Discuss: Tending the Garden of Technology

Well, there’s an interpenetrating downward gyre, too, isn’t there? (I’d forgotten about that image.) Too much damn poetry!

Huxley’s statement is 60 yrs old.  We’ve discovered a lot more since then about “humanity.”  The Neanderthals existed as a specie for 10,000yrs using the same old technology.  Of course they were superceded by their relatives from Africa who continued advances in technology.  I don’t believe that evolution is fueled by “survival of the fittest,” but rather adaptation and co-operation in which each one finds its own particular niche.

Maybe a new technology will emerge that takes us away from the impersonality of the computer, texting etc. to a place with human interaction which is important in making and keeping us “human.”

Give me the poets any day!!!

Well, technium, okay. But to my mind it already exists, has existed for a long time and has now simply gone digital.

Humans succeeded (so far) because at a time of rapid climate change we learned how to externalize adaptation. We took adaptation out of the evolutionary realm and invented a unifying structure that facilitates adaptation. We call this unifying structure
‘culture’, technology is a vast area of this confusing field of human knowledge, skills, attitudes, stories, tools, toolmaking and craft that enables our species -more than any other- to adapt and survive in the more environments than any other. Human culture -of which technology and Mr. Kelly’s technium- are extremely important parts, is like humanity’s ‘coral reef’. It is vast now and we reap the benefits of the diversity of this reef whenever we face new problems, new challenges. We have been creating it since we first learned how to leave behind us cultural objects that survive beyond the lifetimes of individual member of the species. For this reason, language is one of our most distinctive skills, and ‘teaching’ is the primary and distinctive use to which it was first put and for which it is essential. Pictures and carved objects were good first starts, but after language comes everything else. It enables a fundamental change in the way our species transfers knowledge, skills and culture. No other primate actively ‘teaches’. All primates imitate their parents. A few primate-parents demonstrate real skill-tranfer lessons. But no primate parents reinforce these lessons by repetition, breaking the skills into discrete steps, discussing what is to be learned and then assessing and rewarding the performance of specific tasks. Mr. Kelly’s beautiful idea of the technium begins in the ‘cyberspace’ of a Hominid parent’s brain. We have now extended that noetic space electronically and exponentially, making it as real, or perhaps more real but certainly more appealing than our ordinary physical reality. (Who wouldn’t choose to live on Pandora?) But the technium is simply the next generation of culture. It’s not actually a reinvention of what already makes us distinct and adaptable. It’s just a power saw to people who have been using hand-saws for thousands of years. Well, okay dammit, I’m all for power saws.

How extremely sad.  A person who would rather live in a “virtual” reality rather than his own “physical” world.

> A person who would rather live in a “virtual” reality rather than his own “physical” world.

Avatar is a work of art, no more and no less, just as the first cave painting was a work of art, not more nor less.

The robin’s nest, the honey bees’ comb, the orchid, the clouds, and the slime mold are also marvelous creations, like art.

These are aspects of the Whole World, not more nor less. I love the world outside my doors and the one on the inside, too.

plb

Referring to Giles preferring to live there not Pandora as a work of art,it is most certainly that.

> Referring to Giles preferring to live there not Pandora as a work of art

And yet, why not live surrounded by beauty, whether it is nature’s art or human created? I am always saddened by the deadness of most human created environments: schools, factories, eateries, highways—all mostly artless and sterile. We could make our towns and cities things of beauty, a complement to the natural attraction of forests, windswept prairies and but we don’t.

Is it that people in cities don’t want beauty because they are deadened themselves, or are they deadened by the bleak environments? There are beautiful cities and hideous ones. These become virtual environments, too. I wonder where the line exists between “reality” and the lives most of us live.

Is not all of this real? Everything that happens to us, happens as “an experience” which is colored by who we are, perhaps dictated by what we already know. It is hard to tell where I end and the world starts. Pretty much it’s just a line in the sand that I draw.

plb

Have thoroughly enjoyed reading all the interesting, informative comments, but must sign off now.  Need to go to the woods with my dog and cellphone - one living matter the other a technological tool.  I leave you with my morning thoughts written in Haiku.

  Time, the thief passes
stealing minutes and heartbeats
  flowers bloom and wilt

  Black shadows, like ink
spreading across the landscape
    grey winter arrives

Caio

M