The Singularity …
As I have continued my research into evolutionary theory, and have now attended several conferences where Ray Kurzweil has presented, I am in alignment with those who see the Singularity coming upon us. It is not good or bad … it simply is, and will be. To me, the Singularity is a point where the evolution of humanity into a planetary-scale organism occurs. It might sound funny, but it is similar to the “assimilation” that we hear about on Star Trek. It is the creation of a new entity on earth … a new substrate … beyond both the genetic and memetic substrates that exist today. It is the creation of a new form of bond … a new form of communications. I’ll be writing more as I learn more and theorize more! 😉

Singularity – In another 100 years (sans major wars, famines, or diseases) computers will be unimaginably smarter than humans and other advances in sciences like biotech and nanotech will have made our physical bodies irrelevant. This seems like common sense to me. In fact, I don’t argue with the people who say it might happen sooner. This possibility, commonly called singularity, has many followers. In a way, it is as if the whole world is realizing that we’ve already built a tower ten times the size of Babel and God hasn’t woken up yet — and if we can have just a few more minutes, we’ll be able to finally sneak in and see what heaven is like. Of course, even the conservative estimates of singularity would say that a human intellect compared to a cockroach is a charitable comparison when the human intellect is pitted agsinst the computers of singularity. The idea that these computers will even comprehend that humans want the computers to be our servants is perhaps as believable as the guy who talks to cockroaches and knows what they want. In other words, the world of singularity is certainly not a world for humans — at least not humans in any form remotely comprehensible to us today (and if humans morph into transcendental unified trans-bloogified entities, we aren’t really humans anymore, are we?). So there is quite a bit of speculation about whether it will be “good” or “bad” when (if) we get a chance to blow the lid off this thing. I personally don’t see how such distinctions will be possible, any more than a rock can contemplate the “goodness” of the current world. I also know that sitting around speculating about it is not going to do much more than give the crabs a chance to cook up a scheme to pull the tower back down. And one cannot judge harshly those who decided that the tower was the road to hell. If the crab climbs out of the pot, what’s to say that he won’t attract the attention of a hungry predator and get the whole pot gobbled up? Maybe the other crabs are wise to question exactly what it is that seems to be hypnotizing Jonathon Livingston Crab and making him so anxious to leave the safe comfort of the bucket? All vanity, anyway… [Better Living Through Software]

Interesting read … all sorts of perspective on changes to the human brain in recent years … myopia caused by reading more and more?
http://www.mailgate.org/sci/sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy/msg00021.html

ABSTRACT: Storfer’s (2000) argument that there was a parallel
increase in myopia, brain size, and intelligence due to
urbanization (complex visual inputs) during the last century is
analyzed in this commentary. Sex differences, sex hormones, and
human handedness also need to be considered. In his excellent
monograph, Storfer (1999) argues that human brains gradually
increased in size during the past century along with a dramatic
upsurge of myopia, which is highly correlated with human
intelligence. Storfer also argues that these adaptive changes
following urbanization may occur by adaptive epigenetic inheritance
without violating the basic concepts of Darwin’s theory.

The brain is forming …
This post got me thinking once again about my mission to explore the formation of the ‘brain’ of the human organism. What’s facinating is that I truly believe that Dave, and Radio, are good examples of the first massively distributed neural networks of memetic transfer and replication. Using Radio, you are able to publish a stream of memes, created by the streams of memes that you are receiving on a moment by moment basis. So you can subscribe to meme steams, just as a neuron receives signals from numerous other neurons. And you can create a meme stream which effects other neurons … wow … is the brain of the human organism forming?

DaveNet: The Web is a Writing Environment. [Scripting News]

A very cool article about teaching ‘ethics’ in school …
I really liked this CNN article about teaching ethics in schools. What is impressive to me is that people are starting to truly examine the role of teaching the ability to “distinguish” in schools. What I mean by this is that we could potentially teach children to really distinguish who they are being, and distinguish their behavior. Where I believe that the article, and the educators get sidetracked is when they attempt to define absolute right and wrong. Instead, IMHO, if they were to focus on distinguishing, and then consequences of actions, the rest would simply occur …

Great Interview with Dave Winer … and great philosophy …
I am thoroughly impressed by this interview, and the philosophy presented within. Dave always seems to have a great grasp of the possibility that conversations and communication are the root of all creation. He also understands the differences between centralized systems, and the distributed nature of the net. He has some good, IMHO, observations of the recent Microsoft announcements, and many of the new and developing standards. A good read!