The Wisdom of Human Ritual; Don't Leave Home Without It

The ritualistic inclination is built into our species, as you can learn from the profound but simple experiment described below.

Imagine you are a five-year-old being led into a small office. A woman with a warm smile shows you an assortment of strange objects. Some of them are shiny. You feel like playing with them. That’s OK, that’s allowed. Soon the friendly lady takes the objects away and says she wants to show you a video. On the screen is another woman. She has an identical set of objects lined up neatly in a row and she’s doing odd things with them — she lifts one and taps it on another, then puts it back and takes something else, twirling it in a peculiar fashion before replacing it. This goes on for some time. Then the strange objects are pushed back towards you and the lady says: ‘It’s your turn.’ What would you do?

If you were a five-year-old, you would imitate at least some of the actions you observed in the video. No instruction would be necessary. And yet, the behaviour doesn’t appear to achieve anything. The psychologist Cristine Legare and I have been working together for several years trying to understand why young test subjects bother to copy it. Our starting point is that they treat it as a convention of some kind. That is to say, they adopt what we call ‘the ritual stance’, imitating without questioning the purpose of the actions.

In our experiment, however, the behaviour of the woman in the video is ambiguous. Children can't be sure it if is oriented to a goal or not. A surprisingly simple shift helps them to decide: we just alter the last move in the sequence. If the woman puts the last object into a box, it looks like the whole procedure was just a ‘funny’ way of putting an object away. We call this the ‘instrumental condition’. On the other hand, if the objects all end up back where they were originally placed, the whole action sequence appears not to have any tangible purpose. We call this the ‘ritual condition’. When the start and end states are identical, children are more confident that the demonstration on the video should be interpreted as a kind of ritual. And guess what? They copy it much more faithfully, and are less inclined to try out variations on their own initiative. _Harvey Whitehouse

Ritual Mosaic Humans value ritual from their earliest years. The need for human ritual only grows with the years. It seems to have always been that way.

Whether we consider the aborigines of Australia, the Native Americans, the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, or our own European ancestors, we find a world-wide preoccupation with ritual action that cuts across all races, religions, and cultures. We could even say that human culture is primarily a culture of ritual. _Culture of Ritual

Yet in our modern scientific world, the human need for ritual is typically denied and scoffed at, as an unnecessary residual of a more superstitious age.

But only a little thought and reflection should tell us that the further from religious belief and culture that we travel, the more necessary our grounding and passage of time rituals become.

Each culture, society, community, and family will have its own rituals based upon a unique history. Depending upon the ritual one is observing, one is either connecting with his family, community, society, culture, nation, or all mankind.

Rituals were once an unthinking part of daily life for every human living within a society or culture. In the modern scientific age, however, rituals must be consciously employed for their underlying purposes, or they become neglected and forgotten. The loss of grounding that occurs with the withering away of ritual is tragic -- for all that it is rarely noticed.

In The Dangerous Child Method of Education and Child-Raising, ritual is given a prominent role -- particularly in the toddler years, and in the years prior to puberty. Puberty itself is a passage, and deserves its own rite. And so on, through the years of passages that constitute human existence.

Daily rituals should also be utilised, from the earliest years. Here is a brief look at some "mindfulness rituals," meant to ground and vitalise one's daily existence.

1. Sit in the morning. When you wake up, in the quiet of the morning, perhaps as your coffee is brewing, get a small cushion and sit on the floor... I’ll ... just sit, and focus on my breathing going in and out. I’m an absolute beginner when it comes to meditation, but this always starts my day right.
2. Brush your teeth... Try fully concentrating on the action of brushing, on each stroke of each tooth, going from one side of the mouth to the other. You end up doing a better job, and it helps you realize how much we do on autopilot.
3. Eat mindfully. Turn off the TV, put away the computer and mobile devices, even put away the book or newspaper... unless you do this, you are not truly appreciating your food. I like eating... mindfully, paying attention to each bite. It makes the food taste better, and I eat slowly and with gratefulness.
4. Wash your bowl. When you’re done eating, wash your dish immediately. Do it while paying full attention to your washing, to the water and suds.
5. Drink tea... Make your own tea ceremony — prepare the tea carefully and mindfully, pour it slowly, sip it with thoughtfulness. See if you can set aside one time each day to do this, and it will transform your day.
6. Walk slowly. I like to take breaks from work, and go outside for a little walk. Walk slowly, each step a practice in awareness. Pay attention to your breathing, to everything around you, to the sounds and light and texture of objects.
7. Read in silence... Have no television or computers on nearby, and just immerse yourself in the world of the novel. It might seem contradictory to let your mind move from the present into the time of the novel, but it’s a great practice in focus...
8. Look at someone gratefully. Each day, find someone you care about. Instead of just seeing what you always see, really look at the person. Try not to do it creepily. See this person for the miracle that she is, and be grateful for her existence. If you’re feeling generous, tell that person how thankful you are for her.
9. Work with focus. Start your workday by choosing one task that will make a big difference in your work, and clearing everything else away. Just do that one task, and don’t switch to other tasks. _Leo Baubata

These particular "rituals" are based upon the practise of "mindfulness," which is usually associated with zen. But in Dangerous Child training, we incorporate mindfulness rituals without any particular trappings, other than those which might be particularly salient to the child.

There is something trance-like in the observation of many rituals. But rituals can just as easily liberate one from a default state -- a "spinning of the wheels" trance which the brain can easily fall into. Mindfulness rituals in particular tend to help break us out of the many unthinking default trances into which our minds can easily sink.

If meaningful rituals are incorporated into our daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly lives, we are more likely to have a subtextual "soundtrack", mapping system, or system of life indexing, which helps us to better understand where we have been and where we may be going.

Most of us are somewhat familiar with religious ritualism. But many forms of pagan ritual preceded all forms of organised religious ritual as far back in time as we can go. And it is interesting to observe the return of much of this pagan ritual across various parts of modern societies.

As humans try to make sense of an increasingly secular existence, it is crucial for us to understand the importance of our underlying need for ritual -- both on a daily basis, and to mark critical events and transitions in our lives.

To make the most sense of this need, we must go back and understand how rituals naturally came about, and how these native rituals were modified and adapted to meet the needs of different cultures, civilisations, religions, and societies.

Ideology's Greatest Threat: Former Believers In Search of Wisdom

We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided.

...The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. _NYT_Saletan

The excerpts are taken from a William Saletan review of Jonathan Haidt's book, "The Righteous Mind." Just a few years ago, Jonathan Haidt was a partisan American leftist, before he embarked upon an intellectual journey in search of a larger wisdom. His writings and video presentations are causing quite a stir within a number of hidebound ideological communities. Haidt is stirring things up, because he is telling members of his former ideological congregation that they are only human -- much of what they think they know, just ain't so.

Humans typically arrive at a conclusion rapidly in an instinctive, intuitive, massively parallel manner. It is only in retrospect that they construct a logical argument to support their conclusion. The argument, more often than not, serves as armour shielding, to protect against contrary opinions and arguments. When systems of conclusions interact in a mutually reinforcing manner, they can grow over time, becoming ideologies. Ideologies tend to accumulate large conglomerations of defensive rhetorical shielding, which can open to accept those of like mind, and instantly close to exclude outside attacks.

... moral systems aren’t ignorant or backward. [Jonathan] Haidt argues that they’re common in history and across the globe because they fit human nature. He compares them to cuisines. We acquire morality the same way we acquire food preferences: we start with what we’re given. If it tastes good, we stick with it. If it doesn’t, we reject it. People accept God, authority and karma because these ideas suit their moral taste buds. Haidt points to research showing that people punish cheaters, accept many hierarchies and don’t support equal distribution of benefits when contributions are unequal.

...The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment. _NYT Review of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"_ by William Saletan

The problem is shared by humans of all ideologies, of course, not just leftists. What makes the intellectual blindness of the left such a problem today, is the almost total control by the left of academia, main-skankstream journalism, popular media, and governmental regulatory bureaucracies. The resultant veering of public policy and top-down social values out-of-control -- without apparent checks and balances or any sign of deeper wisdom -- threatens to drown most western nations in a quagmire of debt, demographic decline, and mental/moral atrophy.

Being Human: Mental + Representations & Decision-Making from Being Human on FORA.tv
This FORA.TV panel discussion looks at how humans represent reality and make decisions.

The human mind has come to be a remarkable organic machine. It is a shame when so much of the mind's potential is squandered in service of ideology.

Can Realtime fMRI Neurofeedback Help Us Learn Wisdom?

How can humans turn "the stampede toward Idiocracy" into a movement toward a wiser, more intelligent society? It seems obvious that there is a current shortage of both intelligence and wisdom at the highest levels of analysis and decision-making.

"Wisdom and intelligence aren't the same thing,"...only 5 percent of the population can be described as truly wise and that advanced insight begins after adolescence as the brain matures.... _Eurekalert

Real-time fMRI (functional MRI) neurofeedback allows a person to observe his brain activity as it happens. This gives him the ability to alter his own thinking, on the fly. By learning to perform thinking tasks more successfully, the brain can be trained to operate more efficiently at below-conscious levels.

"Just like athletes in training benefit from a coach's guidance, feedback from our brain can help us to be more aware of our thoughts," says co-author Prof. Kalina Christoff, UBC Dept. of Psychology. "Our findings suggest that the ability to control our thinking improves when we know how the corresponding area in our brain is behaving."

For the study, published the current issue of NeuroImage journal, participants performed tasks that either raised or lowered mental introspection in 30-second intervals over four six-minute sessions. fMRI technology tracked real-time activity in the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC), the region of the brain involved with higher-order thoughts.

Participants with access to real-time fMRI feedback could see their RLPFC activity increase during introspection and decrease during non-introspective thoughts, such as mental tasks that focused on body sensations. These participants used the feedback to guide their thoughts, which significantly improved their ability to control their thoughts and successfully perform the mental tasks. In contrast, participants given inaccurate or no brain feedback did not achieve any improvement in brain regulation. _SD

Wiser brains think more efficiently, and arrive at workable solutions to problems more quickly -- even in the midst of distractions. Neurofeedback allows persons to train their own brains to focus on the cognitive task at hand. Properly shaped exercises will allow for more efficient functioning of parts of the brain which work together to provide higher level thought, analysis, and decision making.

We know that much of our understanding of the world -- even our scientific understanding -- is based upon belief and "gut instinct". Our early beliefs are based upon the perceived credibility of the source of our "knowledge." Later beliefs are based at least partially on earlier beliefs -- regardless of their validity.

If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. We don’t practice the scientific method. We don’t rationally consider the evidence presented for a theory. We don’t learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were? _PartialObjects _ via _ Slashdot

The same sort of "house of cards" belief systems also come into play in a person's other belief-based "knowledge". Some scientists even claim that they can tell a "political conservative" from a "political liberal" on a brain scan. No doubt more than a little bit of the scientists' own belief systems are coming into play in the research design and interpretation, but scientists are only slightly advanced monkeys -- like everyone else. That is the point -- everyone uses his belief system in every aspect of his life. And all belief systems are prone to bias, irrationality, and prejudice.

Mere intelligence is no safeguard against biased belief systems. Wisdom, on the other hand, can be a safeguard if it is broad and deep enough. Since most people are not naturally wise -- no matter how intelligent -- it follows that if we want a wiser society, we will need to learn to train people to at least be wiser than they are at present.

Things Only a Skeptical Brain Can Know

The human brain is expensive to maintain, and over time forced the complete reshaping of a woman's pelvis due to its large size at birth. The adult brain is approximately 3 pounds of fatty tissue that consumes 50% of the carbohydrates you ingest every day. If something happens to your brain -- such as head trauma, degenerative disease, or stroke -- your brain can change in ways that make you a different person.

Biomedical science is devising ways to work around brain damage and to mitigate the effects of brain diseases. It is a short step from correcting brain damage to augmenting the power of normal brains. Do human scientists, psychologists, and philosophers understand the nature of human consciousness well enough to know how best to augment the human brain? There are many ways we might approach the problem.

One problem of human consciousness is how slow it is. It takes anywhere from 0.25 to 0.50 seconds for the conscious mind to acknowledge what the unconscious mind already "knows." Accelerating the mind's conscious awareness would bring many positive rewards in high-risk, real time dynamic situations.

Another problem with the human brain: only a few people are intelligent enough to understand the technology and science that advanced human societies depend upon. Most people are far too stupid to acquire the concepts, and to work their way through the chains of logic to reach the "heights of understanding." Making humans "smarter" and more competently capable of complex thought patterns would be a great help in many ways.

But perhaps the greatest problem with human minds is the laziness and lack of curiosity and skepticism when faced with the ideas and theories that they are taught. Children believe what they are told by their parents and teachers, until some of them reach a rebellious stage where they disbelieve what they are told. But that "rebellion" is just as reflexive as the earlier blind trust. In universities, late adolescents revel in their freedom from their early childhood shackles of mind and body, and become easy marks for their professors. Blind reaction in one direction leads to blind trust in another.

It is easier to believe (or reflexively doubt) than to reason out a problem for oneself. An adult brain is barely matured at age 25 or 30 before it begins to slow down. If it has not acquired healthy habits of skepticism, curiosity, and independent thought by that time, it will be almost impossible to learn them.

Popular delusions that should be doubted by healthy skeptical minds, include the impending shortage of crucial materials, and the impending destruction of the Earth by anthropogenic climate catastrophe.

But those are easy delusions to dispel, for the healthy skeptical mind. There are many other, more difficult popular delusions that may take more thought because they lie closer to the center of one's self-concept and identity. If one learns healthy curiosity and skepticism, all paths lead to the center of one's own ego.

Skeptics do not believe or disbelieve, at least not without enormous mental effort to exclude other possibilities. Only a fool will "believe" what he cannot know. An honest religion will admit as much. Honest believers admit their own foolishness. Dishonest believers go on jihad and attempt to beat non-believers into submission, or otherwise eradicate all disbelief.

What can a skeptical brain know? Knowledge is multi-leveled, and of variable quality and robustness. A true skeptic understands more about knowledge than a believer, since a believer is unwilling to undergo the process of testing, falsifying, proving a hypothesis. But that is only a starting point.

Intelligence and wisdom (the appropriate use of knowledge) are two different things.  When intelligent people devote themselves to the polemical defense of an unsupported hypothesis (a belief from faith), the arguments they frame may be complex and superficially convincing.  But how deeply are they capable of building their support?  That is the question.  How long does it take them to get to the issue of falsifiability?  Or do they avoid falsifiable arguments altogether?

To a true believer, his religion is unfalsifiable.  It is circular, tautological, based upon the simplest of "knowledge", and essentially unshakable.  This is true whether the religion is spiritual, political, economic, or "scientific."   A true believer will run away from questions of data, and data reliability.  A skeptic lives in the land of data and data testing.

Skepticism is based upon the (sometimes compulsive) need to break through from one level of knowledge (or ignorance) to a higher level of knowledge (or level of lesser ignorance).  In the world of the honestly curious, the burden of proof is always on the "believer" in the battle between skepticism and belief.  Anyone who adopts a different assumption for reasons other than playing the devil's advocate, is either ignorant, mindless, or unscrupulous.   The skeptic knows this, which explains a great deal of the skeptical stamina in the face of holy inquisitions and the burning of the heretics.

Addendum:  This alarming (alarmist) analysis of the near future of the US contains a great deal of information in the form of graphs, links, multiple personal analyses, etc.  (via The Survivalist Blog)   If you have some time to test your skeptical powers, look for problems with the author's data, arguments, conclusions, and recommendations.  As it deals with "the coming food crisis" it should be a problem that persons of most political and religious beliefs can grapple with -- without creating cognitive dissonance or a crisis of conscience.

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Can Smart Machines Bail Us Out?

Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you'd need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That's about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google's servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion . _Henry Markram

Singularity devotees such as Ray Kurzweil place great hopes upon the advent of a super human level thinking machine that can show us the way out of the labyrinth. According to that meme, the appearance of superhuman intelligence and the onset of the singularity will coincide.

Smart machines do not have to work like the human brain, but since the human brain is the only "smart machine" we currently know of, the first ones probably will. Because we already have a "proof of concept" of the biological thinking machine, the smart money for smart machines is on the people who are trying to reverse-engineer the brain.

A recent Wired article looked at the IBM Almaden project to reverse-engineer the human brain. Several such projects are ongoing around the world, including the Blue Brain project in Lausanne, which was launched in 2005 as a joint venture with IBM. Henry Markram predicts that if progress in new computing machines continues at the current rate, he should be able to simulate a human brain in silico within 10 years. A shrewd observer of technological predictions might observe that a ten year prediction is cheap, allowing plenty of time for one to explain away the prediction.

Still, Markram is definitely one of the people to watch, if one wants to see the state of the art. The video below is two years old, from the 2006 IBM Almaden conference on cognitive computing. For anyone truly interested in the topic, the videos from that conference are worth watching.

Can smart machines bail us out? It depends on where they go to school, on what they learn and from whom. Smart machines, like smart brains, can develop along twisted, dysfunctional lines. Wisdom, intelligence, character, experience, perspective, savvy, competence, vision, are all important for developing truly smart brains and machines. Is it fair to expect from machines what we are unwilling to develop in ourselves? If we were serious about all this, would our educational systems, entertainment methods, and news/informational means take their present forms? Not likely.

Intelligent machines are possible -- we are proof of concept. Whether we are foresighted enough to evolve machines that are both intelligent and wise (from a human perspective) is another question.

Humans: Just Smart Enough to be Stupid

Regardless of what breathless news anchors try to sell you, humans are not living in special times. Human societies have always been in turmoil politically, religiously, economically. Despite the "lessons of Mumbai", human violence was much greater in the past, human suffering much more widespread. Humans have been closer to the brink of destruction, and the environment of Earth has been in greater danger in times past.

Humans are no smarter than in the past, although the wider availability of nutrients and micronutrients has made it easier for more people to be as smart as they are likely to get. Market economics on a broader scale has made the bounty of multi-specialised human effort inexpensive enough to stock in the stores of every country that allows its citizens to trade relatively free of corrupt and official extortion.

Governments can create an atmosphere of freedom and security from violence and fraud, which allows a market economy to flourish. But it is important for governments to maintain a "hands-off" posture except where necessary to ensure valid contracts, patents, copyrights, and standards. When government goes beyond the minimal support of a free market, in an attempt to "drive the economy," problems will begin to crop up.

Unfortunately, many smart humans assume that governments not only can drive the economy, but believe that governments should do so. These humans -- some of them Nobel Laureates -- believe that affluence and prosperity derive directly from the governmental organisations they have devoted their best efforts to.

If even the smartest of humans make such an elementary mistake, what are the rest of humans to think? Particularly when an army of lackeys in the media, the academy, and the bureaucracies stand ready to propagate, amplify, and implement into policy the pronouncements of these "smart but not wise" human authorities.

Once again, governmental and inter-governmental leaders are falling into the trap that so frequently catches persons of power: the pretence of knowledge. Wielding their pretence of knowledge like a bloody club, these leaders are willing to beat down all objections to their most destructive proposals and "reforms". Basking in the glow of pseudo-knowledge, they are perceived by lesser beings as actually being wise.

Smart people can as easily be fools, as anyone else. Particularly when they start believing their own press releases. At that point, the smart person becomes a fool falling down a vicious spiral of self-delusion. For such a person, wisdom would involve knowing when to stop. But wisdom is not usually involved, only fragile self-regard. The person -- and everyone dependent upon him -- get carried along with the flow.

The people soon to be in control of the strongest and wealthiest nation on the planet, believe that they can legislate and administer prosperity and affluence. Starting with that failed premise, there is no combination of "smart people" who will be able to help them succeed. Anyone who thinks otherwise is suffering a common but fatal delusion.

Smarter people might help to limit the damages of such policies of designed failure. More likely, the prospect of failure will merely feed into the delusional cycle which these smart people are trapped within. They will believe that too much has been invested to express doubt, to turn back. Having experienced so much early success in their lives, and having been told how special they are, they will feel obligated to follow through -- until it will be too late to change course, even if they had the will.

Smart people, behaving stupidly. It happens every day. This time, the consequences are likely to be severe for everyone who depends upon the global economy.

If you are positioned so as to be able to take advantage of local or regional prosperity -- which is organised so as to be viable during an international financial crisis -- do what is necessary to assure the soundness of the fallback economy. It is from such pockets of local and regional prosperity that a larger-scale prosperity will be able to establish itself in recovering from the folly of the incoming leadership.

Humans will continue to be smart enough to be stupid, until they stop. You may think that wisdom is the missing ingredient, but that is only partly true. Wisdom is a verb, not a noun, and it is a moving target. Wise people have evolved to an enlightenment which suits a particular environment, or range of environments. Environments change, often drastically. Neither a smart nor a wise person should be complacent. Take care of the essentials first. Then work outward from there, systematically. That is a basic wisdom that is not likely to change, for most environments you may fall into.

Looking for Wisdom, Experience is the Key to Intuitive Good Judgment, Not Credentials

There is a world of difference between someone who is good at their job, and someone who is just putting in time, going through the motions. The world needs a lot more of the former, and a lot fewer of the latter.

A few years ago neuroscientists discovered that the human brain has dual systems for receiving and analyzing sensory impressions, one conscious and one unconscious. In the unconscious, that is the non-declarative system, our sensory impressions are compared with previously stored images. We all have an inner picture book of stored experiences based on what has happened to us previously in life. We also remember the outcome -¬ did it end well or badly? With the aid of these stored sensory impressions, we unconsciously assess the situation at hand and can predict the outcome. This capacity is especially helpful in complex and information-rich situations with a great deal of noise.

The more variations of a situation we have experienced, the richer our picture book will be and the more probable it will be that we recognize the situation at hand.

“It can be a matter of smells, gestures, an ineffable combination of impressions that makes what we call intuition tell us something,” says Lars-Erik Björklund. “We have a memory that needs to be filled up with sensory impressions.”

However, these memories are stored only if they affect us. In other words, for experience to be built up, there must be commitment.

This means, according to Lars-Erik Björklund, that we can never read or calculate our way to all the knowledge and abilities we need in our professional life. Practical experience is indispensable and needs to be revaluated. An uncertified teacher with ten years of experience in the profession can be a much better teacher, assuming that this person is committed to the job, than a newly certified teacher, no matter how knowledgeable he or she is in terms of subject matter knowledge. __ScienceDaily

Most schools tend to emphasize test taking and regurgitation of learned facts, instead of experiential learning that involves all the senses that can engage the child's mind. Exceptions include Montessori, Waldorf, and similar curricula--including some homeschool curricula. Young minds are capable of building a wealth of experiential and procedural knowledge, as well as factual didactic knowledge. Government schools and many university programs ignore that potential, and as a result, young minds are shortchanged into believing they know more than they know.

Young brains myelinate from the back to the front, and young minds coincidentally develop abilities that correspond with the development of the brain. Children (and young animals) pass through developmental "critical periods" when the developing parts of the brain need to be trained with appropriate sensory input for full development to occur.

Most people are familiar with the "feral child" phenomenon. These children passed through critical developmental periods without the sensory input their young brains needed to develop normally. But what about other analogous "feral characteristics" of children that limit their potential, that we take as normal. Critical periods of development in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood that were missed by current methods of child raising?

Intelligence as measured by IQ tests follows a bell shaped frequency curve in the population. The same seems to be true for Executive Function (EF)--an even more important ingredient for life success than IQ. Both IQ and EF are significantly heritable, but within the range of capacity the child inherits, how much of the potential is actually developed by the child's environment?

Humans Still Evolving: No One Knows Where

Recent research on human genomes from several continents shows that distinct human breeding populations are still evolving away from each other. But is this a good thing? Even in countries such as Canada--where several tribes of humans coexist--the tribes appear to be evolving apart. Fragments of homo multiculturalis.

Humans are ingenious primates. Within Europe--for a time the center of world invention and science--evolution seems to have led to homo welfarensis. To make sure Europeans never regress to the atavistic state, European educational systems have instituted a brutal mind-warping indoctrination of its children away from economic freedoms, toward economic authoritarianism.

In many muslim countries, evolution seems to have been striving toward the apex of producing the perfect suicide bomber. Evidence suggests this evolutionary path has neared its goal.

In South America, evolved human ingenuity is largely applied to better ways of producing and smuggling illegal drugs.

Russia appears to have evolved an allergy to procreation--with a rapidly shrinking population unable to man its crumbling civil and military infrastructure. Simultaneously, the evolved Russian tendency to grab any land in sight has mutated to include a grabbing of large areas of seabed. This Russian grab is stimulating a worldwide rush to exploit the arctic.

In China, farmlands are shrinking, the quality of existing food cannot be guaranteed, and many are wondering about the wisdom of locating the 2008 Olympics Summer Games in Beijing.

While hugely important scientific advances are taking place constantly--particularly in the Anglosphere, Europe, and East Asia--human evolution has not been all to the good.

In fact, anyone who is exposed to the mainstream media at all cannot help but wonder how humans can possibly survive as a species? Humans are certainly "glitched", and in many ways a total "kludge." But they do not have to remain that way.

That concern is one reason for the Al Fin blog, and the Al Fin sidebar resource. Every writer at Al Fin wishes for the human species to evolve into a wiser, more intelligent, happier, longer-lived, healthier and more accomplished primate. We share that concern with participants at the Lifeboat Foundation.

If you share that concern, browse the Al Fin sidebar and the resources over at the Lifeboat Foundation. From there, you will find an electronic universe of others who share at least some of your attitudes and concerns. You may even find a partial solution to work on.

Passionate Environmentalism---Sign Up, If You Care

It's pretty easy to use emotional cues to convince someone to take a stand on an issue. That is what propaganda like "An Inconvenient Truth" is all about. Sucking you into the "feel" of doing good.

Humans are irrational. They do not understand most of the things they do, or believe. If this is true among highly intelligent, university trained people, how about people who are drowned in superstitions their whole lives, starting life with less than average intelligence and going downward from there?

The world is not what you think it is.

Cultivating a Sense of Perspective

The Images are from the wonderfully contrarian website IceAgeNow.

Purpose

One of the reasons that there are so many religions in the world, is that most people feel compelled to look outside themselves for a purpose to their lives. Religions claim to reveal a person's "true purpose in life." But why do people feel the need for a "purpose" in the first place?

The University of Minnesota sponsors a "Purpose Project." It is oriented toward helping people deal with the phenomenon of prolonged longevity. According to the Project:

Purpose is that deepest belief within us where we have a profound sense of who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. It is the quality or thread we choose to shape our lives around. It is a source of deep meaning and vitality.

According to author and speaker Richard Leider:

There are three hungers that people are trying to feed throughout their lives. The first is to connect deeply with the creative spirit of life. Sooner or later, most people come to recognize that there is some sort of creative energy that infuses all of life. They feel a hunger to touch that energy and to be touched by it. That doesn't mean that you have to be a creative person in a classic sense-to make your living as a painter, a dancer, a writer, or an actor. It could mean an experience as universal as bringing a child into the world, or helping to nurture and shape a life. It could mean finding ways to infuse the workplace with more creativity and more playfulness.

The second hunger is to know and express your gifts and talents. The people I have met in my 30 years as a career counselor are always absolutely sure that they have some unique talent. They may not know what it is yet. They may not know how to express it. It may have nothing to do with how they earn a living or what they do at work. But they know that they have something within them that they have to contribute. And this feeling lasts throughout your lifetime: The healthiest seniors I've met continue to explore their gifts and abilities, long after they've left the workplace.

The third hunger is to know that our lives matter. Everyone wants to leave behind some kind of legacy, some kind of personal mark. It doesn't have to be great or magnificent. But human beings know that at one level, we each have a own unique thumbprint, and we all want to leave that print behind for others to see that we've been here. We can be successful, make a lot of money, reach a certain status, but it will be success without fulfillment. Fulfillment comes from feeding these three hungers.

The last hunger--wanting to know that our lives matter--appears to be the motivator for many young people who undergo religious conversion, or who perform acts of seeming desperation. Muslim suicide bombers and religious cult members who abruptly cut themselves off from their former lives, are examples of people driven to do something that "makes a difference."

Here is an interesting exercise from Steve Pavlina, to find your "purpose:"

1. Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type (I prefer the latter because it’s faster).
2. Write at the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”
3. Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn’t have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.
4. Repeat step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your purpose.

That’s it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a counselor or an engineer or a bodybuilder. To some people this exercise will make perfect sense. To others it will seem utterly stupid. Usually it takes 15-20 minutes to clear your head of all the clutter and the social conditioning about what you think your purpose in life is. The false answers will come from your mind and your memories. But when the true answer finally arrives, it will feel like it’s coming to you from a different source entirely.

For those who are very entrenched in low-awareness living, it will take a lot longer to get all the false answers out, possibly more than an hour. But if you persist, after 100 or 200 or maybe even 500 answers, you’ll be struck by the answer that causes you to surge with emotion, the answer that breaks you. If you’ve never done this, it may very well sound silly to you. So let it seem silly, and do it anyway.

We are driven so strongly toward a purpose--if not consciously, then sub-consciously--that even the most jaded and cynical individual is susceptible to "the pitch," if presented correctly for that person.

If you are religious, your purpose is decided to a certain degree by others--founders and shapers of your religion. If you are not religious, but are compelled to find purpose, consider this idea from the Purpose Wikibook:

Given that there is no detectable purpose pre-designed into life or the universe, then, if we must have one, we must adopt a surrogate.

To my mind, the only viable option is to support life’s continual evolution and focus upon helping it to achieve an omnipotent ability. Such a purpose is universal and rational; it is a purpose that will last as long as life itself lasts. It accommodates the whole of life, and shows that we care about more than just our own well-being. It declares that we value life for its own sake and think little about the death that must follow, taking it simply as the price to be paid for living.

It should be obvious that such a purpose--like all stated "purposes"--is susceptible to manipulation, distortion, and abuse. Yet, as humans, we are stuck with the need for a purpose, but are given no completely trustworthy formulation of what that purpose should be.

Steve Pavlina's method above reminds me of an interesting exercise utilised by the late John David Garcia, which he called "autopoiesis." To summarise the method, a person will ask for a solution to an important question. The person will then discard the first, automatic thought that comes into the mind, and wait for other answers. The person will most eventually recognise which answers are relevant and useful. It is important to find a quiet place, and have plenty of time available. Garcia taught autopoiesis as a group exercise, which does add an element of expectation that a solo exercise may lack.

The salient feature of mainstream western existence--within academia, as portrayed in the media, and as experienced around the many coffee machines and water coolers of my life--is a lack of meaningful purpose for most westerners. That may be a partial explanation for the merely feeble correlation between affluence and happiness.

Young westerners are fixated on wealth, comfort, and fame. If their lives do not provide these things, it is easy to turn to mind altering chemicals. The trend toward an increase in narcissism, combined with an increase in binge drinking, and extreme drug use, suggests that rather than seeking a deep and meaningful purpose in life, young westerners are looking for escape from unpleasantness.

A later post will discuss the relationship between political activism, religious activism (including terrorism), and the youthful need to "make a difference."



Image Courtesy of Journeys With Purpose

Wisdom

A lot of people are confused about the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Author Paul Graham was one of those confused people, until recently. But now, he says he knows the difference.

A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem related. How?

What is wisdom? I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot of situations. I'm not trying to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word. A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do.

Source.

This is very similar to an Al Fin posting in July 2005:
To be wise is not a state of mind but a state of action. Wisdom is acting in the best manner given all the information at hand. Some of the information may be unconscious, out of reach of verbal consciousness. Wisdom takes account of all information available.

Paul Graham goes on to suggest that intelligence and wisdom may have more in common than most people believe:

So a wise person knows what to do in most situations, while a smart person knows what to do in situations where few others could.

....In the time of Confucius and Socrates, people seem to have regarded wisdom, learning, and intelligence as more closely related than we do. Distinguishing between "wise" and "smart" is a modern habit. [5] And the reason we do is that they've been diverging. As knowledge gets more specialized, there are more points on the curve, and the distinction between the spikes and the average becomes sharper, like a digital image rendered with more pixels.

.... Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them.

....The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people tend to be smart in distinctive ways.

....The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence. Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic. And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment.

Source.

I think that Graham has pulled some important pieces of of the puzzle from the pile, and placed them near their proper places. His advice on developing intelligence is in agreement with some of the best recent research on developing mental abilities in children. Wisdom and intelligence development are indeed arrived at differently. Graham is certainly correct that modern society tends to value wisdom less highly than did ancient societies. What else would you expect from a "youth intoxicated" culture?

The ingredients most valuable for developing next level humans include innate talent (intelligence), self-discipline (character), and wisdom (experienced perspective). By learning how to develop innate talent, along with character and perspective, all of those ingredients become aims of an enlightened educational process.

Unfortunately, most modern education is geared toward the avoidance of useful real-world experience and meaningful self-discipline. Pandering to self-esteem too often takes the place of teaching mental development. The end result is a psychological neoteny that reverberates throughout the society, rendering it impotent to meet the challenges it must face.

Accelerating Future--Top Ten Cybernetic Enhancements

Cybernetic enhancements are a necessary phase in the move to next level humans. Michael Anissimov posted this fascinating post about likely cybernetic/cyborg enhancements last week, but I was too busy to post at that time. Looking at it with a bit more time, I see that I was negligent in not pointing it out to readers.

Who can argue with this list of enhancements?

1. Immortality
2. Superintelligence
3. Ability to Fly
4. Autopoiesis
5. Psychokinesis
6. Easy Appearance Upgrades
7. Super Strength
8. Brain-Computer Interface
9. Telephoto-Microscopic-Full Spectrum Vision
10. Immunity to Disease

If I were making my wishlist, I would probably add "rapid healing from injury", and portable inertial dampers and matter/energy shields. If you have superintelligence, superstrength, and immortality, you can probably work out ways to get most of the things you want.

To be a next-level human, you also must have wisdom and character. Without wisdom and character, a superintelligent immortal would be a curse to humanity.

Discipline, and Talent

Genes vs. the Environment. Websites like Gene Expression and Steve Sailer perform a valuable service by describing research that shows how important genetics and heredity are in the success of individuals and nations. Statistically, intelligence correlates well with success--and intelligence is between 50% and 70% hereditable.

Inherited talent can certainly make the difference between success and mediocrity. But talent without disciplined training can be worse than worthless. A society that lapses into decadent sloth, where hard work is disdained and avoided, is likely to fail eventually.

Quotes on SELF-DISCIPLINE

"The first and best victory is to conquer self."
— Plato
Greek Philosopher

"You can never conquer the mountain. You can only conquer yourself."
— Jim Whittaker


"Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways."
— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Author

"It is not enough to have great qualities; We should also have the management of them."
— La Rochefoucauld


"A man without decision of character can never be said to belong to himself . . . . He belongs to whatever can make captive of him."
— John Foster
Author

"It is necessary to try to surpass one's self always: this occupation ought to last as long as life."
— Queen Christina of Sweden


"I think the guys who are really controlling their emotions ... are going to win."
— Tiger Woods


"Let me . . . ; remind you that it is only by working with an energy which is almost superhuman and which looks to uninterested spectators like insanity that we can accomplish anything worth the achievement. Work is the keystone of a perfect life. Work and trust in God."
— Woodrow Wilson


"We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act, but a habit."
— Aristotle


"Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. The man who does not shrink from self-crucifixion can never fail to accomplish the object upon which his heart is set. This is true of earthly as of heavenly things. Even the man whose object is to acquire wealth must be prepared to make great personal sacrifices before he can accomplish his object; and how much more so he who would realize a strong and well-poised life."
— James Allen


"Nothing is more harmful to the service, than the neglect of discipline; for that discipline, more than numbers, gives one army superiority over another."
— George Washington


"Mental toughness is many things and rather difficult to explain. Its qualities are sacrifice and self-denial. Also, most importantly, it is combined with a perfectly disciplined will that refuses to give in. It's a state of mind-you could call it character in action."
— Vince Lombardi


"There are no short cuts to any place worth going."
— Beverly Sills


"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself-and be lenient to everybody else."
— Henry Ward Beecher


"Keep away from people who belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
— Mark Twain


"If we don't discipline ourselves, the world will do it for us."
— William Feather


"Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power."
— Lao Tzu


"Never suffer your courage to exert itself in fierceness, your resolution in obstinacy, your wisdom in cunning, nor your patience in sullenness and despair. "
— Charles Palmer


"This quality of self-denial in pursuit of a longer-term goal and, indeed, the willpower to maintain the denial, is excellent training for the boardroom."
— John Viney
Drive


"Rule your mind or it will rule you."
— Horace


"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be."
— Thomas á Kempis


"Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal."
— Vince Lombardi


"Success is a matter of understanding and religiously practicing specific, simple habits that always lead to success."
— Robert J. Ringer


"It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'"
— Ralph Waldo Emerson


"Nobody's a natural. You work hard to get good and then work to get better. It's hard to stay on top."
— Paul Coffey
NHL star


"A successful career will no longer be about promotion. It will be about mastery."
— Michael Hammer


"The good Lord gave you a body that can stand most anything. It's your mind you have to convince."
— Vince Lombardi


"The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might and force of habit. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him—and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires."
— J. Paul Getty

Self discipline is the opposite of decadence and sloth. A slothful and decadent society is one that is easy to overcome from within or without. Even the slightest observation shows that socialist and communist societies become decadent--even more decadent than affluent capitalist countries. A society that provides all the amenities to everyone gratis, is a society in danger of breeding sloth into its members.

It is easy for a society to go too far in the opposite direction, as in ancient Sparta, or modern Palestine and Southern Lebanon. Societies bred exclusively for war. These societies will never produce great art or anything else but bloodshed.

Humans have always had to thread the eye of the needle, plot the course between disaster and oblivion. According to history, virtually every society eventually meets with oblivion. Sooner or later.

So, suppose a society learns to breed talent AND self-discipline into its members. Would that be enough to assure the durability of that society and its underlying civilisation? Well, luck plays a part, as does the wisdom of experience in understanding where to apply all that talent and discipline.

Wisdom is not what most people think it is. More later.

Walking the Walk

I am over-educated and over-qualified for most occupations. Too many degrees, too much higher education. As a consultant and writer, I let those credentials work for me. As anything else, I would have a lot of explaining to do. Especially explaining why I continue to train in new fields. To break new ground, a person must understand the ground that has already been broken.

One problem is, it is much too easy for someone to bullshit about longevity and intelligence. Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw have made a good living bull-shitting ever since the 1980s. I met them once and spoke with them briefly. It did not take long for my bullshit detector to go off. They attempted to come across as bio-medical experts, but I was the one who was in medical and graduate schools at the time. They failed the test, they simply did not know what they were talking about. Good enough on a surface level to snow-job the uninformed. Not good enough to back it up.

Preparation for next level humans is too important, too complex, to be left to pretenders and bullshitters. Those types of people may well dominate the interaction with popular media, and that is fine. Consider it a smokescreen of sorts to help conceal the actual work behind the scenes.

Next level humans will be incredibly intelligent, intelligent enough to know how to augment their own intelligence. Time will be a constraint, even for someone with a lifespan of 500 years. Priorities will be set, critical paths laid out, redundancy and rapid adaptability built into the system. No one can really anticipate what it will mean to have an IQ three times normal combined with a several century lifespan.

When next levels are ready to begin walking the walk, they will need guidance, in the same sense that a space ship needs guidance. The dangers are great and numerous and need to be mapped out. Someone has to prepare the way. This is part of the work that needs to be done, along with the nuts and bolts of combining longevity advances with intelligence improvements and emotional balancing/wisdom generation. Long life and intelligence would be a curse without emotional balance and wisdom. All of the above together would be less than fulfilling without tangible guidance and direction.

We cannot any of us know everything. Some of us compulsively try to do so. The best we can accomplish will be very little beside the accomplishments of a next level. All the more reason for the compulsives to do everything in their power to bring the possibilities to reality while there is time for them.

Wisdom

To be wise is not a state of mind but a state of action. Wisdom is acting in the best manner given all the information at hand. Some of the information may be unconscious, out of reach of verbal consciousness. Wisdom takes account of all information available.

Wisdom is contextual. In the current context, it may be wise for someone to accept the reality of death at age 75, or earlier. Even if all disease were conquered, death from trauma would occur. Accidents, warfare, terrorism, homicide. Many of these trauma deaths occur through lack of wisdom on the part of at least one of the persons involved.

Wisdom is not the same as knowing facts. A person may be the repository of a surfeit of factual information, but be a fool. Many of the most intelligent persons living between levels are complete fools. Masters of acquiring and manipulating information, they achieve high levels of monetary and social success. Still their children despise them, their spouses cheat on them, their lives are too often hollow and pointless.

The waste of natural resources is often decried, while the waste of information is generally ignored. To political partisans, information is meant to be wasted and suppressed if it does not automatically provide partisan advantage. This is clear from our news media, which after all are run by between level humans with many faults, including partisan dishonesty.

New tools of information manipulation and correlation have been developed to help with the problem of information overload in modern between level civilisation. Many of these tools are expensive, some are prototypes, with outputs only available to persons of high rank in government or commerce.

These complex software programs are not intelligent, nor are they wise. But they do fill an evolutionary gap in the human capacity to comprehend large amounts of information. They may yet facilitate wisdom in those who are so disposed.

Bill Joy warned against nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. For that, some futurists have tagged him "Kill Joy." Aspiring next levels will merely smile and get on with the difficult work of optimising information acquisition and use. We will need everything that nanotechnology, information technology, and genetic and bio-engineering can give us, if we are to learn wisdom in the larger context of the next level.