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  3. Thank you, Angelo, for an appropriate and needed comment.

    Follows is an another appropriate comment, this time in the form of an excerpt from “The Technological Society,” by Jacques Ellul:

    “. . . the human race is beginning confusedly to understand at last that it is living in a new and unfamiliar universe. The new order was meant to be a buffer between man and nature. Unfortunately, it has evolved autonomously in such a way that man has lost all contact with his natural framework and has to do only with the organized technical intermediary which sustains relations both with the world of life and with the world of brute matter. Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is “no exit”; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.

    The new milieu has its own specific laws which are not the laws of organic or inorganic matter. Man is still ignorant of these laws. It nevertheless begins to appear with crushing finality that a new necessity is taking over from the old. It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression, but what if victory has been gained at the price of an even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical society which has come to dominate our lives?…..

    Comprehending that the proliferation of means brings about the disappearance of the ends, we have become preoccupied with rediscovering a purpose or a goal. Some optimists of good will assert that they have rediscovered a Humanism to which the technical movement is subordinated. The orientation of this Humanism may be Communist or non-Communist, but it hardly makes any difference. In both cases it is merely a pious hope with no chance whatsoever of influencing technical evolution. The further we advance, the more the purpose of our techniques fades out of sight. Even things which not long ago seemed to be immediate objectives – rising living standards, hygiene, comfort – no longer seem to have that character, possibly because man finds the endless adaptation to new circumstances disagreeable. In many cases, indeed, a higher technique obliges him to sacrifice comfort and hygienic amenities to the evolving technology with possesses a monopoly of the instruments necessary to satisfy them. Extreme examples are furnished by the scientists isolated at Los Alamos in the middle of the desert because of the danger of their experiments; or by the would-be astronauts who are forced to live in the discomfort of experimental camps n the manner so graphically described by Jungk.

    But the optimistic technician is not a man to lose heart. If ends and goals are required, he will find them in a finality which can be imposed on technical evolution precisely because this finality can be technically established and calculated. It seems clear that there must be some common measure between the means and the ends subordinated to it. The required solution, then, must be a technical inquiry into ends, and this alone can bring about a systematization of ends and means. The problem becomes that of analyzing individual and social requirements technically, of establishing, numerically and mechanistically, the constancy of human needs. It follows that a complete knowledge of ends is requisite for mastery of means. But, as Jacques Aventur has demonstrated, such knowledge can only be technical knowledge. Alas, the panacea of merely theoretical humanism is as vain as any other.

    “Man, in his biological reality, must remain the sole possible reference point for classifying needs,” write Aventur. Aventur’s dictum must be extended to include man’s psychology and sociology, since these have also been reduced to mathematical calculation. Technology cannot put up with intuitions and “literature.” It must necessarily don mathematical vestments. Everything in human life that does not lend itself to mathematical treatment must be excluded – because it is not a possible end for technique – and left to the sphere of dreams.

    Who is too blind to see that a profound mutation is being advocated here? A new dismembering and a complete reconstitution of the human being so that he can at last become the objective (and also the total object) of techniques. Excluding all but the mathematical element, he is indeed a fit end for the means he has constructed. He is his essence. Man becomes a pure appearance, a kaleidoscope of external shapes, an abstraction in a milieu that is frighteningly concrete – an abstraction armed with all the sovereign sings of Jupiter the Thunderer.”

  4. Anybody here read Vernor Vinge’s novel Rainbows End?

    I’d recommend it. Won the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

    “The book is set in San Diego in 2025.
    …
    “Your hack was noticed. Back when I was young, you could have got a patent off it. Nowadays—”
    “Nowadays, it should be worth a decent grade in a high-school class.”
    “

  5. This technotronic mimicry of innate human capability may seem like an evolution of sorts, but it is actually a step towards greater individual dependence upon databases that are not located in a hyperspace of the mental environment but within the hard wired world of three dimensional forms. This type of technological path is the road to greater and greater reliance on machine computation which has the effect of shutting down the centers of human connectivity to the sentient information waves that permeate all life.

    People have become very excited with these types of endeavours because they provide a means through which true human development on the level of the consciousness can be avoided. On demand digital waves provide a false sense of knowing that is not real in that there is a larger infrastructure that must be functioning properly in order for the system to be operable, this is the gateway to greater reliance on externalized constructs. The shamans of the old way and the true teachers of today, as rare as they are, who can access through the most advanced technology of all – the human form, need not rely on an architecture of silicon but can access the dimensional fields in real time as a function of consciousness. We live in a multi-dimensional field, like overlapping wave forms, each of which can be accessed by a process of attunement and inner development. The mass movement towards digital intelligence is an escape from the necessary work of ‘unionization’ of the mind with the consciousness aspect and provides an excuse which is barely even an echo of our true power. As the internet can be credited with the movement of greater volumes of information and perhaps can be perceived as a liberator of human creativity, which is in a sense accurate, the flip side of this equation is that there is an increasing reliance on this web work of data to such an extent that the data itself becomes all pervasive. We become identified by our data and not by our innate human nature. Ironically those who are best suited to using the internet as a form of intelligence gathering are those who recognize it’s impermanence, these are the ones who are much less apt to fall into the many technological gutters of endless online chatting and texting, aimless surfing, and being on-line for the sake of being on-line which has become an epidemic. Time away from technology now creates an anxiety in western socialized people that is entirely unnatural and unhealthy. This situation will only become more pronounced as the wide acceptance of virtual head gear becomes the tool of choice. These headsets, as I’ve seen them in the ‘akashic records’ will not only allow an individual to totally immerse themselves in a virtual matrix of the left brain, but will also provide the option to overlay images and information into the ‘real world’ picture similar to that described in the video above except projections will not be needed since the interface will be at the optic nerve. This will change human perspective of the natural world in ways that can only be vaguely discerned.

    Imagine this – An individual donning a virtual headset, which most socialized humans now do, walks into a garden. As the individual views the garden data sets are moving about each plant and insect describing the world, a description derived from databases that reflects the common assumptions of what things are. As young children grow up in this environment, where virtual head sets are accepted as a vital educational tool, the child is inundated with constant data which informs the brain as to what things are, the very definition of what life is becomes the unfolding of datasets of information. Can anyone see how this can be problematic?

    In this world of virtual overlays the common perception of what is real and what defines life becomes very regimented and homogeneous because harmonization of information based on social criteria, whether science, or art, will be the benchmark. Harmonization of human perception is the very essence of our technocratic path, though very few consider that such a path will lead to the destruction of diversity since the technology of society itself becomes the dictator of life. For a greater understanding of how human created tools affect human evolution check out the work of Marshall McLuhan and his study of the media ecology. There is a very specific integration pattern as regards technology and each integration changes the human beings perception of himself and the world in which he finds himself/herself. Not all technological applications are beneficial at all times, there must be a corresponding conscious understanding of human nature before certain technologies can be properly assimilated, this unfortunately is not what is currently occurring, we are blindly, voraciously even, consuming every technological species that arrives as if they are toys. This outlook is the delusion of an immature race of beings that does not yet fully understand itself or the world in which it lives.

  6. Just think soon you can have a brain implant…… 🙂 (I don’t knows if you caught that she says that at the very end real fast.)

  7. wow!!!! Have I been asleep???? That presentation was mystifying and magnificent.

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