jesus of Nazareth knew what the center of power was capable of doing. He saw precisely what Rome would do to Jerusalem and the temple if the spiral of violence were not broken. The end of that world came forty years later, in the leveling of Jerusalem. That event prefigures the end of our own world. And just as the Jews of Jesus’ day could not imagine the destruction of the temple, we seem equally incapable of imagining our own destruction.

King’s prophecy, like that of Jesus, is the vision of a complete realist: Nonviolence or nonexistence. King knew that the relatively unexplored reality of nonviolence, the lived reality of the reign of God “on earth as it is in heaven,” was infinitely more powerful than any bomb on earth.

Nonviolence is rooted in the unshakable belief that everyone without exception has a piece of the truth. Let the voice of even Osama bin Laden and the alienated millions he speaks for be heard, not assaulted by our missiles in an act of vengeance. May God’s justice and peace be with all of them, as with all of us.

Let the suffering of countless brothers and sisters, crushed by our policies, be felt by us as one with our own suffering in the shadows of September 11. Let the depth and urgency of their demands for justice become our own, in an inconceivable transformation and unification.

In response to unimaginable violence, let there be the inconceivably more powerful response of impartial justice, a concern for the truth, a compassion for all, and nonviolent noncooperation with evil.

Either that, or let us recognize what we are now choosing–the end of our world. Nonviolence or nonexistence.

Author Jim Douglass is a peace activist and author of several books, including The Nonviolent Coming of God. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

Nonviolence Resource Center

 Reposted from The Other Side Online, © 2002 The Other Side, January-February 2002, Vol. 38, No. 1.

The following essay is reposted from The Other Side.

Housing Comes First?

Ed Loring  

Some years ago I was making pastoral visits on the streets of Atlanta. As I walked up to a vacant lot, I recognized George sitting on a low stone wall that had once been the foundation of a wonderful old house. He and a few friends were drinking beer.

“What’s up, man?” I asked in my best predestined Presbyterian pastor’s tongue.

“Bad, Rev, bad,” George mourned as he slipped the quart bottle behind his bent back.

A few days earlier, George had gotten a decent job at a local factory. He was all smiles then. On Monday, his first day, he worked diligently with renewed hope in his heart.

Monday evening, George walked to a men’s shelter for the night. Tired but still happy, he ate his sandwiches, then found his way to a sleeping mat. As he lay there, the quiet was punctured by rustling, snoring, coughing, and the occasional moans of men who dream of families lost or left behind, only to be awakened by a shove and a gruff “Shut up! I can’t sleep!”

George slept little. At 5:00 a.m., the lights flashed on; he pulled himself from the floor, dressed, and stepped onto the street. A few minutes later, the sky opened up, drenching him in a downpour. He ran under the eaves of an old warehouse, waited while the heavens got hold of themselves, then set out again for the factory.

“You’re late,” his boss growled.

“Got caught in the rain.”

“That’s no way to hold onto a job. Now get busy.”

In mid-afternoon George began nodding. (He hadn’t slept in a bed for two months.) A voice jolted him: “George! What gives, man? Did you party last night? Stay awake.”

“Yes, sir,” George said. But he barely managed to keep his eyes open until quitting time. Then he returned to the shelter for a repeat of the previous night.

On Wednesday George fell asleep and was fired. On Thursday I chanced upon him, his heart filled with despair and his belly filling with beer.

“If I just had a place to live,” George moaned, “I could have gotten enough sleep and kept my job.”

What I learned that day profoundly shaped my political understanding. George taught me a radical insight, subsequently confirmed by hundreds of other homeless persons: Housing precedes life. It ranks right up there with another radical insight I’d learned even earlier: Jesus loves everyone. Combined, these two could be the foundation for a new community of dignity and sufficiency.

But even those of us who are convinced of Jesus’ love frequently persist in ignoring the primacy of housing. We devise programs to generate employment, overcome addiction, and improve education and healthcare; we evangelize and work for social justice. But all this is undermined by our failure to recognize that housing must come first.

Housing precedes employment. In the United States, you cannot live in a house until you’ve earned the rent money. Job training, literacy initiatives, self-esteem programs, all assume that housing will follow employment. But George’s experience indicates otherwise: You cannot hold a job or build a life until you have housing.

The cheap labor and temporary employment that drive the U.S. economy demand a steady supply of new workers. So policy-makers and corporate bigwigs are unwilling to interrupt the flow by first providing housing for the people who fill those jobs. But putting employment before housing fits the needs of employers, not workers. The same revolving door that fills the slots in the factories is chewing up the people who pass through it.

Housing precedes sobriety. Many varied and loving programs help folks fight addictions. But success in getting and remaining sober or clean is almost impossible without housing. The despair and physical suffering of homelessness blunt the desire to enter such programs and weary the muscles of self-discipline required to persevere. Instead, drink and drugs are ever available to fend off the degradation and pain of homelessness.

Those who manage to get through a detox program have a chance at a new start. But that fades quickly when they are thrown back into a labor pool where liquor seems the only way to get through eight hours of mindless work at minimum wage, and into shelters filled with booze. It’s like spitting into the wind.

Housing precedes education. Children who come to shelters in the evening find little space and no quiet, making study and concentration impossible. The same is true for adults in literacy programs, job training, or remedial education. Without a house there is no place to think and dream, to read about a better life, to listen to the beauty and wisdom of our ancestors.

Denied an environment where they can anchor the day’s learning and keep up with their classmates, homeless children struggle against staggering odds. Their adult counterparts must tote books and papers as they shuffle between soup-kitchen lines and crowded shelters. It’s easier just to drop out.

Housing precedes health. All the clinics in the world cannot protect against sleeping outdoors in rain, sleet, and snow, or indoors where the still air holds the germs that latched onto people who, during the day, had no access to toilet facilities or shelter from the weather. Mentally ill people on the streets lack the structure that would ensure control of their illness through medication, or prevent them from being a danger to themselves and others. The religious Right’s famous “family values” evaporate when parents and children never have a space to call their own or the stability that lets them pay attention to more than simple survival.

Housing precedes evangelization. Even the ancient wanderers in the desert and hermits living in caves had a community to welcome and refresh them. Today’s wanderers are on the streets of our cities; today’s hermits live on heating grates and in cardboard boxes. The church can and should offer them the nurturing of the Beloved Community. But no church ought to call someone to accept Jesus Christ until it is ready to bring that person into a house and assist in the arduous task of making that house a home.

Housing precedes the justice struggle. As a social activist, I am troubled when I hear grass-roots organizers proclaiming that only the homeless can help themselves, or criticizing them for their lack of political initiative. I want to ask: How do people harness economic and social forces for justice and equality if they lack a place where they can gather, an address where they can be found, a room where they can install telephones and store supplies?

When housing does not precede life itself, fear develops. The brother or sister without a home becomes a criminal and an enemy. People who might help build and maintain affordable housing instead become vociferous advocates for prisons.

We must turn our lives and hearts around. We must build a social policy and culture that are rooted in housing for everyone. If we don’t, our hearts will continue to harden, our political analysis will fail to have meaning, our lives will be eaten by fear and devoured by hate. For the sake of love, for the sake of life, we cannot let that happen.

 Reposted from The Other Side Online, © 2002 The Other Side, May-June 2002, Vol. 38, No. 3.

I would like to introduce a fellow student of Daniel Quinn. Jim Tull writes:

“The idea that poverty is inevitable has trapped us in stale paradigms. There is a completely different vision we might follow.” 

Shall the Poor Be Always With Us?

Jim Tull 

It is a familiar story. On his final journey toward Jerusalem, Jesus stops in Bethany to eat at the home of Simon, a leper. A woman enters with an alabaster jar of expensive ointment; she breaks the jar and pours the ointment on his head. Her gesture invokes the fury of some present. The ointment was worth a year’s wage, they grumble. It could have been sold, and the money given to the poor.

A single line of Jesus’ reply has been scissored out to become a classic apologetic for poverty: “The poor you will always have with you” (Mark 14:3-9).

This statement, arguably one of the most repeated lines of the Gospels, is often invoked by people who care not a wit for anything else Jesus ever said. Although Jesus did not pretend by his remark to be shedding new light on the problem of poverty, we point to this phrase as proof that poverty is inevitable. When we state that “the poor will always be with us,” we are expressing a reality we accept as a given, as unquestioned in Jesus’ day as it is today.

But it isn’t true. Marshall Sahlins, one of today’s most prominent anthropologists, has identified hunter-gatherer tribal peoples who enjoyed–and enjoyed equitably–a kind of wealth that far surpasses in value the benefits we associate with having wealth in our culture. He dubbed these people “the original affluent societies.” (Using this lens, Columbus and other European explorers and colonists did not discover poverty here in the Americas. They created it.)

Yet the belief persists that poverty is inevitable. In fact, this belief is one of those collectively held assumptions that constitute the mythology of our culture and our contemporary global civilization. And it is not an idle myth, but rather a vital one, a powerful and essential means of sustaining the dominant political and economic structures of our society.

As one who has spent the past twenty-five years actively expressing compassion and indignation at the persistence of hunger, homelessness, and poverty in our affluent nation, I find this myth debilitating. It has convinced us that there is no sense in trying to end poverty; that the best we can hope for is to lessen it. And it has blinded us to how poverty, far from being the fate of humanity, is the product of the way we have structured our civilization.

One way we perpetuate the myth of never-ending poverty is by continuing to believe that the history of our culture and civilization is the history of humanity itself. We view those outside our recorded history as destitute, half-human savages. In fact, humans lived as hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years before the Agricultural Revolution spawned our civilization and culture. Yet our history and our collectively held and lived mythology reduce the human experience to the last ten thousand years of civilization-building that have occurred since that revolution.

Not only does this erase the vast human experience prior to the current era, but it excludes the experience of humans flourishing in egalitarian societies today. There are still scattered pockets of tribal people who have never known the kind of poverty we take for granted. They are living proof that poverty is a function of culture, not of nature.

Another reason this mythology of poverty is so entrenched is that we don’t want poverty to go away. It is convenient to believe that the poor will always be with us, because we live by an economic system that depends on and generates poverty. In fact, our own employment hinges increasingly on its presence.

I was reminded of this by an experience I had during the years I worked at Amos House, a center in Providence, Rhode Island, that offers meals, shelter, and social services to the poor and homeless. One day, a young man was ejected from the soup kitchen for a rule infraction. He shouted back at me from the curb, “You know, if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have a job!”

He was right. The same Industrial Revolution that displaced laborers and the life-sustaining role of small communities (tribes, then villages) also created tremendous marginalization and human need. More recently, automation and cheap foreign labor challenged our economy to find new ways to sustain growth; it responded by creating a burgeoning service industry to take up the slack.

The mounting social problems increased the demand for services. Private and public programs fit the bill nicely–they ease the pain and give the appearance of an effective response without actually solving the problem. (Indeed, the kinds of short-term, palliative interventions provided by such services often allow the problem to worsen over time.)

In a tribal context, humans freely shared the care of others in a mutually supportive network. Today we still feel the need to care for people beyond our immediate family members, but lack the opportunities. At some level, we are like my dog, Pearl: No longer required to hunt instinctively, she continues to play out the hunt in our house and backyard, sometimes in absurdly comical ways. As humans, we have lived 99 percent of our time on earth in tribal structures, compassionately caring for each other. Perhaps we cling to the continuation of poverty because we need a place to express our frustrated inclination toward compassion.

The mutual care that characterized tribal society has been supplanted in our post-tribal world by professional services, functioning within a service system. In this modern sense, service is the attempt to meet needs outside the context of community. Tribal people have no concept of service, just as we do not use the word service to label the care we provide within our families. For individuals with an especially caring disposition, the service system may provide the only outlet beyond one’s own family.

But the professional service system is a poor substitute for the kind of support only a genuine community can give. As author and community activist John McKnight points out, the service system’s network of private and public institutions and agencies is geared to efficiency, and its contact is impersonal, a counterfeit version of the care a community offers. These systems thwart and frustrate compassionate and well-meaning service providers.

Like its precursors of extended family, clan, and village, the nuclear family is growing weaker, increasingly surrendering its support function to professional services. In the very near future, we may all find ourselves supported by service providers alone.

If poverty is not, in fact, inevitable, what can we do to eliminate it? The first and perhaps the most radical task is to recognize the cultural mythology around the inevitability of poverty, and to begin replacing it with an acknowledgment of the earth’s abundance. This strategy is one of learning and relearning. Instead of “the poor will always be with us,” we need to be convinced that “the earth will provide.” The natural order includes cycles of creation and destruction, birth and death, but within them “the earth will provide.” With its abundant and richly diverse community of life, our planet has the capacity to adequately support all its species–us included. No one should languish in the kind of marginal destitution we commonly call poverty.

The second challenge is building community–finding small and more ambitious ways of reintegrating ourselves into small-scale economies of support, founded on trusting relationships. In his novel My Ishmael, Daniel Quinn distinguishes between a tribal economy, founded on the exchange of human energy, and our modern economy, founded on the exchange of products, including service products. In the former, the economy is based on the mutual giving of time and support. In the latter, the economy is product-based, operating on a cycle of making products and getting products. To the extent that we can transfer our faith and reliance from the product system to the communal support system, we contribute to the atrophy (and eventual elimination) of the institutions and political structures of the product system.

The kind of poverty we are familiar with seems inevitable because it is inherent in the culture of our civilization. Eliminating it requires a fundamental break from the way we think and live.

Our allegiances and psychological attachments strongly favor the prevailing way of life. Our default assumption is that the world will evolve toward a “more and bigger” version of what we have today. Yet the capacity to trust the earth and to live by mutual support and the recognition of individual unique gifts lies within us like a recessive gene. For the most part it is dormant; yet should an adjustment call it forth, it is ready to surface.

We see this instinct manifested among some of our society’s disaffected youth. Although they are still partially dependent on the product system, they have chosen to live tribally, preferring the freedom and vitality of life outside the product economy to eking out a living in the usual way. Less dramatic experiments, ranging from intentional rural communities to urban block associations, echo a paradigm that relies on giving and getting support.

For me, one source of hope is the potential for defection within the middle and upper classes. In my facilitation work with materially comfortable members of churches and nonprofit organizations, I find a surprising receptivity to the disturbing message that, judged by the standards of tribal wealth, even our financially well-off are quite poor. People are beginning to see, for example, that a million dollars is not enough to ensure that they won’t spend their last decade in a nursing home (or to pay for it if they do). They are realizing that our contemporary products contest offers us a life that is increasingly accelerated, virtual, alienating, and superficial–as well as ecologically perilous.

As this continues, the rewards of abandoning the game we play become increasingly irresistible. The simple-living trend of the past decade may portend a shift that is deeper and more widespread. Such a shift could provide a catalyst for the cultural break necessary to end poverty.

When we imagine rich people releasing their hold on product wealth and the means of creating it, we may appear to be dreaming. But if we recognize this release as a process of shifting attention to the creation of a different kind of wealth, it becomes a more realistic vision. Were such a process to occur, the marginalized poor would have a better chance of reestablishing access to land and resources. Unfortunately, the prevailing models of development in poor communities and countries are rooted in the products system, which the poor then look to as the only way out. Organizations committed to reducing poverty could emphasize instead strategies that regenerate the self-reliant community life of giving and getting support. Perhaps then we would finally be capable of recreating true societal wealth.

In many ways, the story in Mark’s Gospel is a story of how we view wealth. To those who complained about the waste of a valuable product, Jesus redirected their attention to the communal value behind the woman’s action–her obvious care for him and her anointing of his body for burial. And that, Jesus might remind us, is precisely the point of remembering the story at all.

Reposted from the EDGE, Seth Lloyd writes:  “Something else has happened with computers. What’s happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process. When I think of all the information being processed there, all the information being communicated back and forth over the Internet, or even just all the information that you and I can communicate back and forth by talking, I start to look at the total amount of information being processed by human beings — and their artifacts — we are at a very interesting point of human history, which is at the stage where our artifacts will soon be processing more information than we physically will be able to process.”

Who Is Seth Lloyd?

John Brockman

“Lloyd’s Hypothesis” states that everything that’s worth understanding about a complex system, can be understood in terms of how it processes information. This is a new revolution that’s occurring in science.

Part of this revolution is being driven by the work and ideas of Seth Lloyd, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Last year, Lloyd published an article in the journal Nature — “Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation” (vol. 406, no. 6788, 31 August 2000, pp. 1047-1054) — in which he sought to determine the limits the laws of physics place on the power of computers. “Over the past half century,” he wrote, “the amount of information that computers are capable of processing and the rate at which they process it has doubled every 18 months, a phenomenon known as Moore’s law. A variety of technologies — most recently, integrated circuits — have enabled this exponential increase in information processing power. But there is no particular reason why Moore’s law should continue to hold: it is a law of human ingenuity, not of nature. At some point, Moore’s law will break down. The question is, when?”

His stunning conclusion?

“The amount of information that can be stored by the ultimate laptop, 10 to the 31st bits, is much higher than the 10 to the 10th bits stored on current laptops. This is because conventional laptops use many degrees of freedom to store a bit whereas the ultimate laptop uses just one. There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important. Indeed, as the above calculation indicates, to take full advantage of the memory space available, the ultimate laptop must turn all its matter into energy. A typical state of the ultimate laptop’s memory looks like a plasma at a billion degrees Kelvin — like a thermonuclear explosion or a little piece of the Big Bang! Clearly, packaging issues alone make it unlikely that this limit can be obtained, even setting aside the difficulties of stability and control.”

Ask Lloyd why he is interested in building quantum computers and you will get a two part answer. The first, and obvious one, he says, is “because we can, and because it’s a cool thing to do.” The second concerns some interesting scientific implications. “First,” he says, “there are implications in pure mathematics, which are really quite surprising, that is that you can use quantum mechanics to solve problems in pure math that are simply intractable on ordinary computers.” The second scientific implication is a use for quantum computers was first suggested by Richard Feynman in 1982, that one quantum system could simulate another quantum system. Lloyd points out that “if you’ve ever tried to calculate Feynman diagrams and do quantum dynamics, simulating quantum systems is hard. It’s hard for a good reason, which is that classical computers aren’t good at simulating quantum systems.”

Lloyd notes that Feynman suggested the possibility of making one quantum system simulate another. He conjectured that it might be possible to do this using something like a quantum computer. In 90s Lloyd showed that in fact Feynman’s conjecture was correct, and that not only could you simulate virtually any other quantum system if you had a quantum computer, but you could do so remarkably efficiently. So by using quantum computers, even quite simple ones, once again you surpass the limits of classical computers when you get down to, say, 30 or 40 bits in your quantum computer. You don’t need a large quantum computer to get a big huge speedup over classical simulations of physical systems.

“A salt crystal has around 10 to the 17 possible bits in it,” he points out. “As an example, let’s take your own brain. If I were to use every one of those spins, the nuclear spins, in your brain that are currently being wasted and not being used to store useful information, we could probably get about 10 to the 28 bits there.”

Sitting with Lloyd in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Boston, overlooking the tranquil Boston Public Gardens, I am suddenly flooded with fantasies of licensing arrangements regarding the nuclear spins of my brain. No doubt this would be a first in distributed computing

“You’ve got a heck of a lot of nuclear spins in your brain,” Lloyd says. “If you’ve ever had magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, done on your brain, then they were in fact tickling those spins. What we’re talking about in terms of quantum computing, is just sophisticated ’spin tickling’.”

This leads me to wonder how “spin tickling” fits into intellectual property law. How about remote access? Can you in theory designate and exploit people who would have no idea that their brains were being used for quantum computation?

Lloyd points out that so far as we know, our brains don’t pay any attention to these nuclear spins. “You could have a whole parallel computational universe going on inside your brain. This is, of course, fantasy. But hey, it might happen.”

“But it’s not a fantasy to explore this question about making computers that are much, much, more powerful than the kind that we have sitting around now — in which a grain of salt has all the computational powers of all the computers in the world. Having the spins in your brain have all the computational power of all the computers in a billion worlds like ours raises another question which is related to the other part of the research that I do.”

In the ’80s, Lloyd began working on how large complex systems process information. How things process information at a very small scale, and how to make ordinary stuff, like a grain of salt or a cube of sugar, process information, relates to the complex systems work in his thesis that he did with the late physicist Heinz Pagels, his advisor at Rockefeller University. “Understanding how very large complex systems process information is the key to understanding how they behave, how they break down, how they work, what goes right and what goes wrong with them,” he says.

Science is being done in new an different ways, and the changes accelerates the exchange of ideas and the development of new ideas. Until a few years ago, it was very important for a young scientist to be to “in the know” — that is, to know the right people, because results were distributed primarily by pre prints, and if you weren’t on the right mailing list, then you weren’t going to get the information, and you wouldn’t be able to keep up with the field.

“Certainly in my field, and fundamental physics, and quantum mechanics, and physics of information,” Lloyd notes, “results are distributed electronically, the electronic pre-print servers, and they’re available to everybody via the World Wide Web. Anybody who wants to find out what’s happening right now in the field can go to http://xxx.lanl.gov and find out. So this is an amazing democratization of knowledge which I think most people aren’t aware of, and its effects are only beginning to be felt.”

“At the same time,” he continues, “a more obvious way in which science has become public is that major newspapers such as The New York Times have all introduced weekly science sections in the last ten years. Now it’s hard to find a newspaper that doesn’t have a weekly section on science. People are becoming more and more interested in science, and that’s because they realize that science impacts their daily lives in important ways.”

A big change in science is taking place, and that’s that science is becoming more public — that is, belonging to the people. In some sense, it’s a realization of the capacity of science. Science in some sense is fundamentally public.

“A scientific result is a result that can be duplicated by anybody who has the right background and the right equipment, be they a professor at M.I.T. like me,” he points out, “or be they from an underdeveloped country, or be they an alien from another planet, or a robot, or an intelligent rat. Science consists exactly of those forms of knowledge that can be verified and duplicated by anybody. So science is basically, at it most fundamental level, a public form of knowledge, a form of knowledge that is in principle accessible to everybody. Of course, not everybody’s willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the people who are willing to go out and do that, — if the experiments don’t work, then it means it’s not science.

“This democratization of science, this making it public, is in a sense the realization of a promise that science has held for a long time. Instead of having to be a member of the Royal Society to do science, the way you had to be in England in the 17th, 18th, centuries today pretty much anybody who wants to do it can, and the information that they need to do it is there. This is a great thing about science. That’s why ideas about the third culture are particularly apropos right now, as you are concentrating on scientists trying to take their case directly to the public. Certainly, now is the time to do it.”

Click Here for Seth Lloyd’s Bio Page

Reposted from the EDGE

If you read the newspaper, surf the net, or watch the evening news then you have heard a lot lately about global warming. Earlier this week, I linked to one of the more startling stories in The New York Times where Timothy Egan wrote an article about Alaska’s climate is which he stated that: 

“The average temperature has risen dramatically in the past 30 years and where mosquitoes have shown up in normally frigid Barrow, the northernmost town in North America.

“Large portions of Alaska are melting and other strange things are happening. Just a few hours’ drive from Anchorage, a 1.6-million-hectare spruce forest has been killed by beetles. It is believed to be the largest loss of trees to insects ever recorded in North America. “Government scientists,” wrote Egan, “tied the event to rising temperatures, which allow the beetles to reproduce at twice their normal rate.”

“Meanwhile, enormous fires have been raging in bone-dry regions of western and south-western America. Fires whipped by high winds in Arizona have driven thousands of residents from their homes. In Colorado, which is enduring its worst drought in decades, residents have been trying to cope with at least five major fires, including the so-called Hayman fire, the largest in the state’s history.

“Big fires are becoming the rule. By late last week authorities reported that in the first six months of this year, nearly 800,000 hectares had burned or were burning in the US, which is almost twice the average of the past 10 years. Strange, indeed. Mosquitoes in northernmost Alaska. Much of the west and south-west ablaze. Extended droughts. Extreme heat waves.

“Can you blame global warming? The year 2001 was, globally, the second hottest on record. The hottest was 1998. Do you think, maybe, we should be paying more attention?”

Most of us assume correctly that global warming means the Earth is getting hotter, but why? What is really going on?

If we desire a positive future, we humans will need to really understand global warming so we can begin finding a solution. A good place to start is with this explanation from The WORLD GAME Institute.

What is Global Warming ?

Global Warming is the term used to describe the warming and changing of the Earth’s climate due to the buildup of certain heat-trapping, “greenhouse” gases in the atmosphere. Humanity has altered Earth’s natural climate controls, causing a warming process. Global temperatures have risen by at least .55 ∞C in the last century. Six of the ten hottest years of this century were found in the 1980s. Temperatures are expected to rise by at least .5 -1.5 ∞ C in the next half century as an after-effect of current gaseous build-ups.

Why is it dangerous? BECAUSE a warmer Earth will cause agriculture to suffer. Record heat caused widespread crop loss and drought in 1988. Farmers on a warmer, drier earth will need to irrigate, a process which can increase salinity and waterlogging of soils, thereby decreasing soil quality. Because irrigation is the largest user of water in the world, it could cause water shortages and possibly water wars. BECAUSE many plant and animal species, unable to withstand quick climate change, will face extinction. BECAUSE a warmer Earth will adversely affect human welfare and safety. Incidences of heat attacks, respiratory disease and stroke will increase. Disease and pests are more likely to spread. Tropical storms, tornadoes, landslides, heatwaves and droughts will both increase in number and intensity. Air quality will become poorer. BECAUSE coastal cities like Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Bangkok will be flooded as ocean level rises due to melting glaciers. BECAUSE as ocean levels rise, some inland drinking water sources will become contaminated by saltwater. Wetlands and coastal food stocks will be endangered.

The sun’s energy reaches the Earth as ultraviolet rays. This energy is either reflected by clouds back toward space, or absorbed by the Earth and later discharged as heat and infrared rays. Gases in the Earth’s atmosphere trap the exiting heat and infrared rays, making the Earth a warmer planet and thus able to sustain life. Because these gases absorb and trap heat inside the Earth’s atmosphere – a greenhouse’s glass traps the heat from the sun inside the greenhouse – they are called “greenhouse gases,” and their heating effect on the Earth is known as the “greenhouse effect.” The dominant greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide(CO2); methane(CH4); nitrous oxide (N2O); water vapors(H2O); chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs); and the tropospheric ozones (O3)found in urban smog.

Carbon dioxide is a colorless natural gas formed in animal respiration, and in the combustion and decomposition of organic substances. It is created by cars, factories, agricultural activities, and fossil fuel burning. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas are our main sources of energy. Much of the electricity we use is produced through the burning of coal. The burning of coal generates especially great amounts of CO2. Thus waste and inefficiencies in either the supply or use of energy, such as coal, causes high emission levels of CO2. Deforestation is responsible for 20% of current CO2 released. Methane is a colorless, odorless flammable natural gas produced through wood burning, livestock raising, and rotting of organic material in bogs, wetlands, rice paddies and landfills. Nitrous oxide (or laughing gas) is produced through coal burning, bacterial action, soil microbes digestion, and use of chemical fertilizers and aerosols.

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are synthetic gaseous compounds used in air conditioning and refrigeration, used as blowing agents for packing materials and foam containers, and used as cleaning agents for electric parts. Aerosols once accounted for 50% of all CFC used. Halons, similar to CFCs, are found in air conditioners. CFCs are 20,000 times more capable of trapping heat than carbon dioxide, and have the fastest growth rate of all greenhouse gasses.

The level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has changed many times in the past, giving rise to changes in average temperature levels. These temperature changes occurred over long periods of time forcing evolutionary changes in plants and animals. Prehistoric ages are classified according to their climate and the resulting plant and animal life. There have been 35 ice ages and warmings on Earth so far. Currently, man is artificially raising the level of greenhouse gases, forcing the average global temperature to rise at a faster pace than ever before. We are already committed to a .5 ∞ to 1.5 ∞C increase in average global temperature due to build-up of current emissions. If current rates continue average global temperatures will rise between 1 ∞ and 5 ∞ C. Seemingly small, this will create a dramatic effect. North America was covered by ice when the average temperature was only 5 ∞C colder.

Higher average temperatures will cause evolutionary changes in plant and animal life, and change many facets of life including farming, forestry, fishing, and transportation. However, the exact nature of future changes are under debate due to the complexity of the subject matter. Increased heating of the earth’s surface will lead to increased evaporation and thus precipitation in northern high-latitude areas, even while precipitation in southern, low-latitude areas declines. Regional vegetation and animal life will change. Some fertile fields will become deserts while some northern lands will become usable for crop production. The temperature change may kill plant and animal life before they evolve or adapt to their new environment. A warmer and wetter atmosphere could lead to more frequent and more intense tropical storms. Twenty percent of the world’s population lives on lands likely to be dramatically changed by rising water levels and tropical storms. Humans have been increasing the amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through inefficient and thoughtless use of energy sources and natural resources. Human activity accounts for 27 billion tons of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere each year. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased by 10% since 1958, and by 25% since 1800s. Meanwhile the environment’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide is reduced by the destruction of the forests.

What can we do? We can reduce our level of greenhouse gas emissions without reducing our quality of life. We can replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, or geothermal energy. We can take energy saving measures in our homes. It is estimated that 40- 70% of all home heating expenditures are wasted due to leaky windows and doors, and lack of insulation. We can increase the efficiency of our energy use through development of new transportation methods and more fuel efficient technology. We can reforest areas damaged by deforestation. We can cut back on aerosol use, which once accounted for 50% of all CFC production, and support development of CFC substitutes. By changing our behavior, we can lower carbon emissions and decrease the amount of CFC’s in our atmosphere. In America, where the average person generates twenty tons of carbon dioxide per year, your decision to bicycle or buy a fuel-efficient car will make a difference. By 2010 if we do nothing to improve the fuel efficiency of the world’s 350 million cars, carbon emissions will double. If, however, we limit the auto population to 500 million cars and improve fuel efficiency to 50 miles per gallon, atmospheric carbon will be halved.

Solar Cells From Buckyballs?

David Faiman & Eugene Katz

Because it turned out to be so simple to synthesize, the original C60 fullerene received much attention from scientists in many fields of expertise. Our interest, as solar cell specialists was sparked both by its optical properties and by the fact that the material can be synthesized from graphite and purified using nothing but heat–that is without chemicals. The optical properties of C60 have much in common with a theoretically ideal (albeit environmentally questionable) photovoltaic (PV) material, cadmium telluride. This fact, together with the exciting possibility that it may be possible to generate and purify C60 using merely an intense beam of sunlight, suggest that buckyballs might be the ideal material for solar cells.

There has been some controversy in the scientific literature regarding the optical properties of C60. Could one actually make a solar cell from C60, or only a detector of short-wave ultraviolet light?

We resolved that question by actually making a C60 solar cell. We grew a small crystal of C60, coated one side of it with silver, and exposed it to light. It produced an electric current! We then studied its optical properties in a more thorough and scientific manner and were able to understand many of the reasons leading to the controversy in the first place.

But the path to carbon solar cells is still long because buckminsterfullerene is not a conventional semiconductor. Instead, it combines within a single material the properties of both semiconductors and molecular crystals, which necessitates careful studies of all of its physical and chemical properties. One of the problems that we have yet to solve is how to “dope” C60. (Doping is the addition of trace amounts of foreign atoms to a pure semi-conductor to achieve the desired electrical properties.) This will be necessary if we are to produce a high-efficiency carbon cell that could compete in performance with silicon cells. While we have a number of ideas that are still being tested, we have still not produced a carbon solar cell with any significant degree of efficiency.

However, a group of European researchers centered in Austria has recently achieved an efficiency of 3% in a fullerene solar cell. Their approach is different from ours. Instead of trying to produce a so-called pn junction cell, as is done in the case of conventional silicon PV cells, the European group bonds buckyballs to a polymer chain, producing, in effect, a plastic solar cell.

Now 3% might not seem very impressive compared to more than 10% efficiency obtained from garden-variety crystalline silicon cells. However, this number must be seen in a correct context. First of all, the earliest silicon cells did not achieve 3% efficiency until long after the PV properties of silicon had been realized. Secondly, 3% already comes quite close to the efficiency of many low-cost amorphous silicon solar cells that are widely marketed today.

Perhaps most exciting is the prospect that plastic solar cells, whatever their ultimate efficiency may be, suggest totally new usage paradigms. The European group talks about “throw-away” solar cells that would be manu-factured in huge rolls like today’s polyethylene sheeting. Such material could be made into disposable clothing or other temporary covers, and used to generate power for all kinds of purposes that would not even be considered today because of the high cost of solar cells.

Eugene Katz is a senior researcher at Ben-Gurion University’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research, Sede Boqer.

References

Image Prof. Sariciftci, University of Linz, Austria.

Reposted from Buckminster Fuller Institute

I am a student of Buckminster Fuller’s. In my opinion, someday he will be considered one of our greatest thinkers. Known as Bucky by all who related to him personally, the following are the rules he chose to live by.

Bucky’s Self-Disciplines

I decided that Nature might support a man who was doing what Nature wanted to be done and concluded that I would be informed by Nature if I proceeded in the following manner:

1. Use myself as an experiment to see what, if anything, a healthy, young male human of average size, experience, and capability with an economically dependent wife and new born child, starting without capital or any kind of wealth, cash savings, credit or university degree could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great private enterprise to lastingly improve the physical protection and support of all human lives.
   
   
2. Commit all of my productivity toward dealing only with the whole planet Earth and all its resources and cumulative know-how. Observation of my life to date shows that the larger the number for whom I work, the more positively effective I become. Thus, it is obvious that if I work always and only for all humanity, I will be optimally effective.
   
   
3. Seek to do my own thinking, confining it to only experientially gained information.
   
   
4. Seek to accomplish whatever is to be attained in such a manner that the advantage attained would never be secured at the cost of another or others.
   
   
5. Seek to cope with all humanly unfavorable conditions by searching for the family of relevant physical principles involved.
   
   
6. Reduce my inventions to physically working models and must never talk about the inventions until physically proved or disproved.
   
   
7. Seek to reform the environment, not the humans. I am determined never to try to persuade humanity to alter its customs and viewpoints.
   
   
8. Never promote or sell either my ideas or artifacts or pay others to do so. All support must be spontaneously engendered by evolution’s integrating of my inventions with the total evolution of human affairs.
   
   
9. Assume that nature has its own gestation rates, not only for the birth of each new biological component, but also for each inanimate technological artifact.
   
   
10. Seek to develop my artifacts with ample anticipatory time margins so that they will be ready for use by society when society discovers–through evolutionary emergencies–a need for them.
    
    
11. Seek to learn the most from my mistakes.
    
    
12. Seek to decrease time wasted in worried procrastination and to increase time invested in discovery of technological effectiveness.
    
    
13. Seek to document my development in the official records of humanity by applying for and being granted government patents.
    
    
14. Above all, seek to comprehend the principles of eternally regenerative universe and discover how humans function in these principles.
    
    
15. Seek to educate myself comprehensively regarding nature’s inventory of chemical elements, their weights, performance characteristics, relative abundance’s, geographical whereabouts, metallurgical alloys, and chemical associabilities and disassociabilities.
    
    
16. Seek to comprehend the full gamut of production tool capabilities, energy resources, and all relevant geological, meteorological, demographic, and economic data.
    
    
17. Seek to operate only on a do-it-yourself basis and only on the basis of intuition.
    
    
18. Plan for my design science strategies to advantage the new life to be born on Earth, life born unencumbered with the conditioned reflexes so prevalent today.
    
    
19. Commit whole-heartedly to the above and pay no attention to “earning a living” in humanity’s established economic system, yet find that my family’s and my needs are provided for by seemingly pure happenstance and always only in the nick of time.

Buckminster Fuller Institute

spaceshipEARTH

I found the following at Chris Lucas’ CALResCo site.

A Synopsis of Nature’s Holism

Laurence Evans

Nature’s Holism is about evolution , ecology and human evolution . It provides a scientifically based argument for an unrecognised ecological process that is similar to the yin and yang of Chinese Taoism. The two inter linked ecological processes that I introduce, I term perpetuity and compatibility.

By “holism” I mean that nature shows an interdependence, expressed as a reciprocity between long-associated organisms (living plants and animals), forming a natural panoply. PERPETUITY is the continual and natural drive or impulse for survival and the perpetuation of the individual. Survival and perpetuity reflect an aspect of natural selection, which is the consequence of good design. (Natural selection is the evolutionary process of differential survival and reproduction of organisms because of their differing genetic constitutions being subject to environmental forces. It leads to adaptive evolutionary change.) I show that evolutionary processes lead to interactions and behaviour that provide a degree of compatibility (interdependence) between long-associated organisms. A compatible animal exhibits behaviour reducing its effect upon the habitat upon which it depends for survival. If measured as a relative value, increased efficiency would be found.

Thomas Hobbes , General J. C. Smuts , Immanuel Kant and of course, Charles Darwin provides important conceptual foundations to this book. A parallel idea is found in the science of chaos and complexity . Another primary reference is the Islamic Holy Quraan , but this is a purely empirical idea.  These sources provide strength to the final concept and represent the main areas of conflict in this book, namely theology (religion ) (see note 1 ), ethics (morals), evolution , teleology and holism . Briefly, Hobbes provides clarity in reasoning and a moral philosophy, an essential tool for a book of this type. Smuts outlines a feasible and credible scientific holism. The Holy Quraan provides divine absolute constraints to the possible and a Divine moral code. Kant provides an extensive insight into the implications of teleology and Charles Darwin provides a practical and valid evolutionary mechanism. Nature’s Holism does not appear to align well with the Gaia hypothesis .

Atoms do not change their nature in any fundamental or evolutionary sense in the formation of molecules. Subatomic structure does not conform to the whole. From the molecule upwards, coevolution is possible, conforming that level to the whole. All evolutionary changes are essentially molecular. Atoms provide constraints to what molecular forms are possible.

At the ecosystem level of organisation, with interdependence and coadaptation found between associated organisms, the mode of perpetuation  is to be found in the parts, the individual organisms.

Associations evolve so that the animal is “suited” to use the resources of its niche . In an experiment called Prisoner’s Dilemma (Axelrod), that tested interactive models, the interactive process (where elimination was possible) did not lead to survival of the fittest as is generally understood of evolution today, but led to the fittest being those that COOPERATED. Cooperation implies INTERDEPENDENCE. Biotic interactions during the evolutionary process lead to interdependence. A species’ formation of territories, instead of being a purely competitive mechanism, is behaviour through which beneficial cooperative behaviour can be expressed. The evolution of cooperation requires that successful strategies perpetuate and that there is a source of variation in the strategies employed. Darwinian natural selection requires the same conditions, with variations provided by genetic mutations.

Much of what Darwin said has holistic flair. He uses his term “struggle for existence” in a “metaphorical sense” “INCLUDING DEPENDENCE OF ONE BEING ON ANOTHER (equated partially with compatibility), and including not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny ” (equated with PERPETUITY). We find a more subtle understanding of competition as an interaction in his statement that: “It is good thus to try in our imagination to give any form some advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do, so as to succeed. It will convince us of our ignorance on the MUTUAL RELATIONS OF ALL ORGANIC BEINGS; A CONVICTION AS NECESSARY, AS IT SEEMS TO BE DIFFICULT TO ACQUIRE.” This mutuality leads to compatibility, so Darwin says, “Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close fitting are the MUTUAL RELATIONS of all organic beings TO EACH OTHER and TO THEIR PHYSICAL CONDITIONS of life.” “Thus I can understand how a flower and a bee might become slowly, either simultaneously or one after the other, modified and ADAPTED in the most perfect manner TO each other, by the continued preservation of individuals presenting MUTUAL and SLIGHTLY FAVOURABLE DEVIATIONS OF STRUCTURE.” Further, “if any one species does not become modified and improved in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will soon be exterminated.”

Darwin emphasises the associations of nature by first noting that “Competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature. Its “COROLLARY OF THE HIGHEST IMPORTANCE : That the structure of every organic being (organism) is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all other organic beings, with which it comes into competition.”

For scientific rigor, I introduce an established scientific model, the Lotka Volterra model , but with a slight modification.  

dN1                                           (K1-{N1+i12N2})
—–   =                             r1N1 ————————
dt                                                        K1  

Traditionally, this equation models competition (Smith, 1990), while here interactions of any form between associated species are considered. Putman (1994) recognises this possibility. After Gause , competition dominated the perception of ecologists dealing with the Lotka-Volterra model and ecosystems.

They modified the Lotka-Volterra model to explain other forms of interaction such as mutualism. Biological mutualism is a beneficial, reciprocal relationship between two species. The interaction favours survival, growth or fitness of both species (Smith, 1990). To model this, “The general approach has been a modification of the terms of the Lotka-Volterra equations for competition in which the negative alphas of competition become positive.” They term this positive coefficient the coefficient of mutualism. By the time Putman published his book, “Community Ecology” in 1994, they established this positiveness, negativeness or neutralness of biotic relationships: “Indeed all the various relationships through which the various members of a community might interact, may be represented as ++ (mutually beneficial); +0 (beneficial to one participant, not affecting the other); and +- (beneficial to one, damaging to the other).” To this he adds two more in a table, — (for competition) and 0- (for incidental damage).

The most important variable in this model is the competition coefficient , alpha, which I have call the interactive coefficient ( i-factor ) to accord with the compatibility idea and allow the consideration of all interactions, including competition and cooperation. The competition coefficient (alpha) represents the strength of interaction (i-factor), showing the extent to which the growth rate of species 1 influences that of associated species 2 (Putman, 1994). i12 is the interactive effect on species 1 of species 2 (the effect of species 2 on species 1). INTRASPECIFIC interactive effects represented by the i-factor, or the “cost” of the interactive effect of two individuals of the same species, we give a value of 1. All other interactions with other species are measured RELATIVE to this value. In other words, we allocate the average interactive effect of two individuals of the same species a “cost” of 1. There are many ways of expressing this. Brewer (1994) explains it by saying that “the inhibitory effect of one or more individuals of species 1 on itself is 1/K1 .” This is a valid assumption as animal behaviour has evolved and is predictable so that it has a measurable average cost (statistical probability) for the species concerned. Colinvaux (1973) explains that “if an individual species 1 treats an individual of species 2 as one of its own kind, i21 = K2/K1 = 1.”

In the standard analysis of the Lotka-Volterra Model, ecologists recognise the possibility of coexistence through decreased interactive effects between species (Smith, 1990). When intraspecific competition inhibits the growth of a population more than interspecific interactions do, coexistence is possible. Smith (1990) notes that coexistence occurs when “Each species inhibits its own growth through density-dependent mechanisms more than it inhibits the growth of the other species.” Colinvaux (1973) also notes that “for weakly competing populations, then, the Lotka-Volterra equations predict that both should persist indefinitely, their populations fluctuating only gently about equilibrium levels.” Unfortunately, Smith and other ecologists did not realise the evolutionary implications of this “WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY” that opens between two interactors under such conditions.

Adaptation, when between organisms that are both evolving, leads to what appears like group selection, but is coadaptation. The conclusion drawn from the model is that behaviour which reduces the interactive effect or “cost” between individual organisms of the same ( intraspecific ) or different (interspecific ) species, is selected for through natural selection, as such behaviour leads to ecological stability and individual fitness. Natural selection decreases the intensity of interaction between two associated species through their diversification as this is an economic advantage. Specialization and diversification are adaptive advantages, improving survival potential.
As a final note I provide an interpretation of the paleontological record in the light of the modified Lotka Volterra model. An unexplained mystery is that evolutionary stasis is evident from the fossil record. Species remain unchanged for even millions of years once formed. With this pattern there is a rapid evolution of new species before the period of stasis. Because of this process, there is a glaring absence of transitional or intermediate forms in the fossil record. Geneticists cannot explain this with their models. Complexity theorists can explain these processes and provide an alternative hypothesis to the one I provide.
The same selective evolutionary pressure that reduces interactive costs between two species, also acts within a species. The effect of intense intraspecific competition is the stasis of the species as large variations will tend to be less efficient and rapidly eliminated by the interactive pressure.

Below is a graph of three interacting species where the intensity of intraspecific interactions requires more energy than the average of interspecific interactions. The three species coexist, and due to close association, they coevolve.

This model assumes that intraspecific interactions are  a significant force in many species. Wherever intraspecific interactions require more energy than interspecific interactions, coevolution can result in interdependent associations. Such interactions are epitomised by the bee and the flower and I have termed these compatible associations.

note 1:
“That the two (theology and philosophy) have important overlapping concerns seems beyond question. A systematic philosophy that fails to give any thought to the question of God’s existence could be judged seriously incomplete: likewise a theology that fails to enter into discussion with opposed views of the world, or to explore whatever philosophical support is available for its principal claims.” (Honderich, 1995).

Read more about Nature’s Holism

Raymond  Kurzweil discusses the concept of pattern in this excerpt from the last chapter of the new online book  Are We Spiritual Machines? 

The Material World: “Is That All There Is?”

Ray Kurzweil

In their foreword, George Gilder and Jay Richards describe me (as well as John Searle and Thomas Ray) as “philosophical materialists,” a term they define by quoting Carl Sagan’s view of the material world as “all there is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Kurzweil, Searle, and Ray, according to Gilder and Richards, “agree that everything can or at least should be described in terms of chance and impersonal natural law without reference to any sort of transcendent intelligence or mind. To them, ideas are epiphenomena of matter.”

There are many concepts here to respond to. But my overriding reaction is: What’s the problem with the so-called material world? Is the world of matter and energy not profound enough? Is it truly necessary to look beyond the world we encounter to find transcendence?

Where shall I start? How about water? It’s simple enough, but consider the diverse and beautiful ways it manifests itself: the endlessly varying patterns as it cascades past rocks in a stream, then surging chaotically down a waterfall (all viewable from my office window, incidentally); the billowing patterns of clouds in the sky; the arrangement of snow on a mountain; the satisfying design of a single snowflake. Or consider Einstein’s description of the entangled order and disorder in, well, a glass of water (i.e., his thesis on Brownian motion).

As we move into the biological world, consider the intricate dance of spirals of DNA during mitosis. How about the “loveliness” of a tree as it bends in the wind and its leaves churn in a tangled dance? Or the bustling world we see in a microscope? There’s transcendence everywhere.

A comment on the word “transcendence” is in order here. To transcend means to “go beyond,” but this need not compel us to an ornate dualist view that regards transcendent levels of reality (e.g., the spiritual level) to be not of this world. We can “go beyond” the “ordinary” powers of the material world through the power of patterns. Rather than a materialist, I would prefer to consider myself a “patternist.” It’s through the emergent powers of the pattern that we transcend.

Consider the author of this chapter. I am not merely or even principally the material stuff I am made of because the actual particles that comprise me turn over quickly. Most cells in the body are replaced within a few months. Although neurons persist longer, the actual atoms making up the neurons are also rapidly replaced. In the first chapter I made the analogy to water in a stream rushing around rocks. The pattern of water is relatively stable, yet the specific water molecules change in milliseconds. The same holds true for us human beings. It is the immense, indeed transcendent, power of our pattern that persists.

The power of patterns to persist goes beyond explicitly self-replicating systems such as organisms and self-replicating technology. It is the persistence and power of patterns that, quite literally, gives life to the Universe. The pattern is far more important than the material stuff that comprises it.

Random strokes on a canvas are just paint. But when arranged in just the right way, it transcends the material stuff and becomes art. Random notes are just sounds. Sequenced in an “inspired” way, we have music. A pile of components is just an inventory. Ordered in an innovative manner, and perhaps with some software (another pattern), we have the “magic” (i.e., transcendence) of technology.

We can regard the spiritual level as the ultimate in transcendence. In my view, it incorporates all of these, the creations of the natural world such as ourselves, as well as our own creations in the form of human technology, culture, art, and spiritual expression.

Is the world of patterns impersonal? Consider evolution. The “chanceÖimpersonal” swirl of dust and wind gave rise to ever more intelligent, knowledgeable, creative, beautiful, and loving entities, and has done so at an ever accelerating pace. I don’t regard this as an “impersonal” process because I don’t regard the world and all of its attendant mysteries as impersonal. Consider what I wrote in the first chapter, that “technology is evolution by other means.” In other words, technology is a continuation of the evolutionary process that gave rise to the technology creating species in the first place. It is another paradigm shift, a profound one to be sure, changing the focus from DNA-guided evolution to an evolutionary process directed by one its own creations, another level of indirection if you will.

If we put key milestones of both biological and human cultural-technological evolution on a single graph, in which the x-axis (number of years ago) and the y-axis (the paradigm shift time) are both plotted on exponential scales, we find a straight line with biological evolution leading directly to human-directed evolution.

There are many implications of the observation that technology is an evolutionary process, indeed the continuation of the evolutionary process that gave rise to it. It implies that the evolution of technology, like that of biology, accelerates.

It also implies that technology, which is the second half of the evolutionary line above, and the cutting edge of evolution today, is anything but impersonal. Rather, it is the intensely human drama of human competition and innovation that George Gilder writes about (and makes predictions about) so brilliantly.

How about the first half of the line, the story of evolution that started with the swirling dust and water on an obscure planet? The personalness of the biological stage of evolution depends on how we view consciousness. My view is that consciousness, the seat of “personalness,” is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights).

We have no consciousness detector, and any such device that we can imagine proposing will have built in assumptions about which we can debate endlessly. It comes down to the essential difference between objective (i.e., scientific) and subjective (i.e., conscious, personal) reality. Some philosophers then go on to say that because the ultimate issue of consciousness is not a scientific issue (albeit that the more superficial, i.e., the “easy” issues of consciousness as the philosopher David Chalmers describes them, can be amenable to scientific exploration), consciousness is, therefore, an illusion, or at least not a real issue. However, a more reasonable conclusion that one can come to, and indeed my own view, is that precisely because these central issues of reality are not fully resolvable by scientific experiment and argument alone, there is a salient role for philosophy and religion. However, this does not require a world outside the physical world we experience.

The arguments that I do make with regard to consciousness are for the sole purpose of illustrating the vexing and paradoxical (and in my view, therefore, profound) nature of consciousness, how one set of assumptions (i.e., that a copy of my mind file either shares or does not share my consciousness) leads ultimately to an opposite view, and vice versa.

So we could say that the universe—“all that is”—is indeed personal, is “conscious” in some way that we cannot fully comprehend. This is no more unreasonable an assumption or belief than believing that another person is conscious. Personally, I do feel this to be the case. But this does not require me to go beyond the “mere” “material” world and its transcendent patterns. The world that is, is profound enough.

Read the rest of the chapter from Are We Spiritual Machines?

Reposted from KurzweilAI.net

Ray Kurzweil is one of our most brilliant scientists and technologists. I very much enjoyed his book The Age of Spiritual Machines. He has just published a sequel Are We Spiritual Machines? which is now available online. The following is from the first chapter.

The Evolution of Mind in the Twenty-First Century

Ray Kurzweil

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The results will include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, downloading the brain and immortal software-based humans — the step in evolution.

An Overview of the Next Several Decades The intelligence of machines—nonbiological entities—will exceed human intelligence early in this century. By intelligence, I include all the diverse and subtle ways in which humans are intelligent—including musical and artistic aptitude, creativity, physically moving through the world, and even responding to emotion. By 2019, a $1,000 computer will match the processing power of the human brain—about 20 million billion calculations per second. This level of processing power is a necessary but not sufficient condition for achieving human-level intelligence in a machine. Organizing these resources—the “software” of intelligence—will take us to 2029, by which time your average personal computer will be equivalent to a thousand human brains.

Once a computer achieves a level of intelligence comparable to human intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it. A key advantage of nonbiological intelligence is that machines can easily share their knowledge. If I learn French, or read War and Peace, I can’t readily download that learning to you. You have to acquire that scholarship the same painstaking way that I did. My knowledge, embedded in a vast pattern of neurotransmitter concentrations and interneuronal connections, cannot be quickly accessed or transmitted. But we won’t leave out quick downloading ports in our nonbiological equivalents of human neuron clusters. When one computer learns a skill or gains an insight, it can immediately share that wisdom with billions of other machines.

As a contemporary example, we spent years teaching one research computer how to recognize continuous human speech. We exposed it to thousands of hours of recorded speech, corrected its errors, and patiently improved its performance. Finally, it became quite adept at recognizing speech (I dictated most of my recent book to it). Now if you want your own personal computer to recognize speech, it doesn’t have to go through the same process; you can just download the fully trained program in seconds. Ultimately, billions of nonbiological entities can be the master of all human and machine acquired knowledge. Computers are also potentially millions of times faster than human neural circuits, and have far more reliable memories.

One approach to designing intelligent computers will be to copy the human brain, so these machines will seem very human. And through nanotechnology, which is the ability to create physical objects atom by atom, they will have humanlike—albeit greatly enhanced—bodies as well. Having human origins, they will claim to be human, and to have human feelings. And being immensely intelligent, they’ll be very convincing when they tell us these things. But are these feelings “real,” or just apparently real? I will discuss this subtle but vital distinction below. First it is important to understand the nature of nonbiological intelligence, and how it will emerge.

Keep in mind that this is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines. It is emerging from within our human-machine civilization. There will not be a clear distinction between human and machine as we go through the twenty-first century. First of all, we will be putting computers—neural implants—directly into our brains. We’ve already started down this path. We have ventral posterior nucleus, subthalmic nucleus, and ventral lateral thalamus neural implants to counteract Parkinson’s Disease and tremors from other neurological disorders. I have a deaf friend who now can hear what I am saying because of his cochlear implant. Under development is a retina implant that will perform a similar function for blind individuals, basically replacing certain visual processing circuits of the retina and nervous system. Recently scientists from Emory University placed a chip in the brain of a paralyzed stroke victim who can now begin to communicate and control his environment directly from his brain.

In the 2020s, neural implants will not be just for disabled people, and introducing these implants into the brain will not require surgery, but more about that later. There will be ubiquitous use of neural implants to improve our sensory experiences, perception, memory, and logical thinking.

These “noninvasive” implants will also plug us in directly to the World Wide Web. By 2030, “going to a web site” will mean entering a virtual reality environment. The implant will generate the streams of sensory input that would otherwise come from our real senses, thus creating an all-encompassing virtual environment that responds to the behavior of our own virtual body (and those of others) in the virtual environment. This technology will enable us to have virtual reality experiences with other people—or simulated people—without requiring any equipment not already in our heads. And virtual reality will not be the crude experience that one can experience in today’s arcade games. Virtual reality will be as realistic, detailed, and subtle as real reality. So instead of just phoning a friend, you can meet in a virtual French cafÈ in Paris, or take a walk on a virtual Mediterranean beach, and it will seem very real. People will be able to have any type of experience with anyone—business, social, romantic, sexual—regardless of physical proximity.

Read the online book: Are We Spiritual Machines?

Reposted from KurzweilAI.net