In the previous Blog entry (“New” Consciousnesses) I wrote some thoughts engendered by reading the book “Emergence”. I put in a link to an exerpt from the book. That excerpt has given me an idea for a program that I think catches some of the “bottom up” intelligence discussed in the book.
I have put my thoughts about this program in a web page. http://boppers.net/emergence/hb_tracker2.htm
If you have any comment on this you can post them here… or e-mail them to me.
I have re-started reading “Emergence”, a book by Steven Johnson, about “bottom up” intelligence – one example being an ant colony. The full title of the book is “Emergence – The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.
Click here for an excerpt from this book.
This triggered a thought today that perhaps “death” may be as important to the evolution of these kinds of consiousnesses as it was to the evolution of life on earth. I’m going to work my way up to that thought below. First I will lay out the context in which that thought is especially interesting to me.
In the opening chapters the Emergence book discusses how some kinds of complex systems can evolve to have adaptive behavior. The kind of complex system they discuss have multiple independent agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways with rules, such as the laws of physics, determining the outcome of each interaction. These systems can evolve, or progress, or whatever word you want, to behave somewhat like living beings. Among the examples they give are ant colonies, cities, and slime mold. The author says that we humans tend to look for some sort top down direction, a pace maker, or a ruling group, but that in fact these systems tend to behave more or less indepently of any such control. Rather they are the product of the interaction and the results of each interaction. This is referred to as “bottom up” intelligence.
This fascinates me and also expands on my own view that complex systems, such as hundreds of birds chattering in a tree, or a nation, or a city, can be usefully viewed as life forms with intelligence, memory, purpose, and the ability to learn and adapt. They can exhibit attributes of life and intelligence even though the individual components do not have significant intelligence as with ants and slime mold. Similarly the human body, I have read, is actually a community of cells that work together to form a complex system, though each of the cells is, relativly speaking, dumb. The human brain is another example of this. In other cases, such as a city or nation, the individual units, the humans, have some intelligence, but each one is only a tiny part of the greater creature and the “consciousness” of the greater creature, such as a city is not based on their consciousness.
This is somewhat old ground for me and one I have been thinking about, just for fun, for years. However, today I came up with a new wrinkle on this and I want to write it down while it is fresh in my mind.
Let me start by restating my perspective, my guess, about some of the fundamental aspects of our reality. It seems to me that life and conscioussness are “emergent” qualities of our universe. When certain kinds of complex systems ( multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways) are allowed to persist for long periods of time (it may take billions of years) they tend to (a) get more complex and (b) eventually become homes for forms of life (hard to define, but definitly a persistent dynamic organization [ a dynamic pattern or sequence of patterns ] of physical matter over time ). We see this in what we know of the history of our universe. Initally, we now think, it was amost pure energy (whatever that is) but over time simple elements, like hydrogen, came into being. Over more time more complex elements, like carbon, came into being. Eventualy something we would call life “emerged” from these elements. And eventually something we would call conscioussness emerged in the evolution of some of the life forms. The key elements here are
(a) certain kinds of complex systems,
(b) something like “evolution” where the complex systems eventually find ways to become more complex,
(c) the emergence of something we would call life and
(d) finally, the emergence of something we would call consciousness.
I want to comment at this point that, from our perspective, consciousness seems to be the highest level of this evolutionary chain. This seems to be the most complex and interesting thing to emerge from energy, time, and simple matter, but, it seems likely that there are stages beyond this which either have yet to emerge, or which we cannot percieve. I find it fascinating to speculate on what these future (or unseen) stages of this process might be.
Now for today’s “insight”:
I recall reading years ago, probably in a book by Carl Sagan, that the early forms of “life” on our planet did not evolve.. they just persisted. They were able to somehow absorb things from outside and use them as a source of energy, and perhaps to replace detriorating components, but they just kept existing as long as they could with no real possibility of change.
Then, somewhere along the way, some of these life forms, through trial and error, which we now call evolution, changed so that they did not live forever. Rather they created clones/offsprings and then died. Death entered into the evolutionary chain. This, so it said in the book I read, was a major improvement in the nature of evolution. The other, perhaps equally important change, was procreation from sex. Both allowed for more or less random changes, mutations, to occur between generations. This opened the door to threads of evolutions, evolutionary paths. In some cases the life form evolved to favor one kind of mutation over another. In some cases this gave evolutionary advantages to particular life forms. The stage was set for the process of which we are the product.
Prior to the emergence of death in the process, change was far less likely, and far less able to form preferences and trends (get bigger, survive out of the sea for longer periods etc. ) because there was far less replacements of one system with another. Death, said my unknown author, was probably one of the most important things to come into being in the evolution of life. After organisms started to die and be replaced by their offspring, the evolutionary process took off and evolution occurred at a much much faster clip than before.
So, how about the emergent consciousness of ant colonies, of slime mold, of cities, of nations. Look ma, no death! Cities don’t die very often. They just persist. Interesting. What if cities had to be destroyed every two hundred years. I don’t know that the residents would have to die. They could be redistributed to work those from other cities to build knew ones. Would this be a good thing?
But wait… though cities don’t “die”, they do seem to evolve. They can’t move, as a rule, but they can change. They can add new technology, new infrastructure, new ways of moving goods and people, new laws, changed laws, new guidelines, changed guidelines, new ways of enforcing laws and guidelines (rewards and penalties), new services and new ways of delivering services, new kinds of entertainment, education, communication and on and on.
This is different. The early life forms before death could not do these things. They did not have the abilty to change and adapt that a city does.
Still… I wonder if something like “death” would be benficial. E.g. every 100 years all laws must be abolished and a new constitution adopted. Each new law must be approved individually… no blanket adoption of groups of old laws. The same for education. The same for everything that could abolished and recreated, maybe even buildings, roads, parks, pipes, wires … every physical part of the city and and every rule or convention that could be changed. The same for nations, for clubs,…. for churchs (now there’s something I could get enthusiastic about)
Phase 2 of this line of thought: Early life forms were not mobile. They were stuck in one place, like plants, or they were completely at the mercy of the medium they were in, like the ocean. They had no choice as to where they would be tomorrow. For many of them they would live in only one location. Trees, flowers etc. are like this. Their offspring might end up far away (birds carrying seeds), but often their offspring would very close. Then life forms came into being that could move about, that were not anchored. Mobile life forms, animals, came into being and evolved. These tended to be more complex than plants (at least it seems that way to me) and more able to evolve into creatures that could survive and reproduce in a wide variety of climates. I read recently that man’s evolutionary advantage was in his/her lack of specialization to one climate. We survived because we were generalists. We did not have a shaggy fur coat as part of our body because that would be a disadvantage in hot climates. Rather we had vulnerable skin that could not survive at all in cold climates, and often had to be protected in hot climates… but, we developed the abilty to adapt by making and wearing appropriate clothing.
So… how do these concepts apply to “bottom up” intellgence. Ant colonies can move…a little.. and they do. So can slim molds.. but I don’t think they are truly mobile beings, like individual animals. I would like to hear from the experts about “mobility” in bottom up intelligence.
So, trying to end this rambling, where does this lead? For me it leads to questions about the nature of bottom up intelligences and how that nature compares to more traditional life forms and consciousnesses like animals and humans. I would love to hear, or read, the reflections of experts related to this issue.
Finally, it occurs to me that though cities cannot die, move and adapt the way an animal, especially the human animal, can, there can be other “bottom up” entities that can. These could be virtual entities that exist in cyberspace…and we could attempt to build an environment in which these could evolve, in which something like “death” could be a useful attribute. I find this a big stretch of mind… and perhaps I will be able to say something about it once I have had time to think about it. Right at the moment I feel like my mental reach has significantly exceeded my mental grasp.
Is this line of thought of interest to any one? Did you read all the way to here? Do you have any related thought you would like to share?
Harry Baya Sept 2, 2006
More about the Flat World.
The new world order into which we are entering, the new social fabric that is emerging, seems to me to be most different, most new, in the opportunities it gives to individuals. Before now, it seems to me, only very rare individuals could have a big impact. These were leaders or geniuses or very lucky individuals. The big changes were implemented by the masses, but they were lead by a tiny percentage of the population, the movers and shakers of their generation. I think that’s changing. I think the new world will allow individuals to act in such a way that they can contribute to significant changes through their collective actions rather than through the actions of their leaders. I will try to give a few examples.
What’s new is that the individuals now have a more direct influence on what happens next. Take Amazon.com for example. It might seem that the power of this institution is in its product and its ability to allow people to find what they want and get it efficiently. Of course that’s important, and it’s new in some ways.. but the aspect of what they are doing that seems to me to be part of my new social fabric is the way in which Amazon.com is paying attention to what people buy in such a way that they can tell me that I might like a particular product because others who bought things I bought seem to like something that I had not heard of. It’s a sharing of prefences. It means that instead of waiting for my local store to notice that a product is starting to sell and, if we are lucky, exposing others to it, I am informed quickly of new things of interest. The energy that excites me is not from Amazon.com. Rather Amazon.com has found a way to tap into the energy that it’s customers bring to it.
Blogs can be the same. On the one hand it may seem that what’s exciting about blogs is the software and the distribution opportunities that the internet provides. Yes, that’s true, but it can be viewed differently. Blogs are another opportunity for individuals, not just leaders, but many many individuals, to share with others in a way that did not exist before. A really good insight, or perspective, or idea, or anything that could be put in a blog, can become global within days. The blog architecture is important because it allows the energy and knowledge of individuals to be have a much broader reach.
In the new social context individuals are able to collaborate with, and compete with, others appropriately selected from a far greater population than in the past. An individual might have found it difficult to collaborate on a project with anyone outside his or her town, or outside of, say, half a days’ driving distance. Now, there are many projects in which the collaborators could easily be on different continents.
Here’s another one coming down the pike. At this point it is somewhat difficult for two or more individuals to collaborate if they do not speak a common language. My best guess is that we will one-day have translation software that will effectively remove language barriers for many kinds of work. That is yet another step toward opening the way for individuals to collaborate with, and compete with, others drawn from a much larger ocean.
This is a kind of extreme democracy – in which a far greater number of decisions are made by a mass vote. There will be far fewer intermediaries in the decision making process. Bureaucracies will spend far more of their resources enabling and supporting communications between individuals, and within groups of peers, and far less on weeding things out and pushing them up the hierarchical power structure to be handled. Human organizations will become far more like peer to peer networks, and far less like hierarchically controlled and centralized networks.
I have a strong sense that I am on to something here, that I am seeing something important emerge, yet I am frustrated that I can’t seem to verbalize it adequately, that I can’t communicate what I sense… because I don’t really understand it… I just feel it.
As long as this gong keeps going off in my mind telling me that something important is happening and that I need to pay attention, I will keep trying to capture the message in words.
Years ago I read an article that said that when something, such as the amount of horsepower available to a culture, or the speed in which a message can be delivered, changes by an order of magnitude of seven or more, then the thing changes in nature, not just in kind. The choice of ‘seven”? was kind of arbitrary, but the idea was that when something doubles, it can still be seen as just more of the same, a change, but not a change in kind. However, when something changes by an order of ten, or 20, then something entirely new comes into being. It’s a powerful thought and I have enjoyed thinking about it. Examples abound in technology from steam engines, to telescopes, to computers. My sense is that the changes I am trying to describe in these “flat world”? essays are of that nature. They are difficult to see because those in the middle of them will see them as just more, not different. What they can’t see is that in many cases there is enough “more”? to be different in kind.
A second part of this perspective, which I have not seen described as clearly as the “order of seven/different kind”? model above has to do with synergy, with two or more changes interacting in a way that brings something new into being. A good example of that is the internet. Computers were speeding up and networks were growing. At some point there was a fairly robust network connecting quite a few computers all over the U.S. The synergy was there. Onto that synergistic platform stepped Mosaic, and it’s heirs, the World Wide Web. I think that the growing computer speeds, communications speeds, number of nodes on the world communication network, and growing data storage capacity are a platform supporting a huge range of innovative software applications and approaches to using computing power and communication power. In many cases two apparently unrelated software innovations hit some kind of synergistic space warp that connects them and brings something entirely new into being. Google, Ebay, Amazon.com, Blogs, …and on and on.
Google is another great example of what intrigues me. On the one hand, what is exciting about Google is the power and efficiency of its search engines. It searches billions of sources, and searches smartly in many situations. The power is growing daily. It is indeed very impressive. However, the side of this picture that is so exciting to me is the field in which it is searching. Where did all that information come from? How did their get to be so much searchable stuff on-line so fast? How can that information base grow so quickly? It seems to me that much of this is the work of individuals, people who chose to put things on the web, for profit, for fun, for whatever reason. Millions of small institutions, local libraries, colleges, clubs, families, alumni groups, special interest groups and on and on have put their data on the web. The most exciting part of Google is not the search engine, it’s the ocean of data that’s available to search. As these search tools evolve they will rely more and more heavily on the choices made by individuals. A billion caring people trying to find something interesting are going to be, as I see it, a search tool that no computer can duplicate. The computer can harness that power, it can enable it to do exciting things, but the real power and energy is coming form individuals making informed choices.
Information is to a search engine what steam was to early locomotives. The more organized and useful the information is, the more energy it contains. Think of raw data as being like oil in the ground, and usefully structured information as being like gasoline at the pump.
I’d like to think that everything I am trying to say in these two absurdly lengthy Blog posts will someday be sayable in a paragraph or two, using well understood concepts and metaphors that don’t even exist now. What I am trying to do now is roughly equivlant to Alan Turing, who died in 1954, trying to envision and describe the World Wide Web. He might have sensed the possibility, but the vocabulary to describe it had not been invented yet. Even the word “software”? was apparently not used in the way we use it now till 1960. (here’s a web page on that).
The gong is still ringing in my mind. I’ll probably give this another shot one of these days. Of course, once I read beyond the first chapter of “The World is Flat”? I may not be able to say much without feeling that my thoughts are derivative. For now, I feel they are original. Harry Baya Nov 7, 2005
I read the first chapter of “The World is Flat” tonight (by Thomas L. Friedman, here is the Amazon.com link). I want to write my thoughts down before I read any more. I’ve been mulling over some thoughts for several weeks and this book is so strongly related that I want to write down my thoughts before they are blown away. The book is very well thought out and very strong and my thoughts, though similar, are kind of mushy, willowy and vapor like. Here goes.
I guess I should mention the underlying metaphor for “The World is Flat”. The author tells how several outsourcing operations in India describe the opportunity that enables them to compete for work now when they could not do so ten or 20 years ago. They said that changes in computers and the internet had “leveled the playing field”. This removed the advantages that had previously favored the “home team”. Extending the metaphor of “leveling the playing field” to apply to an already large, and still growing, portion of the planet leads to the conclusion that “The World is Flat”. Probably a more accurate title would have been “The World is Becoming Flatter Every Day”… but the author picked the catchier one, bless his heart!
It seems to me that we are in the middle of a very big shift in the social fabric of our world. I don’t know what else to call it. It has to do with the way people work together to do things, the way they interact about a topic, a goal, a desire, an interest…. almost anything that people can do with other people. It relates to one to one, threesomes, foursomes, and in fact any size group up to the entire population of the planet. It’s most related to the internet, but it’s also related to cell phones, and Tivo, and interstate highways, and anything that relates to communications and transportation.
It feels to me like there are little tentacles reaching out from population centers (including houses, institutions, companies, clubs, churches, towns, cities and on and on) toward each other and they are starting to connect, to touch, to form networks, to create things like neural networks in the brain. They are forming new living beings, new entities, new dynamic creatures. I sense it in things like Google, and Amazon.com, and all the helpful websites that are coming into being, and evolving. It relates most strongly to people helping each other, actions by individuals that benefit others, that help others do what they want to do. You can see it in listservs, in community sites, in Blogs (especially in blogs), in discussion forums, in educational software (my area now) like Blackboard, and WebCT and ANGEL. It’s part of the the ISPs that support web developers, like 1&1 (the one I use) and my son’s SVAHA.com.
It’s not so much that these things are new, though some of them are, it’s that they are hitting a kind of critical mass, and they are going through apparently minor evolutionary changes that are somehow allowing them to become part of a much bigger entity rather than being independent processes. Most of the essesnce of this has been here since the pre-cursors of the internet.. like Compuserve, and BBS’s, but the changes are siginificant, and the underlying infrastructure is somehow permitting an acclerating interaction that, to me, feels almost explosive. It’s the chrystal theory of change… where one local structural change permeates rapidly throught the medium. In this case each permeation lays the basis for another supporting change and another permeation occurs. I feel it’s happening to fast to understand… rather we can only feel it happening.. and see the results clearly only some time after they have occurred.
I feel that I, and billions of others, are being swept along in a tidal wave of change that we can barely sense because everything around us is being swept with us… we don’t realize that we have been moved because our visible world looks much the same.. but sooner or later we will see that huge changes have occured and that we are really really not in Kansas any more.
It is a growing supporting environment that individuals are using to make things (or say things) that will help others to do what they want in life. It is an evolving infrastructure that allows us to share what we learn from day to day, to share what we discover. The Blog is an example, trivial though it is.
I suspect the word “collaboration” catches it best.. but it’s a new kind of collaboration, one that was never possible before the internet. It’s just starting to come into being. The tools and the results are still primitive, still first generation…or even Beta, of Alpha… and, my guess, in many cases not yet even a twinkle in anyone’s eyes.
I have felt it stirring. I have smelled the beast from a distance. I have tried to talk about it to others… and been frustrated at not being able to communicate my sense… it’s almost pre-verbal. I was telling someone about it and they said “Have you read ‘The World is Flat’”. I said, “No, but I did order it from Amazon.com last night”. Now I’ve got it… and I think it’s the author’s reaction to the same things that generated the awareness I am writing about here.
I wanted to write these thoughts down before I read further because the author of that book has thought this stuff through so much more than I have and I doubt that I will be able to invoke the feint awareness of my own insight that I can still feel now. This book will blow that away and replace most of it… but I think that’s what coming is not visible to anyone yet. It’s going to be very big, and very important, and it’s going to become visible in the next few years. It’s already starting to emerge, and that’s what triggered the book, but it’s just starting, and it’s going to be in radical transition, and emergence, from now on. My guess is that we are just becoming aware of the first phase and that this phase will peak in the next five years or so. There will be a lull at some point while initial impact is assimilated, while the infrastructure and the human psychic environment (the social fabric, the meme structure of our world) adjusts and forms a foundation for the next phase. The second phase will last for a long time…more of a long term growth than a sudden shift, and it will change human society in ways we can barely imagine…e.g. it may end war, it may end national boundaries, it may allow focusing of effort to deal with disease and natural disasters the way …umm what’s it called when any number of computers can be connected to form a more and more powerful computer entity ..like the SETI project… that way!
My gut feeling is that this is the start of the visible part of a change that will be as important to the human race as the creation of language… i.e. far more important than the invention of writing, or printing. In my book, this is a biggie… and it’s starting NOW.
I love to think big thoughts. I know that I’m not saying anything of real substance… just blowing smoke about some vague awareness I have that, for whatever the reason, feels to me like a great insight. Still, if I can communicate nothing other than the level of excitement and wonder that these thoughts are giving me, I will have done something as important as writing a good song to sing for you. Harry Nov 4, 2005
One of my favorite sayings is “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” I find that this provides a lot of insight in a wide variety of situations. I use that quote several times a week most weeks. Last week I said it to someone and they replied “Did you ever think that to a nail, everything looks like a hammer.” Wow! That rocked me a bit. It came in hard and fast and flipped my mind into a very new and powerful perspective. I’m still assimilating that thought and viewing reality to see where it fits. It fits a lot of places.
For me the absolute big question is “why, or how, does anything exist at all”. Once something exists it can evolve. My best guess is that our universe evolved from something like a big bang… though it may be cyclical… but how did it ever start? I assume that an answer to that is beyond human understanding.
One way to get a handle on this question is to consider these possibilities:
- that nothing exists,
- that there is no such thing as time, space and matter, -
- that our reality, our universe, does not exist.
- that there could be such a thing as pure consciousness independent from any reality but that there would be nothing for it to be aware of.
Given the empty possibility implied by those statements, how is it that, from our perspective, those statements are clearly false?
Here is my current view of our reality. I think of it as based on what I have read about current scientific knowledge of this area. It seems to me that we are in the middle of a kind of unfolding of our universe. It apparently started off with a very simple, almost pure, substance. For lack of a better name I will call this initial substance “energy”?. That initial substance seems to have had built in tendencies/potential paths of unfolding. I like to use the term “emergent qualities”? to describe these built in tendencies. The major phases in the sequence that I am aware of are as follows:
First there was energy, then there was simple matter, then there was complex matter, then there was life, then there was consciousness. Each stage was an emergent quality of the prior one, sort of pre-loaded into the system as likely to come into being some day.
It’s interesting is to speculate about what comes after where we are now. It’s quite possible that there are many stages beyond what we call consciousness. One possible view of a future stage is that those who reach it will be able to look back on the emergence and existence of our consciousness the same way we look back on the emergence and existence of early life forms (amoebas and the like). Where matter is headed is fascinating too. Maybe the end of time, in the same sense that big bang seems to be the beginning of time, is something we cannot ( yet?) imagine.
Within this view my best guess is that consciousness is a natural outgrowth of certain kinds of dynamic complex system. I’m back to “emergent” aspects of the universe… i.e things that are likely to show up given enough time. It seems very likely to me that computers can evolve into something that has as much, or more, consciousness as we do. The only reason they might not reach that stage is that is that we may destroy ourselves, and them, before they are evolving independently from us. Once they begin to evolve independently of us, and free from our destruction, it seems probable to me that they will someday have at least as much self awareness and “consciousness”? as we do.
Whether they are 50 years from consciousness or 5 billion years (it did take us quite a while to get there) is not known, but my best guess is that, at the current rate of change, they are probably not more than a few thousand years away from it, and could be a lot closer.
The above statements were elicited in my on-going interaction with Rick Randall in the summer of 2005.
In a recent dialog with a friend, Rick Randall, I have found myself trying to state clearly some perspectives that have become important to me over the last 30 years or so in relation to truth, faith, and the possible benevolence of the universe. In particular I want to write up the “truth path” I see myself as following. I got it from a talk by Buckminster Fuller and it is important to me. I also want to state as clearly as I can what aspects of traditional religion (with ministers, belief in heaven and hell, God, prayers etc. ) most bother me, and most attract me. Along the way I also want to comment on my view of “higher powers” andto describe Matt Scanlan’s perspective on making a good story out of the facts of our lives. I’m putting this entry here now to remind me that I want to do these things.
I don’t believe in beliefs. I define beliefs rather narrowly for this.. but that’s OK. There is something I don’t like and I need to give it a working label. “Beliefs” is close enough..and I’ll let the readers make the distinctions needed.
I distinguish between “beliefs” and “assumptions”, as the terms are used here. There are a number of differences. The biggest one is that no- one get’s to choose what they believe. They can discover it, and they can work to change it..but, as I see it, they are basically stuck with their beliefs being whatever they are at any moment. In contrast, we choose our assumptions. We choose to live, or act, as if an assumption was true. We assume it is true and follow through. Some assumptions, such as how gravity affects us, have a very high probability of being correct (i.e. always true).
One of the problems with “beliefs” as I define them is that when people believe something then part of their self definition is involved. If someone challenges, or questions, a belief, then the believer is threatened. They tend to get hostile and defensive. Beliefs are often things we want very much to be so (e.g. “There is a God.”) Assumptions, on the other hand, are just points of view we choose to work with. If someone can show us that our assumption is false, we would, hopefully, appreciate the information.
I have a lot of trouble with a lot of beliefs, especially those tied up with religion. It seems to me that these “beliefs” are the basis for a lot of the prejudice and hostility in our world. And it is such a crock. Most of the beliefs associated with religion (God, Heaven, Hell, angels, prayer, grace etc.) are a complete crok in that there no possible way of being verified, or disproved. To go to war over something as unproven as this is worse than a crime, it’s a tragedy. Ahhh… but I do have a suggestion.
It’s OK to live your life “as if” an assumption is true. E.g. It’s OK to live your life as if there were a kind, caring, omniscient being who is looking after you. It this makes your life work better, then do it.. but don’t BELIEVE it. I know this is messy. Perhaps some things only work if you believe them… and don’t work if you don’t (sort of like the placebo affect). Well, my view is that those things are bogus and should be avoided. If something is only so if you believe it.. then it’s not really so. It’s just a form of self-delusion. I guess I should say that it’s OK with me if others want to live with self-delusion because it make their lives more worth living… but I don’t want to do that. I want my life to be based on (a) objectivly verifiable reality and (b) conscious choices, not on self deception.
I’m sure this ground has been well covered and disected by heavy duty philosophers…any of whom could probably completely undermine this point of view in a converstaion with me. Thank goodness they are not here to do that. However, even with that admission, I like to think their is grain of important insight in this musing and the fact that I am not equipped to defend it against stronger powers does not make it less important.
I also wonder if anyone other than me will ever read any of this. Harry 7/24/2005
I found an article by Stewart Brand, entitled “Environmental Heresies” very thought provoking. The introduction said: ‘The founder of “The Whole Earth Catalog” believes the environmental movement will soon reverse itself on four core issues.’
The Web address for the article is:
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_earth.asp?p=1