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We got a shoutout from ABC News

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Re: We got a shoutout from ABC News

Unread postby mos6507 » Tue 19 May 2009, 11:27:22

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '
')Which doomers have been saying "Oh crap! Doom suddenly fell upon me and I'm totally unprepared because I thought it was going to be Special Peak Oil Doom instead of merely We've Been Here Before Economic Doom?


I withdraw the "blindsided" term. How it's being interpreted is not really what I meant to say. I don't think there are many negatives in peak oil prep during a depression. It's just a pet peeve the degree two which peak oil preppers are being embraced as depression preppers and vice versa. I don't see the two as interchangeable. One can only hope that depression prep will be kind of a gateway drug to peak oil prep.
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Re: We got a shoutout from ABC News

Unread postby Ludi » Tue 19 May 2009, 12:09:44

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', ' ')It's just a pet peeve the degree two which peak oil preppers are being embraced as depression preppers and vice versa. I don't see the two as interchangeable.


I guess it's a philosophical thing. I don't see how Doom Prep would be different between the two kinds of Doom. Maybe because it isn't different for me personally. Of course I've not yet experienced either Financial Doom or Peak Oil Doom. Maybe when I do, I'll find out all my prep for one was useless for the other?
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Re: We got a shoutout from ABC News

Unread postby Stonemason » Tue 19 May 2009, 14:30:40

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('wisconsin_cur', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Stonemason', 'T')here is no proof that 7 Billion people cannot survive on the planet with advanced technology and education into the problems of overshooting the carrying capacity of the earth.


How exactly would we go about providing proof to your satisfaction?


Since you quoted my post I will assume while composing this post that you are addressing me.
Proof is mathematical certainty. The calculation will include any possible scenarios, as what is interesting (to the frontal lobes) are the possibilities.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')aybe we could find a way to feed 7 billion but then they would have more children wouldn't they? Or perhaps you think you can stop them? How, pray tell?


Education is one possibility. If people are informed on a wide variety of subjects it will be possible for them to see the implications of overshooting the carrying capacity of Earth and adjust their values using reasoning and logic.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n the real world we need to ask if we are sustainable and if we are in overshoot given the state of the world as it is and with people as they are. Perhaps we could create a fantasy scenerio where it would all work, but I do not live in a fantasy.


Indeed, we need to conduct a comprehensive survey of the planet's natural resources as it is now factoring our current methods of production and consumption. There are many possibilities to provide cheap abundant energy for our uses, but oftentimes the public is not aware of the findings of many scientific studies to protect the relevance of established energy-for-monetary-profit institutions. Many of these published peer-reviewed scientific studies are basing their conclusions on currently available technology. The evidence points to abundant energy as possible. Why are these possibilities not being implemented?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') live in a world where greed and ignorance are powerful forces. I live in a world where monied and political interests work against long-term sustainability for short-term gain.


Indeed.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') live in a world where the masses chase after the newest shiny object and any short-term gain in the direction of sustainability will, within a few decades, be squandered when a political movement arises saying, "Eat, drink, procreate, you have been repressed by the ecologists!" and such a message will win the day.


That is indeed a possibility. Perhaps ignorance would be at cause for this particular speculation to occur.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')or every Carter (4 years) there will be a Reagan and his apostles. A few years after the "Moral Equivilant of War" we got morning in America and the SUV craze (25 years of excess). This is called, "moving in the wrong direction." This is rooted in what homo sapien is. We could pretend otherwise but I gave up playing pretend a few years ago.

Humans have many possible ways to go about their business. Homo sapien sapiens are no different than any organism in their propensity to choose pleasure over pain. The current society is based on economic and profit incentives. That environment encourages the behaviours you speak against. If corruption is built into a system that rewards deferential advantage, isn't it insanity assuming a different outcome?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ut yes, you can create a fantasy world where we hold hands, sing "I would like to teach the world to sing..." but at some point it might be a good idea to turn off the TV and deal with the world outside your window. When you do I think, perhaps, you will begin to find your proof.

The possibilities come from all. We live in a relational universe, organism are products of their environments with the potential for action. The ability to reason and use logic thanks to their neo-cortex allows humans to inhibit their immediate reactions, drop out of the moment and perform behaviours on themselves: the basis of human thought. Humans use their innate ability of language and turn it in on themselves to control themselves. Humans have executive function. Humans don't have an innate desire for anything beyond the most basic necessities, give them everything they need, and the aberrant behaviour declines as there is no need of it. Studying the differences between cultures reveals that humans go about even securing these basic needs in any way imaginable: there is no one way of being human. Raise the same baby in any different cultures and you will have changed that babies values in later life based on acculturation.

But to quote Dr.Russell Barkley:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Dr. Russell Barkley', '&')quot;What are the Four Executive Functions?

What are the executive functions? The first executive function—neuropsychologists gave it a fancy name: nonverbal working memory. What is it? Sensing to yourself. The first thing that the young child does in human development is they take their sensory motor behavior and make it private. What’s the most important human sense? Vision. Second, hearing. What do humans turn on themselves and make covert? Vision and hearing. You are capable of visual imagery and private audition, and in fact you are capable of taking every sense and making it private and using it in your head. You can see to yourself, hear to yourself, touch to yourself, taste to yourself, smell to yourself. I can taste the merlot I had last night with a New York strip steak. I can re-savor that moment, I can hear the conversation with the waitress, I can replay the restaurant, I can draw you a map of that restaurant downstairs through visual imagery. No other species does this with two exceptions—dolphins and chimpanzees may have a nonverbal system.

Humans start with this visual imagery, private audition, sensing to yourself. This is what you call mental activity, the capacity to re-sense an event and hold it in mind because you’re going to use that to control your behavior. It’s a two-step process: re-sensing the past event and using it to plan a future response; looking back to look ahead. You know this as hindsight and foresight, and the word “sight” is no mistake, because among all of the senses, it is visual imagery we use the most. And second to that, private hearing. We can do it all together, sense to ourselves. We start doing this during the first three months of life. By age twelve months, the human infant and toddler are more capable of this than any other species on this planet.

Notice the list of everything that is given you by a nonverbal system. You can sense to yourself all of these becoming possible, because all of these come out of sensing to the self. There can be no imitation without this system. Because what are you imitating? Not the behavior of the other. You’re imitating a visual image of the behavior of the other person. There can be no imitation unless there is a nonverbal working memory system, which is why very few species imitate and only humans do vicarious learning. Vicarious learning is not where I do what you do, it’s where I do the opposite. I watch your mistakes and it immediately changes my behavior. Imitation is mimicry, doing what you do. Crank it up a notch and do the opposite. I don’t need to make the same mistakes. I learn from yours. Humans are the only species that shows vicarious learning. There are a few other species that imitate and they are the ones I’ve already told you about, which is why we think they have a nonverbal system.

This one you probably didn’t think about, the psychological sense of time that comes out of this executive function, your ability to sense the passage of time. Why do we have this? To anticipate and get ready for the future. Without this system, by the way, there would be no past tense or any future tense in language, because what are you referring to? When you use past and future tense you are referring to images of the past and anticipation of the future.

Here’s the second one: internalization of speech. Indeed, you can’t develop speech without the first one, because what are symbols? Words are simply arbitrary noises that we associate with visual images and other events. Language doesn’t develop until the working memory system is underway. Internalization of speech comes next. You can’t comprehend what you read if you can’t read silently to yourself and hold it in mind and convert it to its meaning, its images.

The third behavior that humans make private is emotion. Emotion to others becomes emotion to myself, becomes private emotion that you can’t see. Every once in a while I catch you doing it; every once in a while you laugh out loud at a joke you’re telling yourself and don’t suppress the laughter. Every once in a while tears well up in your eyes as hard as you try to fight showing those signs of emotional arousal.
Humans are capable of private emotion to themselves. We appear to be the only species that does this one. We take emotions to others, turn it on ourselves, and make it private. So that by the time you grow up, you are capable of a whole range of covert emotions that other people can’t see. I can’t measure them. I could measure your respiration, your heart rate, your skin conductance, and I could see whether you’re in the midst of an emotion, but I won’t see the muscle movements, the covert part of the emotion. I’ll just see what are called the autonomic nervous system signs of it.

If an event happens that causes us to have an emotion, as we get older, we use another emotion to counteract it. Suppose you make me angry? What do I do? Take a positive emotion, juxtapose it on the negative one to try to get myself over it. Count to 10, think positive thoughts, say nice things to yourself, move on. What are the most important emotions to control if you live in a group? Is it the positive emotions? Is it love, humor, affection? Nope. Showing those won’t cost you too much. It’s the negative ones. If you live in a group, you’ve got to be able to control the negative emotions.

This is the definition of an emotion in psychology: It’s a motivational state. If you can’t internalize emotion, you can’t internalize motivation. The third executive function is the source of intrinsic motivation. Let me give you a few words that laypeople use for intrinsic motivation: persistence, determination, ambition, drive, willpower. All future-directed behavior, all goal-directed behavior, all planned, thoughtful behavior requires intrinsic motivation. Why is that? Because the future hasn’t happened yet. How can it motivate you? You have to generate the motivation yourself. And if you can’t do this, you will not get to your goals, finish your projects, follow through on things, pay attention when things are boring. You will not be able to persist.

The final executive function is: play to yourself. I bet you thought play was just something kids do for fun. It isn’t. It is an absolutely crucial human developmental stage: play. Because humans take play with the physical world and make it mental play and make it covert. As a young child, I have to touch everything in sight. Play with it, take it apart, move it around, see what happens. But as I get older, I internalize it, so that I don’t need to touch the world around me anymore. I can play with the world in my head and never touch it. I could take that slide projector apart right now if I needed to. Because I’ve done it so many times before.

So, play to the self. This is the source of all innovation. This is the source of creative problem-solving. This is where we come up with new plans to solve old problems and get to our goals. This is not artistic or musical creativity. This is goal-directed creativity. The ability to problem-solve on the fly as we’re going towards the future whenever we encounter obstacles that get in our way, things that disrupt our plans. This is goal-directed, future-oriented innovation, and all cultural innovation came out of this. We can probably determine when in human evolution this module emerged, because it will be the beginning of rapid cultural change. When did it start? About 60,000 years ago. Prior to that time, humans were not particularly innovative. By the way, when did the first executive function appear in anthropology? Well, let me give you an example. No art would be possible without it. You cannot paint an image in a cave if there is no mental image to paint from. Look for the emergence of art in human evolution and you may see where the first executive function got started.

All right, these are all the things that you get from this executive function. One of them you may not have thought about is verbal fluency, because this is the module that takes old behavior apart and puts it together to form new sequences and to do it very fast.

So in conclusion, Humans evolved because the universe is emergent and so is life. They don't have to play with the rules of the jungle, they have the ability to write their own rulebook, to create.
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Re: We got a shoutout from ABC News

Unread postby Ludi » Tue 19 May 2009, 14:40:36

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Stonemason', '
')
Indeed, we need to conduct a comprehensive survey of the planet's natural resources as it is now factoring our current methods of production and consumption.



http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/
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Re: We got a shoutout from ABC News

Unread postby Stonemason » Wed 20 May 2009, 02:39:30

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Stonemason', '
')
Indeed, we need to conduct a comprehensive survey of the planet's natural resources as it is now factoring our current methods of production and consumption.



http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/


Now just to punch in the other possibilities.
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Re: We got a shoutout from ABC News

Unread postby Ludi » Wed 20 May 2009, 16:31:59

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Stonemason', '
')Now just to punch in the other possibilities.



Anything else you want to post about that would be appreciated. Maybe in a new thread?
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