Category Archives: Society

A Reset Button for the Human Ape – World “Peace” in a Few Years

Have you ever noticed how children tend to be so much more open minded than adults? Their minds are like little sponges that absorb information and view points. It seems that as we age, we have a tendency to be less open minded. This phenomenon has been quantified.

Open to New Ideas

We are all the products of our biology, the environment and the interplay between those two forces. The old saying, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” comes to mind. In many ways, most of us have always had basically very similar values to the people we grew up around. Those values were bestowed upon us during an impressionable time in our brain’s development.

What if we could “reset” adults so that they were as open minded and impressionable as children again? Of course we should leave their existing memories in place. Our memories make us who we are to a point. How we view past events depends as much on how we feel at the time of recall as it does on how we felt during the initial event. Nostalgia is an example of this phenomenon. We often recall events far in the past as “the good old days”, “when times were simpler”. Even when those times were not good at all and far from simple.

Good Old Days Weren’t Always Good

Many adults get locked in to a pattern of thinking from which they never escape. A destructive example of this can be seen in what I like to call “Kamikaze’s on Autopilot”. They are the people who continue to carry on unhealthy habits like not exercising, smoking, eating too much junk food etc even when they know it shortens their life span. No matter what you tell them, they never change. People in sustained conflicts show similar traits.

I believe one of the root causes of sustained world conflicts is the inability of the participants to change their minds (mind change) and decide not to be in conflict. If all sides in a conflict decided to stop disagreeing and harming each other, the conflict would cease. It sounds simple. Yet we know it is very difficult. It is possible that inability to mind change is a limitation of our biology that can be overcome with a “reset” drug or treatment.

The pharmaceutical and military industry could spearhead research into a “reset” drug. Working hand in hand they could come up with the best delivery method and chemical composition. It would most likely have to be administered clandestinely to entire communities at a time.

Potential Delivery Mechanism

What would the effects of a working “reset” drug look like?

It would be essential that the drug only have an effect for a limited time. The drug would have to be partnered with a social outreach component. A campaign designed to expose the communities to new ideas. Imagine entire communities, cities or countries filled with adults as receptive to new ideas as children.

Major conflicts in the effected communities might not cease overnight. The saturation of the community with new ideas coupled with techniques for managing internal states of mind and disagreements would be needed.

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Elephants Look in A Mirror But Humans do so Through a Looking Glass

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Only a hand full of species can recognize themselves in a mirror. Humans and elephants are a part of this exclusive club. The video below is fascinating.

It’s always interesting to see how we clever humans test the mental capacity of other animals. Recognizing ones self in the mirror is a complex process in the brain. It requires skills such as self awareness and deductive reasoning to name a few. Showing an animal it’s reflection in the mirror is an excellent way to test it for these skills of intelligence.

How might a superior intelligence test humans? Alternate universes and realities are a common theme in the musings of human kind via fiction. Physicists theorize that alternate universes and realities can and do exist. This is known as the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. What if advanced beings are able to tap in to this phenomenon?

Reality as Reflection of the Mind

Instead of holding a mirror in front of us, they might “hold a reality” in front of us. And instead of testing individuals for a few minutes, they test our entire species over the course of our evolution.

At it’s heart, this is not a radical or new concept. The idea of Karma is loosely related: “causality where intent and actions of an individual influence the future of that individual.” – Wikipedia. In this case, the phenomenon of Karma, would be an artificial law of nature put in place just for us…an ongoing, interactive puzzle we need to solve and master.

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A New Genetic Memory for Our Species

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Human babies are born with the innate ability to mimic the facial expressions of the people around them. Experiments were conducted with new born infants where the mother waved her tongue and the infant was able to duplicate the action.

The ability to mimic a facial expression is an example of a genetic memory with which we are born. In short, stuff we are born knowing how to do. If the knowledge of how to mimic facial expressions can be genetically imprinted in our brains, why not calculus or String Theory or The Constitution?

Our species has gone through eras where society, culture and/or knowledge have been lost in large catastrophes. Subsequently we had to start from scratch every time. What if people were simply born with all the knowledge they needed to live in our society? It would certainly safe guard our species from the next culture erasing catastrophe.

On a lighter note, perhaps people could be born with the latest and greatest education in ALL fields. Each human being an expert at Math, Engineering, The Humanities, Languages, Philosophy, you name it. This knowledge would become as basic to our species as the ability to regulate heart rate or breathing.

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Google to Offer Instant Search Results in Your Mind

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A former classmate of mine from the George Washington University attended a meeting hosted by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, some months ago.

One of the members of the audience asked Schmidt what to expect from Google over the next 20-30 years. Schmidt hinted that we may see instant Google search results via some sort of chip embedded in our brains some day.

The fact that most of us can take this at least somewhat seriously, shows how much technology is progressing. 50 years ago this would have sounded like science fiction. What happens when something like this becomes science fact?

Instant Google search results in your mind will be the first step on the road to immortality for human beings. On that journey to immortality, our society and culture will forever be changed.

By the time we perfect the brain to chip interface, Google will have gone through many many advancements in search methodology and results listings. Search results will probably look very different from the way they do today. The search results will be more accurate and instead of getting pages and pages of results, you may only get 2 or 3 links that match EXACTLY what you are looking for. That is good news. You would not want your mind cluttered up with SPAM search results. All joking aside, what in the world would an internal, brain interface with Google search results be like?

The Change to Our Society and Culture

The times will be a’changin’ for specialists such as lawyers, doctors, engineers and the like. With the sum of all human knowledge readily available in our minds, all of us will “know” just about everything we need to know in order to prosper in society. The information will most likely not take the form of lists or links to scroll through. Rather, knowledge (search results) will appear as needed, if you opt in. For example, when you type a search now at Google…before you finish typing, guesses at what you are looking for start to appear automatically. Something similar to this could happen in a situational context.

Let’s say you find yourself in a situation with a pregnant woman who is going in to labor. The knowledge of how to deliver a baby will “come to you” seamlessly and you will be able to deliver that baby yourself. Not only will the technical details of how to do it be in the forefront of your mind, there may also be a little wisdom thrown in. The experiences of doctors may also be available to you. You’ll be able to pick and choose the methods and techniques you use to deliver that baby based on what went right and what went wrong for others in your situation.

Lack of schooling will no longer be a barrier for most occupations. When everyone has instant access to all information and instant access to “enough” online wisdom, most jobs that exist today will be able to be performed by anyone. The major exception will be creative jobs….maybe. When anyone can perform almost any job, people will gravitate to occupations that they want to do, not what they HAVE to do. A woman who just turned 18, could have her chip installed one day and then practice neurosurgery or law, competently, the next day. In fact she could be a doctor, lawyer, engineer and computer programmer all with the same ease.

The Road to Immortality

What makes us who we are? Our brains. Information will not be a one way street when it comes to the chips in our brains. In order to do the searches, that chip has to be able to read our minds on some level. As the technology improves, that chip will become better and better at reading our thoughts, storing our thoughts and transferring our thoughts. Eventually, the line between chip and brain will disappear.

Imagine a situation where someone in the future gets “killed” in a plane crash. Their body and their chip are completely destroyed. Shockingly, the family does not mourn. Why? Because before the plane trip, their loved one did a brain backup at the airport. It is reasonable to assume that robotics, cybernetics and cloning will have reached a level where the human body can be duplicated. The Japanese have already begun this process.

Your New Body

That loved one who “died” in the plane crash will be reloaded in to her new body. She will wake up with the memories of everything up until her backup. She may open her eyes and insist that she has a plane to catch.

Do Soul Particles Exist?

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I was recently emailing a friend and she presented a fascinating two part question to me. She asked;

A) “Do soul particles exist? Kinda like undetected dark matter. Might explain why folks feel spiritual/religious connections not yet “proven” by science and..”

B) “Assuming there are invisible soul particles, isn’t it conceivable that they’d be recycled. So someone’s soul may consist of a combination of prior souls. A soul that’s part Martin Luther King, Amelia Earhart and part homeless Indian man. Or even better: Martin Luther King, Amelia Earhart and wise African elephant.”

Soul Particles

When I read the question, my imagination started running with the idea….here is what I speculated.

Yes there are soul particles. They linger about in clusters. Sort of like dust storms. Like dust storms, each individual dust particle is in close proximity to the other. That’s the definition of a “storm/cloud”…a bunch of particles blowing around close to each other. One of the differences between a conventional dust cloud and a soul particle cloud is the dimension in which they are close. Dust clouds work in 3 dimensions. The way we know things in every day life. The soul particle clouds work in a 4th dimension. Or some sort of an equivalent. For example, one particle could be in China and another in Norway. They are far apart in 3 dimensional space. But in 4 dimensional space they could be side by side.

Soul particles are generated by, and also attracted to, the quantum effects in neural tissues. Quantum effects in the neural tissue are the result of electrical activity in the brain. The electrical activity and it’s patterns are determined by the experience of the person and the way their biology reacts to that experience.

There are probably “funky” type effects too. For example, soul clouds might attract other soul clouds which include clusters of other people. Like how certain types of people tend to get along with other similar types of people. And “converse” relationships like that between victim and predator may exist as well. They seem to find each other too, over and over again.

People can move in and out of soul particle clouds by changing their thinking. That thinking changes the electrical impulses in the brain. Those electrical impulses have quantum effects on the neural tissue. The soul particles interact with those quantum effects. Maybe the quantum effects can also have effects on the thinking. There are probably larger clouds and smaller clouds. Some are easier to move into or out of than others. They can overlap.

And somehow, these soul particles tend to have an influence on events that are not directly connected to human influence. Like weather, luck, environment and the time period in which you are born. And maybe seemingly random experiences like the types of information people happen to find themselves exposed to (for example you walk through a book store and a book catches your eye and changes your life). Funky.