Discuss: Tending the Garden of Technology

I’m worried about “agreeing on a set of symbols.”  Once that happens, we’ve carved out a Rushmore, and once we get used to those faces, it’s hard to see alternatives. Of course no communication without symbols; but with hardened symbology, no possibility?  What you see is determined by what you assume will be there, by the paradigm of your culture. Even plural paradigms may not lead to holiness.

Henry, I agree about the danger of hardened symbology. And I agree with Denis about “vast amount of twaddle” on the internet. And I fear the NSAs of the nations. But without information technology standards, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. A n d   i t i s i m p o r t a n t t o r e m e m b e r w e d e p e n d o n   s t a n d a r d   order in our phonemes and letters, which are also information technology.

Getting back to Kelly’s original thread,, is technology sacred, worthy of worship, the logical outgrowth of Evolution?

In 1950 [the year I was born] Julian Huxley stated:

“The ideologically most important fact about evolution [is] the fact that the human species is now the spearhead of the evolutionary process, the only portion of the stuff of which our world is made which is capable of further progress, or indeed of any large-scale evolutionary change at all.”

?

... and if the only “rule” of evolution is survival of the fittest, then isn’t anything that happens the inevitable outgrowth of the evolutionary process?

Or—will we intervene to protect the less fit, the plants and animals that are destined to fall under the force of unbridled human activity? And isn’t this compassion, stewardship, the products of wisdom (which is also a product of evolutionary process).

Without information, no learning. Without learning, no wisdom. Without wisdom, no hope.

Thanks; nice demo of the value of standards! But it’s also a demo of our urge to find each other, which we can only accomplish together (Buber’s “between”)....  Not sure how that relates to the topic; but Blake enjoined us to “distinguish between states, and individuals in those states,” and to prefer “minute particulars” to generalizations. (“For everything that lives is Holy,” he said, generalizing!) Abstraction kills, but it enables communication.  What a bitch.  Maybe there’s more than one kind of communication.

Peter, we are stewards. In 1968 I discovered Teilhard de Chardin in the stacks at the Univ. of Wis. Madison library. See in Wikipedia his notion of “... the unfolding of the material cosmos, from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point.” This rings even truer to me now than it did then. Now I think it has to do with the power of networks, power realized in people who “interoperate” through shared symbols and people who creatively evolve symbols and create new ones.

Maybe the notion of stewardship is what Huxley meant by humanity as the spearhead of evolution—maybe. But I think I’d disagree with him.  Even the steward can be superceded. Embracing technology, even in a stewardly way, may not be religious.  Of course, neither is (organized, abstract) religion religious.

I think there are many kinds, and more and more kinds, of communication. 1968 was the year I read Blake, too. I’m sure the tension between focusing on particulars (Steve Talbott again) and abstractions is what keeps us on Yeats’s upward gyre.