Length 14:48 | Nov 18 2019
“My Lab of Misfits had just the wonderful opportunity and the pleasure to work with […] some of the greatest creators of awe that we know: the writers, the creators, the directors, the accountants, the people who are Cirque Du Soleil,” explains Beau Lotto. While there, he and his team recorded the brain activity of the Cirque audience, as well as their behavior before and after the performance. What did they discover? The brain state exhibited by the audience—awe—felt more social, uninhibited, and comfortable with risk.
This altered state could have profound effects on how we relate to each other as humans, whether in work, in play, or in moments of confrontation. When we think of it that way, it’s easy to agree with Lotto: awe is essential.
Length 15:10 | Nov 5, 2019
Theoretical physicist David Deutsch delivers a mind-bending meditation on the “great monotony” — the idea that nothing novel has appeared in the universe for billions of years — and shows how humanity’s capacity to create explanatory knowledge could be the thing that bucks this trend. “Humans are not playthings of cosmic forces,” he says. “We are users of cosmic forces.”
Will the human civilization ever be utopian?
Lyno Sullivan – author of Newland 2084
The name “utopia” (meaning “no place”) presumes that a utopia cannot be a place. A utopia can be an imaginary place.
A utopia is not a place but is an idea and, as such, it exists in the human mind. Utopia concerns an idealized human behavioral model. It is a blueprint of society. As a model, a utopia is a yardstick to measure features and capabilities of an existing or planned social system. Economy. Taxes, Government. Religion. All topics are fair game for discussion. Topics are fair game for exclusion too; one must not invest excessive time on non-essential features.
As a model, a utopia provides enough of a blueprint that one contemplating human behavioral systems has a tool set for thinking. Figuring out substantive reasons why some human or group’s utopian idea won’t work creates obvious questions. Why not? What could we do more of to further the outcome? What should there be less of?
Having identified one variable. Are there others? Are they correlated or independent? Are there whole defective systems that must be gutted to make a utopia work.
A utopia is not an outcome, in the sense of saying, “we eliminate poverty” or proclaiming “there is war no more”. Such sayings define outcomes. The very outcomes themselves are subjective and subject to interpretation.
A utopia is a model of a working social system which provide goods and services. A utopia explains “how” such a system will behave and what constraints are necessary to assure the behavior comes into being and persists. That it fills its niche and delivers its product in a time affordable and money cost-effective manner. That is contains no hidden social pathology.
My credentials on this topic are that I wrote a book “Newland 2084” about a future world of stable population. Local sustainable communities at the scale of 12,000 humans provide militia scale order. Human producer and consumer cooperatives provide basic human needs. 0% interest loans are available for basic needs, education, housing. NO PREDATORS Everything is decided by changeable (LivingVote) democratic 60%+ vote on an issue by issue basis. NO POLITICIANS. Profit is shared with cooperative members in the form of patronage.
