Dominiek.com

This will be just a quick post since I should get some sleep.

A little while ago Thomas L. Friedman posted an article in the IHT named Doha and Dalian. Doha and Dalian are an Arabic and Chinese city that are relatively unheard of to most Americans. The article then goes to explain how much energy they use and that all of the energy saving done by model Christian American families is just a waste since these cities 'eat those savings for breakfast'.

I really wonder to what extend we should react to the whole global warming issue. On the one hand there is always this stuck in my mind:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw

But if you witness the gigantic boom of Chinese sky-skrapers and smog-pipes it's easy to give up. We just can't beat this. Also, the Singularity -a predicted moment in time where we transcend biology - can be used as an easy justification for a passivist attitude.

Interestingly, I ban into this article by Vernor Vinge about possible non-Singularity scenarios. Two of these three scenario's are scenario's where we screw up:

This is the scenario where we nuke or nanobot ourselves and slowly die off after our population get's reduced to 80% in one 'afternoon'.

This is the scenario where we try to reach the singularity but fail over and over again, by astroids, nukes and what have you.

Like some people commented the latter scenario is less likely to happen, since we will drain out all our oil and natural resources before the second try.

This means we have only one shot. We will either horribly fail or succeed. 1 or 0

This dude explains it much better by worrying about the extinction of guacomole:

"For the love of God/Allah/Ganesha/et al., save the guaco-taco dammit! Otherwise, we can go ahead and stop talking about colonizing mars or communicating with dolphins because this planet is going to be a major drag."

Every once in a while you need to have a great out-of-reality experience. Labyrinth - a Japanese psychedelic trance festival - is an annual opportunity to do this. Labyrinth is a four day event organized by the Mindgames organization and my colleague, the Monk, is it's founder. It is held in the town of Kawaba in the mountains north of Tokyo in the Gunma province. The nearest train station is about 30 minutes by car. (By the way, Kawaba has nice local products, especially their wine)

I have been to psychedelic trance parties in Amsterdam in the past, but none of them were as great as this one. The mix of forest, mountains an oriental country is a great experience. I can only imagine how the parties in the middle of the Moroccan desert would be like.

Another thing that's really nice about these events in Japan is the people. Most people are Japanese and they are very well mannered. Also, the atmosphere is more bohemian since it's a safe camping environment so many people bring their children.

The best thing about these parties is that they are an escape from your normal life. A break from reality even.

As the Singularity can be found anywhere, it can also be found at Labyrinth. Going out there in the nature, far away from technology packed Tokyo. What do we bring? Some blankets, candles, incense and clothing. But we also bring: Huge speakers, electrical spots and chemicals. What do we do?

We unite with nature.

A lot of people might see it as distorting nature, like two opposites. But as a singularitarian, I truly believe that all this techno distortion is part of biology and evolution.

More importantly, it's an awesome experience!

There’s something happening to the Human Race, something big. This change is not as big as ‘the Singularity’, but it might be related to it. How? I don’t know. The observed changes I will discuss manifest them in many fields of human participation. My perspective is mainly that of a Software Engineer who likes to write down what he thinks.

Let me tell you something about the Agile Manifesto. In Software Engineering there have always been many guidelines and methods for structuring the process of building software. A few years ago, some great software engineers sat together and swept away all these procedures and rules. Instead they defined 4 ground principles:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Principle one and three say that building software should be more social. Principle two says that building software should be more pragmatic. Principle four indicates the need for more flexibility and adaptability. Processes based on these principles are more flexible and more adaptive to their environment. Examples of agile-methods are Extreme Programming and Scrum. I was surprised to see that Scrum, named after a rugby-scrum, is actually used in fields outside software engineering. Notable users are: Honda, Xerox and NEC. So even manufacturing industries are harvesting this power of adaptivity.

I think this phenomenon holds a lot of potential. The phenomenon can be seen as changing linear rules to non-linear principles that can be converted to guidelines that respect the environment and their social/human nature. In a sense we are advancing our Dualism -oriented minds to a new era of Pluralism, hence the name Neo-Pluralism. There are two main elements in this phenomenon: vagueness and adaptivity.

Vagueness, a common term in philosophy and linguistics. When can something be true or false? How many grains of sand do you need in order to call something ‘a heap of sand’? In the upcoming science ‘quantum computing’, a quantum computer bit, qubit, is neither true nor false. This trend of vagueness can be seen everywhere. An up-to-date example might be the way you get annoyed when you hear George W. Bush say ‘The Evil Terrorists’. When is something evil, when is something good? Do the Koran/Bible really say what you think they say? Humans are starting to realize that everything is contextual and subjective.

Adaptivity, a common term in biology and business. Darwin’s theory of natural selection relates to this phenomenon in an elegant way. Natural selection and genetic algorithms depend on chaos and mutations in order to adapt to the environment over many generations. Also, in some self-help books, we are toughed how we can live an adaptive principle-centered life in order to achieve success (7 Habits… by Covey ).

The substitution of rules and procedures with principles can also result in values on social responsibility rather then anonymous irresponsibility. A nice example of this is the recent removal of traffic signs and road lines in seven European cities. The project is already showing good results.

One might also wonder how the Internet, nicknamed, the Global Village, can have it’s role in all of this. I think her role will be very big. It could assist us in distributing opinions, relating information and contextualizing the chaos. These things aren’t new, the most basic example of this development is the current Folksonomy phenomenon in Web Land. In general I think the digital world will be a catalyst for many changes in our lives, pluralism is one of them.

As to summarize all of these brain farts, the observed changes can be ‘tagged’ as follows:

• importance of contextualizing and opinions
• embracing vagueness and chaos
• increase of adaptivity and flexibility
• more social responsibility
• things will be more informal (in all social, mathematical, philosophical and linguistic disciplines)