Discuss My Article about Technological Development

[Scott]

Before posting in this thread, please read my article: My Philosophical Look at Technological Development

Please use this thread to discuss that article and the ideas in it, including technological development, its dangers and its relation to societal responsibility.

The products of “excellence” are the effects of the natural process of evolution and can be seen in physical excellence, technological excellence and intellectual excellence.

The ability of humanity to excel is a natural process of evolution. The mutation of mind and body to achieve through natural selection and fitness cannot be controlled by compassion or selflessness which has as its goal equanimity, mediocrity and eventually extinction.

The motivation to excellence is supremacy and supremacy is the natural result of fitness as achieved by natural selection. Those who excel do so as a result of natural fitness.

Technological excellence is the result if physical fitness and intellectual fitness. The products of those two are what allow humanity to thrive, achieve, excel and survive.

Compassion is arrived through technological excellence where it allows an advanced technological advantage to support individual freedom and the right to self determination.

Warfare is not the result of ideology but the progenitor of control and control by force. As a result two approaches to warfare is observed. There are those who initiate force and those who defend against force.

In our global society it has been observed that there are those who wish to impose their will by use of force. Therefore any free society must remain ever vigilant and prepared to guard and defend against that force. Freedom is not a natural course for humanity despite the fact that reasoning concludes that freedom is the natural state of man. For those who have achieved freedom then they must, as observed by history, stand ready and able to defend that freedom.

And as a result of excellence and fitness which freedom supplies technology has offered and developed the means by which freedom is maintained and as such has allowed free people to thrive.

Environmentalism is not a reason to forestall technological excellence. The fitness of man is supplied by nature and as such follows man to provide the products for intellectual excellence and will care for man in any natural evolutionary endeavor.

The current technology developed by the naturally free is being geared to make the nuclear option obsolete. It is only the intellectually inferior and intellectually enslaved that cannot advance past that technological inferiority of the past and move into the primacy of first strike conventional deterrents rather than wishful thinking of the outmoded ideology of the enslaved.

Before posting in this thread, please read my article: My Philosophical Look at Technological Development...
I see our technology as not only incredibly amazing but incredibly disgusting. But I would not recommend that we avoid development.
We need to balance our development.
We need to balance technological development by also developing
our interpersonal skills, our self-control
and
our respect for the consequences of our actions including the consequences of our collective activities.
....

Thanx, Scott.
Excellent!
This says it all:
"I see our technology as not only incredibly amazing but incredibly disgusting.

But I would not recommend that we avoid development.

We need to balance our development.
We need to balance technological development by also developing
our interpersonal skills, our self-control
and
our respect for the consequences of our actions including the consequences of our collective activities."
Example:
We can't disrespect ourselves and any other person, nor disrespect 'Lack of know-how' and undevelopment and not logically expect the consequences of poor self-control, poor interpersonal skills, and excessive out-of-control know-how to be over-applied unnecessarily.

Only Unconditional Respect for self as opposite persons,
for know-how and know-no-how
restores the foundational psychological balance on which the one self and the other self, control and lack of control are balanced, and on which know-how and 'can we?' is balanced with 'should we?'

Do you see how Disrespect of self as dirty and as a problem is the dirty problem-attitude or unclean attitude-problem that automatically leads to an overly dirty environment interspersed with patches of obsessively and excessively compulsive Joan-Crawford overly expensive over-cleanliness at the same time?

Hi Scott

We need to balance our development. We need to balance technological development by also developing our interpersonal skills, our self-control and our respect for the consequences of our actions including the consequences of our collective activities. In an analogy, perhaps guns and cars can be helpful, but how stupid would it be to give a 10-year-old child a loaded real live gun or let him zoom around recklessly in a real live car? We need to balance the power of technological development with maturity.
I love to imagine what ever-increasing technological advancements would hold for a mature, warless, poverty-less global society built on freedom, fairness, self-control and interpersonal caring. But to think of the same ever-increasing technological advancement for a society as immature and self-destructive as our current one, I find myself fighting to hold onto a sad, deep fear as opposed to the bland cynical knowledge that we will destroy ourselves with our own technologically-empowered foolishness.

It is our being that attracts our life. This goes against the grain of modern secularism that believes in interpersonal skills, self control, respect for consequences and similar ideas. But the harsh reality IMO is that since we ARE as we ARE, everything IS as it IS. Water seeks its own level.

A I tried to express in the "Obligations vs. Rights" thread, the balance between these two impulses is only possible with the help of grace.

Like you, I'm concerned with the imbalance between the quality of our collective being and technological potentials. It is so out of balance that I believe there will be unnecessary catastrophes ahead.

So while you will concentrate on how to ACT and I respect the intention, I'm more concerned with becoming aware of the quality of what we ARE: our "being" and its potential.

If our being attracts our life both individually and collectively, when our being is allowed to grow as we grow in our technological potentials, science can come to serve man rather then man serving science as what happens now as our slavery to technology increases.

I believe that without inviting conscious help from above opening us to a conscious perspective, everything will remain as it is and no amount of secular education will change it. Along with making our lives easier, we will develop more efficient methods of mutual self destruction. This duality is natural for our being. As a secularist you will doubt Simone Weil's insight in the following excerpt. As a believer in higher consciousness and its desire to help man awaken to his potential, I see opening to its help as necessary to actualize any of the good we both know man is capable of. Unfortunately with increasing secularism, I tend to believe we are doomed to hard times ahead.

"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace." Simone Weil

I love to imagine what ever-increasing technological advancements would hold for a mature, warless, poverty-less global society built on freedom, fairness, self-control and interpersonal caring. But to think of the same ever-increasing technological

"It's coming yet for a'that;
"When man to man the world o'er
"Shall brothers be for a'that"

Robert Burns

Have faith!

"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace." Simone Weil

quoted by Juice.

Simone typifies desperate attempts to salvage a real God and reality itself from post modernism.

"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace." Simone Weil

quoted by Juice.

Simone typifies desperate attempts to salvage a real God and reality itself from post modernism.

Yes, this is what happens. Secularism seeks to DENY which supports the imballance between technology and the quality of our being. Those like Simone have the need, ablity, and courage to experientially AFFIRM which threatens the imagination of denial. It is no wonder that they must be scorned.

The article speaks of exponential rates of growth...but do you know why?

What is "Technology" really?

In it's basic definition it is the scientific development & refinement of a thing and/or a process. The "Exponential" comes from the fact that one development and/or refinement leads to the ability to further developments and/or refinements of many more things and/or processes, then each of those...well, you get the point, the "Immagination" & the "Impossible" now are able to become reality

Yes, "Technology" is not unlike a most fierce of viruses H.I.V., It feeds off of what we provide and creates more, every generation ever evolving, mass producing.

We are now so addicted to "Tecnology" if some major calamity caused all the world's technological devices to forever fail, this worlds population would drop to 10% overnight, The Homish would not be affected, and a few farmers may make it, but the rest of us would be screwed !!!

Yes, "Technology" is not unlike a most fierce of viruses H.I.V.[...]

It is this sort of alarmist claptrap that makes philosophical discussions of progress so depressing and stupid.

Philosophy and Religion are alone in all of academia in their inability to keep pace with technology, or to engage with the fact of radical change.

This has not always been the case, of course. There have been brave, optimistic, radical and future-oriented philosophies, but the modern philosophical establishment is too stagnant, too in-bred and too fearful of annihilation by the social sciences to be what it can be, or could be. Should be.

Scott makes good, sound points. Technological progress is not the only desirable form of progress. Other forms of advancement and civilisation are being neglected.

However to lay all the blame at the door of technology itself is lazy-minded and irresponsible. If there are failings, they are our failings. If there are successes (and there are more than there ever have been in the history of the world) then they our our successes.


This neo-Luddite fanaticism grows out of the same pessimistic cynicism that makes our societies unhappy, our economies fragile and our democracies weakened. I cannot express in word the black contempt I have to such attitudes.

And if I hadn't stuck the boot in hard enough already, here's a salvo-by-proxy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc

Hughes writes: But is advancing our power a general advancement for us when we use that power for our own disadvantage? In the end, will we say that our technological development helped us or destroyed us?
Of course, Hughes is earnest in his development of the thesis presented in this article, that technological development presents a paradox: that the fruits of technological advancement might not be worth the effort, unless we use careful moderation in their deployment.

Thus, in our hasty efforts to translate technology into capital returns, for example, we may forsake common sense and even the safety of future generations for the sake of immediate returns on investments. As such, rivers and water sources are mindlessly polluted, peace and tranquility are compromised, and we are forced to live and work in unhealthy environments, as examples of what our need for more good stuff brings. That is, good stuff, as defined by a culture that embraces the idea: “truth is what sells.”

Too, Hughes pines for a world in which reason and goodwill would triumph over immediate gratification of wants and needs, so that forbearance becomes virtuous, and technological development becomes thoughtfully controlled.

I should think that if such a culture would present itself and begin to burgeon, it would have to be quickly exterminated by the ruling classes and their enormous networks of support. Those elites who have risen to the top of the pyramid and who have secured a present and future for themselves and their posterity by aiding and abetting and cultivating their deeply innervative networks, of course, would work collaboratively for its death for the sake of power.

(Examples? See: Sparta, culture of; Empire, Roman; Christianity, Development of; Christianity, persecution of; Christianity, hegemony of; The Church and the persecution of heritics, Toqumada and the Inquisition, British Empire, The Anglo/American West and its continuous reaction to the idea that a classless society may be possible (Marx).)

Anyone who has lived and worked in group situations should be well acquainted with the fact that pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttony in its many forms, envy and sloth ain’t dead yet. The idea here being that despite the level of civilized development of the individual, he or she will still have to confront the existence of the passions in others, and in ones self. The upshot, here, being that “careful moderation” shall likely go wanting when the prospect of control over the means of production and distribution becomes a reality.

Yet, it is the idea that such a world of reason and goodwill and forbearance is possible, that generates hope, and even movement toward such an ideal.

Gregory R. Susoreny

What's lacking here is the concept of meritocracy, which involves judging people according to their proficiency at a particular technique. If this is done then the technique itself becomes the arbiter of what is good and bad, and people lose the ability to confer value based on humanistic principles.

We live in a largely meritocratic scoiety. The people who make all of our most significant decisions are technical experts, because the supposed decision-makers rely on technical expertise without being able to evaluate it.

As another commentator expressed elsewhere (and, sorry, I can't find the link), today's problem with technology is that what started as a way to create labour-saving devices is now an information- and task-spewing conglomeration that has increased the amount of silly make-work we do. If you speak to someone you get one response, but if you send an email to 10 people you get 10 responses. This increases our capacity to do work but therefore results in us doing more work, a lot of it fairly stupid.

My opinion is that, in technologically advanced societies, the number of tasks required for survival has dramatically increased and is beginning to exceed the natural human limitation on how many tasks a person can do per day. As this happens other aspects of what used to be considered human life, such as imagination and creativity, are being squeezed out, and I foresee the generation wearing diapers right now as growing up to be totally uncreative and incapable of imagining anything. Perhaps this is the first step in how beehives came to be what they are now.

Woody