Presentations

We started presentations today, and they were pretty interesting.  I was really interested in Lindsey Mango's, with the essential question "Why do Native Americans stay on reservations when the conditions are so bad?"  Part of her answer was that many Native American people know that if they leave the reservations, they will lose their culture.  So they choose to live in squalor.  This shows how incredibly passionate many Native Americans are about their cultures; having a culture must really offer a lot to them if they're willing to forgo clean water and adequate living conditions to have it.  I wonder what it's like to have such a strong cultural identity.

The Week

I'm really excited about Obama possibly visiting our school.  It would be the experience of a lifetime to meet Barack Obama, although he hasn't exactly been revolutionary.  I wish he would be more bossy about the environment.  Someone has to do it.

I think, though I'm not sure, that even if science can give us infinite more brain connections and cells, we won't be able to access it all.  You know how they say we only use 10% of our brains?  Well, we know that some parts of our brain are dormant or underused because we live in civilization--parts of the brain used for walking on rough terrain, for example.  Also, the way we view the world is much different from the way uncivilized cultures viewed the world, and I wonder if this accounts for differences in brain activity.  It will be interesting to see how we can use our new, bigger brains.

So I've been thinking

I've been thinking about Malcolm Godwin's hypothesis in The Lucid Dreamer that the world we see around us is about as substantial as our dreams are.  The idea has been presented before that the way our relatively little brains store so much data is by creating holograms of the universe inside our heads.  This conjecture can be used to explain many mysteries of the brain, and the workings of holograms oddly parallel dreams.

I've started to have dreams when I'm half-asleep and half-awake, drifting in and out of consciousness like when I'm on an airplane.  I know everyone has these kinds of half-awake dreams, but I'm having a lot of them, and they seem to be as vivid as normal dreams.  Like in normal dreams, I believe that what I'm experiencing is real reality, but the difference is that I am often experiencing the real world simultaneously, with the part of me that's awake.

Maybe what Dr. Richard Alpert, a.k.a. Ram Dass, said is true: that we are all existing in multiple realities, only aware of one at a time.  And traveling between the realities in which our consciousnesses exist is like changing the channels on a TV (On Lost, Desmond got caught between multiple channels several times).

The Lucid Dreamer

I've already read a little bit of The Lucid Dreamer, but I'm really excited about reading the whole thing. It's full of really interesting information about how the brain dreams. What I'm most interested in is distinguishing the difference between the dream world(s) and reality. Is this world just as much a construct of our imaginations as our dreams are? What makes us sense dreams, and why are some senses more accute than others? What facets of the brain affect how we view "reality"?

Starting "On Intelligence"

Well, On Intelligence arrived and I've started reading it. It's not as well-written as The Singularity is Near--not as urgently. But I can tell it's going to be interesting. I want to know if there's any hope for technology expanding humans' consciousness and intelligence. Unless it does this, it's only going to weaken our species (the Singularity scenario seems to partly make up for technology's backfalls by taking our bodies out of the equation and making us super-smart). Unless technology is going to benefit humans and not just surround us, it's not worth it. Please tell me what you think: will it be good for technology to expand our minds vastly (if you're like me and you automatically set up tent in the "technology is bad" camp, try to get rid of that prior notion to answer this question), or will it be destructive to us?

Is higher intelligence better?

I'm writing this on Monday instead of on Friday, but anyway:

I was against the Singularity before I found out what it was. I still believe technology has done much more harm for our species than good (I don't think this point is really up for debate. Just ask a biologist whether technology has advanced or hindered our evolution, health, and happiness. For those last two you'd have to turn to an anthropologist, and from what I've read it looks as though we are just starting to catch up, lifespan-wise, to "primitive" peoples. Indian chiefs and warriors in the 1800s and 1900s--famous Native Americans for whom we have birth and death dates--lived into their eighties and nineties while, according to Ray Kurzweil at least, the civilized European-Americans were benefiting form the aid of period technology and dying at 45. The Kwaaymii Indians of the Laguna Mountains, in our own back yard, considered "old" to be in their eighties, and some lived into their hundreds--according to their last living member at least. As for the happiness question, no one can tell us for sure. Surely primitive cultures had a higher infant death rate [which actually would help control the population and contribute to evolution] and they probably had to labor for long hours for survival purposes. But who today can say they don't spend their lives working? More important for me is that universally, aboriginal people had such a deep, incomprehensible connection with the earth, almost like they were part of a giant organism or something. Many Native Americans called it "the Great Mystery.") But now that I know the Singularity's all about becoming extremely intelligent, I can't really argue against that. Intelligence is good, although I disagree with all the other implications of the Singularity, like living in a virtual reality, being at the mercy of nanobots (which might be controlled by a government--too much power if you ask me), and devaluing death. The way we got to our current level of intelligence is that it just happened. Different parts of our brains control different functions, like sight, euphoria, curiosity, etc. How can the scientists and machines creatively invent new functions? I'm also curious how something so positive could spring from several thousand years of civilization and technology--something so negative.

Consciousness

I'm beginning to think that, once again, technology promises us what we already have. I used to be opposed to the Singularity because nature is so much better than better living through chemistry. However, apparently one of the predictions Kurzweil makes is that technology will infinitely expand our minds, bringing us beyond our current level of intelligence, and wake up the "dumb" universe, giving everything intelligence and consciousness.

There's nothing to object to there. More intelligence is not a bad thing; no good can come from staying in the dark intentionally. There are no unsolvable problems, only lower levels of intelligence. Intelligence is great. But I think this all may be already accessible. The Lucid Dreamer goes on an on about how problems and situations that dumbfounded people in their daily lives were easy to solve in the dream world. Astral projectionists and lucid dreamers, as well as people who are skilled at meditating, speak of a "third eye" which actually corresponds to the pineal gland in the brain, and of going beyond their physical bodies to explore the mysteries of the universe and other dimensions, unimaginable in this realm.

Modern-day "shamans" and proponents of the drug DMT say that by using DMT, which also occurs naturally in our metabolic system, you can tap into nature's consciousness. If the universe has a consciousness and we're all a part of it, that's pretty cool. If we can access naturally these greater intelligences, the negative side of the Singularity doesn't seem worth it.