2012 - What does it mean to you?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Cyclopea

That is a fantastic paper and I wish it was short enough to have posted it here directly. You are very good at explaining complex theories to a layperson.
That paper deserves a thread of it's own.
Just say No to New Age Fascism!
"any meaning-creation systems we deploy should be in line with science or, if that is not possible, they should stay as far away from the purview of science as is humanly possible." Indeed.

Thank you for the praise. I enjoyed writing it and my professor thought it was a lot of fun to read. I appreciate your saying that I was able to make it understandable because one of the books I would really like to write at some point is a full-bodied exploration of what a new meaning-creating system would look like that took, as a jumping-off point, the world as described by science.

One thing that has caused me to lose sleep over the last decade or so is that I have come to realize that our meaning-creating systems (read religion or spirituality) are largely out-of-date. Most of them describe a world that is actually very much contrary to the world as described by modern science. This is something that we can ill-afford any longer because there are some very big questions that are either barreling down on us or have already arrived and our meaning-creating systems do not appear to have the tools to deal with them.

I'll mention three to illustrate the kinds of problems I'm talking about:

1) Climate change. We *must* deal with this problem but it is not so simple or straight-forward as all of us getting rid of our cars and no longer using fossil fuels. Unless you have the stomach for a VERY large die-off (think half the human population) we can't just turn the clock back to the pre-agricultural era. The agricultural era (pre-Industrial revolution) can't sustain 6 billion+ people. What's more, those of us in the nations that have *already* passed to a post-industrial nation cannot ethically go to those nations that have yet to pass through the industrial phase and say "yes, granted, we chopped down our forests and paved over everything in sight but YOU can't do that because the planet can't afford it so, sorry, it's no better than subsistence agriculture for you and your descendants".

2) Advances in biology. Within our lifetimes some very interesting things are going to happen. One of which is that we are going to develop truly NEW lifeforms. By this I mean DNA patterns that have *never* existed, in any form, on this planet before. The first artificial cell has been created. A truly novel form of life is on the horizon. What's more, at this point, cloning is an engineering problem and not a scientific problem. (The difference here is this: the scientific problem is "can it be done" the engineering problem is "how do we do this efficiently, safely and economically".) When human clones exist what do we do then?

3) Sentient machines. While I think this one may be the most distant from where we sit now, at *some* point I think we're going to have to deal with a truly sentient machine. It may be a robot, it may be an AI but it will be self-aware. What rights should a self-aware artifact have? Should it own itself or can it be owned by its creator?

NONE of the religions or spiritual systems created so far appear to have any real means of dealing with these questions and they are *deep* questions. At least two of those I expect to see on our plates in my lifetime. The last one is most likely beyond the horizon of my life but will almost certainly be addressed by the time my granddaughter is an old woman. We currently don't have the tools to solve the problems. "We shouldn't play god" isn't an answer. "This or that ancient civilization was in harmony with nature" isn't an answer even if it were true (and it has never been true for any civilization). "We shouldn't build such things" isn't an answer. "The Bible forbids it" isn't an answer. All our cop-outs and short-cuts to actually truly entering into the question.

What's more most of our meaning-creating system misappropriate scientific *sounding* language to bolster their cases. The invocation of quantum mechanics is just the latest and most egregious example of this. Quantum theory doesn't say what New Agers say it does. At the same time, New Agers miss the elegance of beauty of what quantum mechanics *does* say because they are trying to make it into something it isn't. I love QM and wish I had the mathematics to read the literature on it in its native language but I don't (particle physicists take math classes that are, essentially, tuned for their field and while there is cross-over it is a different kind of mathematics than what I, as a biologist, will ever use). What I do know of QM, leaves me in awe with my head spinning because the sub-atomic world is so wonderfully wacky and weird. I wish that people who use QM as a way to give their spiritual beliefs the imprimatur of science would just sit with the subject matter, meet it on its *own* terms and try to wrap their heads around objects as small as an electron or try to imagine, really viscerally imagine, the problem of detecting the position and momentum of an electron at the same time. Once you've grasped that this is a problem that cannot be solved, ever, by anyone, under any circumstances, one gains an appreciation for just how majestic the universe is and just how puny our brains actually are.

One last thing before I close. I wish that more people truly internalized what several very eminent scientists have called the three blows to homo sapiens inflated sense of itself. Those three are this:

1) The heliocentric model. The insult here was that it took the Earth from being a special place in the Universe and made us realize that our planet is a perfectly ordinary nickel-iron rock, orbiting a completely undistinguished main-sequence star at the outer edge of a perfectly ordinary spiral galaxy.

2) Darwinian evolution by natural selection. The insult here is that it took us from being some special creation, above and beyond nature and told us that we are a large-brained African primate that is an absolute newcomer to this planet.

3) Neuroscience. The insult here is just getting warmed up. Already we are discovering that we ARE our brains. There are no thoughts you have that occur outside your brains. All your loves, all your joys are electrochemical reactions happening in your neural system. That doesn't mean that they are not *real* just that they are not *special*.

Cheers
Aj

[Cyclopea]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

Thank you for the praise. I enjoyed writing it and my professor thought it was a lot of fun to read. I appreciate your saying that I was able to make it understandable because one of the books I would really like to write at some point is a full-bodied exploration of what a new meaning-creating system would look like that took, as a jumping-off point, the world as described by science.
That sounds fascinating. I can't imagine a formal merging of the two that doesn't end up in a cultic kool-aid situation- lol!


One thing that has caused me to lose sleep over the last decade or so is that I have come to realize that our meaning-creating systems (read religion or spirituality) are largely out-of-date. Most of them describe a world that is actually very much contrary to the world as described by modern science. This is something that we can ill-afford any longer because there are some very big questions that are either barreling down on us or have already arrived and our meaning-creating systems do not appear to have the tools to deal with them.

I'm not sure that religions have truly been "meaning systems" for some time now. I think they function as an ideological and cultural glue tying together human superorganisms which vie with each other for resources. Like a bacterial meme substrate. Ecstatic experiences result from abandoning the independent self into the comfort of the larger (super)organism.
I don't really see any religions embracing modernity itself, much less scientific and technological advances. Most religions seem to be concerned with creating a child-like infantilized worldview where some "great parent" cares for the believer and cradles them safely in a place of stasis.
I don't really see any religion embracing any technology or forward looking view but rather nostalgia for an era that believers feel existed when they were children, or an imagined nostalgia for an era that they feel must have existed in times past. In fact, "The Past Into The Future" might be an adequate slogan for the relationship religion has with science. Or maybe "The Past As We Fantasize It". In that context it will be ethicists, not religious folks, that "wrestle" with the future. Religion will just say "Future Bad."

I'll mention three to illustrate the kinds of problems I'm talking about:

1) Climate change. We *must* deal with this problem but it is not so simple or straight-forward as all of us getting rid of our cars and no longer using fossil fuels. Unless you have the stomach for a VERY large die-off (think half the human population) we can't just turn the clock back to the pre-agricultural era. The agricultural era (pre-Industrial revolution) can't sustain 6 billion+ people. What's more, those of us in the nations that have *already* passed to a post-industrial nation cannot ethically go to those nations that have yet to pass through the industrial phase and say "yes, granted, we chopped down our forests and paved over everything in sight but YOU can't do that because the planet can't afford it so, sorry, it's no better than subsistence agriculture for you and your descendants".

Well that would be nice. But a biological colony's prerogative is expansion in size and the allocating of increased resources for same. Therefore, only when decreased carbon emissions (etc.) increase "profit" will such changes be adopted. To do otherwise would require that a massive biological meta-organism be formed among all existing colonies, one that suddenly stopped expansion and practiced containment in response to a theoretical future threat. Both parts of that equation- that all countries/peoples/cultures would join together in agreement, and that such a uniform coalition would voluntarily cease seeking wealth, seem highly unlikely.

2) Advances in biology. Within our lifetimes some very interesting things are going to happen. One of which is that we are going to develop truly NEW lifeforms. By this I mean DNA patterns that have *never* existed, in any form, on this planet before. The first artificial cell has been created. A truly novel form of life is on the horizon. What's more, at this point, cloning is an engineering problem and not a scientific problem. (The difference here is this: the scientific problem is "can it be done" the engineering problem is "how do we do this efficiently, safely and economically".) When human clones exist what do we do then?

I agree, the age of "artificial" life is upon us. Novel lifeforms, cloning, transhumanism, total body transplants, etc. The ethicists will have their day, and taboos will be both created and discarded, and I believe it will all be quite shocking and distasteful to the backward-looking folks but human creativity is unstoppable and it will all eventually become quite rote and all of us alive now will have our DNA preserved as "heritage" DNA for our ancestors to play with. New social conventions will be adopted that are easily integrated into "meaning creation systems" as they truly exist (media/educational/cultural agreements), but not for religions which will continue to look backwards to an imaginary time.

3) Sentient machines. While I think this one may be the most distant from where we sit now, at *some* point I think we're going to have to deal with a truly sentient machine. It may be a robot, it may be an AI but it will be self-aware. What rights should a self-aware artifact have? Should it own itself or can it be owned by its creator?

It will be interesting to see how that plays out...

NONE of the religions or spiritual systems created so far appear to have any real means of dealing with these questions and they are *deep* questions. At least two of those I expect to see on our plates in my lifetime. The last one is most likely beyond the horizon of my life [You never know! ] but will almost certainly be addressed by the time my granddaughter is an old woman. We currently don't have the tools to solve the problems. "We shouldn't play god" isn't an answer. "This or that ancient civilization was in harmony with nature" isn't an answer even if it were true (and it has never been true for any civilization). "We shouldn't build such things" isn't an answer. "The Bible forbids it" isn't an answer. All our cop-outs and short-cuts to actually truly entering into the question.

What's more most of our meaning-creating system misappropriate scientific *sounding* language to bolster their cases. The invocation of quantum mechanics is just the latest and most egregious example of this. Quantum theory doesn't say what New Agers say it does. At the same time, New Agers miss the elegance of beauty of what quantum mechanics *does* say because they are trying to make it into something it isn't.[I had to bold that part!] I love QM and wish I had the mathematics to read the literature on it in its native language but I don't (particle physicists take math classes that are, essentially, tuned for their field and while there is cross-over it is a different kind of mathematics than what I, as a biologist, will ever use). What I do know of QM, leaves me in awe with my head spinning because the sub-atomic world is so wonderfully wacky and weird. I wish that people who use QM as a way to give their spiritual beliefs the imprimatur of science would just sit with the subject matter, meet it on its *own* terms and try to wrap their heads around objects as small as an electron or try to imagine, really viscerally imagine, the problem of detecting the position and momentum of an electron at the same time. Once you've grasped that this is a problem that cannot be solved, ever, by anyone, under any circumstances, one gains an appreciation for just how majestic the universe is and just how puny our brains actually are.

One last thing before I close. I wish that more people truly internalized what several very eminent scientists have called the three blows to homo sapiens inflated sense of itself. Those three are this:

1) The heliocentric model. The insult here was that it took the Earth from being a special place in the Universe and made us realize that our planet is a perfectly ordinary nickel-iron rock, orbiting a completely undistinguished main-sequence star at the outer edge of a perfectly ordinary spiral galaxy.

Good point.

2) Darwinian evolution by natural selection. The insult here is that it took us from being some special creation, above and beyond nature and told us that we are a large-brained African primate that is an absolute newcomer to this planet.

I agree, and also think there is quite a bit more to understand about Group Selection and it's relationship to evolution, and what that "blow" will mean to our sense of culture and civilization (including religion).

3) Neuroscience. The insult here is just getting warmed up. Already we are discovering that we ARE our brains. There are no thoughts you have that occur outside your brains. All your loves, all your joys are electrochemical reactions happening in your neural system. That doesn't mean that they are not *real* just that they are not *special*.

I'm not sure how this will play out. Perhaps this is what will erode the sense of "self" and ultimately allow the formation of a larger colony?


Cheers
Aj

------------------------
What fun!
I told you you should have started another thread on it!