Toward an Empathic Civilization

I really don't know if I can say it better than this.

Love's Labors Won

Sometimes it's amazing the things we manage to forget, and we could fill encyclopedias with the sheer amount of common sense that we've discounted or ignored as we've constructed our civilizations around us. The good news is, we seem to be rediscovering some of this lost wisdom, and this time science is backing it up. Want your relationship to stay solid? Then it's a good idea to practice good old fashioned human bonding behaviors. Cuddling, eye contact, relaxing skin-to-skin contact of all kinds, and providing physical comfort like shoulder or head rubs - all of these behaviors are integral to defusing defensiveness and building trust inside a relationship. Human bonding is modeled on the emotional bond between a mother and her child - and though you'd think it would have always remained obvious how important it is to develop this maternal bond, as recently as the middle of the 20th Century, parents were being advised not to hold or comfort their children because of the "dangers of mother-love."

Love, bonding, and trust are "dangerous?" Why would we ever conceive of such a thing? How could we ever stray so far, en masse, from these simple instincts? The reasons are multifarious and the logic is deeply hidden in the labyrinths of our biochemistry, but what matters is this: A simple headline on an internet news aggregator can help set things straight, at least a single reader at a time.

Read more about it here: The Lazy Way to Stay in Love: Steer your limbic system to sustain romance via Psychology Today

We Want A Rock

Humans are a pattern-seeking species. Whether there is a true line of logical causality between two similar phenomena or not, if they seem to match up we will correlate them. The science-minded among us will argue that if no logical causality can be proven, then the correlation is meaningless. Individual subjective reality, however, does not draw its power from logic.

If a rock looks like a face, then it becomes something more than a rock. We see faces in the rock, and somewhere behind that phenomenon we're tacking on a personality to the face. There's no shame in that - it's what our brains are wired to do, because seeking pattern is a big part of what's kept our species alive so far. Is that a leopard, or just the midday sun shining through leaves? We might remind ourselves, "don't be silly, it's just a rock," but that rock kind of looks like Grampa, and that makes me think of the time we went fishing when I was six...

The magic happens inside our heads, which is also conveniently where we keep the Universe. Peek-a-boo, rock people see you.

Read and see more here: I See Rock People: Mimetoliths of the World, via wired.com

(And for those of you with They Might Be Giants stuck in your heads from reading the title to this post, here is relief.)

When The Going Gets Weird, We Inflate New Dimensions

It's axiomatic that the individual human intellect can't wrap itself around the real shape of the universe, but it's interesting to see how science, since we decoupled it from religion more or less five centuries ago, keeps presenting us with stranger and stranger versions of what might really be going on. In the beginning, Copernicus and Galileo unseated our planet as the center of the cosmos - such a counterintuitive development, as any human can easily see that the sun goes around the earth, and that the fixed stars wheel around us pinned to the inside of a giant sphere. It seems so evident that the Earth is the center of the universe, doesn't it?

It also seems evident that natural space is made of four dimensions: three of space and one of time. New work, however, is suggesting that this wasn't always the case. Way back at the beginning of time, during the first few moments of the Big Bang, it now appears that the universe may have possessed only two dimensions: one of space and one of time. What's more, the Large Hadron Collider (in between creating black holes with which to destroy the solar system) may be able to furnish us with evidence to support this hypothesis - which if true, suggests something even stranger: Our universe, as it ages, may be dimensionally "promoted" again, so that the same natural space we now move through will be made up of five dimensions, not four.

What seems evident right now is that I need another cup of tea, before anything even weirder occurs. I'm not sure I know how to boil water in the fifth dimension.

Read more about it here: ONCE UPON A TIME, THE UNIVERSE WAS REALLY WEIRD via Discovery News

So Long And Thanks For All The Fish

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.

- Douglas Adams

As Adams has pointed out so concisely, humans have historically had rather a narrow view of what constitutes intelligence. Cetacean researchers have long been able to vouch for the functional intelligence of their subjects, but a new report now suggests that sperm whales may possess names, pronounced with different timing inflections in their eerie clicking, singing language. It is one thing to be intelligent enough to work out how to solve a problem; squirrels raiding bird feeders do that in back yards all over America every day. It is quite another to have a sense of your own self-awareness, and to possess a theory of mind that allows you to extrapolate the existential experience of another being. Personal names would be one indicator of such self-awareness. Could you kill someone so easily if you knew his name and history?

Used to be, the guys that lived on the other side of the mountain were stupid idiots because they didn't do things our way. Then we saw how much we had in common with them compared to the people who lived on the other continents, who were even weirder. Now we feel such empathy for these people we've never met, people who live thousands of miles away from us, that we text hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of aid to them within days of a devastating earthquake.

We recognize the intelligence of others, and we understand their capacity to suffer. The human ability to expand our empathic reaction is proven, and it may yet save us all, including the whales.

Read more about it here: Sperm Whales May Have Names via Wired.com

The Floating World

When I was a little kid, my parents would take me to the U.K. for summer vacation to visit my father's family in Scotland. Even though I had been told (and shown, using a globe) that the world was a sphere and knew logically therefore that Scotland existed somewhere on the same continuous surface as us, I whimsically decided one day that the clouds overhead were the bottoms of islands and continents, and that we had to fly to get to see Aunt Martha because really she lived up in the sky somewhere.

Scotland may not float in the air, but the rock we live on actually does float on something: other, denser rock. It floats because it's lighter (granite and sediment being lighter than basalt), and also because it's hotter, and hot stuff rises. It can be disconcerting to think about the Wasatch Front as equivalent to so much floating soap scum on the surface of Bathtub Earth, but there you have it. The planet is dynamic and living, and the continents underneath us are moving all the time. We need not worry about "saving the Earth," because whatever we do to the surface of this sphere - up to and including turning it into a vast, radioactive wasteland devoid of higher lifeforms - will eventually be digested, tamed, and recycled by the forces of erosion and plate tectonics. Even with all of our power to remove mountains for copper and to drill the deep seabed for oil, from a geological standpoint, we are still inconsequential. The Earth will be fine; what we should be worrying about is our continued ability to live upon it.

Read more about it here: World On Water: Geophysicists Show That Crust Temperature Variation Explains Half Of Elevation Differences In North America via ScienceDaily

Instant Perspective

Satellite Photos of Japan, Before and After the Quake and Tsunami - via NYTimes.com

There's a lot of disaster media going around. The coverage of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami, and now the nuclear crisis has seen cyberspace provided with endless videos, photos, graphs, and articles, some more accurate and others more hysterical. For sheer "see it for yourself" bang for the buck, though, the NYTimes does it best. Understated, scrupulous, devastating. Move the slider across the image to see the before and after of the same shot.

I have never seen this done before, and I think it's worth noting that we have now gotten to the point where media like this can put us almost in the back yard of places thousands of miles away from where we live. Have a look at this. It's an unedited, single-shot video of the tsunami coming ashore in Kesennuma, Miyagi prefecture. In six minutes you watch the wave build from the first rills of murky water shooting up the asphalt, to cars and vans floating away, to whole houses being swept from their foundations and moving through the streets like so many restless elephants.

Even after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, we did not see media this rich, this immediate, and this deeply upsetting. You can endlessly argue the ethics of technology, but there can be no doubt that it is now enabling us to expand our empathic reaction to cover the entire planet. I'd like to quote Swami Beyondananda on this one: "If it appears that the sky is falling, it is only because we are ascending."

Deep Thought

MIT researcher Deb Roy shares with us a project he undertook to record, on video and audio, his son's first 90,000 hours of life. In the video you can hear his son learn to enunciate "water" from a first baby utterance of "gaga" over a period of six months. Roy also shows us an astoundingly powerful media dataset based on the same technology he used to record and analyze his son.

I wish that Douglas Adams could have been alive to see this. In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he posited the planet Earth as a giant computer, designed by a race of hyperintelligent, pan-dimensional beings to calculate the great question to the great answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. The answer, of course, is 42. But the question...?

Roy appears to have developed the technology needed for us to witness the workings of our own species, and to intuitively grasp individually what we are thinking and experiencing as a compound entity. It's as if we've figured out how to hook up a monitor to Adams' "computer Earth," and have installed a little monitoring program so we can achieve greater group self-awareness. I'm thrilled and fascinated.

Read the whole story here: Deb Roy: The birth of a word - via TED talks

On The Matter Of Entities

This was probably conceived as a publicity stunt, but I think the meta-analysis of it is fascinating. I attended a talk by Dale Pendell last year in which he drew parallels between the Faustian concept of demons and spirits, and the present-day existence of corporations as entities endowed with personhood and rights. There's something there; certainly corporations have their own agendas and priorities that are not necessarily aligned with the priorities of the humans who work for them, they are the titans that presently bestride our planet, and it is arguable who is serving whom.

Read the whole story here: "Clergy Perform Exorcism On Chase Bank To Banish 'Demons Of Selfishness, Avarice" via Huffington Post