Several sciences
Early influences on my life were science and technology, discovered mostly from published material. Science seemed to bring awareness of a colorful rich diversity of things, particularly nature, and science itself seemed the process of connecting all these things together so as to model the behavior of it all so as to improve guesses as to what will happen as a result of whatever. Technology seemed to me to be the tools that provided science with its instruments of observation and comparisons, as well as tools in the form of consumer usage, like kitchen appliances and the automobile.
As I grew older, school showed there were "several sciences", such as physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. Each of those "sciences" seemed to grasp ever larger levels of complexity, so the tools and processes for analyzing and predicting became quite different. Yet there was the appearance that each of the sciences would someday merge into detailed unified wholeness with the other sciences: physics would describe all chemical processes; chemistry would explain all biological science processes; biological science would explain all social science. And over the decades I have seen much progress of each of the sciences extending their reach toward the other sciences.
As technology continued to provide ever more complex and dedicated tools, the computer became quite a tool for grouping like things together, a basic science function. The internet enabled computers to reach out and share some kinds of data and processes with other computers and thus to their human users which sometimes included those involved with the sciences.
The urge to observe what is going on out there, and to correlate it with one's own experiences so as to optimize the relationship with what is going on inside oneself with what is going on out there. The bodymind forms functional models of that relationship based upon past experience, as seeded by instinctive hard wiring at birth. Science and technology is like the pooling of such resources among people including others of the past, all with the same function. That pooling of a common model of it all via science and technology, enables ever greater connection between the individual's activities and the potential effects even echoing far beyond the immediate space and time around the person in the moment.
As people take from the Earth's purified resources such as ore mines, then use the products made from them and then discard those products, this increases the entropy of those materials, making it harder to re-use them. Many of such discard byproducts of the processes of civilization are not utilizable by the diverse natural beings of nature, which had recycled the byproducts of the primitive peoples. Thus those byproducts accumulate in the ecosystem, often having unexpected side effects on the resources out there, such as food sources found in the sea, and in global warming from CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere becoming noticeable even in comparison with natural weather cycles. The ever widening reach of science and technology needs to reach far better than it has been doing, so that each person can predict what effects will result from potential actions, each person from the handicapped invalid in a wheelchair to the presidents of powerful countries, they each need to have at instant access, an assessment of short and longer term results of their potential actions in response to whatever. Will computer technology with its internet be able to provide this in time before some civilization-fatal thing is chosen inadvertently?
Then comes the reaching of social science toward political science and even military science, ever more complex arenas of knowledge. At the same time comes the reaching toward motivational science, not just the advertising industry and "spin masters" who add color and purposeful narrow meaning when interpreting things for others who are not there to observe for themselves, but all things that influence what the individuals and groups do; even if provided with knowledge of predicted effects of various paths of choices; the motivational sciences processes could be pushing the "point man" at each moment to diverge widely from choices that optimize the long term existence of civilization and the greater ecosystem of life and resources, even of nearby space, potentially.
However, much does not connect up even with all these tools; a few "activist" groups work to stir up attention to special issues, such as overfishing causing food depletion, trawling destruction of ocean floor habitat, and unnecessary CO2 production. Those kinds of things ought to have been already dealt with along the way by a fully informed humanity. But no, did not happen that way. Something seems very broken, or maybe never was working actually, in the big picture.
I look back to where the problem seemed to begin. Goes back to the comic books from which I learned to read before kindergarten, and continuing in the years beyond that. Clearly the artificial characters and events in the comics had little to do with reality, yet they were very attention getting, and one's ways are learned through attention. Cartoon animals tricked and bashed each other, ever springing back up to go at it again with barely a shake of the klonked head. When I myself scraped a knee, I spent a long time with the owee, taking quite awhile to spring back up, different from the cartoon characters. Some comics had people too, and the ones I enjoyed the most were individuals ever chasing after the gangs who were trying to conquer the world; the ones in spaceships were the most dazzling, the science fiction linked in with my interest in science and technology. Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon took on the equivalent gangs who were attempting to grab the girl and conquer the planet. Here were people portrayed that were doing dazzling activities, quite different from the relatively drab world I saw in "real life." Movies happened, including cartoons and newsreels at intermission time along with popcorn; WWII started and newsreels were full of photos of war's destruction. I somehow managed to get my parents to take me to see "Fantasia" 6 times over the years, with its rich diversity of portrayal of ways of being, and clearly in fantasyland, unlike the brutal portrayals of the war's newsreels during intermission. So here was what people were really doing with their science and technology. The problem existed even back then. I later learned that history books were full of such capers, people using science and technology not only for making life better, but also for more effective ways to bash other people. rarely was their mention that people sometimes worked together to restore and maintain the environment up which all of them depended for well being.
In the past decade, was it that things got too dull, it was back to the comic books for pattens for interesting behavior? The head-on crashing of airliners into prominent large buildings was lots like bulls ramming the flanks of the dominant males; the country went to war against another far country chasing a character named from some Flash Gordon comic book invader from another planet. Spinmasters and events churned up the drama, it was never clear really wheteher they were in cahoots from the beginning, either. It was adrenaline-pumping drama galore from then on, and too often it was like the guy on the bus getting bumped in front by someone distracting him from noticing that someone else was simultaneously picking his wallet from the back. The dazzling war news prevents us from seeing what is going on at the daily life level in the country, things that otherwise might have incited civil war here.
One thing is different: in the early comic books, it was the one hero that chased after and just in time stopped the gangs who were attempting to take over the world or whatever; in present times, it is the gangs that chase after the lone person who was said to be the cause of it all, not noticing when that target was dead things changed little; the excitement of the hunt goes on, distracting from the pickpocket in the back, taking trillions from America already, most borrowed from the future generations. The comic book adventures somehow got twisted around, the fun is gone but the attention getting remains. Even when some introspection occurs, it is like the comic opossum Pogo who once sent word back from the front lines "we have met the enemy and he is us."
The utter enthusiasm with which we jumped into war, along with the later war opeing up a pandoras box that would be uncloseable, what a plan. It is as if the generation that came along after mine had learned behavior not just from comic books reading, but the video games that were comic book adventures they themselves could participate in, and the options to move were few: attack back utterly. Conditioned responses, unsupervised in the video comic book adventure arena. That when the video game was done, they walked back into the dining room and had nice food propared by Mom, so there was no reprocussions for the symbolic atrocities played upon each other in the video games.
Much of life's principles I learned in the comic book stories; and of romance, the Western songs of "she/he done me wrong," wrote the patterns for even lovelife, amazingly well. So it seems conceivable that the generation after mine's saga since "9/11" is merely video games' patterns conditioned in the players, is what happened.
Is there any indication we have learned from such goofs? The world continues to sag under civilization's diverse loads; we could be dealing with that kind of thing instead of living out video adventures that hurt for real. Surely lots of possible heroic adventures struggling to restore a world that not only gets sick from our stuff, but also goes on rampage once in a while. A world, by the way, that we and our progeny depend on for our existence. Milk is not made in grocery store shelves overnight. Mother Earth does not have infinite capacity to clean up after us. Yet, it is not likely the game players care about all that; dinner will be waiting at the dining room table when we tire of the game playing; the cute girls will look starry-eyed at the winners of the games, as always. Life is good.
As I grew older, school showed there were "several sciences", such as physics, chemistry, biology, and social sciences. Each of those "sciences" seemed to grasp ever larger levels of complexity, so the tools and processes for analyzing and predicting became quite different. Yet there was the appearance that each of the sciences would someday merge into detailed unified wholeness with the other sciences: physics would describe all chemical processes; chemistry would explain all biological science processes; biological science would explain all social science. And over the decades I have seen much progress of each of the sciences extending their reach toward the other sciences.
As technology continued to provide ever more complex and dedicated tools, the computer became quite a tool for grouping like things together, a basic science function. The internet enabled computers to reach out and share some kinds of data and processes with other computers and thus to their human users which sometimes included those involved with the sciences.
The urge to observe what is going on out there, and to correlate it with one's own experiences so as to optimize the relationship with what is going on inside oneself with what is going on out there. The bodymind forms functional models of that relationship based upon past experience, as seeded by instinctive hard wiring at birth. Science and technology is like the pooling of such resources among people including others of the past, all with the same function. That pooling of a common model of it all via science and technology, enables ever greater connection between the individual's activities and the potential effects even echoing far beyond the immediate space and time around the person in the moment.
As people take from the Earth's purified resources such as ore mines, then use the products made from them and then discard those products, this increases the entropy of those materials, making it harder to re-use them. Many of such discard byproducts of the processes of civilization are not utilizable by the diverse natural beings of nature, which had recycled the byproducts of the primitive peoples. Thus those byproducts accumulate in the ecosystem, often having unexpected side effects on the resources out there, such as food sources found in the sea, and in global warming from CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere becoming noticeable even in comparison with natural weather cycles. The ever widening reach of science and technology needs to reach far better than it has been doing, so that each person can predict what effects will result from potential actions, each person from the handicapped invalid in a wheelchair to the presidents of powerful countries, they each need to have at instant access, an assessment of short and longer term results of their potential actions in response to whatever. Will computer technology with its internet be able to provide this in time before some civilization-fatal thing is chosen inadvertently?
Then comes the reaching of social science toward political science and even military science, ever more complex arenas of knowledge. At the same time comes the reaching toward motivational science, not just the advertising industry and "spin masters" who add color and purposeful narrow meaning when interpreting things for others who are not there to observe for themselves, but all things that influence what the individuals and groups do; even if provided with knowledge of predicted effects of various paths of choices; the motivational sciences processes could be pushing the "point man" at each moment to diverge widely from choices that optimize the long term existence of civilization and the greater ecosystem of life and resources, even of nearby space, potentially.
However, much does not connect up even with all these tools; a few "activist" groups work to stir up attention to special issues, such as overfishing causing food depletion, trawling destruction of ocean floor habitat, and unnecessary CO2 production. Those kinds of things ought to have been already dealt with along the way by a fully informed humanity. But no, did not happen that way. Something seems very broken, or maybe never was working actually, in the big picture.
I look back to where the problem seemed to begin. Goes back to the comic books from which I learned to read before kindergarten, and continuing in the years beyond that. Clearly the artificial characters and events in the comics had little to do with reality, yet they were very attention getting, and one's ways are learned through attention. Cartoon animals tricked and bashed each other, ever springing back up to go at it again with barely a shake of the klonked head. When I myself scraped a knee, I spent a long time with the owee, taking quite awhile to spring back up, different from the cartoon characters. Some comics had people too, and the ones I enjoyed the most were individuals ever chasing after the gangs who were trying to conquer the world; the ones in spaceships were the most dazzling, the science fiction linked in with my interest in science and technology. Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon took on the equivalent gangs who were attempting to grab the girl and conquer the planet. Here were people portrayed that were doing dazzling activities, quite different from the relatively drab world I saw in "real life." Movies happened, including cartoons and newsreels at intermission time along with popcorn; WWII started and newsreels were full of photos of war's destruction. I somehow managed to get my parents to take me to see "Fantasia" 6 times over the years, with its rich diversity of portrayal of ways of being, and clearly in fantasyland, unlike the brutal portrayals of the war's newsreels during intermission. So here was what people were really doing with their science and technology. The problem existed even back then. I later learned that history books were full of such capers, people using science and technology not only for making life better, but also for more effective ways to bash other people. rarely was their mention that people sometimes worked together to restore and maintain the environment up which all of them depended for well being.
In the past decade, was it that things got too dull, it was back to the comic books for pattens for interesting behavior? The head-on crashing of airliners into prominent large buildings was lots like bulls ramming the flanks of the dominant males; the country went to war against another far country chasing a character named from some Flash Gordon comic book invader from another planet. Spinmasters and events churned up the drama, it was never clear really wheteher they were in cahoots from the beginning, either. It was adrenaline-pumping drama galore from then on, and too often it was like the guy on the bus getting bumped in front by someone distracting him from noticing that someone else was simultaneously picking his wallet from the back. The dazzling war news prevents us from seeing what is going on at the daily life level in the country, things that otherwise might have incited civil war here.
One thing is different: in the early comic books, it was the one hero that chased after and just in time stopped the gangs who were attempting to take over the world or whatever; in present times, it is the gangs that chase after the lone person who was said to be the cause of it all, not noticing when that target was dead things changed little; the excitement of the hunt goes on, distracting from the pickpocket in the back, taking trillions from America already, most borrowed from the future generations. The comic book adventures somehow got twisted around, the fun is gone but the attention getting remains. Even when some introspection occurs, it is like the comic opossum Pogo who once sent word back from the front lines "we have met the enemy and he is us."
The utter enthusiasm with which we jumped into war, along with the later war opeing up a pandoras box that would be uncloseable, what a plan. It is as if the generation that came along after mine had learned behavior not just from comic books reading, but the video games that were comic book adventures they themselves could participate in, and the options to move were few: attack back utterly. Conditioned responses, unsupervised in the video comic book adventure arena. That when the video game was done, they walked back into the dining room and had nice food propared by Mom, so there was no reprocussions for the symbolic atrocities played upon each other in the video games.
Much of life's principles I learned in the comic book stories; and of romance, the Western songs of "she/he done me wrong," wrote the patterns for even lovelife, amazingly well. So it seems conceivable that the generation after mine's saga since "9/11" is merely video games' patterns conditioned in the players, is what happened.
Is there any indication we have learned from such goofs? The world continues to sag under civilization's diverse loads; we could be dealing with that kind of thing instead of living out video adventures that hurt for real. Surely lots of possible heroic adventures struggling to restore a world that not only gets sick from our stuff, but also goes on rampage once in a while. A world, by the way, that we and our progeny depend on for our existence. Milk is not made in grocery store shelves overnight. Mother Earth does not have infinite capacity to clean up after us. Yet, it is not likely the game players care about all that; dinner will be waiting at the dining room table when we tire of the game playing; the cute girls will look starry-eyed at the winners of the games, as always. Life is good.
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13:55
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