Diminishing return... Historian Yuval Noah Harari has sounded an alarm regarding the power of some of the new technologies to harmfully disrupt human life as we know it. Key disruptions include serious economic impacts on life as humans steadily lose their utility and instrumental value as a factor in the means of production. Perhaps causing … Continue reading The (human) “useless class” →

      Posing the first problem:     Non-human living entities live in an objective reality (that is, they're consciously at-one with material objects, surfaces, exteriors: a monological reality). Conversely, humans seem to live concurrently—and self-consciously—in both subjective and objective realities (that is, a dual, or dialogical reality). This very basic truth is built into our ['integral'] holism mnemonic: … Continue reading The first problem →

No free will? Last week ("No free will?") we followed historian/author Yuval Noah Harari in raising some crucially significant questions regarding free will and the impact technology may soon have on our human future. I shared a curious Homo Deus quote. Harari writes: If we want to understand our life and our future, we should … Continue reading Free will—or algorithms? →

  Paul Revere for our time? On my reading, Yuval Noah Harari has made telling a deadly serious cautionary tale his mission. In his books, Sapiens, and Homo Deus,—full disclosure: I'm still reading through Homo Deus (I'm processing my provisional understandings of Harari's thought here on the blog in real time)—Harari paints a troubling picture of a … Continue reading No free will? →

  Sapiens (wise)? For illustrations in my two most recent blog posts I've quoted passages from a (NY Times bestselling) book by historian Yuval Noah Harari entitled, Sapiens. The subtitle is: A Brief History of Humankind. Any work so ambitious necessarily uses lots of shorthand. While I have no lack of instances where my view diverges … Continue reading Six+ kinds of humans →

  Problem with Or? Pioneers or settlers. Thinkers or feelers. Introverts or extroverts. So forth or so on. If there are only two kinds of people, then the list of possible iterations for those two kinds must be endless. Some divisions possess extraordinary power, e.g., accepted or rejected, rich or poor, esteemed or reviled, and, … Continue reading Language gap →

  Multiple universes? I don't understand the math on it, however, at least one stream of string theory postulates that there are infinite universes all happening now. They don't say, but I imagine all the universes are operating within the same Eternity. Perhaps there are infinite concurrent eternities, too, and they just haven't worked out the … Continue reading Gyrations? →