Kevin Kelly (What does Technology Want? p196) quotes George Lucas:
Just maybe that is about to change (Perhaps on December 21?? 
I think we are in a rapid change right now. It will be more visible soon. I think the feminist consciousness, the decline of religion, urbanisation, education are all leading to a shift in consciousness that means there will be ever more psychotherapists.
See also:
http://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2012/evolution-of-consciousness/
The book by Kevin Kelly “What does technology want continues stimulate my thinking.
He is eloquent on the evolution of tech. To make his case he draws on parallels in biological evolution. He comes up with principle after principle that are deep insights into any change process. He reminds me constantly of Frederick Engles and on the dialectics of nature. There are principles of change that go beyond one sphere.
Today it is this S curve that grabbed me.
You would need to read the chapter to fully get it, but take the example of rail road air as the three levels of technology that work together to ensure that transport increased at a constant level, of say miles, speed and lower costs.
What I do is relate this to the evolution of psychotherapy. Or lets call it conscious intimate relationships. A mere 40 years ago there were about 10 therapists/counsellors in Christchurch, now it is more like 400. What is that curve about? The psyche is on the move!
I imagine the three technologies are:
Analytical psych
Humanistic Psych
And now still in the lower reaches of its s curve, relationship psych
Freud, Moreno, Jung… methods are known by their founders.
This is because they are working in the realm of relationships. They are included in the science.
They are not working with things.
Marx is the same.
There is no objective thing they are working with.
In so far as we are part of such a modality we are part of a community around that person.
The Buddhists have lineage, so do psychologists but we don’t acknowledge that so easily.
It would be better to acknowledge our whakapapa in the psychological realms of our work in a more conscious way.
Science Weekly Extra: Craig Venter on the science of synthetic biology
Really quite an amazing story.
I could well get a little bio printer in my lifetime for body bits. (that might have been another podcast) Almost certainly I’ll print out my very potent flu jabs.
Loved this discussion:
Bryan Boyd Interviewed by Kim Hill
Here is the book:
I will read the book. But as I listened I was burying to join in on the discussion. I have since my days studying under Prof. Robert Bigelow in the late 60s at Canterbury had an understanding of “gene pools”. The concept makes sense of how some things might benefit the survival of a species even when individuals do not have more babies.
Brian Boyd touched on this lightly in the interview, I’ll be interested to see if he does this more fully in the book.
The point is this: if lyrical poetry (or anything else) is useful to the group then only a few need to have a gene for it, and even if they individually don’t have more babies, the group as a whole might survive and a neighbouring group who does not have that gene in their pool might not.
I’ve been thinking about this in relationship to the purpose of monogamy. It seems that it has a special place in healing wounds from childhood. But this typically does not happen till after the crucial childbearing years, in the second reflective half of life. I think of the powerful impact even one or two healing couples can have in a group. They can foster relationship education as well. They might influence psychological health, and more robust grandchildren.
PS
Bigelow’s book here: Amazon – The Dawn Warriors
I’ve been reading Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. One of the central thesis of the book is that evolution is not only driven by adaptation. There are two other forces at work: structural forces, ie the laws of physics and contingency, luck. What if Beethoven did not have a piano?
I’ll post the picture that impressed me again:
This is a central idea (from the book):
The progression of inventions is in many ways the march toward forms dictated by physics and chemistry in a sequence determined by the rules of complexity. We might call this technology’s imperative.
What is stirring me to write this post is that I listened to a podcast today on Tech Nation, Moira Gunn interviewing Adrian Bejan – details
It is uncanny, and totally in line with the Kevin Kelly theory of what is inevitable that these tow come up with the same ideas. This is the time when we make a shift from classical darwinism, to incorporate something marx might have called dialectical materialism.
More about & by Adrian Bejan here:
Interview with ‘Design in Nature’ Author Adrian Bejan, Part One …
His book on Amazon:
This theory, Bejan calls it “Constructal Law” governs everything. From his book:
The constructal law is revolutionary because it is a law of physics—and not just of biology, hydrology, geology, geophysics, or engineering. It governs any system, any time, anywhere, encompassing inanimate (rivers and lightning bolts), animate (trees, animals), and engineered (technology) phenomena, as well as the evolving flows of social constructs such as knowledge, language, and culture. All designs arise and evolve according to the same law.
What excites me is that the same law – or rules of complexity, a law about change really, governs the psyche too. I think Jung was onto this with archetypes. These structures hare universal across cultures.
Amazon
I’ve quoted a few things from this book on the blog already, so click the tag, Kevin Kelly and you will see my notes as I read the book.
I think its profound.
Its not just about the evolution of technology. He revises biological evolution in a radical way. Its not just him though, he draws on many latest developments in the field. The main thrust is captured in this image from the book.
Just got a name for something I have grasped for a long time. I used to call it accidental by products of evolution, and had this idea when I was doing biology aged 15. EG the piano and music itself is a by product of the evolution of fingers. We as humans have gone beyond what was biologically fittest, accidental by-products just heaped upon themselves and interacted with each other to enable creativity and consciousness.
From What Technology wants by Kevin kelly page 50: “These inadvertent anticipatory inventions are called exaptations in biology.”
The point is that in the evolution of technology it is all exaptation. The reason is that the basis of tech evolution is not genetic, the information is carried by social means. Thus nothing goes extinct, and all innovations can be resurrected. In other words we can cut and paste to make new things, that process is far faster and more efficient than evolution in the biological sphere. Sexual reproduction is a form of cut & paste, but still far more primitive than what we can do with our inventions.
Id love to graft the Graffiti handwriting system from the dead Palm onto a current smartphone for example.
I have been thinking (fairly useless activity) about ideas, being fairly useless. The video a few posts back with Rose and Dawkins made something clear to me. The ideas or the code are nothing on their own, they need to be fertilised, and take hold. The ideas are like sperm, they need an egg that will actually hatch. Another way of putting it is that culture is to ideas as is the petri dish to the cell. Things don’t grow in a vacuum, but only under very specific conditions.
“Men make their own history,’’ wrote Karl Marx, ‘‘but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’’
This video, which I’d seen before, is well introduced here:
Influential Marketing Blog: How To Start A Movement:
Some ideas are a banquet. They go on and on, and invite us to consider what they really mean for hours or days – or sometimes much much longer. Then there are the flashes of insight. The quick sparks that we immediately react to and understand when we hear or see or touch them. These are the types of ideas I wish I could find and share more often. Ideas that inspire in a moment. Starting a movement, for most people, is much more complicated than just having an idea. If you happen to work in a place where this is part of your goal, your questions are often about stakeholders and messages and creating something “viral.” We are all seeking the formula that turns that idea into a movement.This weekend I saw a short 3 minute video presentation from Derek Sivers at TED that presented an irreverent conclusion – that leadership, your idea and even your “strategy” may be the most overrated elements of creating any kind of movement. Here’s the video:
More on evolution and the basis for altruism. I heard this show ages ago, I can recall listening to it while scrambling up a steep loose rockface! (Miles reminded me about it on Facebook) The kinship theory makes total sense to me, but it does not mean the group theory is wrong does it? Why the either/or here?
In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another? The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today’s plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness … or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?Copy of the audio:
The Good Show
