History and Perception of Time: Labeling and Control

I use the word "control" in the title but I think in this semantic sense it's human; oh-so human.

Here's What I'll Ramble On About Here:
- Noocene Epoch
-"human progress"
- acceleration of data, information
- Anthropocene Epoch
- Holocene Epoch
- a final riff

So: How do you think we're doing so far in the Noocene Epoch? (There oughtta be an umlaut over that second "o" in Noocene.) I copped this Epoch from The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader. There it was defined as something like: how we manage and adapt to the immense amount of knowledge we've created. My answer is: I don't know, but I suspect a lot of us are having birth-pangs of a rather longue duree, if we can use that term on a personal scale.

Mutt: We can't.
Jute: We can.
Mutt: You won't.
Jute: I will.

With something like a logarithmic increase in world population and technological development, including Teilhard's global media/communications vision of a noosphere (the human mind permeating the electromagnetic spectrum), we seem to be going a bit nuts; it may be coming too fast for our biologically-evolved selves. And are we making logarithmic-like gains in empathy, understanding, and a general updating of ethics and manners, a cosmopolitan outlook? My knee-jerk says nay; Steven Pinker wants to argue something like a "yes" to this in his recent doorstop The Better Angels Of Our Nature. And I so want to believe his basic thesis is right.

Human "Progress"
On the other hand, there's a long tradition of denial of "progress" by heavyweight thinkers. I usually read them as necessary correctives to a general cultural mindlessness about "progress." Chris Hedges has a bit of a jeremiad this week: the very technological boom that we've created - it started only a few minutes ago, on the vast homo sapiens sapiens timescale - is the very thing that may be taking us down. For those of us with an atavistic need for Bad Time when there's one to be had, read Hedges's "The Myth of Human Progress."

Acceleration of Info
Robert Anton Wilson thought the general rise of social lunacy and conspiracy theory was related to the information flow-through in society, which, according to statistics he derived from French economist Georges Anderla, was doubling at ever-increasing rates. Bytes, Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom may all "be" different things, indeed, but RAW's (and Kurzweil's for that matter) notions of pegging an idea and a method for counting, then watching the curve rise absurdly quickly, seems an effective rhetoric to get us to think of acceleration of processes, however flawed the methodology may be.

Futurist Juan Enriquez talking about data-doubling for 2 minutes.
Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (ancient!: from 2001)
Robert Anton Wilson and Terence McKenna on information doubling; 4 minutes

Anthropocene Epoch
According to RAW's Jumping Jesus, we were at 4 Jesus in 1500, then 8 by 1750 and the start of the Industrial Age. I increasingly see the Industrial Age as now being described as the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch. Can we get out of it unscathed? I increasingly doubt it. I don't mean the human experiment on this rocky watery planet will end soon, but I do think we will radically alter what it means to be "human" in the next 30-50 years.

                                                  Cesare Emiliani

Holocene Epoch
The Age of Faith. The call of Being. The Mind of Europe, the Ming Dynasty, the "postmodern," The Sixties...All of these ways of conceptualizing our time here (and any other one you can think of) happened during the Holocene Epoch, which was coined by Cesare Emiliani: he thinks our calendar, which shifts when a Jewish rabbi-carpenter-anarchist was born, is too subjective. The "entirely recent" (AKA "Holocene") is, for Emiliani, anything from 10,000 years ago to today, roughly the Neolithic to now. The last great Ice Age had receded: the human story is told in the last 10,000 years, and so why don't we just add a "1" to whatever year we're in now and think of time that way? So, we're living in 12013 now.

I confess I'm a sucker for romantic intellectuals who are so overweening in their grandiosity of ideation that they think they can change the basic calendar. Do I think Emiliani's idea will ever catch on? Not a chance. But it has caught on with me. I like the psychological sense of a new way to control my perception of time with the Holocene.

Final Riff
To whatever extent human's many problems represent an Existential Risk: climate change, lurking plagues, asteroid collisions, Mutually Assured Destruction, and continued overpopulation (the world had roughly 200 million total when the anarchist rabbi was born; 791 million in 1750; 1.6 billion in 1900; 2.9 billion in 1960; 3.6 in 1970; 4.4 in 1980; 5.2 in 1990; 6.0 in 2000; and we passed 7,000,000,000 around Halloween, 2011); whether there's another Great Dying, or a Robot Apocalypse, or a happy Singularity or Omega Point: we will need to pass through something Ahead that we might later think of as a Bottleneck Epoch.

On another level and despite the many charming cyclical models of Time and History proffered by some of our more ingenious thinkers, the ideas from Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and Derrida lead me to agree with Derrida: there is no lost original language or vocabulary that will restore our sense of being grounded in some sort of Absolute Ultimate. All that is or seems, seems as metaphor, and we must find our way bravely in this present (which we want, at times, to be "timeless"). We post-postmoderns: can we believe in a teleology for our species, within an historical trajectory? Do we take seriously an eschatology? Clearly some do, but they seem in a negligible minority. In the previous paragraph I hazarded a Bottleneck Epoch, my optimism winning out. I, like Buckminster Fuller, am biased: I like the humans and I, as Bucky said, want them "to be a success in universe."

Nonetheless, how do we think about our present eschatoteleological dilemma? (A: mostly, we don't.)

I wrote this entire post in hopes that someone will think me a Heavy Cat.

A Ramble on Digital Media and Mental Hygiene

Some of you know about the French philosopher and Jesuit and geologist and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. He was involved in Peking Man. He thought rocks were "alive" in some sense. He was involved in Piltdown Man. The Pope forbid him to publish his writings, because they advocated for evolution. Teilhard was a mystic of some sort, no doubt, and a universal thinker, and wonderfully weird. I'm not a catholic, but I love his ideas.

[The interested reader might start with his The Phenomenon of Man.]

He thought there was some teleological, vitalist force that was pulling human evolution toward Omega Point. The idea resonates with the Singularitarians, like Ray Kurzweil, but there seems some crucial differences. Anyway...

Teilhard posited in the 1940s (or earlier?) that humankind would in the future extend its nervous system around the globe. This was the noosphere, an atmosphere made of mind-stuff. (He was actually extending an idea from Vladimir Vernadsky. Or perhaps Edouard Le Roy. Anyway...) This idea influenced another catholic Generalist in my pantheon, Marshall McLuhan. His concept of the "global village" was heavily influenced by Teilhard.

Teilhard was cited more than any other thinker as influential on what Marilyn Ferguson called "The Aquarian Conspiracy" in her 1980 book of the same name. Teilhard was mentioned just above Jung, Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Aldous Huxley. This book and its ideas - rather puzzlingly to this blogger, and undoubtedly a boon for Ferguson's sales - proved to be an enduring threat to Larouche-ites and other Christian right wing groups. (See this example, for one among many. <-----Pssst! Those of you who love a good, thick, meaty conspiracy theory: don't miss this one! It's a sort of meta- conspiracy theory, in that the theorizing about the hated conspiracy seems almost far more conspiratorial than the "Aquarian Conspiracy" itself. Ferguson really scored with her title! But I wildly digress...)

So now we have the noosphere, in a major sort of way. And you are participating in it right where you are sitting now. Here's my question for us: is this contributing to your happiness? Can you check in with your feelings and say, "Yep, reading this guy's blog and these other Internet things I've done in the last hour are really the things I need to be doing. I like this. I need this and I find it fulfilling."?

Hey, maybe your answer is yes. But maybe not.

A brilliant blogger articulates his struggles well in a way that sheds light on this general topic here.

In the last week I've spent a lot of time researching (on the Web!) the term "addiction" with regard to cell phone use, Facebook, texting, playing video games, checking email, viewing pornography, and watching TV. Among other things. And there is no shortage of data there. There are a ton of studies, especially with regard to TV. The point is: clearly, some people have major problems with digital media and its appropriate place in their own lives. (For those with addictions, I am no doctor, but I would like to suggest some form of cognitive behavioral therapy, for reasons I might go into in some future blog rant-post.)

Why, with this wonderful mystical noosphere/Global Village, are some of us having such a hard time?

Two things immediately come to mind, and they are interconnected, it seems to me:

1.) We as the species homo sapiens have been physically like we are for around 195,000 years. We reached what's called "behavioral modernity" around 50,000 years ago. (Those of you who balk at these figures, let me know in the comments section, please.) But we've only had electric lights for around 130 years. Cut to the chase: for evolutionary reasons, most of us simply don't know how to most appropriately incorporate all the dazzling digital gadgetry at our disposal. One way to reassess one's stance towards digital media and their own feelings of well-being would be to get radical and look at one's own hierarchy of values.

2.) Every form of electronic media can - and should - be seen as having its own imperative(s). Is your Android conscious? Of course not. (Disagreements welcome in the comment box below.) The tremendously talented, probably-specialistic geeks who programmed your gadget DO have assumptions, both hidden and available to their own consciousnesses. Your iPad did not develop over millions of years like the duck-billed platypus. Just take a moment and contemplate - and I'm not assuming anything actively nefarious here! - that, by a welter of knowledge about human motivation - that by definition your gadget (including Blogger!) was developed by a large team of expert programmers who had assumptions about social reality and even "human nature" that were/are subconscious or unconscious or just generally unavailable to themselves.

But any medium - including books - will program you if you don't program it. (EX: killers in the name of their Holy Book) If you're bored and don't know what to do with yourself and reach for the email/cell phone/Facebook/Twitter/TV, etc...: you have not programmed those things; they have programmed you. They want you to use them for their own reasons, but you need to use them for YOUR reasons. Because you're a totally unique, free and creative individual with the spark of the Infinite within. For a tremendous buzz on this idea, see Douglas Rushkoff's recent book Program or Be Programmed.


So yes, friends: be a vibrant part of the Global Brain, with its noosphere enveloping us all, pulling us toward...something? (I will not dogmatize about this!) But be conscious in your use of these powerful new media. Aye, go have a blast, but be careful out there!

Tu quoque: Yes, I have my own media addiction, and it has to do with books. Some other time.