Winter 2020 discussion prompts
- What is humanity’s situation with respect to surviving long-term with a good quality of life? (Frame the core opportunities and obstacles.)
- What attributes of our evolved, experientially programmed brains contribute to this situation? (What are the potential leverage points for positive change within our body-brain-mind system?)
- What courses of research and action (including currently available systems, tools, and practices and current and possible lines of R&D) have the potential to improve our (and the planetary life system’s) near- and long-term prospects?
Following is a list of (only some!) of the resources some of us have consumed and discussed online, in emails, or face-to-face in 2019. Sample a few to jog your thoughts and provoke deeper dives. Please add your own additional references in the comments below this post. For each, give a short (one line is fine) description, if possible.
- In The Age of AI (Frontline video – about 2 hours)
- Cognitive aspects of interactive technology use
- The origins and evolutionary effects of consciousness
- Damasio on consciousness
- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
- Team Human by Rushkoff
- Life 3.0 (video interview – about 1 hr 23 min)
- Life 3.0 synopsis
- Eric Brynjolfsson and Max Tegmark on ‘Life 3.0’ – exponential change (video – about 1 hr)
- Zero marginal cost society – collective commons
- Syntegration – key to innovation
- Storytelling as adaptive collective sensemaking
- How does music affect the brain?
- The neuroscience of creativity
- Is the info processing (IP) metaphor of the brain wrong?
- Intra-species evolutionary arms race drove brainpower leaps
- Evolutionary theory: Fringe or central to psychological science
- Climate change and social transformations
- Algorithm, not talent or merit, determines wealth distribution
- 2019 ‘best’ year on record for humans
- Influence of capitalism on well-being
- Does altruism exist?
- Networks thinking themselves (video – about 1 hour)
- Did ability to enter trance states enable formation of human society?
- Cultural evolution
- Free, Fair and Alive: The insurgent power of the commons
- New scientific model can predict moral and political development
- Do our models get in the way?
- 40-year update on meme theory
- Beyond free will: The embodied emergence of conscious agency
- How the internet is affecting your brain
- Ideas of Stuart Kauffman
- This link shows 12 positive benefits of meditation supported by scientific studies
- Part of the collective commons transformation is how humanity has become a hybrid cyborg with the machine, meaning the personal computer and an internet connection. It has fundamentally changed our nature to one of a mass-communicated collaborative commons. The Frontiers ebook is the tech side of that development, whereas the more social side is what Rifkin writes about.
- Heart-rate variability and social coherence
- How cooperatives are driving the new economy
- Yuval Noah Harari Is Worried About Our Souls
- The Age of Entanglement
- Fungi as a new model for cooperation and communication?
- The landscape of 21st century science
- The collective computation or reality in nature and society (among other great SFI resources)
- Brain tunes itself to criticality, maximizing information processing
- Evolved biocultural beings
- Editorial: Evolutionary Theory: Fringe or Central to Psychological Science
- From computers to cultivation: reconceptualizing evolutionary psychology
- Evolved computers with culture. Commentary: From computers to cultivation: reconceptualizing evolutionary psychology
- Information-Processing and Embodied, Embedded, Enactive Cognition Part 1
- Frontiers – Peer-reviewed, free-access scientific journals
- Divided brain, divided world (video – about 11 mins)
- Is the power law really all dat?
- Scale-free networks are rare
- Consciousness in humanoid robots
- Journal: Human Arenas
- SFI: InterPlanetary Round Table Discussion: Our Future in Space (Neal Stephenson and others)
- Thinking devices – imitation, mind-reading, language and others – are neither hard-wired nor designed by genetic evolution
- EU Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI
- The neural and cognitive foundations of math
- AI will never conquer humanity
- The agency of cognitive artifacts
- Neuroscience: Deep breathing changes your brain
The Neural Basis of Human Prosocial Behavior, a new Frontiers in Science ebook here. The blurb: With the rise of laboratory and field experimental economics, the famous prisoner’s dilemma, public good, dictator, ultimatum, and trust games have become the classical paradigms of studying prosocial behavior. Due to the increasing use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) with human subjects playing economic games, the neural basis of prosocial behavior has been uncovered by a large amount of neural imaging and stimulating research. A wide range of brain areas including, but not… Read more »
From this article in the ebook: “The Dual-process System claims that there are dual subsystems in fairness-related decision making: one is automatic, with an immediate response and an emotional system with no cognitive effort, whereas the other is controlled and comparatively slow, with a rational system of cognitive effort. The emotional system represents the intuitive response; however, after learning and calculation, the rational system requires an adaptive response to different situations by regulating the emotional system (Loewenstein and O’Donoghue, 2004; Sanfey and Chang, 2008; Feng et al., 2015). Fairness-related decision making is influenced by systematically and effectively regulating responders’ fairness… Read more »