The World is Changing

I remember when I first saw those big red caterpillar busses in Los Angeles I thought the worlds long anticipated sci-fi image was finally starting to take shape...this may have been a superficial observation of a rather mundane vehicle, but Its been striking me lately how much world is changing. Well, yes, you might say, about fuckin time you picked up on this, its been changing, but my point is, people are finally noticing.

Its made me realize, humans are just not optimized to understand intellectual concepts emotionally, it takes direct experience to be emotionally cued in, direct experience is processed more immediately, striking many more physioemotional chords. This isnt to say the intellectual capacities of the human brain are useless, in fact, it seems the thinking capacities of the human brain are finally tuned to comprehend the complex socio-economic networks weve built up just in time to consider re-arranging them.

Being a proponant for the evolution of the human mind, I find it extremely interesting that we find ourselves in the midst of an environmental crisis that requires us to consider the abovementioned complex, non-linear networks and their larger scale impacts, particularly in light of how thoroughly entangled our lives are with petroleum. It seems to me that the human brain has only recently, in the last several decades, evolved to a point where it can retroactively comprehend the networks it has unwittingly manifested. We were always building a non-linearly networked world, our brains just didnt quite compute the sum of its interconnected parts.

But first, how did we arrive at this greater level of across the brain interconnectivity that enables our timely comprehension of greater levels of complexity? I can see in rather plain view two moments in history when the human brain was modified towards complexity on a massive scale. One was the widespread use of LSD, a drug with the potential to speed up the rate at which connections are made across the brain. Next, the computer revolution, which allowed us to instantly access and incorporate the wealth of knowledge collected online into our thought processes and work methods to simultaneously operate in many different mediums that mutually inform and enrich one another.

Now what becomes interesting is whether we can successfully disentangle ourselves from the tightly woven network of material products and processes that we acknowledge as unsustainable and leap into a more intelligent future?

Fri, May 30, 2008  Permanent link