Philosophy

A Universe of Conversations

There is a whole universe of conversations out there.

Ever since Covid, this world of conversations has been expanding very rapidly.

And now with the world falling apart in so many ways,… More and more people are joining this world of conversations…

Asking questions like, what do we do?

Now that the world is falling apart, exponentially overheating, the Amazon and other remaining rainforests are being intentionally decimated to make way for palm oil plantations, soybeans for livestock, cattle ranches, etc.

And what of all the things that we know we should be doing, at the level of a whole world, but we can’t seem to get our act together as a species, and collectively figure out how we all need to work together to make it all happen?

The documentary Thrive and the recently released Thrive II show many different technologies that would change our world, which we have, as a species, failed to get behind, support, and implement at planetary scale.

And those are just the tip of the iceberg:  we have all the tools and methods we need to cool the planet, arbitrarily quickly in fact, through SRM – solar radiation management.  The fact that we are not deploying these tools and methods in a timely manner now that exponential planetary overheating and its impacts have become, well, exponentially worse …. Inexcusable does not quite capture the essence of this epic failure on the part of humanity, which is supposed to be the caretaker species.  This is analogous to the 18-year-old older brother of younger siblings, left in charge of the household for a long weekend. And instead of caring for his younger siblings properly and responsibly, he instead shoots up on heroin, and through manipulation and violence pimps out his younger siblings in order to get more, more, more…

Humanity as a whole, we are that drug–addicted 18-year-old, and all of Mother Earth’s children species are like the younger siblings in the preceding paragraph, bearing the brunt of humanity’s collective irresponsibility.

So, the question remains:  What do we DO about it all?

The obvious answer is to organize ourselves into a singular, planetary Network of Conversations.  Transformational conversations, that is:  those focused on saving, healing and transforming life on Earth.

The following 10 minute video shares this all in a hopefully humorous way, getting down to the brass tacks of attracting humanity to participate in the Network of Conversations:

Onward with the philosophical inquiry:

But who is responsible for humanity’s collective irresponsibility?

Um, might it be… The President of the United States?

The lyrics of Ozzy Osbourne’s song Crazy Train, sum it up well: “One person conditioned, to lead in control. The media sells it, and you live the role.”

OK, if one person is conditioned to lead in control… And the rest of us are conditioned to follow, and assign credit to that leader for the gains society makes… And also assign blame to that leader for society’s failures (consider, for example, how much American society blames Trump for her failures).

I am using that “one person” as a metaphor. One could equally well blame “rich people” as a group, or perhaps “capitalism and money” as the basis for our current economic mode of production, causing so much concentration of wealth, poverty, starvation and death at the other end of the spectrum, as well as planetary destruction, as everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator of the current market price for board feet of mahogany, for example.

I would like to shift focus from the preceding inquiry, of basically “who is to blame, or who is responsible, for doing the conditioning … which is responsible for humanity’s collective irresponsibility.”  With a nod again to Ozzy Osbourne’s lyrics above, “One person conditioned, to lead and control”.  Regardless of such questions as ‘who is currently doing the conditioning on a daily basis?’, to ‘Who set up the conditions for the present conditioning as an ongoing reality?’… regardless of all of that (and it is all very important, please do not get me wrong), I have a very simple hypothesis:

If we can succeed at creating a collective superintelligence which grows exponentially over time, with its growth spanning myriad dimensions, such that collectively the whole of this multi-dimensional exponential growth covers, holistically and respectively:

·      Collective sense-making of all that is going on

·      Holistic design of literally all of the solutions we are going to need over time

·      Holistic design of the implementation plan of all of these solutions, addressing all dependencies, etc. (to paraphrase Winston Churchill, ‘all plans are useless, but planning is essential.’  Or to quote the great philosopher Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan, until you get punched in the mouth.”).  The essential point being that planning itself is an ongoing activity, which ultimately informs the very next decisions we must take.

·      Holistic monitoring, with myriad feedback loops, of the moment by moment implementation of all the preceding.

And off into the sunset…

OK, so tell me more about this exponentially growing collective super intelligence.

Here, check out this page on Radish.org:

OK, now in immediate practical terms, how do we set about unleashing this exponential growth of collective superintelligence (CSI for short)?

Fortunately, the process has begun, and is well underway.  Back to the beginning of the story: the planetary network of conversations spanning all of the preceding, and much, much, much more of course, has been growing exponentially since well before Covid. And now with the combined forcings of Covid, and the myriad other facets of our present collapse trajectory, most of which are exponential themselves, all creating the perfect conditions for these kinds of transformational conversations to become very very popular, not because they make us feel good, but because they make us feel sane… In an increasingly insane world.

Because those of us who are awake and playing the real game, to paraphrase President Vicente Fox:

For us, we know that there is only one game in town:  the game of saving life on Earth. That is the immediate game. And that is the first part of a three part “larger goal” which is saving, healing, and transforming life on earth.

Building off of this concept of the “new sane”, the most dialed in.  The “new sane” are realizing, individually as well as collectively in conversation, that it is not enough for us all to fundamentally agree on what needs to be done, and sit in our own respective bubbles or boxes which keep us isolated… Regardless of whether that is isolated within the private sector, working on monetizing some forest or other… Or whether that is isolated within the nonprofit sector, within one of the approximately 1 million nonprofit organizations which are all competing with each other for money… And each of them is focused on one, or at best a small number of issues… No one is looking at Mother Earth’s issues as a whole.

No, it is not enough just to be in agreement, and then live in our own respective bubbles, while Mother Earths goes down.

So if that is not enough, then what would be enough?

To answer that question, I am going to write a very long, compound sentence, with very lengthy parentheticals offshoots, as well as small paragraphs between commas and within parentheses… as well characterize some of my writing below…

Table stakes, I maintain, for saving a critical mass of life on earth (ideally much much more than that, all the way to the theoretical a maximum of “How much of life on earth could we possibly save, starting at the present moment, if all of humanity magically started working together in optimal unison, making sacrifices where needed, and more likely enjoying a vastly happier existence as a collective caretaker species?”) . . .

Let’s define the preceding quote as “the life-saving possibilities frontier”, with a somewhat cynical job at the parallel concepts from macroeconomics of “the production possibilities frontier”.

. . . such that humanity herself survives in the near term (the next decade or so), (Again, that is not the singular goal; the singular goal is maximizing LSPF), is that humanity her self become much more tightly integrated in terms of the very realm of this world of conversations we keep coming back to:

Again, repeat one of the preceding versions of Wauter’s drawing.

A number of us had a really wonderful conversation about this about 10 months ago, which we recorded, and which you can enjoy the essential 30 minutes of here:

That is what I’m talking about when I talk about humanity must become much more tightly integrated, as regards this world of conversations we keep coming back to.

(At this point, maybe just throw in… A tiny little iconic image of the world of conversations)

Another slice at fundamentally the same thing is the white paper on radish:

Include a link to the white paper page on radish.

Yet another slice at fundamentally the same thing is the following five minute video on caps on the hungerless games:

The final and essential point of the preceding is that the world is a marketplace, not just a marketplace of products, services, activities, currencies, missions, conversations, and ideas…

But that the world’s marketplaces are all messed up: driven and to a large extent defined by a game we did not ask for, and which is killing all of us.

The video concludes that we need market-based solutions, to these market-based problems.

The essential market-based solution we propose at the present moment in history, early November 2020, is this:

We need to give much more liquidity to the marketplace of conversations, and what I mean by that, more precisely is that we need to create the conditions necessary for those conversations which wish and need to grow, to grow.

On “the other side of the marketplace” you have individuals who are seeking to join and enrich conversations, and themselves become enriched by the process.

At this point I will simply cut to the chase, and reveal the market-based solutions we are in the process of rolling out, to facilitate all of this:

The first is a combined:

Speed–networking event, among transformational conversations and their participants, such that like-minded, and otherwise symbiotic parallel conversations can discover each other, learn about the essence of each other, spending two minutes each…and ultimately intermingle, cross-pollinate, and co-create together.  This is the most important goal of The Press Conference.

Except that the benefits to the world of such interactions need not be limited to a single pair of conversations.  Rather, any combination of any number of conversations can intermingle, cross-pollinate and co-create.

This reminds me of my friend Jonathan, back in the early 90s, when I was at a party at his house, and a whole bunch of people arrived at the same time who didn’t know each other… And there were a bunch of people who are already there… Many of them did not know each other either… And then Jonathan said to the entire group of us, “instead of making an N-squared introductions… Why doesn’t each person just say a little about themselves…”

That’s basically the idea here: rather than going through all the monotony and tedium of “traditional networking”, whether online or in person, let’s just get together and make an institution out of The Press Conference as on ongoing public event, for transformational conversations to connect with each other, and with the larger world.