What are ways we can help Earth?

Infinite!
Look for cooperative ways of creating what calls to you.
Be conscious of all that we do. Be aware that everything effects everything else, and think in terms of creating harmonies with natural systems in all that we do.
Look beyond the dominant ideas of markets and competition, and see that both have a role, but that cooperation and human values offer the greatest value to all in the long term.
Accept all that is.

Do what we can to reduce our impact on the planet, eat as much fresh fruit and vegetables as possible and as little animal products as possible (preferably none).
The effect of this is three fold:
it is easy to feed the population of the planet on plant food (and I have been vegan for 3 years now), thus reducing the stress we place on the ecosystem; and
people are much healthier on a diet of fresh whole plant foods (with as few chemical additives as possible [preferably none]); and
reduced chemical inputs also leave the environment healthier.

Get past the concepts of markets and money. The pursuit of money is scarcity based, and must maintain scarcity for a significant fraction of humanity. We have the technical ability to create abundance and security for all of humanity, and the systems we have based around money and markets are the greatest impediment to delivering that to everyone on the planet.

Get to know your neighbours, and those around you. Ask them about what it is that most important to them, ask questions that let them see what they are doing now is working against their own values, and help them find ways of being that deliver what they value, while also assisting all life on earth.

It is not a trivial issue.
There are no single silver bullets.
And there are billions of things that we can each do, and the more of us that do them the greater the impact is.
It is a matter of awareness and choice and belief.
Believing that you can make a difference is always the first step in the process of making that difference.

Are you more of a vision board or vision bored type person?

Hi Laurie,

Ailsa & I attended Oshkosh in 1992.

I guess http://www.solnx.org is my vision board, and http://www.tedhowardnz.com is my developing thoughts as to how to get there.

Part of my vision is empowerment of everyone to achieve whatever it is they responsibly choose.
Part of what I have learned in life is that there is no “right way”, there are an infinite class of paths that work for everyone, and a larger infinity of paths that don’t work.
And no one is perfectly prescient.
All any of us can do is make the best choice we can, based upon the information we have, and then dance with the consequences of our choices and everyone else’s.

Part of what I like is uncertainty and novelty. So I always have plenty of blank space, openings for possibilities beyond my ken.

So yes – I have visions, big visions that effect all of humanity, a vision of universal prosperity, of universal freedom, of universal responsibility. And I also enjoy going places I haven’t been before.

I’m not often bored.
Far too much to think about, too much to learn, to read, to watch, to try.

Robert A Freitas Jr on Ray Kurzweil’s Accelerated Intelligence site

Complex topic Robert, with some great development of ideas, and some implicit assumptions, some of which seem to me to be clearly flawed.

I doubt that nanotech can completely control thought, influence certainly, but not “control”. I am sure it can be used to control action, but that requires some intelligence behind the control.
There is always danger form someone who is sufficiently smart, sufficiently patient, and sufficiently committed – for whatever reason (be it a grievance or a vision).

It seems clear to me, that the greatest danger is in promoting centralised systems. The greatest security seems to come from massive redundancy, and decentralising everything. I know your 1981 paper for NASA on a variation on that theme got nowhere in the current strategic environment, and my own independently developed thesis on http://www.solnx.org has gained little traction, and remains out there.

It is now clear to me, that it is the systemic incentive structure implicit in market valuation (aka money) that is the greatest single and immediate existential threat we face (which is not to deny the reality of threats from nanotech, AI, biotech, or tyrants).

Markets have served us well in our history as a way of distributing scarce resources and as a way of encouraging innovation.
The problem with market valuation is that it cannot do anything with real distributed abundance other than value it at zero (or negative).

Markets are based on the notion of scarcity. Someone has to not have enough what you have more than enough of, for what you have to to be of value to them.
Thus there can never be a real market incentive to deliver universal abundance, no matter how valuable such a thing might be to all of the individuals in the market.
In the coming age of robotic production, markets and money are becoming the greatest limiting factors to human productivity and human prosperity and freedom.

It seems clear to me that the old saying that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance” will be true throughout eternity.
There can be no guarantees – any sort of guarantee would fundamentally undermine the whole notion of freedom.

And if we are delivering systems that ensure that everyone has their survival needs met, and everyone has access to education and resources and travel and communication, such that they can choose their own reasonable paths in life; then the vast bulk of humanity is primed to operate in cooperative fashion, and will in fact generally work to safeguard their freedom.

As a side issue, it seems clear to me also that choosing a path in life that is determined by genetically or culturally derived feelings of happiness is not necessarily a line of choice that anyone should be promoting.
Evolution has never had to deal with what we have to deal with now.

I know from my own experience of being given a 50% chance of living 5 months (3 years ago, after a diagnosis of terminal metastasised melanoma), doing some research, and giving up all of the foods that I found tasty, allowed me to beat the cancer (I am now tumour free, I am also strict vegan, following 55 years of being a carnivore). I have never felt healthier, and according to medical checks, have probably never been healthier.

So our genetic and cultural ideas of happiness can be extremely deceptive.
They worked (on average, over time) in our evolutionary past, but not necessarily in our present.

Choice is a wonderful thing – few people have much real experience of dealing with it; fewer still have experience of going beyond the biological and cultural ideas of happiness; or beyond the cultural bounds of value.

Are you superstitious?, in what ways?

The Oxford defines superstition as:
“Unreasoning awe or fear of something unknown, mysterious, or imaginary, esp. in connexion with religion; religious belief or practice founded upon fear or ignorance.”

We are all superstitious, and mostly we are unaware of it, because we think our superstitions are truths.

There is a definition of superstition that goes “A superstition is only a superstition when it is not a superstition”, which means that it is only false beliefs we hold as truth that appear to others to be superstitions. Once we see them as false ourselves, they are no longer superstitions.

I strongly suspect that most of what passes for knowledge is in some essential aspect superstition. Hence I tend to treat all things with a degree of uncertainty, and am open to new evidence and new interpretations of existing evidence.

[followed by]

Hi Deb

LOL !

I just love how the intuitive function of brain works !!!
All those holographically associated concepts exciting potential in our neuronal connections. Probability and uncertainty on a mind-numbing scale – yet the power of it !!!!!!!!!!

In my understanding, superstition does not relate to acts, it relates to the belief structure behind the acts. It is about how accurately the belief structure models reality, and the acts are hints at what that belief structure may be.

Someone who believes in the magic smoke model of computer operation, and someone who understands electrical and logic theory, may both do the same thing when one of the components in their computer short circuits. They may both go to the component store for a new component. For the superstitious, it would be for a component with the magic smoke safely and usefully locked inside it (clearly it is the magic smoke that makes it work, as evidenced by the fact that when the smoke escapes, it stops working).

So actions alone are not sufficient clues about superstitions.
One must dig into the depths of explanatory frameworks.

And if one goes deep enough, it seems to me that one always runs into superstition. That is just how it must work.
We don’t get born with absolute knowledge of how the universe works.
We do get born with a brain that allows us to make ever more accurate models of how things work in reality; but most of us get stopped by various cultural modalities that require agreement amongst groups, and our mammalian drives to be part of the family/tribe – that is very much a part of the DNA that makes us possible.

So yeah – all good fun, all essentially superstition at some sufficiently deep level. Just talk to a particle physicist about quarks and gluons – those are weird things!

[followed by]

Ya know OM, the really strange thing, is that worrying can actually stop things happening.
If you are worrying about something, then you are taking up valuable brain time/real-estate with worry that could be being used productively to bring the outcome into being.

And I shot all the elves years ago. They just tended to short out the electronic circuitry.

[followed by]

Hi OM

I haven’t taken a soldering iron to a computer in a very long time (close on 20 years). In the early days (early 80s), I would take one to every meeting of the microcomputer club, because there would be someone there with a dead board, and we would need to find the dead chip, unsolder it, and solder in a new one. I got so good at finding dead chips, I could just dampen my fingertips, and hold them above the chips, and tell from the “feel” of them, if they were working or not. That used to freak some of the guys out, but it saved a lot of time staring at an oscilloscope.

Had my own computer set itself alight at a club day in Auckland once – that gave me some nervous moments (that machine cost me $4,500 in 1980, which was a lot of money back then. It had a Z80 processor, and 32K of RAM – which was a lot – most guys only had 2K machines at that stage, and my first machine only had 500 bytes.

So I have seen a few changes.
Just had my daughter tell me off for still typing www. in front a website addresses – old habits die hard.

And yeah – plans. Plan, try, amend plan, try again, repeat until successful.

Very powerful questions Bill.

Seems to me, that whatever answers we think we may have at any point of time, ultimately come down to some sort of utilitarian function from some particular perspective.

It seems to me, that the very concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, or whatever binary valuation system one adopts, is simply the simplest possible approximation to the utility of actions. Such utility seems to be potentially infinitely variable over context and time.

The extent of choice is a powerful inquiry – and quite the most interesting one I have found.
There seems to be a lot in that related to the old adage, “nature to be commanded must first be obeyed”. As we bring awareness to the causes of our being below our choice, so we create gaps between impulse and action, where choice can occur. That seems to be an infinitely recursive process.

Interesting journey this thing called life.

What role does color play in your life?

Something that I appreciate, a dimension in the experience of being (without it there would be only shades of grey).

I don’t actually do much with colour directly, other than appreciate it everywhere around me.
Mostly I am working with black text on a white background

And even on this screen there are various shades of blue here and there, and occasional touches of yellow.

Why is nature so beautiful?

So many different perspectives on this question.

In one sense, all of nature is not beautiful, and some of it is.
Most people don’t find people and animals starving to death, or being torn apart by predators, particularly beautiful, and they are part of nature.
Acknowledging that not all nature is beautiful, there is a great deal of nature that is.

There seem to be two general classes of reasons for us finding the beauty that we do in nature.

1 is that it seems beyond any reasonable doubt that we have evolved on this planet over a period of billions of years, and our sense of what is attractive (beauty) has evolved to draw us towards things that are life sustaining (on average over time). In this sense, our whole ability to appreciate beauty is the product of the evolution of the complex systems of life that we find ourselves in.

The other aspect is simply that there is nothing else around that comes close to the complexity that nature has evolved.
We are starting to approach the lower levels of life complexity with some of our most abstract language, and we are still some way away from the levels of complexity that exist in something like a flower for example.

Then there is the cultural influence on what we each consider beautiful.
This is a very complex topic, deeply recursive in its relationships.

So it is really complex.

And there is definitely much to be had from simply appreciating the beauty that is in nature, be it from a flower, a bird, a forest or a fish, a rainbow or the ocean.

[followed by]

Hi Mendy

I have been a hunter and fisherman most of my life.
I certainly appreciate the beauty of the hunt, and the hunter (upper level predators).
And there is something not quite so beautiful about a ferret running through a nesting colony of birds just ripping the throats out of as many as it can. Most people don’t see a lot of beauty in that sort of act (and some do).

When I was fishing, we called it “the fever”. That urge to hunt and to kill just because you can, irrespective of need or utility of that killed.
Most hunters have felt it, experienced it (I certainly have). I have that particular “fever” under tight control now, and there appear to be potentially infinitely variable recursive variations on a theme.

[followed by]

Hi OM

Controlling it in myself is one thing, trying to control it in others is extremely difficult.
I remember many years ago, having been out swan shooting. I walked up to the edge of the lake, two swans flew towards me, I dropped them both, and that was it for me. Two was the limit.
I was with 3 other guys, so I had to wait, while they blazed away and missed.
I never fired another shot that night, and the other guys used quite a bit of ammo, with not much result.
On the way home, they were still so hyped up that they started shooting road signs.
I could not get them to stop, so I just took the next right turn and drove away from home.
After half an hour’s driving on back country roads with few signs to shoot at, they finally agreed to put the guns away, and I turned around and drove us back home.
It was one guy who was the ring leader, but once he started, the others followed (he’s dead now, pushed a helicopter further into its flight envelope than it could go).

I have quite a few “tigers” in those depths, that is one of the lesser ones; and yes – it does require vigilance.

What in your viewpoint is Life’s greatest privilege?

No argument with any of the answers given above.

The awareness of life itself, the ability to choose, the intuitions to choose from, the experiences that power intuition, the chemistry that makes it all possible, the systems that overlay the chemistry, it is all one big tightly intertwined ball, and all of it precious.

Align with the gist of his message – particularly the “go out and make a difference” bit that he finished on.

Well worth the time to watch that video.

How drones made it easy for Americans to kill a particular person anywhere on the planet

The news seems to be hidden in the term “Strategic evasion”.

It is clear to me, that the US strategic policy is being largely determined by the interests of money. In the strategic “games theory” sense, money is a measure of market value, and will thus always tend to find an optimum level of scarcity that delivers maximum flow of money.

This is clearly not in the human interest of those individuals who find themselves in the lower end of the distribution curve.
Reliance on money and markets must always incentivise this sort of distribution, and cannot be stably structured to produce abundance for all.

So long as we have such systemic lack of potential abundance, we will have people with extreme grievance against the system at the structural level.
It is simply impossible to produce long term security in such a strategic environment.

If the systemic objective is long term security, then the logic is clear, that we must abandon markets (money) as the prime measure of value, and instead make our major strategic decisions based upon security concerns. It is clear that only strategies that deliver universal abundance of all key necessities offer any chance of real long term security.
Other strategies can be stabilised for shortish terms (perhaps a few hundred years), and ultimately they become vulnerable to fundamental systemic instability.

So from a deep systemic strategic sense; the US policy of force in the interests of money, rather than meeting fundamental human needs, is unstable, and is highly likely to lead to major systemic failure.

This is abundantly clear from the math, but is in no ones economic interest to make public – hence – evasion.