Inquiry

Hello!

Just a quick contribution, will get back later with more links.

It is well known that many of the technological advances we have access today comes from leading edge experiments in Universities and the military industry. The internet and video games are examples of that. Based on these facts, many of the advances we are seeing today in these environments will shape our daily life in the future in terms of technological interaction and use.

I recently came in contact with a person at the USC who is leading one of their several projects related to virtual reality, including virtual worlds, avatar emotions, artificial intelligence, computer generated storyteling and narrative, interactive 360 holographic images, mixed reality, stress disorder virtual therapies, VR psyhcology and neuroscience, etc...

I invite you to take a look at that and just imagine.... all these technologies being used in the future (maybe not far!) for psychological, therapeutic and developmental means... and video games can be a great part of that.

Here is the link to all their projects: http://ict.usc.edu/projects/all/

All the best!
Moses Silbiger

www.pressplaytogrow.com

www.integraleye.com

the dire Climate Change predictions of James Lovelock will not come to pass.

alternative energy, especially solar, would be one of the most significant advancements at a macro level that will minimize our dependency on fossil fuels. along with this will come breakthroughs in batteries that will power the second coming electric cars. Tesla Roadsters will be as common as Mini Coopers.

the LHC Computing Grid will change the Internet beyond our current comprehension.

Biotechnology will continue to be a lucrative industry due to breakthroughs in genetics, this means more effective birth control methods, gene therapy, and exercise pills.

Dean Kamen's Slingshot will help people in developing nations to have potable drinking water.

Space explorations will be more affordable.

thinking about future technology makes me excited and hopeful. come to think of it, the Singularity is almost here. it just needs more tinkering and scaling :)

--

http://www.c4chaos.com

Well, to get the right answer, we have to ask the right questions.

In this case, the question about technological advancement lends itself to the usual pathology of our Orange Age:  what KW calls, "Flatland," or Objectivisim -- preoccupation with the means of manipulating external experience as an indirect way of manipulating interior experience -- technology.

Technology has its necessary place, but it can't substitute for the basic awakening and integration of innate human functions, grounded in our very biology, that correlate the capacity for perceptual and mental discrimination (UL) with sensory-motor organization (UR).  The problem with Objectivism is that it distracts/detracts from the subjective side of development and overemphasizes mental development at the expense of awakening and integration of the physical (both as seen and as felt).  So my answer to the posed question is "deeper development of Centaur Consciousness."  (See Rolfing, Integral Rolfing, and somatic education, in general.)

I listened to KW's description of the Brain-Mind Implantation Chip (for access to the Information Singularity-to-Come in 30 years or so) with some disappointment and a sense of pathos -- about the lack of recognition that knowledge and language depend for their meaning upon associated feelings and habits of action made familiar by memory.  Knowledge involves sensory-perception, motor-behavior, and memory, which are highly context dependent.  Words aren't enough; images aren't enough.  Meaning comes from the meeting of "the perceiver" (as a complex of memory patterns, subjectively experienced, conscious or subconscious) with the sensory (or virtual-sensory) stimuli of novel experiences; meaning comes from their integration, not just from their introduction.  New experiences are always incomprehensible and gain meaning in a time-bound process involving action, the sensations of actions, and memory.

By way of example, chips now exist to substitute for the retina of the eye and the cochlea of the inner ear -- for seeing and hearing.  Individuals who have never had sight or hearing who are surgically equipped with these chips find it at first  impossible to make sense of the neural information being transmitted into them; it's incomprehensible to them.  Progress in making sense of this artificial sensory input has, for such individuals, been extremely slow.  The limit is not the technology, but the organism and consciousness being called to make experiential sense of the technology.

Information has meaning only insofar as it connects with ones capacity for feeling, action, and personal memories of feelings and actions, embedded in ones present life-experience.  In other words, information can't be downloaded much  faster through a chip than it can through the eyes and ears because it's the integration of that information that takes so much time, not the seeing or hearing of the words.

If a person were somehow to download "their consciousness" (a concept I will, for the moment, refrain from examining), his or her capacity for absorbing new experience into "knowledge" would be, if not basically ended, reduced to a faint, virtual mirage.  That said, in my view, the notion of downloading consciousness into technology is, if not a dead end, a sad absurdity.

The "mind" doesn't think; the body thinks -- or more exactly, it's the body, thinking - and we think according to our capacity to organize and mobilize our subtle tension patterns (think REM or the sub-vocalization movements of reading) in more or less complex and dynamic ways, felt and experienced as thought.  If you don't quite see my point, notice that you can't count to ten any faster in your mind than you can with your lips!

So, I say that, however great the technological advance may be, it is advances in the somatic domain, the awakening and integration of ones innate functional capacities, all the way down into the biological organism, that will make the biggest difference (since that's the greatest deficiency/potential), and upon which all integration of technological advances depends.  That's development of a deeper Centaur consciousness -- mind-body integration, or somatic education.

In my view the most significant technological change we could have in the next 20 years would be the success of nuclear fusion. The sun in a flask so to speak. This would allow all the people of the world to have a decend standard of living, not just the West, without stuffing  the planet. There could be clean water, enough safe food and adequate transport for all.  Once the people of the world have the foot of dire neccessity off their  neck we could have a blossoming of mankind. The oil and coal companies would not be impressed but some may argue they have had their turn and there are other uses for coal and oil.