Technosphere/Biosphere

An excellent and imaginative post from Everett.

The upcoming climate/energy crisis is the product of a clash between two competing ecosystems, the biosphere and the technosphere. This is not to say that machine and animal are automatically in opposition, the issue is that the biosphere is unable to react to the technosphere fast enough to maintain equilibrium. Evolution is a process that affects all entities with heredity. The biological process of evolution is an established fact. Evolution in machines is a more radical idea, but one espoused by many STS theorists. To summarize, technologies are built on previous technologies, that is to say they express a heredity. The course of technological development is guided by selection pressures of technical possibility, and the desires of human actors.

The biosphere and technosphere are incompatible, because technical evolution occurs on a time scale orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. Without protection, the biosphere will be forced back by technological artifacts that occupy the same macro-niches, in terms of land and resources. The technosphere, areas substantially altered by human technology, now occupies most of the land area of the planet. With its speed enhanced efficiency, without external pressures, it will expand to cover the entire world.

I cannot predict the state of the post-crisis equilibrium. The biosphere will survive, as the rocks and seas that existed before life remain. But as Mike's post postulates, we may see a convergences between biological and technological. Biology will take place on technical substrates rather than physical ones. Genetic technologies will decrease the timescale of biological evolution, perhaps providing a method for the biosphere to compete with the technosphere. Of course, a genetically engineered organism is a technical process, so this is another means by which the biosphere is being rendered obsolete.

Timescales: Expect mankind to become extinct when posthuman evolutionary timescales significantly outpace human evolutionary timescales by an order of 5-10.

There are 1.2 billion people alive today who were born before the molecular basis of life was discovered

This is for those who claim that some of the questions we ask today will never be answered.

(Population data from here. Using the central dogma of molecular biology, articulated in 1958, as a somewhat arbitrary cutoff point.)

Brains at DARPA

The gnomes at the Pentagon are always pushing the limits of science, and these days they're looking into brains. A leading DARPA initiative investigates the possibility of telepathy. I can't say that faster communication between soldiers is the wave of the future. While it'd be useful to be able to communicate well in a squad that was split up, there are probably easier ways to do this. While I'm fairly sure general emotional states could be transmitted, the only one that seems useful militarily is 'danger.' Extracting enough information out of an EEG to allow tactical command seems like a major challenge. For a good look at how a developed system of this type would work, see Scalzi's The Ghost Brigade.

Where I see this coming in handy is in therapy, negotiations, and relationships. If these machines allow better interpersonal emotional understanding, i.e. empathy, they offer a path to peace. By becoming more in tune with our emotions, we can better understand ourselves and each other, reducing tension in this world.

BONUS LINK:
Techer could be new DARPA chief.

Penetrabit: Slime-Temples

by Rob Hardin

Life is a disease of matter.
--Goethe

I
30 cm. of creeping protoplasm,
absently gibbering spirals, hexahedrons, hillocks, trills
may indicate an autocatalytic reaction.
And the hypnotic figurations of nerve axons-

Receptive, active, quiescent-
turn like scrolls of electrolyzed plasma.
Both substances reveal a talent for spatial organization:
their dead thrashings trace patterns of cerebral complexity.

Similarly, the contractions of human heart muscle
resemble a wave spreading outward.
When the wave is broken, heart fibrillations
exhibit persistent patterns. And, often

these autocatalytic spirals of disease
are attended by failure and death.

II
The surface of the brain
may also erupt in a necropolis of spirals.
Reverberating cortical depression
brings with it a pattern of self-propagating forms.

Even a disc galaxy follows this rococo pathology:
its tentacles of stars are ragged whorls.
A parahuman architect is endless sketching cochlear temples to its own vacant energies.

If god is dead, he is dressed as a tendrillar Louis XIV,
and his fingers are twitching.

Five Principles for Productive Debate

If two parties can not agree to the following five principles of debate, then the debate is unlikely to reach a correct and reasonable conclusion. Even with these principles in place, a debate may be unsolvable, as evidenced by apparent paradoxes in the perfectly logical and rigorous framework of mathematics.


1 : Both parties must be open to convincing by rational argument

2 : Both parties must argue for both sides of the debate

3 : Sloppy logic will lead to 'reasonable' but useless or incorrect results

4 : All evidence must be considered with equal statistical weight and fact-checked

5 : No Faith except that which is common to both parties

If these principles can not be agreed upon, then a productive resolution of the debate can not be guaranteed.

If principle 1 is violated, then the debate becomes a pointless exercise in contradiction.

If principle 2 is violated, then the debate may be decided based on who has more charisma or better rhetoric, not on which side is more correct. Adhering to principle 2 also ensures that both parties have respect and understanding of the opposing viewpoint.

Principle 3 is impossible to attain absolutely ( except in math ), but both parties should be disciplined and adhere to as rigorous of reasoning as is possible.

If principle 4 is violated then your debate has no firm ground to stand on, and it will devolve into an exercise in manipulating the truth rather than finding it.

If principle 5 is violated, principle 1 is automatically violated simply by use of contradictory axioms : the union of your reasoning frameworks automatically contains a contradiction, and no sound resolution is possible.

Some debates or arguments are too poorly defined to meet these five criteria. Some debates may contain within them an inherent contradiction to these five criteria.

Catastrophic Futurism

A brief overview of current futurism shows that most of it is predicated on a notion of catastrophe. Global warming, energy, finance, radical terrorism, the Singularity, all of these concepts have at their core the idea that mankind is held hostage to unpredictable events beyond our control. Taleb's influential Black Swan theory posits infrequent, large scale events as the causal driver of history. There is of course a large degree of validity to this point of view. We undoubtedly do face major problems, but is catastophism a useful futurist model?

Futurism's obsession with the catastrophe has distracted us from the real goal of the discipline. The job of a futurist is not to predict the future, his job is to create the future. If a visionary is right, it is only by accident. Instead of aiming for correctness, we should aim for visionary impact and power. Mankind wants to hope. We must be allowed to dream.

Forget predictive power, these are the axioms we must build on:
1) Which human values are important?
2) What technological means are available?
3) What does a world that embodies our values and means look like?

The seventh (and most paranoid) possible reason why serious people no longer write about hallucinogens

A variant of [4] below.

Mutual Disrespect

"Do you have anything besides... existential destruction of all attempts at reasoning this evening?"
"... Yeah, it's a bit bleak isn't it."
"Can you articulate what if anything is problematic with religion?"
"The usual response is that it's the enemy of reason, etc., but then you have to argue that reason is a good thing.
I would be more inclined just to state that religions are groups of replicators which manifest a great deal of power and use it in ways often contrary to the interests of 'humanity,' and other replicator-groups with the same power and the same human-orthogonal utility functions are much more readily criticized, e.g. nationalisms, political ideologies, secular traditions, technologies, 'globalization', but religion is uniquely sacred, and 'respectable' members of society are obliged to pay lip service to it.

We act like the solution to religious strife is some kind of limp 'mutual respect', where a rabbi and a priest and an imam sit in the same room and say nice things about each other. I'd prefer mutual disrespect. I'd prefer that they sit in that room and argue about total nonsense until they turn blue, and let the rest of the world see how utterly silly it is."