The Impact Bias: Future Happiness and Despair Never Live Up to Expectations
Project: Polytopia

The Impact Bias

"Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. So, just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.

However, interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. The fact is, that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives [graphs of these data are shown in the video embedded below].

Now, don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, have revealed something really quite startling to us. Something we call the impact bias, which is the tendency for your mental simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.

From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. In fact, a recent study — this almost floors me — a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness" (Dan Gilbert, TED talk 2006).

One must wonder:

What influence the Impact Bias has had on the intense futuristic theorizations meanderings, ruminations, and intellectual exchanges that is the SpaceCollective?

Is it possible that a large portion of the posts on this dynamic infospheric platform are overblown, overreaching, and overprojected, as a result of this cognitive bias that is so robust that even those with the worst possible Amnesia (they always forget who they just met after 30 seconds or less) still fall victim to it?

Are we overestimating the impact of the future here in the future of everything playground? Are ideas like the Noosphere and Singularity grand products of our overweighting of the importance of future events, and underweighting the significance of the present (or past)?

Is the existence of this very site simply a product of a stilted reality perspective, a mindframe, that our implicit cognitions impose on our pre-frontal cortices to expect future events to give us more in affective as well as rational currency than it could ever possibly produce? Maybe.

For more of Dan Gilbert's research on cognitive biases and happiness:

Wed, Mar 24, 2010  Permanent link

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SuperBrain: The Brain Re-Creating Itself
Project: Polytopia

The modern computer has been essential to coming to understand how the Social Brain works, whether serving as a stimulus in an experiment, creating behavioral models, or performing complex statistical analyses on vast data sets.

However, IBM has been trying to take this a huge leap further. That is, IBM has been attempting to create a computer that works just like the human brain, because the human brain regularly performs an enormous number of processes, simultaneously, while expending minimal energy in the process (Marois & Ivanoff, 2005).

A recent breakthrough in IBM's project came out very recently:

"IBM has announced significant progress toward creating a computer system that simulates and emulates the brain's abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, while rivaling the brain's low power and energy consumption and compact size.

Modern computing is based on a stored program model, which has traditionally been implemented in digital, synchronous, serial, centralized, fast, hardwired, general-purpose circuits with explicit memory addressing that indiscriminately over-write data and impose a dichotomy between computation and data.

In stark contrast, cognitive computing — like the brain — will use replicated computational units, neurons and synapses that are implemented in mixed-mode analog-digital, asynchronous, parallel, distributed, slow, reconfigurable, specialized and fault-tolerant biological substrates with implicit memory addressing that only update state when information changes, blurring the boundary between computation and data.

To perform the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceed the scale of the cat cortex, the team built a cortical simulator that incorporates a number of innovations in computation, memory, and communication as well as sophisticated biological details from neurophysiology and neuroanatomy.

This scientific tool, akin to a linear accelerator or an electron microscope, is a critical instrument used to test hypotheses of brain structure, dynamics and function. The simulation was performed using the cortical simulator on Lawrence Livermore National Lab's Dawn Blue Gene/P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144 terabytes of main memory.



The algorithm, when combined with the cortical simulator, allows scientists to experiment with various mathematical hypotheses of brain function and structure of how structure affects function as they work toward discovering the brain's core computational micro and macro circuits.

After the successful completion of Phase 0, IBM and its university partners were recently awarded $16.1 million in additional funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 1 of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative. This phase of research will focus on the components, brain-like architecture and simulations to build a prototype chip.

The long-term mission of IBM's cognitive computing initiative is to discover and demonstrate the algorithms of the brain and deliver low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence and use significantly less energy than today's computing systems."

Source: Scientists Perform Cat-Scale Cortical Simulations and Map the Human Brain

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Questions on the Implications & Limits of Supercomputers:

-If humans are able to successfully re-create their organic brains with cold chips and circuits, using their natural intelligence, and technology grows at an exponential rate (Moore's Law), while evolution progresses at a relatively steady rate (Becoming Human)- is it fair to say that the computing power, complexity, diversity, and richness of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers will then outmatch that of the very brains which produced them?

-If the brain is the most evolved and sophisticated system known, then creating a computer that exceeds human cognitive capacities is really the triumph of Technology over Evolution - of Human Selection over Natural Selection - no? Does this then place us technically in a new stage of evolution? Are we are already in the age of self-evolution?

-Can we manufacture "creative cognitive-computers"? These IBM supercomputers may become as quick and expansive as the human brain, but will they offer equally unique and/or creative output? More? Less?

-Can these highly-developed machines demonstrate dynamic creativity without limbic and emotional systems? Does creativity require emotion?

-Can we build emotional computers?

-Combined, Nature's Brain plus Man's Brain = SUPERBRAIN? That is,could/ will these supercogitators be employed in human brains to enhance mental capacity? With such a procedure could the average IQ in places with enough capital for large portions of the population to do this be increased to 120, in concert with the notion of Flynn Effect, rather than around the 100 score it is supposed to be now?

-I wonder how much the first fully-functioning mammalian-scale-intelligence-possessing computer will cost? How long before it is affordable to a researcher?

-Does it not make sense in terms of Darwinian Fitness that the brain should try to re-create itself in a form that is malleable and augmentable, allowing for the hand of Human Will to grow more robust than the hand Nature's Will?

Sat, Dec 19, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: cognitive computer, neurotechnology, mind machine merging, singularity, psychology
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Looking IS Healing: Nature

"Demonstrating that we have a biologically programmed positive response to nature is more difficult, because we don’t respond as dramatically to something that’s not a threat.

But numerous studies since the 1970s suggest the subtle power of natural scenery to heal both body and mind. Texas A&M researcher Roger Ulrich, for instance, has shown that people who watch a calming nature video after a stressful experience have markedly lower muscle tension, pulse, and skin conductance activity after less than five minutes. This translates into significant medical benefits.

Ulrich also monitored patients after gallbladder surgery and found that those assigned to a room looking out on trees needed far fewer painkillers than patients in rooms that faced a brick wall.

Heart surgery patients in rooms with nature scenes on the wall experienced less anxiety and smoother recoveries than patients with blank walls or abstract art.

Likewise, cosmonauts confined for months in outer space quickly lose interest in video programs and other diversions. They prefer to stare out the window at the untouchable Earth."

Source: The Natural History of Art

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If this is indeed the case, one wonders if creating hospitals that are all surrounded by trees, streams, flowers, and other natural splendors (as much as possible, cities can be tough) - would actually save hospitals money in the long run via quicker and more successful recoveries and treatments? Such saved capital could then be further invested into spreading the program, as well as perhaps bringing down other health care costs, and perhaps even making medical care available for more of the 47 million without. In other words, should Obama make "naturalizing" our hospital and health care settings in general, a priority in his new health care plan?

Also, is this not in a big way a testament to the profound psychological implications for somatic health? Even for you dualists out there, there is little doubt that the brain, the mind, the mental unit system, as it were, plays in many cases as much a role, or more, in one's experience of bodily pleasure or pain, sickness or health, as does the trillion-celled somatic structure itself.

Perhaps next time I have a headache I'll hike to my local waterfall instead of popping an aspirin.

I suggest some of the SC gives it a try as well.

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For another study on the healing power of nature, please click here.

Tue, Jun 9, 2009  Permanent link

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4 Billion Years in 6 Minutes

PSYCHOGENESIS:

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"The human brain is made up of one-hundred billion neurons - and each neuron forms about a thousand to ten-thousand contacts with other neurons - so the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, that is to say, potential brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe" (Ramachandran).
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Do you suppose that we could do the next 4 billion years in 6 minutes?

Also, does anyone have any input on the book Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett?

Or, more pointedly, what does the Collective think about resolving the conflict between the clear trend of science (in strongly evidencing a lack of free will) and the robustly intuitive notion that we are agents of our future? Also, since it seems we will never really know how everything is determined, unless magically a GUT appears - how will we ever confirm, or deny, the existence of free choice?

Is the age old question of freedom vs. determinism unresolvable, irreconcilable, a waste of our time?

Cheers.

Wed, Jun 3, 2009  Permanent link

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The Social Brain Speaks: Lessons in Language

There is no doubt that language offers both demonstrations of and a special window into the social brain, and human nature in general. Watching Dr. Paul Bloom's lecture on language at Open Yale Courses, I learned a number of intriguing facts about our linguistic faculty:



(1) Babies who are not spoken to directly (though are around speaking) seem to develop the same capacity for language as those babies who are addressed on a regular basis. There appears to be no interesting influence of parental speech rearing on the ability for babies to normally develop the miracle of speech. (But, why would anyone not talk to their babies? Some cultures see this as senseless because 'what does the baby have to say?')

(2) In Nicaragua, there are documented cases of children who have created their own individual sign language out of the need for better means of communication because their parents, who do not know sign language, possess a broken form of spoken language.

(3) All neurologically normal humans, who at least hear language or have another person to communicate to, can develop normal speech abilities.

(4) There has never been a human culture discovered that does not possess and use language.

(5) Children of slaves who spoke "pidgin," or a broken-up mishmash of different languages which is not a fully developed language (created by the desire to communicate between slaves with different tongues), were able to produce a full-blown linguistic system (often called "creole") with phonology, morphology, and syntax. The ability to manufacture a language in a single generation from parents with an incomplete one, seems to suggest that humans have some inborn capacity for language. For, how else do we satisfactorily explain this phenomenon?

(6) There are a number of completely intelligent children who are social beings with a strong desire to communicate, who simply cannot learn language. This can be attributed, perhaps, to genetic defects, as one could have a genetic defect that might cause one to see the world differently as in color blindness.

For 6 more unusual facts about human language and a link to a transcript of Dr. Bloom's lecture please go here: The Social Brain.

Tue, Jun 2, 2009  Permanent link

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The Extended Mind
Project: Polytopia

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?

The mind appears to be adapted for reaching out from our heads and making the world, including our machines, an extension of itself.

This concept of the extended mind was first raised in 1998, right around the time Google was born, by two philosophers, Andy Clark, now at the University of Edinburgh, and David Chalmers, now at the Australian National University. In the journal Analysis, they published a short essay called “The Extended Mind” in which they asked a simple question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?”

Most people might answer, “At the skull.”

But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.

Clark and Chalmers asked their readers to imagine a woman named Inga. Inga hears from a friend that there’s an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She decides to go see it. She thinks for a moment, recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, and starts walking that way. She accesses her belief that MOMA is on 53rd Street from its storage place in her brain’s memory network.

Now imagine a man named Otto, who has Alzheimer’s. His memory is faulty, and so he keeps with him a notebook in which he writes down important details. Like Inga, Otto hears about the museum exhibit. Since he can’t access the address in his brain, he looks it up in his notebook and then heads off in the same direction as Inga.

In the view of Clark and Chalmers, Inga’s brain-based memory and Otto’s notebook are fundamentally the same. Inga’s mind just happens to access information stored away in her brain, while Otto’s mind draws on information stored in his notebook.

The notebook, in other words, is part of his extended mind. It doesn’t make any difference that Otto keeps his notebook tucked away much of the time. After all, Inga tucks the memory of MOMA’s address out of her conscious awareness most of the time too.

Clark and Chalmers concluded that real people are actually more like Otto than like Inga: We all have minds that extend out into our environments.

Accepting Wall-less Minds as Natural

Eleven years later, this argument continues to trigger fierce debate among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. There is no doubt that the extended mind is a weird concept.

One reason it seems so strange is that our minds feel as if they are really totally self-contained. We innately believe, for example, that as we walk down a street, we are continuously filming a detailed movie of our surroundings and using that mental movie to decide what to do next. But like many beliefs we have about ourselves, this movie is an illusion. Our awareness is, in fact, remarkably narrow.

One of the most spectacular demonstrations of how oblivious we can be was carried out by psychologists Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher Chabris at Harvard University.

They asked people to watch a video of students weaving around each other and passing a basketball. Half the students wore white shirts, the other half black. The subjects had to keep track of how many times the ball was passed by members of one of the teams. In the middle of the game, a gorilla (rather, a student in a gorilla costume) sauntered through the scene.

Many subjects later reported that they never saw the gorilla; their brains discarded it as extraneous.

Inside our heads, instead of making a perfect replica of the world, we focus our attention on tiny snippets, darting our eyes from point to point. We extract only the information we need for whatever task is at hand, whether we’re sorting the laundry or climbing a mountain.

What’s even more remarkable about our brains is that they actually search for new things to make part of this feedback system.

Imagine you are poking a stick into an animal’s burrow. As you poke away, you are aware of what the far end of the stick is touching, not the end you’re holding in your hand. This kind of extended sensation appears to be the result of a reorganization of the brain.

Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons in their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire in response to stimuli at the end of the rake, not on the monkey’s hand. Other neurons, in the brain, respond to things that appear to lie within arm’s reach. Training the monkeys to use the rakes caused these neurons to change—reacting to objects lying within rake’s reach rather than arm’s reach.

Natural-Born Cyborgs

The eagerness with which the brain merges with tools has made it possible to create some stunning mind-machine interfaces.

For instance, Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University and his colleagues put electrodes in the brains of monkeys to link them to a robot arm. The monkeys quickly learned how to move the arm around with pure thought; their neurons reorganized, establishing a new feedback loop between brain and robot arm.

Humans are proving just as good at this merger of mind and machine.

The U.S. Navy has developed a flight suit for helicopter pilots that delivers little puffs of air on the side of the pilot’s body as his helicopter tilts in that direction. The pilot responds to the puffs by tilting away from them, and the suit passes those signals on to the helicopter’s steering controls. Pilots who train with this system can learn to fly blindfolded or to carry out complex maneuvers, such as holding the helicopter in a stationary hover.

The helicopter becomes, in effect, part of the pilot’s body, linked back to his or her mind.

Results like these, reveal a mind that is constantly seeking to extend itself, to grab on to new tools it has never experienced before and merge with them.

Some people may be horrified by how passionately people are taking to their laptops and GPS trackers. But if you think about it, it would be surprising if we didn’t.

We are “natural-born cyborgs.”

Conclusions

The extended mind theory doesn’t just change the way we think about the mind. It also changes how we judge what’s good and bad about today’s mind-altering technologies.

There’s nothing unnatural about relying on the Internet—Google and all—for information. After all, we are constantly consulting the world around us like a kind of visual Wikipedia. Nor is there anything bad about our brains’ being altered by these new technologies, any more than there is something bad about a monkey’s brain changing as it learns how to play with a rake.

Neuroscientists will soon be able to offer fresh ways to enhance our brains, whether with drugs or with implants. To say that these are immoral because they defile our true selves—our isolated, distinct minds—is to ignore biology.

Our minds already extend out into the environment, and the changes we make to the environment already alter our minds.

Source: I edited How Google is Making us Smarter
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Questions left to Answer

As a result of advanced machine-brain connecting technologies, will more people embrace minds as completely unbounded entities encouraging the Hyper-Evolution of Self-Evolution?

When the mind and the internet fully unite as THE Extended Mind, do we become Ubermenschen?

Is the mind really only what the brain does, and in context of this article, employs? Or is it more?

Fri, Jan 16, 2009  Permanent link

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"Computer Game's High Score Could Earn The Nobel Prize In Medicine"

"A new game, named Foldit, turns protein folding into a competitive sport. Introductory levels teach the rules, which are the same laws of physics by which protein strands curl and twist into three-dimensional shapes — key for biological mysteries ranging from Alzheimer's to vaccines.

After about 20 minutes of training, people feel like they're playing a video game but are actually mouse-clicking in the name of medical science. The free program is at http://fold.it/.

'We're hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it's done by,' said Popovic, who presented the project today at the Games for Health meeting in Baltimore. 'Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize.'

Proteins, of which there are more than 100,000 different kinds in the human body, form every cell, make up the immune system and set the speed of chemical reactions. We know many proteins' genetic sequence, but don't know how they fold up into complex shapes whose nooks and crannies play crucial biological roles.

Computer simulators calculate all possible protein shapes, but this is a mathematical problem so huge that all the computers in the world would take centuries to solve it. In 2005, Baker developed a project named Rosetta@home that taps into volunteers' computer time all around the world. But even 200,000 volunteers aren't enough.

'Long-term, I'm hoping that we can get a significant fraction of the world's population engaged in solving critical problems in world health, and doing it collaboratively and successfully through the game,' David Baker, a UW professor of biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, said. 'We're trying to use the brain power of people all around the world to advance biomedical research.'

Foldit includes elements of multiplayer games in which people can team up, chat with other players and create online profiles. Over time the researchers will analyze people's moves to see how the top players solve puzzles. This information will be fed back into the game's design so the game's tools and format can evolve."

See the original article here.
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I think what I appreciate most about this revolutionary project is that it is a microcosm of the potentially unfathomable power a humanity connected and singularly-focused can harness.

It brings to mind the Pangea Day event which occurred this past Saturday, where 24 short films made by anyone and everyone around the world were watched on “millions of screens and shared at more than 1,000 events and parties.” The concept was to fuse the differentiating consciousnesses of as many individuals as possible into a collective human experience through personal and potent films to promote world peace.

It seems to me both of these projects are original and substantive attempts at employing modern tools to amalgamate the masses on a level never before reached to thrust the progress of the species forward. It'll be interesting to track the concentric circling of Foldit and Pangea Day and see what fruit they do or do not bear. For I think either way, there is a lot to be learned from their successes as well as their failures.

I'd also be curious to know what potential the Collective thinks such endeavors really have, what parallel projects I may have missed, and any ideas one may have for new projects dedicated to funneling vast pools of brainpower into solving a weighty human problem?

You can see the Pangea Day films here.

Tue, May 13, 2008  Permanent link

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A time and place where we redefine the very fundamentals

I think this event will be instructive and illuminating on how human communication on one of the most massive scales ever achieved can be used to push forth the Hyper-Evolution of Self-Evolution and perhaps lead to a both wider and deeper unified human experience than has ever been known - and therefore, may also be a partial realization of the potential the SpaceCollective community is dedicated to exploring - a time and place where we redefine the very fundamentals of what definition is – what experience is - what knowledge is - what an individual is - what humanity is - what existence is – and become, for all intensive purposes, another species entirely.


I'll be watching…

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The Pangea Day Mission & Purpose

Pangea Day is a global event bringing the world together through film.

Why? In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that – to help people see themselves in others – through the power of film.

The Pangea Day Event

Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow us see the world through another person's eyes. Details on the Pangea Day films can be viewed here.

The program will also include a number of exceptional speakers and musical performers. Queen Noor of Jordan, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, musician/activist Bob Geldof, and Iranian rock phenom Hypernova are among those taking part.

What Will Happen After Pangea Day

People inspired by Pangea Day will have the opportunity to participate in community-building activities around the world. Through the live program, the Pangea Day web site, and self-organized local events, everyday people will be connected with extraordinary activists and organizations.

Many of the films and performances seen on Pangea Day will be made available on the Web and via mobile phone, alongside open forums for discussion and ideas for how to take social action.

A Pangea Day documentary will be created to catalyze future activities, and dozens of talented filmmakers will make strides in their careers.

History

In 2006, filmmaker Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize, an annual award granted at the TED Conference. She was granted $100,000, and more important, a wish to change the world. Her wish was to create a day in which the world came together through film. Pangea Day grew out of that wish. Watch Jehane Noujaim’s 2006 acceptance speech now.

The Trailer



The specific information on Pangea Day (below the double dash) was taken from: http://www.pangeaday.org/index.php

(artwork by Alex Grey entitled Oversoul)

Fri, May 9, 2008  Permanent link

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The Hyper-Evolution of Self-Evolution
Project: Polytopia

The Hyper-Evolution of Self-Evolution has already begun to shatter the bones and frames of everyone and everything humans know and think humans know...but let me start from the beginning.

The following is an excerpt from a post by rene entitled,
"SpaceCollective’s Grand Narrative."

"According to Kahle [Brewster Kahle runs the Internet Archive], there are roughly 26 million books in the library of congress, the largest print library in the world. This may seem like a lot of books, but in the digital age it doesn’t represent that many data. On the web, for example, an equivalent amount of information as is printed in the total number of books is posted online every two months.

When you consider that at the moment it takes one person a year to scan 3000 books, it means that all 26 million titles can be scanned by the population of Detroit in the course of one long weekend. In terms of computer storage the entire content of a book on average takes up only one megabyte. Twenty six million megabytes translates into 26 terabytes, which can easily be stored in a box that comfortably fits on one small shelf."

The Hyper-Evolution of Knowledge

Rene's posting makes it abundantly clear that the amount of information at the fingertips of anyone with internet access, far surpasses the capacity of even the most exhaustive house of knowledge planted in physical-reality.

In fact, the ever-growing power of cyber-reality has thrust mankind into a kind of epistemological overdrive, into The Hyper-Evolution of Knowledge.

For there is now a very real possibility for anyone at any time and in almost any place, to know virtually anything he or she so desires. And as access and usage spread, more and more people are fulfilling this Grand Potential.

This is a quantum leap in human evolution.


(Image by unknown)

The Hyper-Evolution of Self-Evolution

Such premises entail the only limitations remaining between human beings and mass superintelligence are the circumscriptions of their imaginations.

Giving credence to the idea that the human imagination appears unbounded, it seems fair to say human creatures are in a period deserving of the label, The Hyper-Evolution of Self-Evolution.

Questions of Consequence

The Hyper-Evolution of Self-Evolution has already begun to shatter the bones and frames of everyone and everything humans know and think humans know.

This is good because to exceed one's own expectations of themselves as well as the human race, to propel each other to even greater glories, past perceptions/inclinations/realities must be dispelled.

Old and decrepit branches of the Tree of Man must break off for the trunk to support the crown as it extends into the heavens.

But, will we become mired in billions of terabytes of data, losing sight of the blade of grass amidst the vastness of the prairie?

Will each piece of information become less important as the pool of knowledge floods the human psychic world?

Or, will the average person become capable of understanding more about that blade of grass in a matter of minutes, than even the great Walt Whitman himself was able to comprise in an entire lifetime of brilliance (see Leaves of Grass)?

Will the human mind and the human race adapt to perhaps the most abrupt evolutionary development in its history, becoming at some levels a collection of Übermenschen?

The Question Answering Itself?

Interestingly, as man's greatest tool, the Internet is increasingly amassing data which addresses this very phase in human evolution.

And so, the understanding required for humankind to maximize the potential of their evolutionary ripening is likely to come from that which triggered the evolutionary ripening.

In a sense, the Internet may provide both the question and the answer - both the challenge and the resolution.

Self-Evolving

In conclusion, as we hyperspeed into a world where human advancement (along with human imperilment) burgeons at an ever-increasing pace and by almost unfathomable leaps and bounds, transforming everything known and unknown - we remain as we have - self-evolving creatures limited only by our minds.

Wed, Apr 2, 2008  Permanent link

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