TRON LEGACY: Ending the Open Society to make way for TRANSHUMANISM

[Dig]

Still trying to figure it all out. The entire system is all gaming to create efficiencies and perfection to deploy in the real world to create the perfect society.

anyone else seen it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron:_Legacy

Watching Quorra's capture, Kevin sees Rinzler for the first time and immediately recognizes him as Tron, apparently reprogrammed into servitude under Clu. Meanwhile, Clu addresses his troops, revealing his plans to use Kevin's disc as a means of sending himself and his army into the real world in order to "perfect" it. The address is chilling for two reasons: one is its eerie similarity to a speech Flynn gives in the real world an an ENCOM event, in flashback at the start of the film - the other is that while the words are similar, Clu's motives are polar opposite to those of his creator. While Kevin commandeers transport off of the warship, Sam saves Quorra and retakes Kevin's disc.

The trio again heads for the portal, pursued by Clu, his guards and Rinzler using Light Jets. Between Quorra's evasive flying and Sam manning a rear turret, they manage to shoot down most of their opponents, leaving only Clu and Rinzler. As the flyer takes damage, Rinzler makes eye contact with Kevin, suddenly rousing memories of his original identity as Tron. Declaring, "I fight for the Users," Rinzler deliberately collides with Clu's Light-Jet. As Clu and Rinzler plummet towards the digital Sea of Simulation, Clu manages to steal Rinzler's spare Light Jet and continues his pursuit. After plunging into the sea, the red illumination on Rinzler's armor changes to his original white, signifying the regaining of his identity as Tron.


The Open Society / Open Architecture / Cloud Computing / etc. are all RAND Corporation objectives to put an entire matrix over all aspects of society and then "perfect it".

Near the end, Kevin declares that the real world is not perfect and this is the inherent flaw in the sub-elite's thinking. They are only helping the elite because they really think they are capable of perfecting something. All they are doing is giving more and more of their own power to nutball control freaks who already know that we are not perfect. Additionally, more and more the programs prevelant are attacking the users of them, controlling the users, engaging in behavioral modification, limiting access, closing free thinking, etc. The whole purpose was to give more freedom to the individuals, but that is obviously a trap we need to face set by the elites. Additionally, the statement "Clu's motives are polar opposites to those of his creator" is right on. The powerful elite class' motives are polar opposites to those of our creator (sorry for deifying the charater Kevin, but there is an analogy to be made). We have been granted a set of human rights by our creator which is the polar opposite of the desires of the elite class who were granted the gift of life by the same creator!

[carlee]

Josh reeves covered this movie on his show yesterday if you care to listen http://www.theglobalreality.com/categories/radio-show-archives  it is the dec 22 show all covered in the first 20 min

[Dig]

Also, it ain't all anti-NWO and there are many "saviour" and "godlike" themes. But overall, it seems to expose the insanity of the creeping electronic dog collar agenda popping up all over the place.

[Dig]

Josh reeves covered this movie on his show yesterday if you care to listen http://www.theglobalreality.com/categories/radio-show-archives  it is the dec 22 show all covered in the first 20 min

cool thanks

[Kilgore Trout]

Also, it ain't all anti-NWO and there are many "saviour" and "godlike" themes. But overall, it seems to expose the insanity of the creeping electronic dog collar agenda popping up all over the place.

And the agenda is streamilined for high speed dehumanize mode.

[Dig]

Basically the end of the first movie created this so called open society (even referred to as the New World Order in the first movie). This new movie exposes how that NWO has created the transformation of humans into cattle and how it needs to end. They call it the grid in the movie (similar to the matrix) and the job is to build the perfect society, but that is a fallacy because we will never be perfect and we already are perfect (kinda wild). Flynn realized that every game that the grid monitors only adds to its overall power (this is the RAND principal), and "the only way to win is not to play".

BTW, the arcade in the original movie (FLYNN'S) is the capstone and that is where he comes up with the idea of the perfect society and in the end he sees the insanity in that goal.

Other things I noticed is that recently the metals for the Olympics changed to open discs. The new disc is also open in the new tron. I believe this is a subcondcious conditioning or statement that we are in the age of the open society. The open society by all accounts is f**king batshit crazy insane and will lead to more tyranny, death, and chaos then the world has ever known. Perhaps even the illuminated nutballs at the rat trap "Disney Productions" have had enough of this obvious ponzi scheme attempting to deprive us of all inalienable rights.

[Dig]

Another quote from the movie which actually speaks on behalf of the transhumanists:

"She is the last reamining ISO. She is the miracle. A digital frontier that will reshape the human condition."

Well, that really sounds a lot like:

In Whose Image? Remaking Humanity through Cybernetics and Nanotechnology
http://www.cbhd.org/content/whose-image-remaking-humanity-through-cybernetics-and-nanotechnology
Post Date: 12/01/2002
Biotechnology Emerging Technology Human Enhancement
Author:  C. Christopher Hook, MD

Though the controversies surrounding human cloning and stem cell research have recently captured the public's attention, the less well-known technologies of cybernetics and nanotechnology are equally worthy of focus in that they have the potential to transform the way we think about human beings. Unfortunately, our conceptions of cybernetics have largely been formed by Hollywood and have thus been dismissed as mere science fiction, while most of us have heard little to nothing about nanotechnology. The goals of this essay are therefore to provide an overview of cybernetics and nanotechnology, to consider the current state of development of these fields, and to explore some of the ethical issues that these technologies will surely raise.


Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition
http://metanexus.net/magazine/tabid/68/id/10544/Default.aspx
By Jean-Pierre Dupuy

Foreword

I chose the topic of my contribution to our workshop after I discovered, first with amazement, then with wonder, N. Katherine Hayles’s beautiful book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics1. Amazement because she and I worked on the same fairly confidential corpus, in particular the proceedings of the Macy conferences, which were the birthplace of cybernetics and, I have claimed, of cognitive science, we celebrate the same heroes, in particular Warren McCulloch, Heinz von Foerster and Francisco Varela, and, in spite of these shared interests and passions, we apparently never heard of each other. She and I live and work worlds and languages apart. The world is still far from being a close-knit village. Wonder at realizing how from the same corpus we could arrive at interpretations that, although compatible or even complementary, are so richly diverse or even divergent.


Transhumanism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable. Transhumanists look to biotechnologies and other emerging technologies for these purposes. Dangers, as well as benefits, are also of concern to the transhumanist movement.[1]

The term "transhumanism" is symbolized by H+ (previously >H[2]) and is often used as a synonym for "human enhancement". Although the first known use of the term dates from 1957, the contemporary meaning is a product of the 1980s when British philosopher Max More and some American futurists began to articulate transhumanist principles,[3] and organize in the United States what has since grown into the transhumanist movement. Transhumanist thinkers predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label "posthuman".[1] Transhumanism is therefore sometimes referred to as "posthumanism" or a form of transformational activism influenced by posthumanist ideals.[4]

The transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives. Transhumanism has been described by one critic, Francis Fukuyama, as the world's most dangerous idea,[5] while one proponent, Ronald Bailey, counters that it is the "movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity".[6]


In the end, Flynn destroys Clue and himself by re-integrating and leaves the last remaining ISO with his son to go back to the "real world". So he destroys the grid/matrix/RAND gaming environment, yet portals his cybernetic/transhumanist masterpiece to the "real world" in some spin on the trinity. hmmmmm

[agentbluescreen]

No but it has exposed how cheap-a$$ skinflint Hollywood producers are so scared, unimaginative, exploitative, broke and morally and intellectually bankrupt they can't afford nor risk developing any new stories.

[Dig]

TRON LEGACY COUNTDOWN: The Disappearance Of Kevin Flynn & The Return Of Jeff Bridges
http://www.latinoreview.com/news/tron-legacy-countdown-the-disappearance-of-kevin-flynn-the-return-of-jeff-bridges-9198
By Ron Henriques on February 12, 2010                     

Winter is upon us in full swing and though I personally can not wait until the warmer seasons the Winter of late 2010 can not get here fast enough. Why you ask? Well come the end of this year, Disney releases Tron Legacy, the long awaited sequel to their 1982 cult hit Tron. There's little buzz amongst the general movie public about this film, but just like the recent smash success Avatar, I'm sure Disney's marketing strategy involves revealing more about the sequel bit by bit. I'm pretty sure that by this summer's end, it will be a greatly anticipated movie event among audiences. For die-hards like me, there is a wealth of information and even back-story to be found about the film's plot. (See for yourself and visit Flynn Lives.com.) The official synopsis reads:

Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), looks into his father’s disappearance and finds himself pulled into the same world of fierce programs and gladiatorial games where his father has been living for 25 years. Along with Kevin’s loyal confidant (Olivia Wilde), father and son embark on a life-and-death journey across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.

The Disappearance of Kevin Flynn.

So what happened to Kevin Flynn at the conclusion of the original Tron? When last we saw him it looked as if he had become a major player at the Encom corporation after exposing Senior Executive VP Ed Dillinger (David Warner) as a thief who stole his video game programs and passed them off as his own. Flynn wrote the programs for games such as “Matrix Blaster”, “Vice Squad”, “Light Cycles” and Encom's biggest hit, “Space Paranoids”. According to Flynn he was “this close to starting my own little enterprise” when Dillinger stole his files and presented the programs to Encom, received a huge promotion and later ousted him from the company. After defeating the Master Control Program inside the game world, Flynn was able to locate the evidence needed to expose Dillinger, but his story didn't end there.

Anyone who attended Disney's faux Flynn's arcade parlor at last year's San Diego Comic-Con saw several promotions for fictitious Encom games including one that read “Home of Tron”. That doesn't make sense, Tron was the name of the movie, not a game within the movie. Well it looks like Flynn created a game based on his adventures in the digital world and named it after friend Alan Bradley's (Bruce Boxleitner) security program and avatar Tron. With the game a smash success, Flynn would be promoted to VP of Creative Development and later Encom's CEO. Bradley, once Flynn's rival for the affections of ex-girlfriend Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan), would soon join him in the boardroom as COO. It looks as if the late 80's was a very good time for Encom and Flynn. The company will rise to become the biggest video game producer in the world, and Flynn would find love and marry, eventually having a son, Sam. All of that would soon change tragically.

Flynn changed gaming forever with Tron, became Encom's CEO and gave up bachelorhood.

The official synopsis of the film is inaccurate concerning how long Flynn has been missing. If the story is set in 2010 and Flynn mysteriously vanished twenty-five years earlier, that would put his disappearance around 1985. According to the fictitious magazine “Hot Truth Weekly”, Flynn was widowed that year and never recovered. That same year he retired from Encom “to create a digital frontier that will reshape the human condition”. What does that mean exactly? Is the digital frontier he refers to the game world? Or was Flynn hoping to fashion a completely different experience? Caprica, the currently running spin-off of the television hit Battlestar Galatica features a completely realistic VR world, which has been twisted by teen hackers into underground clubs of games, sex, death and destruction. It makes a parent's worst fears of online chat rooms look tame. Could a similar immersible and completely realistic VR world be what Flynn was working on? Was he hoping to advance the laser digitizing technology created by Encom in the first film and grant the public access to this world at a price? If that's true then the reason why the cyber-universe “has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous” is because of the new programs Flynn developed for the Tron video game hence the film's title Tron Legacy.

Whatever the case may be, it looks as if Flynn became obsessed with the virtual world and ultimately disappeared there when he mysteriously vanished in 1989. According to one journalist “search parties were formed...not a trace of Encom's in-house genius could be found.” He left behind a young son and his good friend Alan Bradley stepped down as COO when “the company began 'grave-robbing' or rifling through Flynn's private files for a backlog of ideas, sketches and programs. Encom entrenched itself in every platform imaginable and transcended the arcade to move into gamer's homes and offices.”

Now comes a little conjecture on my part. Did Flynn willingly choose to stay in the VR world? Despite the disappearance of its CEO, Encom's stock prices soared, which means those left with the keys to the kingdom certainly took a lot of credit. Michael Sheen, James Frain and John Hurt have all been rumored to play villains in Tron Legacy. It's been confirmed that Sheen is a deadly nightclub owner in the game world and Frain personally told About.com that he plays Jeff Bridges' right-hand man. Is he referring to Bridges as Flynn or Bridges as the corrupted version of Flynn's avatar Clu. (We'll get to him soon.) That leaves Hurt who having a history of playing suited villains must be the current head of Encom in the 21st century who may or may not have had a hand in trapping Flynn in the VR world. It looks as if the only confidant 27-year-old Sam Flynn can look towards in the real world is Alan Bradley, since Boxleitner reprises his role in the film. It's unclear whether old girlfriend Lora will make an appearance, although Cindy Morgan did manage to find her way to Flynn's arcade at Comic-Con.

It remains to be seen if Kevin Flynn is a prisoner in the digital world or has chosen to live there in exile. The exclusive scene shown at Comic-Con where Sam tracks a phone call from “a number that hasn't been used in twenty-five years”, leading to his discovery of a secret room behind a Tron game at his father's abandoned arcade suggests that Flynn senior may have been attempting to contact his son in the real world. Then there is a character rumored to be one of the film's major villains, a new version of Flynn's program Clu, who has since turned evil or in software terms, “corrupted”. He's obviously taken a liking to hunting down and eliminating rogue programs, as evidenced in the film's concept trailer. This has to be Clu 2.0 since the original program was “de-rezzed” by the MCP in the first Tron film.

With the aid of digital f/x tools, Bridges gets to play a photo-realistic younger version of himself as Clu, but as Flynn he looks about twenty-five years older. Why is that? This is not a physical world, but a virtual one where everything is comprised of ones and zeroes. Well, as demonstrated in the first film, programs age and sometimes become obsolete. It happened to the MCP, which “ began as a chess program” and was later revealed to be withered and old and it happened to the tower guardian Dumont (Barnard Hughes). Though Flynn is not a program, but a user, perhaps the same laws of physics (or is it software?) apply to him.

The Return of Jeff Bridges

It looks like Jeff Bridges is on a winning streak that has slowly been snowballing. Post production on Tron Legacy is far from over, yet Bridges is back in the public eye with an acclaimed performance in the current release Crazy Heart. As soon as I saw the film a few months back I knew Bridges would receive an Oscar nomination, but with so much praise across the board for his performance it would appear as if he is a lock to win. Even if the coveted gold statue doesn't find its way into his hands, Bridges' presence in the media has been increasing rapidly. The thing is, Bridges never really disappeared. He's been the voice of Duracell for several years, has had a string of supporting roles, including one as the U.S. President in Rod Lurie's The Contender (2000) which earned him an Oscar nomination. Playing the mentor turned major villain in the smash hit Iron Man reminded the public of how great he is. Bridges recorded a version of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire with Kim Carnes for The Contender, but Crazy Heart is the film that demonstrated what a soothing singing voice he has. It all started for Bridges when co-star Kris Kristofferson invited him to jam with visiting friends Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard on the set of Heaven's Gate (1980). His gritty, yet sensitive voice is nearly a perfect fit for Ryan Bingham and T. Bone Burnett's songs for Crazy Heart and has been received so well that Bridges recently participated in the charity single remake of We Are The World.

There's “The Dude” amongst all these star singers, but what's Vince Vaughn doing back there?

2010 looks to be a great year for Bridges, because not only will he star in Tron Legacy, but a remake of True Grit directed by the Coen Bros. Can “The Dude” really step into the shoes of “The Duke” as Rooster Cogburn, a role that won John Wayne his only Oscar? It wouldn't be his first western since he once starred as legendary lawman James Butler Hickok in Walter Hill's underrated Wild Bill (1995). The film opens around the same time as Tron Legacy and being the first western directed by the Coen Bros should prove interesting.

Tron Legacy is a very big deal for Disney, a major tentpole for this coming Christmas season and a project they have deeply invested in. Skeptics may see it as a revisit to a cheesy 80's kids movie, but actors such as Sheen and Frain, show great enthusiasm for its story and character development when asked about it. The star power of Bridges isn't what will attract audiences, but the chance to revisit a world created by a cult classic with the promise of something new. Bridges' popularity and the fan base he developed from The Big Lebowski will surely help, but I'm pretty sure that his current awards winning streak with Crazy Heart and other projects will play a role in putting a brighter spotlight on Tron Legacy and the actor's future. The only thing us fan's could use in the meantime is a proper trailer. It's time for a real sneak peek at what we're getting and not the occasional photo or promotional artwork released every few weeks. Awareness for the film has to begin spreading now. The chance to run a promo for this 3-D feature has already passed since Avatar, a film that is most definitely a game changer for the format, has been in theaters for nearly two months. Seeing a proper trailer would be nice. Seeing it in 3-D would be better. Disney does have another opportunity and in fact are releasing a film in the format in just a few days. It would be the perfect movie to attach a 3-D trailer for Tron Legacy to. Care to guess what it is?

[agentbluescreen]

Well I'm gonna save my next {+pepsi and popcorn} $60 for The Ten Commandments in 3D

[Dig]

http://www.screened.com/tron-legacy/16-193348/

Later on at dinner Kevin asks Sam some general questions about his life. Sam asks one: why didn't he come back. Kevin explains that he was creating a new grid with Tron and Clu. But a miracle happened, the sea of iso's. Programs that were borne of the digital world of their own accord. He became completely enamored by these evolutionary beings while Clu saw them as imperfections. Clu betrays Kevin and defeats Tron in an ambush. Clu rewrites Tron to be his servant. After that the portal closed leaving Kevin trapped inside. Enormous power is required to power it for it to remain open. So then it could only be opened from the outside. Clu begins his reign with the genocide of iso beings.
 
Sam entering this world leaves the door open for 8 more hours. Kevin urges Sam to do nothing because Clu needs Kevin's ID to open the portal. Sam can't sit still and tries to recruit Quorra. Instead she tells him about a program named Zeus that was a friend a long time ago. He heads off in Kevin's light cycle towards the grid.

Sam enters the city easily and finds a homeless program. He trades the bike for the program's coat. Soon after he meets Gem again. She takes him up to Castor's bar. He meets Castor and says how he wants to meet Zeus. Castor takes him and Gem to a more private room.
 
Clu's advisor tells him that Flynn's light cycle has been found and that the point of origin has been detected. Clu and some troops head off towards Kevin's base. They find no one there. Clu picks up a metal apple and sees his own reflection. He has a flashback to when Kevin creates him and orders him to make a perfect world. Back in the present he backhands the bowl of fruit of the table. Right after he sees the view of the grid and heads back.

Sam meets Castor

Castor confesses that he is Zeus. He tells Sam that he will need to change his appearance and to forge an ID. While Clu's forces break into the bar. Sam realizes betrayal and jumps down onto the main floor. Quorra appears out of nowhere and fights until her left arm is disintegrated. Kevin enters the scene and powers down the place and causes programs to fight Clu's troops. He escapes with Quorra in Sam's arms. Right before the elevator door closes Kevin's ID is stripped by a grappling hook. A timed explosive goes off at the door and propels the elevator to the ground. Castor derezzes the trooper and takes the disc. While the elevator reaches terminal velocity, Kevin messes with the controls until it brakes before impact. On the ground floor they decide to make a break for the portal.

Clu meets Castor in his bar. Castor asks if their current deal of him ruling the city was still in effect. Clu makes a drink for him and exchanges it for Kevin's ID. Shortly after Clu's men put 4 bomb charges and leave. “Enjoy the drink,” says Clu before the explosions decimate the bar.

The solar sailer

The Flynns and Quorra take off in a solar sailer. Kevin has it change course over the sea of isos. During their brief respite, Kevin takes out the bad code in Quorra so her arm starts reconstructing. He mentions to Sam that she will reboot soon and that she is an iso. While waiting for her Sam tells Kevin about what he missed in the real world. She wakes up just a little before they enter Clu's invasion ship.
 
Inside of the ship is hundreds of rectified programs for Clu's army. Further in they see Tron patrolling. Quorra hands her ID to Flynn and distracts Tron. She becomes captured while they run through the nearby door. Quorra meets Clu thus he says he has something special planned for her. Kevin and Sam end up on a catwalk above the hangar bay as Clu descends into his speech of invasion of Earth. Sam tells Kevin to grab some wheels and he'll improvise.

On the flight deck stands one guard by a ship. Kevin sneaks up behind and overrides some programming. He tells the program that is taking the ship. The program tells him he isn't authorized so Kevin knocks him in the head. Then the program instantly relents and tells him to have a safe trip.

Sam and Quorra

Sam makes his way to the master control room. He fights through a couple of guards and enters the room with Kevin's ID. Clu's advisor just stands there and lets Sam take the disc. He grabs the advisor by the throat and demands to know where Quorra is. Right then her and Tron are by the door way. Quorra ducks so Sam throws Kevin's ID at Tron. It passes by and makes it way back. Quorra kicks Tron as Kevin's ID flies at him. Tron dodges both but is knocked outside. Sam helps Quorra up and snatches one of the apparatus wings. They leap out onto the flight deck and make it to Kevin's ship.
 
The ship starts up and flies off Clu's warship. Quorra pilots while Sam mans the turret. Clu finds the disc missing and destroys his advisor. Tron makes his way back through the open door. They and 3 other soldiers chase after the Flynns with light ships. A dogfight between the groups emerge with the energy exhaust as a factor. Many shots and barrel rolls later leave the turret disabled. Only Tron and Clu left to destroy them. Kevin sees Tron overhead and asks “What have you become Tron?” Tron hesitates before a killing blow and flies off. Clu goes in for another strike but Tron does a kamikaze attack. Both ships explode leaving them an unimpeded flight to the portal.

As Tron falls he is about to activate another light ship but Clu takes the bar from him. Tron falls into the sea and his colors change from orange to white. Clu flies away.

The group makes it to the portal but see Clu standing in the way. Kevin tries to reconcile with Clu but he knocks Kevin away. Sam throws a few punches but is beaten back towards the portal. Quorra uses a grappling hook and swings underneath to behind Clu. Kevin manages to egg Clu to take the disc off of him. The bridge starts separating. Clu finds the disc to be Quorra's. Sam holds Kevin's ID above his head activating the portal. Clu leaps to the other side of the bridge. He barely makes the ledge but tries to enter the portal. Kevin kneels down and sends a wave of energy that captures Clu in it's vortex. It sends Clu straight into Kevin and they reintegrate. An explosion of thermonuclear proportions rip through the portal structure and anything nearby.
 
Soon after Sam is downloading the program of Kevin's work into a data chip that has a LED light on it. He leaves the office and meets Alan in the arcade. Where Sam tells Alan that he wants to see him at 8am because Alan is the new chairman. Sam leaves the arcade to Quorra waiting outside by his bike. He wants to show her something so they ride off. Quorra finally sees a sunrise for the first time and smiles.

[Dig]

Sam is nearly killed before Quorra (Olivia Wilde) rescues him, taking him to a distant hideout. There, he is reunited with his father Kevin. It is revealed that during The Grid’s development the so-called “isomorphic algorithms” (ISOs) manifested out with the potential to unlock mysteries in almost every field of science, philosophy and art. Clu saw the ISOs as imperfect beings and following his programming, betrayed both Kevin and Tron and seized control over The Grid. He then systematically eliminated all ISOs. It is further revealed that the portal to the real world, which takes massive amounts of energy to sustain, cannot be open indefinitely and ultimately closes: it can only be opened from the outside. Quorra reveals that Kevin can choose to “re-integrate” with Clu at any time, but that the process would destroy them both.
http://dianatan.net/tron-legacy-2010-3d-movie/

100% TRANSHUMANISM!

This is the agenda

[Dig]

CYBERNETICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOTHINGNESS...


http://www.comicbookmovie.com/fansites/BrentSprecher/news/?a=26367

Actress Olivia Wilde recently discussed how legendary teenage warrior Joan of Arc inspired her character of Quorra in director Joseph Kosinski's Tron: Legacy. Now, in a new interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Wilde once again discusses how she channeled "The Maid of Orléans" to play the helpful program, and also reveals that Buddhism had a part to play in her construction of the character.

Quorra has what in Buddhism is referred to as "the beginner's mind": a great sense of optimism and appreciation for all things. I was very much inspired by Joan of Arc; when I made the connection between Quorra and Joan of Arc, it all fell into place. Unlikely warriors. Childlike warriors. Joan of Arc seemed to have one foot in another world. She was led by a higher power, guided by compassion and selflessness. She had this rare combination of a warrior's spirit and innocence. That all made a lot of sense for Quorra. Her devotion to Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is what guides her. The addition of Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) really rocks her world and energizes her revolutionary spirit.

One person who was very helpful as we were creating [our characters] was Jeff Bridges' own Zen master, Bernie Glassman, who is probably the coolest Zen Buddhist alive. He's a social activist. His entire philosophy was so inspiring to all of us. The film raises so many interesting philosophical questions, it forces you to be constantly discussing this stuff on set. Even artificial intelligence versus humanity. That, of course, comes up in a movie like this or The Matrix or Blade Runner. I was thinking, "What does Quorra, as a form of artificial intelligence, possess that humans do not?"


Cyberphilosophy & the Nature of Personhood An Information-processing Approach to the Notion of Anatta in Buddhist Philosophy
http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/10685498.aspx
Arash Moussavi

Computational metaphysics is a broad term that should be taken to represent a wide variety of systems. The idea behind all of these systems though is more or less the same: to exist is to be computable. Most formulations of computational metaphysics start their work with discussions about the nature of the external world as a computerized reality, i.e. a physical world which is programmed into a massively parallel computing machine. In this paper, I begin my representation of computational metaphysics by relying on consciousness as the first and foremost reliable reality. Drawing upon the Cartesian radical doubt and phenomenology, I attempt to sketch an outline of a computational world-view in which our body is a cursor on the screen of our consciousness. The principles of psycho-cybernetics (information processing approach in psychology) then help me to provide a rigorous account of our interactions with this digital consciousness. This framework provides me with a novel standpoint from where I can have a fresh look at the nature of some of the well-known Buddhist doctrines particularly one of the most counterintuitive amongst them: the doctrine of anatta (Selflessness).


So the humans will not just jump off the cliff on their own as portrayed in the movie "Conan the Barbarian". But, with TRON LEGACY and CYBERNETICS this will be a foregone conclusion.

[Dig]

Oh yeah and her favorite author is Jules Vernes.

I am surprised she did not say HG Wells.

WTF!

[Dig]

http://collider.com/olivia-wilde-interview-tron-legacy/62799/

Were you involved your look for this film?

Wilde: Yes. It was a true collaboration to create Quorra. When we originally started putting together ideas for her it was really kind of up for grabs because Quorra of course was not in the original film. And Joe Kosinski was very interested in making her unique and an unusual femme, or not even femme fatale, but a female heroin in this type of film that was unlike any other. So we worked very hard to make her very intelligent and powerful but at the same time childlike and nuanced so that she would not just be there as a kind of foil for the men, not just be eye candy. I think that she could’ve very easily, I think, with a different team that character could’ve easily turned into the temptress of the ‘Tron’ world. She could’ve just been this kind of sexy femme fatale. With a suit like that it’s easy to fall into that, I think, but because Joe was adamant that she not be that and because I worked very, very hard to create someone who was not that we were able to work together to create Quorra. We were very inspired by Joan of Arc. I brought the concept of Joan of Arc in very early on, about six months before we started shooting. I said, ‘Joe, I found Quorra. I figured her out. She’s Joan of Arc,’ because Joan of Arc was this unlikely warrior, this child who could lead an army. She was kind of unnaturally powerful and seemed to have this connection to another world, to a higher power, to be guided by something greater than her and by selflessness and that was Quorra. That combination of innocence and strength is unusual in characters.

So once we found this historical reference it was really fun to flesh her out, but Joe was completely onboard with that from the beginning, and that’s when you’ve hit the jackpot with a director, when they can be as excited about that stuff as you are. I remember emailing Joe at 3AM, again, six months before we started shooting anything and saying, ‘I figured it out. I was looking at ancient Korean Buddhist warriors and I think that Quorra is one of them and they fight with swords. So Quorra needs a sword.’ And the next day it was like, ‘Great. Quorra has a sword. We can work on that.’ So that’s part of the reason that I feel so proud of the finished product of Quorra, because so much hard work went into it, so much collaboration and so much love and I feel very proud of the way that she’s come out. She’s quirky and odd and I like that. Another reason I was so adamant about making so intelligent, as well as being a warrior, is because I really wanted her to appeal to the female audience and particularly young females. I want her to be a role model for young audiences. I want girls to feel inspired by her strength and her wit and her intelligence and her compassion. [But not the fact that she is a cybernetic organism produced by $Trillions in stolen wealth from the masses only to go back and eliminate humanity as part of the transhumanist agenda? You want little girls inspired by that?] I think that it’s rare these days to have a female character in these types of movies that isn’t just there to look really sexy in a suit. Too often that’s what happens, and then you wonder who do these little girls dress up as for Halloween. When I was little we dressed as Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman represented social justice and honesty. Now I’m not sure who they dress up as. Although, this year, pretty cool, before the movie came out I saw a lot of Quorra’s walking around. So that was pretty exciting. But I really wanted Quorra to be appealing to both men and women and I feel very proud of how she’s turned out.

Can you talk about the Manga look and the talking about Joan of Arc I can see it in the hair –

Wilde: Yes. The hair was very inspired by Joan. We wanted something almost androgynous. She’s a fighter. That’s her purpose. Quorra. She’s there to protect Flynn. She needs to be able to move fast and so if she had long, flowing ‘Little Mermaid’ hair it would be very practical for her. So we wanted her to have the kind of slick non-organic look of the ‘Tron’ world, but at the same time be really practical and also good looking. We wanted it to be something flattering of course, but it was a process of going through several different wigs and designs. Again, Joe and I worked together very closely on that. As for makeup we wanted her to look different from the rest of the programs and she has a little bit more of  human look, a little bit more texture, a little more skin tone, but she still has that very white, very pale look. The eye makeup, yeah, we had an amazing team. Rosalina Da Silva is the makeup artist who designed that look and it just seemed to make sense for her. As you notice, the Sirens were the other females in the film and they had these long, incredible lashes and they’re more just kind of unbelievably sexy and rocker chic in their makeup. We wanted Quorra to be a kind of alternative to that, still quite intense but not quite as glamorous. So it was a fun process to figure all that stuff out.

You have such a strong gay following –

Wilde: That’s great.

What do you think they can connect with in this film?

Wilde: I think that they’ll connect with much of the same things that everyone else will connect with, that it’s just a great story about humanity and about compassion. The message of the film is really that we need to remind ourselves of the beauty of human connection and of nature and pull ourselves out of devices for a moment and appreciate what it is just to be human beings. So I think that message is the same for everyone of all lifestyles. But it is also a true love story and a family story. Anyone who has a relationship, strained or not, with their father will really connect to this story because in the end that’s what it’s about. It’s about a son and a father finding each other again. I find that incredibly moving and powerful. I think beyond the special FX and all the beauty of this film that’s really what is at it’s heart and core.

Watching last night I sort of got some political undertones in the film –

Wilde: Absolutely. There’s a totally anti-fascist message here.

She really believes she’s doing the right thing, having this war on imperfection. Do you get that now having seen the whole film?

Wilde: Yes, absolutely, and I saw it more than ever in the movie last night. I knew that was there in the script, but I was really excited to see, like, ‘Ooh, good. We have a little bit of a political slant.’ Maybe no one will notice but you and me, but I think the message, again, is that imperfection is beautiful, the idea of accepting flaws. The story is of a dictator who has ethnically cleansed this universe and what’s left is this desperate and miserable world. The message I think of course is that compassion, humanity and humility are important in our own lives as well as in politics. Again, that makes me think about how incredible Jeff’s performance was because to create a character like Clu who was this merciless dictator who really kind of sends chills up your spine as you think of maybe who he resembles in actual history, but I think it does have a message as well, a political message as well as one just about humanity in general. [What about the transhumanist message? It is amazing how transhumanists feel that they are saving humanity from itself!]

Since you wrapped on this your career has taken an upward swing. Can you talk about the last year or two in your life and what you’ve been able to do?

Wilde: I feel like the luckiest person on the planet. ‘Tron’ was such a departure for me. Quorra was unlike anyone I’d ever played before and I got to create someone who was unlike anything anyone had ever seen me do before, out of anything I’d ever done before. So after that I was really excited about doing that again, about departing from myself again and transforming again because beyond the physical transformation of ‘Tron’ it was really quite a transformation on many levels. So it also piqued my interest in action as well as kind of adventure films and sci-fi. That’s something that I never thought that I would do. I never saw myself quite in that genre. It was such an exciting thing to be a part of it particularly because of the people who follow those types of movies. My experience at Comi-Con has been so incredible and so exciting. So after ‘Tron’ I was excited to do ‘Cowboys and Aliens’. That’s something that’s a very different film, and again, a huge departure for myself and a total transformation and I feel very blessed to be a part of that and everything in between. It’s been a really, really incredible year and every single thing that I’ve done has been very different from the last. Now it seems to all be bubbling to the surface. I’m very proud.

How do you like being turned into merchandise? Is this your first experience with that?

Wilde: This is my first experience with that. I don’t think there’s a little ‘House’ Thirteen doll, unless I’m missing something. There should be. It’s really quite odd. I like Carrie Fisher’s take on it. She’s such an incredible writer and actress and person. I don’t know if any of you have read or seen her one woman show ‘Wishful Drinking’. She talks a lot about the merchandise that came from ‘Star Wars’ including a blow up doll. I haven’t heard of any of those being created for Quorra, but it’s a funny out of body experience to see some miniature version of yourself on a shelf. Again, I feel so proud to have created this character and so whenever I see a little Quorra or I see a Quorra costume I just feel like this was something that we created together and it’s just been a very different experience when you feel like you’ve designed a character. Every part of her look and being is something that comes from the research that went into creating her personality and her history. So I’ve enjoyed that experience so far, but the second that I see a Quorra blow up doll I won’t.

Can you talk about your physical transformation for this?

Wilde: It was challenging. I was shooting ‘House’ while I was training for ‘Tron’. So I would wake up way earlier than anyone should ever wakeup and go and do a few hours of training a day that included cross training, cardio training, martial arts training. I mean a lot of what Quorra does in the movie is mixed martial arts. So that was something that I worked very hard on. We had an incredible stunt team called 87eleven. They’ve done a lot of the big films in the last ten years and they’re just extraordinary and I really appreciated that they gave me the confidence to do a lot of my own stunts. But they said, ‘You’re going to have to train for it,’ and I was completely open to that. I completely physically transformed my body. I have never looked like that before and I will never look like that again. It was important in creating Quorra to transform myself physically because once I understood what it was like to be able to fight and to have those kinds of muscles and to have that strength it changed the way that I walked. It changed the way that I stood and I suddenly understood what it felt like to be able to protect myself which I’d never really felt before. It was the first time that I realized how important that physical training is to creating a character beyond just the aesthetics.

Were you relieved to stop training?

Wilde: Oh, yes. It was such a relief. I couldn’t wait. The entire time we were shooting ‘Tron’ I was planning my meal on the wrap day.

What was it?

Wilde: Well, I’m married to an Italian and so it was all about the pasta and the wine.  I couldn’t wait. I would just dream about my giant plate of pasta while we were on set. On these big films you’re so lucky to have the best trainers in the world teaching you how to fight. Everyone in their department is the best of the best. So it’s such an honor to have them focused on creating something for you to maximize the impact of your character. So you have to bring your focus and your energy and never complain because it’s such an honor to have these people working on you to turn you into a little warrior. It was quite an honor.

The costume is so sculpted to you, does it pose problems as the training goes on and as you get leaner?

Wilde: Well, the thing about these costumes is that they don’t stretch. So certainly once we had our last fitting it was like, ‘Okay. This is the size of the costume now.’ Just so you know it can’t change. It’s not like we can do a little adjustment on this one. Each suit was a sculpture. It was such an intricate piece of craftsmanship. So you couldn’t say, ‘Oh, they’ll get me another one. Maybe they can let this out a little at the seams.’ So there was a certain dedication to the suit, a relationship that we had to have with our suits, both good and bad. But of course over four months of working you fluctuate physically and of course you train and train and train for a movie and then once you actually start doing the movie you don’t have time to train. Luckily I survived and was able to stay in that suit just  until the last second.

When you were a teenager did you prefer science fiction stories over romantic stories?

Wilde: I’ve always been a fan of science fiction. My family, we all used to watch ‘Star Trek’ together which is kind of a nerdy family activity. But as far as reading science fiction I think that Jules Verne was probably the extent of my science fiction literature in my library.

[Amos]

can't wait to see it

[Dig]

Philosophy of mind
http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/Philosophy_of_mind

 
A Phrenological mapping of the brain. Phrenology was among the first attempts to correlate mental functions with specific parts of the brain.

Philosophy of mind is the philosophical study of the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, and consciousness, and of the nature of their relationship with the physical body: the so-called "mind–body problem". Kim, J., "Problems in the Philosophy of Mind". Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Ted Honderich (ed.) Oxford:Oxford University Press. 1995.

Dualism and monism are two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind–body problem. Dualism asserts the separate existence of mind and body, and can be traced back to Plato ed. E.A. Duke, W.F. Hicken, W.S.M. Nicoll, D.B. Robinson and J.C.G. Strachan, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. and Aristotle Aristotle (c. mid 4th century BC) On the Soul (De anima), ed. R.D. Hicks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907; Books II-III trans. D.W. Hamlyn, Clarendon Aristotle Series, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. in the West and the sankhya school of Hindu philosophy in the East and was most precisely formulated in modern terms by René Descartes in the 17th century. Monism, first proposed in the West by Parmenides and in modern times by Baruch Spinoza, maintains that there is only one substance; in the East, rough parallels might be the Hindu concept of Brahman or the Tao of Lao Tzu. Spinoza, Baruch (1670) Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (A Theologico-Political Treatise).

Substance dualists argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, while property dualists maintain that the mind is a jumble of independent properties that emerge from the brain and cannot be reduced to it, but that it is not a distinct substance.Hart, W.D. (1996) "Dualism", in Samuel Guttenplan (org) A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell, Oxford, 265-7. Physicalists argue that only the brain actually exists, idealists maintain that the mind is all that actually exists, and neutral monists adhere to the position that there is some other, neutral substance and that both matter and mind are properties of this unknown substance.Kim, J., "Mind-Body Problem", Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Ted Honderich (ed.). Oxford:Oxford University Press. 1995. The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of materialism (or physicalism), including behaviorism, the identity theory, and functionalism.

Most modern philosophers of mind adopt either a reductive or non-reductive physicalist position, maintaining in their different ways that only the brain exists. Reductivists assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be explained by neuroscientific accounts of brain processes and states. Non-reductionists argue that though the brain is all there is, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental descriptions and explanations are indispensable and cannot be reduced to the language and lower-level explanations of physical science. Putnam, Hilary (1967). "Psychological Predicates", in W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill, eds., Art, Mind and Religion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Continued neuroscientific progress has helped to clarify some of these issues, but they are far from having been resolved, and modern philosophers of mind continue to ask, "How can the subjective qualities and the intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties be explained in naturalistic terms?"

The mind–body problem is essentially the problem of explaining the relationship between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or processes. Our perceptual experiences depend on stimuli which arrive at our various sensory organs from the external world and that these stimuli cause changes in the states of our brain, ultimately causing us to feel a sensation which may be pleasant or unpleasant. Someone's desire for a slice of pizza will tend to cause that person to move their body in a certain manner in a certain direction in an effort to obtain what they want. But how is it possible that conscious experiences can arise out of an inert lump of gray matter endowed with electrochemical properties? How does someone's desire cause that individual's neurons to fire and his muscles to contract in exactly the right manner? These are some of the essential puzzles that have confronted philosophers of mind at least from the time of René Descartes.

Dualist solutions to the mind–body problem
Dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.

One of the earliest known formulations of mind-body dualism existed in the eastern sankhya school of Hindu philosophy (c. 650 BCE) which divided the world into purusha (mind/spirit) and prakrti (material substance). In the Western philosophical tradition, we first encounter similar ideas with the writings of Plato and Aristotle, who maintained, for different reasons, that man's "intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, his physical body.

However, the best-known version of dualism is due to René Descartes (1641), and holds that the mind is a non-physical substance. Descartes was the first to clearly identify the mind with consciousness and self-awareness and to distinguish this from the brain, which was the seat of intelligence. Hence, he was the first to formulate the mind–body problem in the form in which it still exists today.

Arguments for dualism
The main argument in favour of dualism is simply that it appeals to the common-sense intuition of the vast majority of non-philosophically-trained people. If asked what the mind is, the average person will usually respond by identifying it with their self, their personality, their soul, or some other such entity, and they will almost certainly deny that the mind simply is the brain or vice-versa, finding the idea that there is just one ontological entity at play to be too mechanistic or simply unintelligible. The majority of modern philosophers of mind reject dualism, suggesting that these intuitions, like many others, are probably misleading. We should use our critical faculties, as well as empirical evidence from the sciences, to examine these assumptions and determine if there is any real basis to them.

Another very important, more modern, argument in favor of dualism consists in the idea that the mental and the physical seem to have quite different and perhaps irreconcilable properties. Jackson, F. (1982) “[Epiphenomenal Qualia].” Reprinted in Chalmers, David ed. :2002. Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Oxford University Press. Mental events have a certain subjective quality to them, whereas physical events obviously do not. For example, what does a burned finger feel like? What does blue sky look like? What does nice music sound like? Philosophers of mind call the subjective aspects of mental events qualia (or raw feels). There is something that it is like to feel pain, to see a familiar shade of blue, and so on; there are qualia involved in these mental events. And the claim is that qualia seem particularly difficult to reduce to anything physical. .

Interaction dualism
 
Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals (1648)

Interactionist dualism, or simply interactionism, is the particular form of dualism first espoused by Descartes in the Meditations. In the 20th century, its major defenders have been Karl Popper and John Carew Eccles. It is the view that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, causally interact with physical states. Descartes' famous argument for this position can be summarized as follows: Fred has a clear and distinct idea of his mind as a thinking thing which has no spatial extension (i.e., it cannot be measured in terms of length, weight, height, and so on) and he also has a clear and distinct idea of his body as something that is spatially extended, subject to quantification and not able to think. It follows that mind and body are not identical because they have radically different properties, according to Descartes.

At the same time, however, it is clear that Fred's mental states (desires, beliefs, etc.) have causal effects on his body and vice-versa: a child touches a hot stove (physical event) which causes pain (mental event) and makes him yell (physical event) which provokes a sense of fear and protectiveness in the mother (mental event) and so on.

Descartes' argument obviously depends on the crucial premise that what Fred believes to be "clear and distinct" ideas in his mind are necessarily true. Most modern philosophers doubt the validity of such an assumption, since it has been shown in modern times by Freud (a third-person psychologically-trained observer can understand a person's unconscious motivations better than she does), by Duhem (a third-person philosopher of science can know a person's methods of discovery better than she does), by Malinowski (an anthropologist can know a person's customs and habits better than he does), and by theorists of perception (experiments can make one see things that are not there and scientists can describe a person's perceptions better than he can), that such an idea of privileged and perfect access to one's own ideas is dubious at best.

Other forms of dualism
 
Three varieties of dualism. The arrows indicate the direction of the causal interactions. Property dualism is not shown.

Other important forms of dualism which arose as reactions to, or attempts to salvage, the Cartesian version are:

1) Psycho-physical parallelism, or simply parallelism, is the view that mind and body, while having distinct ontological statuses, do not causally influence one another, but run along parallel paths (mind events causally interact with mind events and brain events causally interact with brain events) and only seem to influence each other. Robinson, Howard, "Dualism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/dualism/This view was most prominently defended by Gottfried Leibniz. Although Leibniz was actually an ontological monist who believed that only one fundamental substance, monads, exists in the universe and everything else is reducible to it, he nonetheless maintained that there was an important distinction between "the mental" and "the physical" in terms of causation. He held that God had arranged things in advance so that minds and bodies would be in harmony with each other. This is known as the doctrine of pre-established harmony.

 
Portrait of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by Bernhard Christoph Francke (circa 1700)

2) Occasionalism is the view espoused by Nicholas Malebranche which asserts that all supposedly causal relations between physical events or between physical and mental events are not really causal at all. While body and mind are still different substances on this view, causes (whether mental or physical) are related to their effects by an act of God's intervention on each specific occasion. Schmaltz, Tad, "Nicolas Malebranche", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=

3) Epiphenomenalism is a doctrine first formulated by Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley, T. H. (1874) "On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History", The Fortnightly Review, n.s.16:555-580. Reprinted in Method and Results: Essays by Thomas H. Huxley (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898). Fundamentally, it consists in the view that mental phenomena are causally inefficacious. Physical events can cause other physical events and physical events can cause mental events, but mental events cannot cause anything, since they are just causally inert by-products (i.e. epiphenomena) of the physical world. The view has been defended most strongly in recent times by Frank Jackson.

4) Property dualism asserts that when matter is organized in the appropriate way (i.e. in the way that living human bodies are organized), mental properties emerge. Hence, it is a sub-branch of emergent materialism. These emergent properties have an independent ontological status and cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the physical substrate from which they emerge. This position is espoused by David Chalmers and has undergone something of a renaissance in recent years.

Monist solutions to the mind–body problem
 
Baruch (de) Spinoza

In contrast to dualism, monism states that there is only one fundamental substance. Today the most common form of monism in Western philosophy are physicalistic. Physicalistic monism asserts that the only existing substance is physical, in some sense of that term to be clarified by our best science. Stoljar, Daniel, "Physicalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2005/entries/physicalism/ However, a variety of formulations are possible (see below). Another form of monism is that which states that the only existing substance is mental. Such idealistic monism is currently somewhat uncommon in the West.

Phenomenalism, the theory that all that exists are the representations (or sense data) of external objects in our minds and not the objects themselves, was adopted by Bertrand Russell and many of the logical positivists during the early 20th century. Russell, Bertrand (1918) Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, London: Longmans, Green. It lasted for only a very brief period of time. A third possibility is to accept the existence of a basic substance which is neither physical nor mental. The mental and physical would both be properties of this neutral substance. Such a position was adopted by Baruch Spinoza and popularized by Ernst Mach Mach, E. (1886) Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen. Fifth edition translated as The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of Physical to the Psychical, New York: Dover. 1959 in the 19th century. This neutral monism, as it is called, resembles property dualism. In the following discussion, only physicalistic monisms are considered. (See also: idealism.)

Behaviorism

Behaviorism dominated philosophy of mind for much of the 20th century, especially the first half. In psychology, behaviorism developed as a reaction to the inadequacies of introspectionism. Introspective reports on one's own interior mental life are not subject to careful examination for accuracy and are not generalizable. Without generalizability and the possibility of third-person examination, the behaviorists argued, science is simply not possible. The way out for psychology was to eliminate the idea of an interior mental life (and hence an ontologically independent mind) altogether and focus instead on the description of observable behavior.

Parallel to these developments in psychology, a philosophical behaviorism (sometimes called logical behaviorism) was developed. This is characterized by a strong verificationism, which generally considers unverifiable statements about interior mental life senseless. But what are mental states if they are not interior states on which one can make introspective reports? The answer of the behaviorist is that mental states do not exist but are actually just descriptions of behavior and/or dispositions to behave made by external third parties in order to explain and predict others' behavior.

Philosophical behaviorism is considered by most modern philosophers of mind to be outdated. Apart from other problems, behaviorism implausibly maintains, for example, that someone is talking about behavior if she reports that she has a wracking headache.

Identity theory

Type physicalism (or type-identity theory) was developed by John Smart and Ullin Place as a direct reaction to the failure of behaviorism. These philosophers reasoned that, if mental states are something material, but not behavior, then mental states are probably identical to internal states of the brain. In very simplified terms: a mental state M is nothing other than brain state B. The mental state "desire for a cup of coffee" would thus be nothing more than the "firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions".
 
The classic Identity theory and Anomalous Monism in contrast. For the Identity theory, every token instantiation of a single mental type corresponds (as indicated by the arrows) to a physical token of a single physical type. For anomalous monism, the token-token correspondences can fall outside of the type-type correspondences. The result is token identity.

Despite a certain initial plausibility, the identity theory faces at least one heavy challenge in the form of the thesis of multiple realizability, which was first formulated by Hilary Putnam. It seems clear that not only humans, but also amphibians, for example, can experience pain. On the other hand, it seems very improbable that all of these diverse organisms with the same pain are in the same identical brain state. If this is not the case however, then pain cannot be identical to a certain brain state. Thus the identity theory is empirically unfounded.

But even if this is the case, it does not follow that identity theories of all types must be abandoned. According to token identity theories, the fact that a certain brain state is connected with only one "mental" state of a person does not have to mean that there is an absolute correlation between types of mental states and types of brain state. The type-token distinction can be illustrated by a simple example: the word "green" contains four types of letters (g, r,e, n) with two tokens (occurrences) of the letter e along with one each of the others. The idea of token identity is that only particular occurrences of mental events are identical with particular occurrences or tokenings of physical events. Smart, J.J.C, "Idenity Theory", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL= Anomalous monism (see below) and most other non-reductive physicalisms are token-identity theories. Despite the problems faced by the type identity theory, however, there is a renewed interest in it these days, primarily due to the influence of Jaegwon Kim.

Functionalism

Functionalism was formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor as a reaction to the inadequacies of the identity theory. Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of an empirical computational theory of the mind.Block, Ned. "What is functionalism" in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, 2 vols. Vol 1. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1980). At about the same time or slightly after, D.M. Armstrong and David Kellogg Lewis formulated a version of functionalism which analyzed the mental concepts of folk psychology in terms of functional roles. Armstrong, D., 1968, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, Routledge. Finally, Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use led to a version of functionalism as a theory of meaning, further developed by Wilfrid Sellars and Gilbert Harman.

What all these different varieties of functionalism share in common is the thesis that mental states are essentially characterized by their causal relations with other mental states and with sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. That is, functionalism quantifies over, or abstracts away from, the details of the physical implementation of a mental state by characterizing it in terms of non-mental functional properties. For example, a kidney is characterized scientifically by its functional role in filtering blood and maintaining certain chemical balances. From this point of view, it does not really matter whether the kidney be made up of organic tissue, plastic nanotubes or silicon chips: it is the role that it plays and its relations to other organs that define it as a kidney.

Nonreductive physicalism
Many philosophers hold firmly to two essential convictions with regard to mind–body relations:

1. Physicalism is true and mental states must be physical states.

2. All reductionist proposals are unsatisfactory: mental states cannot be reduced to behavior, brain states or functional states.

Hence, the question arises whether there can still be a non-reductive physicalism. Donald Davidson's anomalous monism is an attempt to formulate such a physicalism.

The idea is often formulated in terms of the thesis of supervenience: mental states supervene on physical states, but are not reducible to them. "Supervenience" therefore describes a functional dependence: there can be no change in the mental without some change in the physical. Stanton, W.L. (1983) "Supervenience and Psychological Law in Anomalous Monism", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64: 72-9

Eliminative materialism

If one is a materialist but believes that all reductive efforts have failed and that a non-reductive materialism is incoherent, then one can adopt a final, more radical position: eliminative materialism. Eliminative materialists maintain that mental states are fictitious entities introduced by everyday "folk psychology". Should "folk psychology", which eliminativists view as a quasi-scientific theory, be proven wrong in the course of scientific development, then we must also abolish all of the entities postulated by it.

Eliminativists such as Patricia and Paul Churchland often invoke the fate of other, erroneous popular theories and ontologies which have arisen in the course of history. For example, the belief in witchcraft as a cause of people's problems turned out to be wrong and the consequence is that most people no longer believe in the existence of witches. Witchcraft is not explained in terms of some other phenomenon, but rather eliminated from the discourse.

Linguistic criticism of the mind–body problem
Each attempt to answer the mind–body problem encounters substantial problems. Some philosophers argue that this is because there is an underlying conceptual confusion. Such philosophers reject the mind–body problem as an illusory problem. Such a position is represented in analytic philosophy these days, for the most part, by the followers of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteinian tradition of linguistic criticism. The exponents of this position explain that it is an error to ask how mental and biological states fit together. Rather it should simply be accepted that humans can be described in different ways - for instance, in a mental and in a biological vocabulary. Illusory problems arise if one tries to describe the one in terms of the other's vocabulary or if the mental vocabulary is used in the wrong contexts. This is the case for instance, if one searches for mental states of the brain. The brain is simply the wrong context for the use of mental vocabulary - the search for mental states of the brain is therefore a category error or a pure conceptual confusion.

Today, such a position is often adopted by interpreters of Wittgenstein such as Peter Hacker. However, Hilary Putnam, the inventor of functionalism, has also adopted the position that the mind–body problem is an illusory problem which should be dissolved according to the manner of Wittgenstein.

Naturalism and its problems
The thesis of physicalism is that the mind is part of the material (or physical) world. Such a position faces the fundamental problem that the mind has certain properties that no material thing possesses. Physicalism must therefore explain how it is possible that these properties can emerge from a material thing nevertheless. The project of providing such an explanation is often referred to as the "naturalization of the mental." What are the crucial problems that this project must attempt to resolve? The most well-known are probably the following two:

Qualia

Many mental states have the property of being experienced subjectively in different ways by different individuals. For example, it is obviously characteristic of the mental state of pain that it hurts. Moreover, your sensation of pain may not be identical with mine, since we have no way of measuring how much something hurts or describing exactly how it feels to hurt. Where does such an experience (quale) come from? Nothing indicates that a neural or functional state can be accompanied by such a pain experience. Often the point is formulated as follows: the existence of cerebral events, in and of themselves, cannot explain why they are accompanied by these corresponding qualitative experiences. Why do many cerebral processes occur with an accompanying experiential aspect in consciousness? It seems impossible to explain.

Yet it also seems to many that science will eventually have to explain such experiences. This follows from the logic of reductive explanations. If I try to explain a phenomenon reductively (e.g., water), I also have to explain why the phenomenon has all of the properties that it has (e.g., fluidity, transparency). In the case of mental states, this means that there needs to be an explanation of why they have the property of being experienced in a certain way.

Intentionality
 
John Searle - one of the most influential philosophers of mind, proponent of biological naturalism (Berkeley 2002)

Intentionality is the capacity of mental states to be directed towards (about) or be in relation with something in the external world. This property of mental states entails that they have contents and semantic referents and can therefore be assigned truth values. When one tries to reduce these states to natural processes there arises a problem: natural processes are not true or false, they simply happen. It would not make any sense to say that a natural process is true or false. But mental ideas or judgments are true or false, so how then can mental states (ideas or judgments) be natural processes? The possibility of assigning semantic value to ideas must mean that such ideas are about facts. Thus, for example, the idea that Herodotus was a historian refers to Herodotus and to the fact that he was an historian. If the fact is true, then the idea is true; otherwise, it is false. But where does this relation come from? In the brain, there are only electrochemical processes and these seem not to have anything to do with Herodotus.

Philosophy of mind and science
Humans are corporeal beings and, as such, they are subject to examination and description by the natural sciences. Since mental processes are not independent of bodily processes, the descriptions that the natural sciences furnish of human beings play an important role in the philosophy of mind.There are many scientific disciplines that study processes related to the mental. The list of such sciences includes: biology, computer science, cognitive science, cybernetics, linguistics, medicine, pharmacology, psychology, etc.. Pinker, S. (1997) How the Mind Works. tr. It: Come Funziona la Mente. Milan:Mondadori, 2000. ISBN 8804499087

Neurobiology
The theoretical background of biology, as is the case with modern natural sciences in general, is fundamentally materialistic. The objects of study are, in the first place, physical processes, which are considered to be the foundations of mental activity and behavior. Bear, M. F. et. al. Eds. (1995). Neuroscience: Exploring The Brain. Baltimore, Maryland, Williams and Wilkins. ISBN 0781739446 The increasing success of biology in the explanation of mental phenomena can be seen by the absence of any empirical refutation of its fundamental presupposition: "there can be no change in the mental states of a person without a change in brain states."

Within the field of neurobiology, there are many subdisciplines which are concerned with the relations between mental and physical states and processes:
Sensory neurophysiology investigates the relation between the processes of perception and stimulation.
Cognitive neuroscience studies the correlations between mental processes and neural processes.
Neuropsychology describes the dependence of mental faculties on specific anatomical regions of the brain.
Lastly, evolutionary biology studies the origins and development of the human nervous system and, in as much as this is the basis of the mind, also describes the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of mental phenomena beginning from their most primitive stages.
 
Since the 1980's, sophisticated neuroimaging procedures, such as fMRI (above), have furnished increasing knowledge about the workings of the human brain, shedding light on ancient philosophical problems.

The methodological breakthroughs of the neurosciences, in particular the introduction of high-tech neuroimaging procedures, has propelled scientists toward the elaboration of increasingly ambitious research programs: one of the main goals is to describe and comprehend the neural processes which correspond to mental functions (see: neural correlate). A very small number of neurobiologists, such as Emil du Bois-Reymond and John Eccles have denied the possibility of a "reduction" of mental phenomena to cerebral processes, partly for religious reasons. However, the contemporary neurobiologist and philosopher Gerhard Roth continues to defend a form of "non-reductive materialism."

Computer science
Computer science concerns itself with the automatic processing of information (or at least with physical systems of symbols to which information is assigned) by means of such things as computers. From the beginning, computer programmers have been able to develop programs which permit computers to carry out tasks for which organic beings need a mind. A simple example is multiplication. But it is clear that computers do not use a mind to multiply. Could they, someday, come to have what we call a mind? This question has been propelled into the forefront of much philosophical debate because of investigations in the field of artificial intelligence ("AI").

Within AI, it is common to distinguish between a modest research program and a more ambitious one: this distinction was coined by John Searle in terms of a weak AI and a strong AI. The exclusive objective of "weak AI", according to Searle, is the successful simulation of mental states, with no attempt to make computers become conscious or aware, etc. The objective of strong AI, on the contrary, is a computer with consciousness similar to that of human beings. The program of strong AI goes back to one of the pioneers of computation Alan Turing. As an answer to the question "Can computers think?", he formulated the famous Turing test. Turing believed that a computer could be said to "think" when, if placed in a room by itself next to another room which contained a human being and with the same questions being asked of both the computer and the human being by a third party human being, the computer's responses turned out be to indistinguishable from those of the human. The Turing test has received many criticisms, among which the most famous is probably the Chinese room thought experiment formulated by Searle.

The question about the possible sensitivity (qualia) of computers or robots still remains open. However, at this point in time, most computer scientists are not very optimistic. Some computer scientists believe that the specialty of AI can still make new contributions to the resolution of the mind–body problem. They suggest that based on the reciprocal influences between software and hardware that takes place in all computers, it is possible that someday theories can be discovered that help us to understand the reciprocal influences between the human mind and the brain.

Psychology
Psychology is the science that investigates mental states directly. It uses generally empirical methods to investigate concrete mental states like joy, fear or obsessions. Psychology investigates the laws that bind these mental states to each other or with inputs and outputs to the human organism.

An example of this is the psychology of perception. Scientists working in this field have discovered general principles of the perception of forms. A law of the psychology of forms says that objects that move in the same direction are perceived as related to each other. This law describes a relation between visual input and mental perceptual states. However, it does not suggest anything about the nature of perceptual states. The laws discovered by psychology are compatible with all the answers to the mind–body problem already described.

Philosophy of mind in the continental tradition
Most of the discussion in this article has focused on the predominant school (or style) of philosophy in modern Western culture, usually called analytic philosophy (sometimes also inaccurately described as Anglo-American philosophy). Other schools of thought exist, however, which are sometimes (also misleadingly) subsumed under the broad label of continental philosophy. In any case, the various schools that fall under this label (phenomenology, existentialism, etc.) tend to differ from the analytic school in that they focus less on language and logical analysis and more on directly understanding human existence and experience. With reference specifically to the discussion of the mind, this tends to translate into attempts to grasp the concepts of thought and perceptual experience in some direct sense that does not involve the analysis of linguistic forms.

In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel discusses three distinct types of mind: the subjective mind, the mind of an individual; the objective mind, the mind of society and of the State; and the Absolute mind, a unity of all concepts. See also Hegel's Philosophy of Mind from his Encyclopedia., translated by A.V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) ISBN 0198245971.

In modern times, the two main schools that have developed in response or opposition to this Hegelian tradition are Phenomenology and Existentialism. Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl, focuses on the contents of the human mind (see noema) and how phenomenological processes shape our experiences. trans.: Giovanni Piana. Milan: EST. ISBN 88-428-0949-7 Existentialism, a school of thought led by Jean-Paul Sartre, focuses on the content of experiences and how the mind deals with such experiences. Flynn, Thomas, "Jean-Paul Sartre", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/entries/sartre/

An important, though not very well known, example of a philosopher of mind and cognitive scientist who tries to synthesize ideas from both traditions is Ron McClamrock. Borrowing from Herbert Simon and also influenced by the ideas of existential phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, McClamrock suggests that man's condition of being-in-the-world ("Dasein", "In-der-welt-sein") makes it impossible for him to understand himself by abstracting away from it and examining it as if it were a detached experimental object of which he himself is not an integral part.

Consequences of philosophy of mind
There are countless subjects that are affected by the ideas developed in the philosophy of mind. Clear examples of this are the nature of death and its definitive character, the nature of emotion, of perception and of memory. Questions about what a person is and what his or her identity consists of also have much to do with the philosophy of mind. There are two subjects that, in connection with the philosophy of the mind, have aroused special attention: free will and the self.
Free will

In the context of the philosophy of mind, the question about the freedom of the will takes on a renewed intensity. This is certainly the case, at least, for materialistic determinists.According to this position, natural laws completely determine the course of the material world. Mental states, and therefore the will as well, would be material states which means human behavior and decisions would be completely determined by natural laws. Some take this argumentation a step further: people cannot determine by themselves what they want and what they do. Consequently, they are not free.

 
Immanuel Kant rejected determinism and defended free will

This argumentation is rejected, on the one hand, by the compatibilists. Those who adopt this position suggest that the question "Are we free?" can only be answered once we have determined what the term "free" means. The opposite of "free" is not "caused" but "compelled" or "coerced". It is not appropriate to identify freedom with indetermination. A free act is one where the agent could have done otherwise if she had chosen otherwise. In this sense a person can be free even though determinism is true.

The most important compatibilist in the history of the philosophy was David Hume. Russell, Paul, Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility Oxford University Press: New York & Oxford, 1995. Nowadays, this position is defended, for example, by Daniel Dennett.

On the other hand, there are also many incompatibilists who reject the argument because they believe that the will is free in a stronger sense called originationism. These philosophers affirm that the course of the world is not completely determined by natural laws: the will at least does not have to be and, therefore, it is potentially free. The most prominent incompatibilist in the history of philosophy was Immanuel Kant. translation: F. Max Muller, Dolphin Books, Doubleday & Co. Garden City, New York. 1961. Critics of this position accuse the incompatibilists of using an incoherent concept of freedom. They argue as follows: if our will is not determined by anything, then we desire what we desire by pure chance. And if what we desire is purely accidental, we are not free. So if our will is not determined by anything, we are not free.
The self
The philosophy of mind also has important consequences for the concept of self. If by "self" or "I" one refers to an essential, immutable nucleus of the person, most modern philosophers of mind will affirm that no such thing exists. The idea of a self as an immutable essential nucleus derives from the Christian idea of an immaterial soul. Such an idea is unacceptable to most contemporary philosophers, due to their physicalistic orientations, and due to a general acceptence among philosophers of the scepticism of the concept of 'self' by David Hume, who could never catch himself doing, thinking or feeling anything. However, in the light of empirical results from developmental psychology, developmental biology and the neurosciences, the idea of an essential inconstant, material nucleus - an integrated representational system distributed over changing patterns of synaptic connections - seems reasonable. In view of this problem, some philosophers affirm that we should abandon the idea of a self.

For example, Thomas Metzinger and Susan Blackmore both practice meditation, claiming that this gives us reliable conscious experience of selflessness. But this is a minority position. More common is the view that we should redefine the concept: by "self" we would not be referring to some immutable and essential nucleus, but to something that is in permanent change. A well-known defender of this position is Daniel Dennett.

[Dig]

Watch the documentary THE AGE OF TRANSITIONS to see where this is heading and why Newt Gingrich probably loves this movie.

[Dig]

Watch the documentary THE AGE OF TRANSITIONS to see where this is heading and why Newt Gingrich probably loves this movie.

The Age of Transitions
http://holtz.org/Library/Social%20Science/The%20Age%20of%20Transitions%20by%20Newt%20Gingrich.htm
Newt Gingrich
www.newt.org
4.4.00

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. We are already experiencing the dramatic changes brought on by computers, communications, and the Internet. The combination of science and technology with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists has created a momentum of change which is extraordinary. Yet these changes will be overshadowed in the next twenty years by an emerging even bigger set of changes based on a combination of biology, information and nanoscience (the science of objects at a billionth of a meter, from one to four hundred atoms in size). This new and as yet unappreciated wave of change will combine with the already remarkable pattern of change brought on by computers, communication and the Internet to create a continuing series of new breakthroughs with new goods and services. We will be constantly in transition as each new idea is succeeded by an even better one. This will be an Age of Transitions and it will last for at least a half-century.

2. In the age of transitions, the way we acquire goods and services are rapidly evolving in the private sector and in our personal lives. Government and bureaucracy are changing at a dramatically slower rate and the gap between the potential goods and services, productivity, efficiencies and conveniences being created, and the traditional behaviors of government and bureaucracies are getting wider.

3. The language of politics and government is increasingly isolated from the language of everyday life. Political elites increasingly speak a language that is a separate dialect from the words people use to describe their daily lives and their daily concerns. The result in part is that the American people increasingly tune out politics.

4. Eventually a political movement will develop a program of change for government, which will provide greater goods and services at lower and lower costs. When that movement can explain its new solutions in the language of everyday life it will gain a decisive majority as people opt for better lives through better solutions by bringing government into conformity with the entrepreneurial systems they are experiencing in the private sector.

5. Understanding the Age of Transitions, applying its principles to create better solutions for delivery of government goods and services, and developing and communicating a program in the language of everyday life - so people hear it and believe it despite the clutter and distractions of the traditional language of politics and government - is a very complex process and requires thought and planning.
DRAFT COPY - DRAFT COPY - DRAFT COPY - DRAFT COPY -  

Newt Gingrich
www.newt.org
4.4.00

Introduction

We are living through two tremendous patterns of scientific-technological change. Each would be powerful in itself. Combined, the two patterns guarantee that we will be in constant transitions as one breakthrough or innovation follows another.  Those who study, understand and invest in these patterns will live dramatically better than those who ignore them. Nations that focus their systems of learning, health, economic growth and national security on these changes will have healthier, more knowledgeable people in more productive jobs creating greater wealth and prosperity and living in greater safety through more modern, more powerful intelligence and defense capabilities. Those countries that ignore these patterns of change will fall further behind and find themselves weaker, poorer, and more vulnerable than their wiser, more change oriented neighbors. The United States will have to continue to invest in new science and to adopt our systems of health, learning and national security to these patterns of change if we want to continue to lead the world in prosperity, quality of life and military-intelligence capabilities. At a minimum we need to double the federal research budget at all levels, reform science and math learning decisively and modernize our system of health and learning and government administration. Periods of transition are periods of dramatic cost crashes. We should be able to use the new patterns of change to produce greater health and greater learning at lower cost. Government administration can be more effective at lower cost. Our national security will experience similar crashes in cost. This combination of better outcomes at lower cost will not be produced by liberal or conservative ideology. It will be produced by the systematic study of the new patterns and the use of new innovations and new technologies to produce better results more cheaply.
The Communications and Computer Revolution

The revolution that has been dubbed the Information Age began around 1965. The earliest recognitions of this vast change were Kenneth Boulding's The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (1964), Peter Drucker's The Age of Discontinuities (1969), Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Future Shock (1970), and their far more useful and analytical The Third Wave (1980). These commentators all understood that the industrial era was being replaced by some new, profound change. As Drucker's title, The Age of Discontinuities indicates, they were not sure what would come out the other end but they were sure it would not simply be a more powerful industrial era.  Computing is a key element in this revolution. The numbers are stunning. According to Professor James Meindl, the chairman of the Georgia Tech Microelectronics Department, the first computer built with a transistor was "Tradic" in 1955, and it had only 800 transistors. The Pentium II chip has 7,500,000 transistors. In the next year or so an experimental chip will be built with one billion transistors. Within fifteen to twenty years there will be a chip with one trillion transistors. However you graph that scale of change, it is enormous and its implications are huge. It is fair to estimate that we are only one-fifth of the way into developing the computer revolution.  Yet focusing only on computer power understates the scale of change. Communications capabilities are going to continue to expand dramatically and that may have as big an impact as computing power. Today most homes get Internet access at 28,000 to 56,000 bits per second. Within a few years a combination of new technologies for compressing information (allowing you to get more done in a given capacity) with bigger capacity (fiber optic and cable) and entirely new approaches (such as satellite direct broadcast for the Internet) may move household access up to at least six million bits per second, and some believe we may reach the 110 million bits needed for uncompressed motion pictures. Combined with the development of high definition television and virtual systems, an amazing range of opportunities will open up. This may be expanded even further by the continuing development of the cell phone into a universal utility with voice, Internet, credit card, and television applications all in one portable handheld phone.

The S curve of Technological Change

The communications and computer revolution and the earlier industrial revolution are both examples of the concept of an "S" curve. The s curve depicts the evolution of technological change. Science and technology begin to accelerate slowly and then knowledge and experience accumulates they grow much more rapidly. Finally, once the field has matured the rate of change levels off. The resulting pattern look like an S. These large "S" curves are made up of thousands of smaller breakthroughs that create many small "S" curves of technological growth.

The two "S" curves of the Age of Transitions

We are starting to live through two patterns of change. The first is the enormous computer and communications revolution described above. We are at most only one-fifth of the way through it. The second, only now beginning to rise, is the combination of the nano world, biology, and information. These two "s" curves will overlap. It is the overlapping period we are just beginning to enter and it is that period which I believe will be an Age of Transitions.
The Age of Transitions

The Nano World, biology, and information as the next wave of change

Focusing on computers and communications is only the first step toward understanding the Age of Transitions. While we are still in the early stages of the computer-communications pattern of change, we are already beginning to see a new, even more powerful pattern of change that will be built on a synergistic interaction between three different areas: the nano world, biology, and information.  The nano world may be the most powerful new areas of understanding. "Nano" is the space between one atom and about 400 atoms. It is the space in which quantum behavior begins to replace the Newtonian physics you and I are used to. The world "nano" means one-billionth and is usually used in reference to a nanosecond (one billionth of a second) or a nanometer (one billionth of a meter). In this world of atoms and molecules, new tools and new techniques are enabling scientists to create entirely new approaches to manufacturing and to health. Nanotechnology "grows" materials by adding the right atoms and molecules. Nanotechnology is probably twenty years away but it may be at least as powerful as space or computing in its implications for new tools and new capabilities. The nano world also includes a series of material technology breakthroughs that will continue to change how we build things, how much they weigh, and how much stress and punishment they can take. For example, it may be possible to grow carbon storage tubes so small that hydrogen could be safely stored without refrigeration, thus enabling the creation of a hydrogen fuel cell technology with dramatic implications for the economy and the environment. These new materials may make possible a one-hour flight from New York to Tokyo, an ultra lightweight car, and a host of other possibilities. Imagine a carbon tube 100 times as strong as steel and only 46th as heavy. It has already been grown in the NASA Ames Laboratory. This approach to manufacturing will save energy, conserve our raw materials, eliminate waste products and produce a dramatically healthier environment. The implications for the advancement of environmentalism and the irrelevancy of oil prices alone are impressive. The nano world makes possible the ability to grow molecular helpers (not really tools because they may be organic and be grown rather than built (what?) We may be able to develop anti-cancer molecules that penetrate your cells without damage and hunt cancer at its earliest development. Imagine drinking with your normal orange juice 3,000,000 molecular rotor rooters to clean out your arteries without an operation. The nano world opens up our understanding of biology and biology teaches us about the nano world because virtually all biological activities are at a molecular level. Thus our growing capabilities in nano tools will expand dramatically our understanding of biology. Our growing knowledge about molecular biology will expand our understanding of the nano world. Beyond the implications of the nano world for biology, in the next decade the Human Genome project will teach us more about humans than our total knowledge to this point. The development of new technologies (largely a function of physics and mathematics) will increase our understanding of the human brain in ways previously unimaginable. From Alzheimer's to Parkinson's to Schizophrenia, there will be virtually no aspect of our understanding of the human brain and human nervous system which can not be transformed in the next two decades. We are on the verge of creating intelligent synthetic environments that will revolutionize both how the medical institutions educate and plan. It will be possible to practice a complicated, dangerous operation many times in a synthetic world with feel, smell, appearance and sound, all precisely the same as the real operation. The flight and combat simulators of today are stunningly better than the sand tables and paper targets of forty years ago. An intelligent, synthetic environment will be an even bigger breakthrough from our current capabilities. Designing a building or an organization will be possible in the synthetic world before you decide to do it for real. The opportunities for education will be unending.
Finally, the information revolution (computers and communications) will give us vastly better capabilities to deal with the nano world and with biology.
It is the synergistic effect of these three systems together (the nano world, times biology, times information) that will lead to an explosion of new knowledge and new capabilities and create an intersecting s curve. We will simultaneously be experiencing the computer/communications revolution and the nano world/biology/information revolution. These two curves create an age of transitions. This rest of this paper attempts to outline the scale of change being brought about by the age of transitions, the principles that underlie those changes, and how to apply those principles in a strategic process that could lead to a governing majority.
Politics and Government in the Age of Transitions

In the foreseeable future we will be inundated with new inventions, new discoveries, new startups, and new entrepreneurs. These will create new goods and services. The e-customer will become the e-patient and the e-voter. As expectations change, the process of politics and government will change.  People's lives will be more complex and inevitably overwhelming. Keeping up with the changes which affect them and their loved ones exhausts most people. They focus most of their time and energy on the tasks of everyday life. When they achieve success in their daily tasks they turn to the new goods and services, the new job and investment opportunities, and the new ideas inherent in the entrepreneurial creativity of the age of transitions. No individual and no country will fully understand all the changes as they occur, or will be able to adapt to them flawlessly during this time. On the other hand, there will be a large premium placed on individuals, companies and countries that are able to learn and adjust more rapidly.

Reality and the Language of Politics and Government

Reality and Language of Everyday Life

The Developments, Ideas and Realities of The Age of Transitions

The political party or movement that can combine these three zones into one national dialogue will have an enormous advantage, both in offering better goods and services, and in attracting the support of most Americans.  The new products and services created by the Age of Transitions are creating vast opportunities for improving everyday life. The government has an opportunity to use these new principles to develop far more effective and appropriate government services. Politicians have the chance to explain these opportunities in a language most citizens can understand, and to offer a better future, with greater quality of life, by absorbing the Age of Transitions into government and politics.  The average citizen needs to have political leadership that understands the scale of change we are undergoing, and which has the ability to offer some effective guidance about how to reorganize daily life - which simultaneously has the ability to reorganize the government that affects so much of our daily life. Inevitably, the Age of Transitions will overwhelm and exhaust people. Only after they have dealt with their own lives do they turn to the world of politics and government.  When we do look at politics we are discouraged, and in some cases repulsed, by the conflict-oriented political environment, the nitpicking, cynical nature of the commentaries, and the micromanaged, overly detailed style of political-insider coverage. The more Americans focus on the common sense and the cooperative effort required for their own lives, and the more they focus on the excitement and the wealth-creating and opportunity-creating nature of the entrepreneurial world, the more they reject politics and government as an area of useful interest.  Not only do politics and government seem more destructive and conflict oriented, but the language of politics seems increasingly archaic and the ideas seem increasingly trivial or irrelevant. People who live their lives with the speed, accuracy and convenience of automatic teller machines (ATM's) giving them cash at any time in any city, cell phones that work easily virtually everywhere, the ease of shopping on the web and staying in touch through email find the bureaucratic, interest group and arcane nature of political dialogue and government policy to be painfully outmoded. Politicians' efforts to popularize the obsolete are seen as increasingly irrelevant and therefore ignored.  This phenomenon helps explain the January 2000 poll in which 81% of Americans said they had not read about the Presidential campaign in the last 24 hours, 89% said they had not thought about a presidential candidate in the same period, and 74% said they did not have a candidate for President (up 10% from last November).

The average voters' sense of distance from politics is felt even more strongly by the entrepreneurial and scientific groups who are inventing the future. They find the difference between their intensely concentrated, creative and positive focus of energy and the negative, bickering nature of politics especially alienating, so they focus on their own creativity and generally stay aloof from politics unless a specific interest is threatened or a specific issue arouses their interest.  Projects that focus on voter participation miss the nature of a deliberate avoidance by voters of politics. In some ways this is a reversion to an American norm prior to the great depression and the Second World War. For most of American history people focused their energies on their own lives and their immediate communities. The national government (and often even the state government) seemed distant and irrelevant.  This was the world of very limited government desired by Jefferson and described by Tocqueville's Democracy in America. With the exception of the Civil War, this was the operating model from 1776 until 1930. Then the depression led to the rise of big government, the Second World War led to even bigger government, and the Cold War sustained a focus on Washington. When there was a real danger of nuclear war and the continuing crisis threatened the survival of freedom, it was natural for the President to be the central figure in America and for attention to focus on Washington.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a gradual slow shift of power and attention out of Washington and back to the state and local communities. There has been a steady decline in popular attention paid to national politics. Those who complain about this pattern and who seek higher turnout and greater public participation misunderstand the mechanisms and patterns that are at work.  Projects that focus on voter participation often miss the nature of this deliberate avoidance of politics. When Republicans designed a positive campaign of big ideas in the 1994 Contract With America, some nine million additional voters turned out (the largest off year one party increase in history). When Jesse Ventura offered a real alternative (at least in style) in 1998 younger voters turned out in record numbers.

The voter as a customer is telling the political-governmental system something profound by his or her indifference. The political leadership class is simply failing to produce a large enough set of solutions in a language that is worth the time, attention, and focus of increasingly busy American citizens.  After a year of traveling around America (23 states) and spending time with entrepreneurs, scientists and venture capitalists, I am increasingly convinced that the American voters are right. Let us imagine a world of 1870 in which the private sector had completed the transcontinental railroad and the telegraph, but the political-governmental elites had decided that they would operate by the rules of the pony express and the stagecoach. In private life and business life you could telegraph from Washington to San Francisco in a minute and could ship a cargo by rail in seven days. However in political-governmental life you had to send written messages by pony express that took two weeks and cargo by stagecoach that took two months. The growing gap between the two capabilities would have driven you to despair about politics and government as destructive, anachronistic systems. Similarly, imagine that in 1900 a Washington Conference on Transportation Improvement had been created but the political-governmental elite had ruled that the only topic would be the future of the horseshoe, and busied themselves with a brass versus iron horseshoe debate. Henry Ford's efforts to create a mass produced automobile would be ruled impractical and irrelevant. The Wright brothers' effort to create an airplane would be laughed at as an absurd fantasy. After all, neither clearly stood on either the brass or the iron side of the debate. Yet which would do more to change transportation over the next two decades: The political-governmental power structure of Washington, or the unknown visionaries experimenting without government grants and without recognition by the elites? Consider just one example of this extraordinary and growing gap between the opportunities of the Age of Transitions and the reactionary nature of current government systems. The next time you use your ATM card consider that you are sending a code over the net to approve taking cash out of your checking account. It can be done on a 24/7 basis (24 hours a day, seven days a week) anywhere in the country at your convenience. Compare that speed, efficiency, security, and accuracy with the paper dominated, fraud and waste ridden Health Care Financing Administration with its 133,000 pages of regulations (more than the Internal Revenue Service). As a symbol of a hopelessly archaic model of bureaucracy there are few better examples than HCFA. This growing gap between the realities and language of private life and the emerging realities of the Age of Transitions on the one hand and the increasingly obsolete language and timid (horseshoe improvements) proposals of the political governmental system convinces more and more voters to ignore politics and focus on their own lives and on surviving the transitions. This is precisely the pattern described by Norman Nie, et.al in the Changing American Voter. They described a pool of latent voters who in the 1920s found nothing in the political dialogue to interest them. These citizens simply stayed out of the process as long as it stayed out of their lives. The depression did not mobilize them. They sat out the 1932 election. Only when the New Deal policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt penetrated their lives did they become involved. In 1936 Alf Landon, the Republican nominee, actually received a million more votes than Herbert Hoover had gotten in 1932. However FDR received seven million more votes than he had gotten in his first election. It was this massive increase in participation that made the polls inaccurate and created the Democratic majority, which in many ways survived until the 1994 election. The Republican victory of 1994 by drawing nine million additional voters over its 1990 results (the largest off year increase in American history) used bold promises in a positive campaign to engage people who had been turned off by politics. There is a similar opportunity waiting for the first political party and political leader to make sense out of the combination of daily life with the possibilities being created by the Age of Transitions and develop both a language and a set of bold proposals which make sense to the average American in the context of their own lives and experience.

This paper should be seen as the beginning of a process rather than as a set of answers. Political-governmental leaders need to integrate the changes of the Age of Transitions with the opportunities these changes create to improve people's lives, develop the changes in government necessary to accelerate those improvements, and explain the Age of Transitions era - and the policies it requires - in the language of everyday life, so people will understand why it is worth their while to be involved in politics and subsequently improve their own lives. Getting this done will take a lot of people experimenting and attempting to meet the challenge for a number of years. That is how the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians, the early Republicans, the Progressives, the New Dealers and the Reagan conservatives succeeded. Each, over time, created a new understanding of America at an historic moment. We aren't any smarter, and we won't get it done any faster. However, the time to start is now and the way to start is to clearly understand the scale of the opportunity and the principles that make it work.

Characteristics of an Age of Transitions

Thirty-six years after Boulding's first explanation of the coming change, and thirty-one years after Drucker explained how to think about a discontinuity, some key characteristics have emerged. This section outlines 18 characteristics and gives examples of how political and governmental leaders can help develop the appropriate policies for the age of transitions. However, it should first be noted that there is an overarching general rule: assume there are more changes coming.  It is clear that more scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs are active today than in all of previous human history. Venture capitalists are developing powerful models for investing-in and growing startup companies, and in the process they are acquiring more and more capital as the markets shift away from the smokestack industries and toward new models. It is also clear that there is a growing world market in which more entrepreneurs of more nationalities are competing for more customers than ever in human history. All this growing momentum of change simply means that no understanding, no reform, no principle will be guaranteed to last for very long. Just as we get good at one thing, or come to understand one principle, it will be challenged by an emerging new idea or achievement from a direction we haven't even considered. Within that humbling sense that the change is so large we will never really know in our lifetime the full analysis of this process, here are 18 powerful characteristics for developing government policy and politics in the Age of Transitions:

1. COSTS WILL CRASH  A major pattern will be a continuing, and in many cases steep, declines in cost. An ATM is dramatically cheaper than a bank teller. A direct-dial phone call is much less expensive than an operator-assisted call. My brother used Priceline.com and received four airlines tickets for his family for the price of one regular ticket. We have not even begun to realize how much costs will decline (including health and healthcare, education and learning, defense procurement and government administration). We also have not yet learned to think in terms of purchasing power instead of salary. Yet the pattern is likely to be a huge change in both purchasing power and behavior for both citizens and government. Those who are aggressive and alert will find remarkable savings by moving to the optimum cost crashes faster than anyone else. As a result they will dramatically expand their purchasing power.

2. A CUSTOMER CENTERED PERSONALIZED SYSTEM  With Amazon.com and other systems you can look up precisely the books or movies you want and, after a while, they sense your interests and they begin to bring items to you that you may like. We can consider a personal Social Security Plus account because we already have personal Roth IRA's and 401k's. We can consider a personal learning and personal health system just as we have e-tickets for our Internet purchased airline tickets. Anything that is not personalized and responsive to changes in the individual will rapidly be replaced by something that is.

3. 24-7 IS THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE  Customer access 24 hours a day and 7 days a week will become the standard of the future. ATM's symbolize this emerging customer convenience standard. You can get cash 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, yet today's schools combine an agricultural era 9 or 10 month school year (including the summer off for harvesting) with an industrial era 50 minute class, with the foreman at the front of the room facing a class of workers facing him or her, in a factory style school day, in a Monday to Friday work week. Learning in the future will be embedded in the computer and on the Internet and will be available with a great deal of customization for each learner at his or her convenience and on demand. Similarly, government will have to shift to its customers' needs rather than demanding that the customers make themselves available at the bureaucrat's convenience. These are big changes and they are unavoidable given the emerging technologies and the e-customer culture that is evolving.

4. CONVENIENCE WILL BE A HIGH VALUE  As customers get used to one-click shopping (note the shopping cart approach on Amazon) they will demand similar convenience from government. People will increasingly order products and services to be delivered to their homes at their convenience. They will initially pay a premium for this convenience but over time they will conclude that it is a basic requirement of any business they deal with. After a while e-customers will begin to carry these attitudes into their relationship with bureaucracy, and as e-voters they will favor politicians who work to make their lives easier (and therefore more convenient).

5. CONVERGENCE OF TECHNOLOGIES WILL INCREASE CONVENIENCE, EXPAND CAPABILITIES, AND LOWER COSTS  The various computation and communication technologies will rapidly converge with cell phones, computers, land-lines, mobile systems, satellite capabilities and cable all converging into a unified system of capabilities, which will dramatically expand both capabilities and convenience.

6. EXPERT SYSTEM EMPOWERED PROCESSES  When you look up an airline reservation on the Internet you are dealing with an expert system. In virtually all Internet shopping you are actually asking questions of such a system. The great increase in capability for dealing with individual sales and individual tastes is a function of the growing capacity of expert systems. These capabilities will revolutionize health, learning and government once they are used as frequently as they currently are in the commercial world. If it can be codified and standardized it should be done by an expert system rather than a person. That is a simple rule to apply to every government activity.

7. MIDDLEMEN DISAPPEAR  This is one of the most powerful rules of the Age of Transitions. In the commercial world, where competition and profit margins force change, it is clear that customers are served more and more from very flat hierarchies, with very few people in the middle. In the protected guilds (medicine, teaching, law and any group which can use its political power to slow change) and in government structures there are still very large numbers of middlemen. This will be one of the most profitable areas for political-governmental leaders to explore. In the Age of Transitions the customer should be foremost and every unnecessary layer should be eliminated to create a more agile, more rapidly changing, more customer centered and less expensive system.

8. CHANGES CAN COME FROM ANYWHERE  The record of the last thirty years has been a growing shift toward new ideas coming from new places. Anyone can have a good idea, and the key is to focus on the power of the idea rather than the pedigree of the inventor. This directly challenges some of the peer review assumptions of the scientific community, much of the screening for consultants used by government, much of the credentialing done by education and medicine, and much of the contractor-certification done by government. This principle requires us to look very widely for the newest idea, the newest product and the newest service, and it requires testing by trial and error more than by credentialing or traditional assumptions.

9. SHIFT RESOURCES FROM OPPORTUNITY TO OPPORTUNITY  One of the most powerful engines driving the American economy has been the rise of an entrepreneurial venture capitalism that moves investments to new opportunities and grows those opportunities better than any other economy in the world. There is as yet no comparable government capacity to shift resources to new start-ups and to empower governmental entrepreneurs. There are countless efforts to reform and modernize bureaucracies, but that is exactly the wrong strategy. Venture capitalists very seldom put new money into old corporate bureaucracies. Even many of the established corporations are learning to create their own startups because they have to house new ideas and new people in new structures if they are really to get the big breakthroughs. We need a doctrine for a venture capitalist-entrepreneurial model of government including learning, health, and defense.

10. THE RAPIDITY OF BETTER, LESS EXPENSIVE PRODUCTS WILL LEAD TO A CONTINUED PROCESS OF REPLACEMENT Goods and services will take on a temporary nature as their replacements literally push them out the door. The process of new, more capable and less expensive goods and services, and in some cases revolutionary replacements which change everything (as Xerox did to the mimeograph, and as the fax machine, e-mail and pc have done), will lead to a sense of conditional existence and temporary leasing that will change our sense of ownership.

11. FOCUS ON SUCCESS  Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have a surprisingly high tolerance for intelligent failure. They praise those who take risks, even if they fail, over those who avoid risks, even if they avoid failure. To innovate and change at the rate the Age of Transitions requires, government and politicians have to shift their attitudes dramatically (and it would help if the political news media joined them in this). Today it is far more dangerous for a bureaucrat to take a risk than it is to do nothing. Today the system rewards (with retirement and non-controversy) serving your time in government. There are virtually no rewards for taking the risks and sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding. Yet in all the other areas of science, technology, and entrepreneurship the great breakthroughs often involve a series of failures (consider Edison's thousands of failed experiments in inventing the electric light and how they would have appeared in a congressional hearing or a news media expose). Setting a tone of trying, and rewarding success while tolerating intelligent failure, would do a great deal to set the stage for a modernized government.

12. VENTURE CAPITALISTS AND ENTREPRENEURS FOCUS ON OPPORTUNITIES  This is similar to focusing on success but refers to the zone in which energy and resources are invested. It is the nature of politics and government to focus on problems (schools that fail, hospitals that are too expensive, people living in poverty) when the real breakthroughs come from focusing on opportunities (new models of learning that work, new approaches to health and healthcare that lower the cost of hospitals, ways to get people to work so they are no longer in poverty). Venture capitalists are very good at shifting their attention away from problem zones toward opportunity zones. Politicians and the political news media tend to do the opposite. Yet the great opportunities for change and progress are in the opportunities rather than the problems.

13. REAL BREAKTHROUGHS CREATE NEW PRODUCTS AND NEW EXPECTATIONS  Before Disney World existed it would have been hard to imagine how many millions would travel to Orlando. Before the Super Bowl became a cultural event it was hard to imagine how much of the country would stop for an entire evening.  Before faxes we did not need them, and before e-mail no one knew how helpful it would be. One of the key differences between the public and private sector is this speed of accepting new products and creating new expectations. The public sector tends to insist on using the new to prop up the old. For two generations we have tried to get the computer into the classroom with minimal results. That's because it is backward: The key is to get the classroom into the computer and the computer in the child's home, so learning becomes personal and 24/7. Doctors still resist the information technologies that will revolutionize health and healthcare, and which will lower administrative costs and decrease unnecessary deaths and illnesses dramatically. In the private sector competition and the customer force change. In government and government protected guilds the innovations are distorted to prop up the old and the public (that is the customer) suffers from higher expense and less effective goods and services.

14. SPEED MATTERS: NEW THINGS NEED TO GET DONE QUICKLY  There is a phrase in the Internet industry, "Launch and Learn," which captures the entrepreneurial sense of getting things done quickly. It suggests that you launch your business or your new product and learn while you are building it. As one Silicon Valley entrepreneur suggested, he had moved back from the East because he could get things done in the same number of days in California as the months it would have taken where he had been. Moving quickly produces more mistakes but it also produces a real learning that only occurs by trying things out. The sheer volume of activity, and the speed of correcting mistakes as fast as they are discovered, allows a "launch and learn" system to grow dramatically faster than a "study and launch" system. This explains one of the major differences between the venture capitalist-entrepreneurial world and the traditional corporate bureaucracies. Since governments tend to study and study without ever launching anything truly new it is clear how even further the gap gets between the public and private sectors in an Age of Transitions. Today it takes longer for a Presidential appointee to be cleared by the White House and approved by the Senate than it takes to launch a startup company in Silicon Valley.

15. START SMALL BUT DREAM BIG  Venture capital and entrepreneurship are about baby businesses rather than small businesses. Venture capitalists know that in a period of dramatic change it is the occasional home run rather than a large number of singles that really make the difference. The result is that venture capitalists examine every investment with a focus on its upside. If it does not have a big enough growth potential it is not worth the time and energy to make the investment. Government tends to make large risk-averse investments in relatively small controllable changes. This is almost the exact opposite of the venture capital-entrepreneurial model. The question to ask is: "If this succeeds, how big will the difference be, and if the difference isn't very substantial, we need to keep looking for a more powerful proposal."

16. BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS IS THE FIRST BIG PROFIT OPPORTUNITY  While most of the attention in the Internet market is paid to sales to the final customer, the fact is that that market is still relatively small and relatively unprofitable. However, there is no question that Internet based systems such as Siebel and Intelisys are creating business-to-business opportunities that will dramatically lower the cost of doing business. Every government, at every level, should be rationalizing its purchasing system and moving on to the net to eliminate all paper purchasing. The savings in this area alone could be in the 20 to 30 % range for most governments. The opportunities for a paperless system in health and healthcare could lead to a crash in costs rather than a worry about rising costs.

17. APPLYING QUALITY AND LEAN THINKING CAN SAVE ENORMOUS AMOUNTS  Whether it is the earlier model of quality espoused by Edwards Deming or the more recent concept of lean thinking advocated by James Womack and Daniel Jones, it is clear that there is an existing model of thinking-through production and value, on a systematic basis, and creating more profitable, less expensive approaches. The companies that have really followed this approach have had remarkable success in producing better products at lower expense, yet it is almost never used by people who want to rethink government.

18. PARTNERING IS ESSENTIAL   No company or government can possibly understand all the changes in an Age of Transitions. Furthermore, new ideas will emerge with great speed. It is more profitable to partner than to try to build in-house expertise. It allows everyone to focus on what they do best while working as a team on a common goal. This system is prohibited throughout most of government, and yet it is the dominant organizing system of the current era of startups. As government bureaucracies fall further and further behind the most dynamic of the startups (in part because civil service salaries cannot compete with stock options for the best talent), it will become more and more important to develop new mechanisms for government-private partnering.

These initial principles give a flavor of how big the change will be and of the kind of questions a political-governmental leader should ask in designing a program for the Age of Transitions. They can be refined, expanded and improved, but they at least start the process of identifying how different the emerging system will be from the bureaucratic-industrial system that is the heart of contemporary government.

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The Principles of Political-Governmental Success In an Age of Transitions

In the Age of Transitions people will be so busy and the sheer volume of new products, new information, and new opportunities will keep people so limited in spare time that any real breakthrough in government and politics will have to meet several key criteria:

1. Personal  It has to involve a change that occurs in individual people's lives in order for them to think it is worth their while, because it will affect them directly. Only a major crisis such as a steep recession or a major war will bring people back to the language of politics. In the absence of such a national crisis political leaders will not be able to attract people into the zone of government and politics. Instead they will have to take government and politics into people's lives by using the new technologies and new opportunities of the Age of Transitions to offer better solutions that will really affect people's lives.

2. Big Ideas  The change has to be large enough to be worth the time and effort of participation. People have to believe that their lives or their family's lives will really be affected by the proposals or they will simply nod pleasantly at the little ideas but do nothing to get them implemented. If you would attract millions of new people into the process you have to have ideas big enough and personal enough to be worth their time and effort.

3. Common Language  New solutions have to be explained in the language of every day life because people will simply refuse to listen to the traditional language of political and governmental elites. People have become so tired of the bickering, the conflict, and the reactionary obsolete patterns of traditional politics that they turn off the minute they hear them. New solutions require new words and the words have to grow out of the daily lives of people rather than out of the glossary of intellectual elites or the slogans of political consultants.

4. Practical  The successful politics of the Age of Transitions will almost certainly be pragmatic and practical rather than ideological and theoretical. People are going to be so busy and so harried that their first question is going to be "will it work?" They will favor conservative ideas they think will work and they will favor big government ideas that they think will work. Their first test will be "will my family and I be better off?" and their second test will be "can they really deliver and make this work?' Only when a solution passes these two tests will it be supported by a majority of people. Note that both questions are pragmatic and neither is theoretical or ideological.

5. Positive  The successful politicians of the Age of Transitions will devote eighty per cent of their time to the development and communication of large positive solutions in the language of everyday life and the gathering of grassroots coalitions and activists to support their ideas. They will never spend more than twenty per cent of their effort on describing the negative characteristics of their opponents. When they do describe the destructive side of their opponents it will be almost entirely in terms of the costs in the lives of Americans of the reactionary forces blocking the new solutions and the better programs (study FDR's 1936 and 1940 campaigns for models of this lifestyle definition of the two sides-the helpful and the harmful. FDR was tough on offense but more importantly he cast the opposition in terms of how they hurt the lives of ordinary people.)

6. Electronic  The successful large, personal, positive, practical movement of the Age of Transitions will be organized on the Internet and will be interactive. Citizens will have a stake in the movement and an ability to offer ideas and participate creatively in ways no one has ever managed before. The participatory explosion of the 1992 Perot campaign in which tens of thousands of volunteers organized themselves and the internet based activism of the closing weeks of the 1998 Ventura campaign are forerunners of an interactive, internet based movement in the Age of Transitions. None has occurred on a sustainable basis yet for two reasons:

First, no one has come up with a believable solution big enough to justify the outpouring of energy beyond brief, personality-focused campaign spasms lasting weeks or a few months.

Second, no one has mastered the challenge of building a citizen-focused genuinely interactive system that allows people to get information when they want it, offer ideas in an effective feedback loop, and organize themselves to be effective in a reasonably efficient and convenient manner. When the size of the solution and the sophistication of the system come together we will have a new model of politics and government that will be as defining as the thirty-second commercial and the phone bank have been.
Big Solutions at a Big Event as the Defining Activity of a National Campaign

Twice Republicans have successfully used "Capitol Steps" events to define their goals in a dramatic way. In 1980 the Republican Senate and House candidates gathered on the Capitol steps with Ronald Reagan and George Bush and made a series of key promises including the thirty per cent cut in income tax rates and strengthening the military. A month later a number of little known underdog candidates were elected to the Senate by narrow margins and to almost everyone's surprise the Republicans had captured control of the Senate for the first time in nearly a generation. In elections won by 7,000 and 14,000 votes the final legitimacy and focus given to the candidate by standing next to Ronald Reagan and pledging big changes was almost certainly decisive.

In 1994 the Republican House candidates stood together on the Capitol steps and pledged to implement a Contract with America. Their sincerity and the scale of their proposal changed the campaign and drew nine million additional people to the polls.

The two events have to be seen within the context of a long buildup and an intensive, focused follow through between the event and the election. In both cases the issues had been developed over many months. In both years the candidates had been using the major issues for months before the big event. In both cases candidates and campaigns were poised to take the message home and use advertising, speeches, debates and editorial boards to continue driving home the big solutions. In both cases outside activists had been recruited, encouraged and coordinated to continue building the power of the ideas. The events only mattered within the larger context of these preceding and following activities.

In both cases the key messages were resonating off existing understanding among the American people rather than trying to communicate or sell something new. Tax cuts had been a key issue in the 1978 Congressional campaigns, Jack Kemp and Bill Roth had been articulating supply side economics for four years, Reagan had campaigned throughout the spring on the need for a tax cut and it was in the Republican national platform. In 1994 the calls for a balanced budget, welfare reform, tax cuts, and stronger defense were the echoes of a generation of conservative and Republican speeches. In both cases we were trying to build a responsive chord with proposals the American people already knew about.

The key is the long development of a set of proposals the Presidential nominee is committed to and willing to campaign on, their general acceptance by the party within the leadership of the Presidential nominee, their articulation throughout the spring and summer, their inclusion in the national platform, and their use during the fall campaign with a decisive symbolic moment occurring as the entire team gathers to prove it is a team and to pledge to implement the proposals. Only by having a process of this type can the proposals be driven home strongly enough to define October.

Proposals Big Enough to Attract the American People and to Define the 2000 Election on Terms Favorable to Republicans

The following proposals can be explained in the daily lives of Americans, apply some of the solutions available in the Age of Transitions, and will improve life enough to be worth the attention and then support of a vast majority of Americans.

1. Social Security Plus - Every American deserves the right to save a portion of their FICA tax and control it in a tax-free account which could be invested in a broad range of instruments. This will save Social Security permanently without a tax increase or a benefit cut. It will ensure that the poorest worker will have a savings account within six months of starting to work, and within a few years will be a saver and investor with a piece of the action.  For younger Americans this can produce retirements at three to six times the wealth they will get from the government system and it will protect the system from collapsing when the baby boomers retire. For older Americans this step, if coupled with the end of the penalty for working, the abolition of the death tax, and the guarantee that they would get every penny, including cost of living increases which is due them, would reassure them that we had improved their lives. Social Security Plus is particularly better for African American males who have a lower life expectancy than other Americans and as a result transfer an average of $10,000 in FICA Tax to other people. Social Security Plus would allow them to pass their savings on to their family and would be a big improvement for African Americans over the current system. Hispanics have the lowest rate of savings of any group in the country. Social Security Plus would create, overnight, a retirement savings account for every working Hispanic. It is a powerful tool for increasing the wealth of younger Hispanics and Hispanic families. By transferring well over a trillion dollars from the control of government back into the private sector Social Security Plus will lower interest rates, increase the availability of capital and increase economic growth. Properly communicated in personal terms and in the language and media of a variety of groups, and with the support of activist-advocates from all those groups, the advantages of Social Security Plus should draw an entire generation of younger Americans from all ethnic backgrounds into politics in order to get the reform that will dramatically improve their lives and increase their wealth. For more information see www.Social Security Plus.org.

2. Max Tax - More take-home-pay for every American both in the short run with a big tax cut and in the long run with lower taxes in general. In everyday language "more take-home-pay" is more real and more powerful than "tax cuts" (which is a political term which then translates into more take-home-pay). The current budget surplus gives us an opportunity to have a major tax cut and the Age of Transitions gives us an opportunity to modernize and privatize government until we cap all taxes (state, federal, and local) so that no American pays more than 25% of their income in total taxation. The two goals are reinforcing but not identical. First, there should be a large tax cut because the surplus is created by the American taxpayer and they deserve their own money back. Furthermore, any money left in Washington will be spent by politicians to expand government and please interest groups. Therefore the choice is simple; with a surplus you either have a tax cut or bigger government. Thus in the immediate future a big tax cut should be favored both to help taxpayers with more take home pay and to keep government in Washington from growing. Second, there should be a ten-to-fifteen year goal of modernizing and privatizing government to bring all taxation down to a maxtax of 25%. For forty years Americans have told Reader's Digest that they favor a maximum tax of 25% of their income. In peacetime if you work all of Monday and part of Tuesday for the government you should be allowed to work the rest of the week for yourself, your family, your voluntary charities, your religious institution, and your own retirement. Readers of Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion know that America historically was a very low tax nation. Prior to 1930 there was a 150-year history of limited government with limited taxation in peacetime. The theory was that strong citizens and active communities could work within limited effective government in a pattern that maximized freedom and minimized the dangers of dictatorship (this is the heart of the 18th century Whig critique of the British political system which was the basis of Jefferson's model of government). We have had a 70-year experiment in large centralized bureaucratic government. As Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion makes painfully clear this experiment was very costly in lives wasted and people trapped in poverty. One of our greatest achievements was the welfare reform that liberated over fifty percent of the people on welfare and returned them to jobs and to school. In some states we now have so few people on welfare there is a real opportunity to get every one of them to work. The next stage after balancing the budget and welfare reform is to set as a goal the dramatic modernization and privatization of government so that taxes could be capped at 25% (state, federal, and local combined) of an individual's income. This may seem a grandiose goal. Yet remember that in 1970 when Governor Ronald Reagan first proposed welfare reform at the National Governor's Conference he was defeated 49 to 1. Not a single Republican Governor voted with him because the idea was too bold. By 1996 we had won the argument so decisively that in a New York Times poll 92% of the American people favored welfare reform including 88% of the people on welfare. America today ranks behind a number of other countries in the successful privatization of government functions. Yet the Age of Transitions is going to make possible dramatic improvements in goods and services at lower costs simply by bringing together modern technology, entrepreneurship and venture capital approaches to transform obsolete and archaic government services. Consider just a few examples of the changes that are possible and that provide both better services to the citizen and lower taxes.

First, British and French water systems have never been government run. The result is a higher level of technology and management skill than most government run systems. When Atlanta contracted out its water system it saved the city 44% a year. The seven major cities that have privatized their water so far have run from 20 to 50% in savings with the average being about a third. That would amount to $500 million a year for New York City if it contracted out its water operation. The citizens get better water at lower cost.

Second, only 18% of the child support that is due is actually paid to the children. That means 82% of the children who should be getting child support from a responsible adult are being denied the money. Government is so incompetent that $3 billion is actually sitting in the bank because it has been paid but the government can't find the children. Minimalist attempts at private contracting within the current system routinely fail because the public employee unions simply sabotage them. Apparently, union dues are more important than children. Liberal politicians sympathize with children in poverty, but not enough to fight the unions that elect them. Yet we live in an age when Visa, MasterCard and American Express all do a good job of finding their card members and getting them to pay. We live in an age when private collection companies would make a big profit collecting more money for more children. Only our commitment to the obsolete model of bureaucratic enforcement keeps these millions of children in poverty. Here is a privatization that would be more compassionate, more humane, and would enforce responsibility while lifting children from poverty and would lighten the burden on the taxpayer all at the same time. This could also be a major commitment which would speak to millions of single mothers and to grandparents in immediate human terms about directly improving their lives (and as such this item might become a major proposal in a capitol steps event and in a campaign platform).

Third, ZooAtlanta went from being an $800,000 a year city bureaucracy run so badly it was on the verge of losing its accreditation to being a privately run $11million a year research institution of world renown. There is a nationwide move toward privatized zoos with entrepreneurial leaders, such as Terry Maples in Atlanta. It is creating better institutions with more aggressive, creative energy, a greater focus on the public and much lower cost to the taxpayer.

These are simply three examples of the opportunities for privatization and modernization. Any serious look at Europe or Latin America would yield dozens of examples of formerly government run systems now being run better at lower cost and with greater customer satisfaction in the private sector. For more information see www.MaxTax.org. Modernizing and privatizing government to get the maximum tax down to 25% is perfectly compatible with paying down the federal debt. A smaller debt means smaller interest payments and therefore lower taxes. A series of annual debt payments combined with annual tax cuts would achieve the goal of a smaller debt, a smaller government, lower taxes, more take-home pay, and greater economic growth, with lower interest rates. In 1997 we cut taxes and balanced the budget by controlling government spending. Controlling government spending will allow you to cut taxes and pay down the national debt. The alternative is to neither cut taxes nor pay down the debt but instead divert the money. We should drop the argument of tax cuts versus debt reduction and simply do both. Our children will have lower taxes, better incomes, lower interest rates and a healthier country.
3. End the Death Tax  As a simple, single goal we should abolish the death tax immediately. Abolishing the death tax is a 79-15issue (Zogby, January 2000) among the American people. This is not a new development. In 1982 abolishing the death tax was on the California ballot and it won by 65-35 despite the opposition of much of the media.  People intuitively know that it is wrong to punish grandparents for saving for their grandchildren. People also intuitively know that if government has already taxed the money once it should not be able to tax it again. Finally people know that the very rich use lawyers and trusts to avoid the tax while the real losers are the workers who lose their jobs when the family business is sold.  This tax hurts economic growth by diverting money to lawyers and loopholes, and by discouraging economic activity among the elderly. We would have a bigger economy, with faster growth, with more jobs, and with greater wealth if we abolished the death tax.
4. Use Technology to Empower the Disabled  Every American with a disability should be connected with the best technologies and given the best opportunity to truly pursue happiness as their Creator endowed them with the right to do.  The Age of Transitions is going to create marvelous opportunities to enhance the lives of Americans and, especially, to improve the lives of Americans with significant disabilities. We should be committed to doubling scientific research and development in the federal budget and totally overhauling both the bureaucratic structures and the anti-work, anti-common sense rules of the federal government. The 120 federal agencies currently dealing with disabilities administer public policies that clearly discourage work and undermine families, while encouraging the warehousing of people in costly institutions. We need to make capital investments in people, rather than "maintaining" them in lifelong dependence on the government. Citizens with significant disabilities are denied freedom and opportunity by existing policies that require them to be indigent and unproductive in order to be eligible for healthcare insurance and other essential supports.  With improved access to technology and opportunities, people who have previously been perceived as unable to contribute to society can be productive. If we are to empower citizens with significant disabilities, and if society is to benefit from their abilities, we must redesign all federal and state disability programs to foster independence and dignity. The current "maintenance" model is a slow death that fosters dependence and dehumanization. An "empowerment model" will reattach these Americans to life and afford them the same opportunities other citizens take for granted - the opportunities to live, work and learn in their communities. This is a perfect example of a bold solution in the context of an Age of Transitions that simply leaves behind all the bureaucratic rhetoric of the old system. The new technologies can be developed with stunning speed. The Internet can create markets and opportunities for those with significant disabilities in ways yet unexplored. Accomplishing reform that reduces the barriers to work for people with disabilities will serve the best interests of both the taxpayer and citizens with disabilities. Eliminating the institutional bias in Medicaid long-term care policy will strengthen American families and enable people with significant disabilities of all ages to enjoy lives with greater dignity and independence. There are hundreds of thousands of severely challenged Americans whose lives would be dramatically improved by these changes. They, their families and those whose lives they touch will flock to a movement that takes seriously the challenge of bringing together the discoveries of science, the creativity of entrepreneurs and the needs and talents of Americans with disabilities.
5. Health and Healthcare  Health and healthcare can be dramatically improved for virtually every American and in the process the price will come down. The obsolete system we currently have kills an estimated 98,000 Americans a year in hospitals by inappropriate medicine (report by the Institute of Medicine). Two-thirds of those (about 65,000 dead Americans a year) are caused by inappropriate prescriptions for people whose current drug prescriptions or past history make the new prescription lethal. Hundreds of thousands of additional Americans are re-hospitalized annually through inappropriate prescriptions. The human and financial cost is a significant part of our health budget. The Age of Transitions has already invented solutions that would save 50,000 plus lives and several billion dollars a year. Doctors should enter their prescriptions in a palm pilot or other computerized device, patients should have computerized health records, and a computer should check each new prescription against the patient's record to make sure they will not be killed or sickened by the new drug. All the technology is available but each part of the system clings to its obsolete arguments about an earlier era. Only the patient and the society are harmed. Patients ought to own their own health records and they should be electronic. Billing should be electronic and the patient should be able to review it for accuracy (imagine a restaurant that refused to let you see the bill). Patients ought to have access to full knowledge about their health situation and to the most current developments that might affect their survival. Litigation laws must be reformed to protect doctors and hospitals that voluntarily report their errors. The system will keep lying to itself and to us if the price of honesty is a lawsuit that bankrupts. Some system of balance between the right to sue and the vital importance of honest self-reporting must be found. Citizens should have the true patient's right to take their tax deductibility and buy their own health insurance if they don't like the HMO or the insurance company their employer has chosen. Group health insurance as a tax-deductible item is an accident of a 1943 wage price decision to help workers without increasing inflation. We do not need to abolish group insurance; we simply need to take the first step of giving workers the right to take their share of the deduction if they disagree with their employer's choice. The argument that individual insurance is too expensive is simply technologically ignorant. Within a year or two the Internet will allow aggregated individual accounts without agents' commissions (unless state laws artificially block them). If Amazon can sell books then Internet health can sell individual policies at low costs. Every citizen should be allowed 100% deductibility in buying health insurance so everyone is on an equal footing. In the Age of Transitions every citizen should have their own health insurance and this requires a Fair Care approach of creating a focused tax credit for the working poor. It would also require changing Medicare and Medicaid into vouchered systems to return the power of purchasing health insurance back to individual Americans. The absurdity of the Health Care Financing Administration's 133,000 pages of regulations and the fact that HCFA continues a paper system when clearly every bill should be electronic (which would save billions of dollars and decrease fraud by allowing patient review of their own record) should be all we need to know to abolish HCFA and replace it with an entrepreneurial model for encouraging the most modern delivery of health and healthcare at the lowest cost. We should favor doubling the federal science budget as rapidly as possible and across the board. As the public follows events like Michael J. Fox's battle with Parkinson's disease, there is a growing constituency for finding solutions. The movement that recognizes the value of scientific advance and is prepared to make it an extremely high priority will have a vast coalition of people who support that goal. The investment should be broad rather than narrowly focused on the National Institutes of Health because the basic sciences such as math, physics, and chemistry provide the underlying principles and technologies that make possible the scientific advances at NIH. For example, brain sciences require a significant investment in mathematics and physics to develop the tools to study the human brain as it is operating.
6. Learning  Learning is a primary requirement of success in the Age of Transitions. Everyone will have to learn all his or her lives. Our current failure in bureaucratic, government-run education is clearly a threat to our success in the next quarter century. Some key steps need to be taken:

First, learning must be seen as lifetime and wherever possible systems should be learner focused, Internet based and available on a 24/7 basis.

Second, every school should deliver good education or be closed. Children should not be sacrificed for union dues or bureaucratic comfort.

Third, every child deserves a publicly financed education but their parents should determine whether the school is meeting their child's needs and if the school is failing the parents should have the right to send their child to a school (public or private) that they believe will prepare their child for a lifetime of work and citizenship.

Fourth, teachers should have a disciplined environment in which to focus on teaching. Master teachers and star teachers should be paid commercially competitive salaries. Teaching should become an entrepreneurial and missionary endeavor and great teachers should have access to stock options, salaries and bonuses that make teaching a competitive profession again (note the measure is student success not accreditation, certification, years in service, etc.) Startups and companies could be encouraged by tax breaks and changes in SEC rules to donate stock to pools for star and master teachers. The first teacher millionaire who earned the money by education achievement would dramatically change a lot of thinking about teaching as a profession.

Fifth, colleges and universities are unnecessarily expensive. There are dozens of new technologies and systems in the Age of Transitions that can lower the cost of higher education and make it dramatically more accessible for all Americans. There are virtually no incentives, and a lot of roadblocks and hostilities, to any effort to modernize and rationalize higher education, and yet the cost to the family, the taxpayer, and the student are growing absurd. We should be for better learning, at lower cost, and with greater convenience for all Americans.
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7. Safety and National Defense  There are at least seven major steps we must take to rebuild America's strength and provide for our security in an increasingly dangerous world:

A. Focus resources on helping Colombia win its war against the drug cartel. Colombia is vastly more important to America's immediate interests than Kosovo or Bosnia and yet we have starved the war in Colombia and ignored the needs of our neighbor. We should undertake all steps necessary to support democracy in Colombia and to destroy the drug cartels' ability to survive in that country.

B. Build a global missile defense system that is capable of protecting our troops on overseas deployments, our allies' cities, and our homeland. Such a system can only work if it is space based. We could someday lose a city or an expeditionary force because the diplomats and the lawyers prevailed over the scientists and the engineers. We should be committed to building the best system we can develop and giving our people and our allies the maximum protection against a limited missile attack.

C. We need a much more sophisticated intelligence capability if we are to monitor terrorist groups, a wide variety of countries, and several emerging centers of power simultaneously. There will be a great need for more human intelligence about terrorists and for more human analysis about complex events. Those who complain that the intelligence agencies overlook things should realize that intelligence is even more thinly stretched than the military and that the requirements of a decentralized real time world have dramatically expanded the burden on the intelligence agencies. We will also have to rethink hiring and salary policies if the intelligence agencies are to have any access to the new sciences that have attracted venture capital support and priced government out of the market.

D. We must completely overhaul the failed policies of not protecting our secrets. From penetration of the political process by Chinese and Indonesian sources to penetration of the nuclear laboratories by foreign spies to a scathing report by the State Department Inspector General there has been a government-wide failure to protect American secrets. This has to be reversed and American security has to be reestablished.

E. The danger of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological and chemical) is so great, and the loss of life would be so major, that a Homeland Defense system must be established to prepare for the health, security, and reconstruction requirements of a terrorist or rogue state attack on one or more American cities using a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon of mass destruction. The danger is greater than people believe and the complications of dealing with such an attack are enormous. A prepared America could save hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of lives. This requires a coordinated effort by the military, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the Center for Disease Control, the FBI and state and local authorities.

F. Research and development should be launched to develop a next generation military and intelligence capability. The Age of Transitions will require a series of leapfrog disruptive technological advances if the United States is to maintain its current lead over the rest of the world. The tendency of all bureaucracies is to focus on risk avoiding incremental change. In a period of dramatic scientific and technological advance that will allow others to catch up with us. Our goal should be to create a bloc obsolescence of the current American defense system and its replacement with a next generation model around 2010 and then a second replacement wave around 2020.

G. The Pentagon remains a massively hierarchical bureaucracy in a world of small venture start-ups. Our goal should be to symbolically reduce the Pentagon to a triangle by eliminating at least forty per cent of the mid level management, decentralizing and returning focus to the forces in the field rather than the bureaucracy in the city.
8. Safety at Home  People have every right to demand that government keep them and their families safe. Protecting ourselves from violence is one of the most important obligations of government. In the current setting we need to take three decisive steps toward a safer America. Two of them are short term and the third is long term:

First, we have to focus the resources to win the war on drugs. We have to sharpen the focus on discouraging drug use in America. A decline in drug use has a significant impact on violence and we have all too often focused on almost anything but winning the war on drugs.  

Second, the program developed in Richmond, Virginia to lock up felons who are picked up with guns has dramatically lowered the violent crime rate in Richmond. It is a federal program that works without registering guns. By focusing on criminals crime goes down. We will expand the proven success of creating safer cities to every part of the country by focusing on the criminal rather than harassing the innocent. If this program were currently in use across America thousands of innocent people would be safe who will become victims of violent crime due to our failure to expand this program. We will save those citizens and their families by aggressively going after the guilty.  

Third, over the long run we have to reintegrate adolescents, and especially adolescent males, into adult society. The Age of Transitions will create many opportunities for young people to be engaged in far more exciting activities than standing on a street corner being led by a peer their own age. This is a longer term solution but in the most violent and lost parts of our culture nothing less than reintegration into healthy relations with adults and opportunities to do real work for real rewards will suffice to keep some young people from decaying into destructive and self destructive behaviors.

9. Scientifically Based Environmentalism  The Age of Transitions is going to make possible dramatically more powerful understanding of the environment and of how we can manage our role on the planet to have optimum biodiversity and economic growth. We should pioneer breaking out of the current regulatory-litigious-bureaucratic and political sloganeering approach to the environment and develop a much more powerful and positive model of integrating scientific knowledge into decision making.  Global warming is a perfect example of the gap between scientific knowledge and political rhetoric. Tens of billions of dollars have been allocated for various Kyoto Conference agreements and other measures to "fix" a problem that is considered "conventional wisdom" in the political world. However, we are learning new information every day that casts, at the very least, a reasonable doubt as to how much we actually know about the existence of global warming or its potential causes.  We have just learned, for instance, about a new phenomenon - only 3 years in discovery - called the Pacific Dacadal Oscillation, which scientists believe may put us on the brink of a change in climate patterns that could last 20 or 30 years (Washington Post, 1/20/00). It affects the Pacific Ocean - a third of the earth's surface - and these scientists believe it would take ten years of data before they could "declare with confidence" that they knew what it meant, because it involves fluctuations and reversals in temperature, and has the potential to affect weather from China to the Sahara.  Rather than having an ideological fight over global warming we should insist that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NSF, NASA and the National Academy of Sciences develop a ten-year thorough strategy for dramatically increasing our understanding of weather and climate. Only then will we have the knowledge to make decisions about large changes in the society.  Similarly many of our clean air problems will be solved if hydrogen fuel cell technology continues to develop.  Finally a sophisticated monitoring system for the rain forests, combined with corporate leadership in developing strategies for protecting the rain forests, could lead to a dramatic improvement in their survivability.  These are examples of a more aggressive science and technology, modern management and free enterprise based approach to a healthier environment, greater biodiversity, a growing economy, and expanded freedom.
The Particular Challenge for 2000

For change to be successful in 2000 it is essential that we sincerely and aggressively communicate in ways that are inclusive and not exclusive, particularly with the Hispanic population. Our political system cannot sustain effectiveness without being inclusive. There are two principle reasons this strategy must be pursued:

1. A majority in the Age of Transitions will be inclusive. The American people have reached a decisive conclusion that they want a unified nation with no discrimination, no bias and no exclusions based on race, religion, sex or disability. A party or movement that is seen as exclusionary will be a permanent minority. The majority in the Age of Transitions will have solutions that improve the lives of the vast majority of Americans and will make special efforts to recruit activists from minority groups, to communicate in minority media, and to work with existing institutions in minority communities. For Republicans this will mean a major effort to attract and work with every American of every background. Only a visibly aggressively inclusive Republican Party will be capable of being a majority in the Age of Transitions.

2. The ultimate arbiter of majority status in the next generation will be the Hispanic community. The numbers are simple and indisputable. If Hispanics become Republican the Republican Party is the majority Party for the foreseeable future. If Hispanics become Democrat the Republican Party is the minority Party for at least a generation. On issues and values Hispanics are very open to the Republican Party. On historic affinity and networking among professional politicians and activist groups Democrats have an edge among Hispanics. There should be no higher priority for American politicians than reaching out to and incorporating Hispanics at every level in every state. Governors George W. and Jeb Bush have proven Republicans can be effectively inclusive and create a working partnership with Hispanics. Every elected official and every candidate should follow their example.
Conclusion

These are examples of the kind of large changes that are going to be made available and even practical by the Age of Transitions. The movement and Party which first understands the potential of the Age of Transitions, develops an understanding of the operating principles of that Age, applies them to creating better solutions, and then communicates those solutions in the language of everyday life will have a great advantage in seeking to become a stable, governing majority.  This paper outlines the beginning of a process as big as the Progressive Era or the rise of Jacksonian Democracy, the Republicans, the New Deal, or the conservative movement of Goldwater and Reagan. This paper outlines the beginning of a journey not its conclusion. It will take a lot of people learning, experimenting, and exploring over the next decade to truly create the inevitable breakthrough.

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Chapter 12

FRANCISCO VARELA

"The Emergent Self"

http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/t-Ch.12.html

Stuart Kauffman: Francisco Varela is amazingly inventive, freewheeling, and creative. There's a lot of depth in what he and Humberto Maturana have said. Conversely, from the point of view of a tied-down molecular biologist, this is all airy-fairy, flaky stuff. Thus there's the mixed response. That part of me that's tough-minded and critical is questioning, but the other part of me has cottoned on to the recent stuff he's doing on self- representation in immune networks. I love it.

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FRANCISCO VARELA is a biologist; director of research at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, and professor of cognitive science and epistemology at the École Polytechnique, in Paris; author of Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979); coauthor with Humberto D. Maturana of Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980) and The Tree of Knowledge (1987), and with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch of The Embodied Mind (1992).





Francisco Varela: I guess I've had only one question all my life. Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is a key and eternal question.

As a consequence, I'm interested in the nervous system, cognitive science, and immunology, because they concern the processes that can answer the question of what biological identity is. How can you have some kind of identity that simultaneously allows you to know something, allows cells to configure their own relevant world, the immune system to generate the identity of our body in its own way, and the brain to be the basis for a mind, a cognitive identity? All these mechanisms share a common theme.

I'm perhaps best known for three different kinds of work, which seem disparate to many people but to me run as a unified theme. These are my contributions in conceiving the notion of autopoiesis — self-production — for cellular organization, the enactive view of the nervous system and cognition, and a revising of current ideas about the immune system.

Regarding the subject of biological identity, the main point is that there is an explicit transition from local interactions to the emergence of the "global" property — that is, the virtual self of the cellular whole, in the case of autopoiesis. It's clear that molecules interact in very specific ways, giving rise to a unity that is the initiation of the self. There is also the transition from nonlife to life. The nervous system operates in a similar way. Neurons have specific interactions through a loop of sensory surfaces and motor surfaces. This dynamic network is the defining state of a cognitive perception domain. I claim that one could apply the same epistemology to thinking about cognitive phenomena and about the immune system and the body: an underlying circular process gives rise to an emergent coherence, and this emergent coherence is what constitutes the self at that level. In my epistemology, the virtual self is evident because it provides a surface for interaction, but it's not evident if you try to locate it. It's completely delocalized.

Organisms have to be understood as a mesh of virtual selves. I don't have one identity, I have a bricolage of various identities. I have a cellular identity, I have an immune identity, I have a cognitive identity, I have various identities that manifest in different modes of interaction. These are my various selves. I'm interested in gaining further insight into how to clarify this notion of transition from the local to the global, and how these various selves come together and apart in the evolutionary dance. In this sense, what I've studied, say, in color vision for the nervous system or in immune self-regulation are what Dan Dennett would call "intuition pumps," to explore the general pattern of the transition from local rules to emergent properties in life. We have at our disposal beautiful examples to play around with, both in terms of empirical results and in terms of mathematics and computer simulations. The immune system is one beautiful, very specific case. But it's not the entire picture.

My autopoiesis work was my first step into these domains: defining what is the minimal living organization, and conceiving of cellular-automata models for it. I did this in the early 1970s, way before the artificial-life wave hit the beach. This work was picked up by Lynn Margulis, in her research and writings on the origins of life, the evolution of cellular life, and, with James Lovelock, the Gaia hypothesis. Humberto Maturana and I invented the idea of autopoiesis in 1970. We worked together in Santiago, during the Socialist years. The idea was the result of suspecting that biological cognition in general was not to be understood as a representation of the world out there but rather as an ongoing bringing-forth of a world, through the very process of living itself.

Autopoiesis attempts to define the uniqueness of the emergence that produces life in its fundamental cellular form. It's specific to the cellular level. There's a circular or network process that engenders a paradox: a self-organizing network of biochemical reactions produces molecules, which do something specific and unique: they create a boundary, a membrane, which constrains the network that has produced the constituents of the membrane. This is a logical bootstrap, a loop: a network produces entities that create a boundary, which constrains the network that produced the boundary. This bootstrap is precisely what's unique about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed. This entity has produced its own boundary. It doesn't require an external agent to notice it, or to say, "I'm here." It is, by itself, a self- distinction. It bootstraps itself out of a soup of chemistry and physics.

The idea arose, also at that time, that the local rules of autopoiesis might be simulated with cellular automata. At that time, few people had ever heard of cellular automata, an esoteric idea I picked up from John von Neumann — one that would be made popular by the artificial-life people. Cellular automata are simple units that receive inputs from immediate neighbors and communicate their internal state to the same immediate neighbors.

In order to deal with the circular nature of the autopoiesis idea, I developed some bits of mathematics of self-reference, in an attempt to make sense out of the bootstrap — the entity that produces its own boundary. The mathematics of self-reference involves creating formalisms to reflect the strange situation in which something produces A, which produces B, which produces A. That was 1974. Today, many colleagues call such ideas part of complexity theory.

The more recent wave of work in complexity illuminates my bootstrap idea, in that it's a nice way of talking about this funny, screwy logic where the snake bites its own tail and you can't discern a beginning. Forget the idea of a black box with inputs and outputs. Think in terms of loops. My early work on self-reference and autopoiesis followed from ideas developed by cyberneticists such as Warren McCulloch and Norbert Wiener, who were the first scientists to think in those terms. But early cybernetics is essentially concerned with feedback circuits, and the early cyberneticists fell short of recognizing the importance of circularity in the constitution of an identity. Their loops are still inside an input/output box. In several contemporary complex systems, the inputs and outputs are completely dependent on interactions within the system, and their richness comes from their internal connectedness. Give up the boxes, and work with the entire loopiness of the thing. For instance, it's impossible to build a nervous system that has very clear inputs and outputs.

The next area of significant work involves applying the logic of the emergent properties of circular structures to look at the nervous system. The consequence is a radical change in the received view of the brain. The nervous system is not an information-processing system, because, by definition, information-processing systems need clear inputs. The nervous system has internal, or operational, closure. The key question is how, on the basis of its ongoing internal dynamics, the brain configures or constitutes relevance from otherwise nonmeaningful interactions. You can see why I'm not really interested in the classical artificial-intelligence and information-processing metaphors of brain studies. The brain can't be understood as a computer, in any interesting sense, and I part company with the people who think that the brain does rely on symbolic representation.

The same intuitions cut across other biological fields. Deconstruct the notion that the brain is processing information and making a representation of the world. Deconstruct the militaristic notion that the immune system is about defense and looking out for invaders. Deconstruct the notion that evolution is about optimizing fitness to live in the conditions present in some kind of niche. I haven't been directly active in this last line of research, but it's of great importance for my argument. Deconstructing adaptation means deconstructing neo-Darwinism. Steve Gould, Stuart Kauffman, and Dick Lewontin, each in his own way, have spelled out this new evolutionary view. Lewontin, in particular, has much appreciated the fact that my work on the nervous system mirrors his work with evolution.

My fourth area of concentration — the most recent one — consists of using the same concepts to revise our understanding of the immune system. Just as conventional biology understood the nervous system as an information-processing system, classic immunology understands immunology in military terms — as a defense system against invaders.

I've been developing a different view of immunology — namely, that the immune system has its own closure, its own network quality. The emergent identity of this system is the identity of your body, which is not a defensive identity. This is a positive statement, not a negative one, and it changes everything in immunology. In presenting immunology in these terms, I'm creating a conceptual scaffolding. We have to go beyond an information- processing model, in which incoming information is acted upon by the system. The immune system is not spatially fixed, it's best understood as an emergent network.

I've also carried out empirical work corresponding to these intuitions. These ideas are incarnated into new experiments, and provide new results. For example, in classical immunology you were dealing with an external response system that was always watching out for invaders. If this made sense, the system would shrink to nothing if there were no invaders. Yet when mice are raised in milieus free from external challenge, their immune systems are normal!

Classical medicine remains baffled by the spectrum of diseases known as autoimmune diseases. Why? Because autoimmune disease is outside the paradigm of immunology. There's nothing to vaccinate against; there's no bacteria coming from outside. It's something that the system does to itself. AIDS is a dramatic case of the deregulation of this coherent emergent property, much like ecological dysfunctioning. People think AIDS is an infection. This is, of course, true, but not true in the sense that once the system is infected with AIDS it triggers a condition of self- destruction of the immune system. HIV triggers a deregulation, which then amplifies itself and becomes its own nightmare. Thus when you look at the urine of an AIDS-infected patient, less than 5 percent of the dead lymphocytes are HIV-infected.

This is typical of an autoimmune condition: the system eats itself up. Consequently, it's beginning to dawn on people that looking for AIDS vaccines is a complete waste of time. From my point of view, the right approach is first to understand the nature of this global regulation. One hint of how to do this is to look for ways to reconnect the system. In this regard, autoimmune diseases are seen as a deregulation, a condition that cries for more connectedness, rather than as a condition susceptible to treatment with a vaccine. For example, look at drug addiction in terms of a social disease: Drug addicts are in some sense an autoimmune disease of society, because they end up destroying segments of society. What those people need is to be given support, jobs, and family care; you reconnect them back into the society. One approach we study is to provide new, normal antibodies that help to re-create the network. We are researching more sophisticated ways of doing this, but we need to have a pointer on where to go. Vaccines are not the answer.

I'm interested in establishing empirical correlations between a long-standing interest in Buddhist practice and scientific work. Western tradition has avoided the idea of a selfless self, of a virtual self. This egolessness, or selflessness, is truly the core of Buddhism. Over the past two thousand years, the Buddhists have developed philosophical, phenomenological, and epistemological sophistication, and they have invoked this intuition in a very hands-on way. We can use these insights much like people in the Renaissance used Greek philosophy to try to understand the science of Galileo.

Buddhism is a practice, not a belief, and every Buddhist is, in some way, lay clergy — involved in the way a scientist is involved in his or her work, or in the way a writer's mind is involved in writing, present in the background, all the time. People today have the leisure and sophistication to practice what before was only practical for monks. Buddhism affects Western culture through the individuals who practice it, through people who occasionally take it up as an escape. Buddhist ideas are prevalent throughout our culture — in physics and biology, for example, the basic ideas are Buddhism in disguise.

My view of the mind has been influenced by my interest in Buddhist thought. Buddhists are specialists in understanding this notion of a virtual self, or a selfless self, from the inside, as lived experience. This is what fascinates me about that tradition. Dan Dennett, incidentally, has come to the same conclusion in his own way. But while Dan focuses on the cognitive level, my own approach is to think about several biological levels, as I have mentioned, perhaps because I'm influenced by the broad idea of nonrepresentationalist knowledge. In my reality, knowledge coevolves with the knower and not as an outside, objective representation.

I see the mind as an emergent property, and the very important and interesting consequence of this emergent property is our own sense of self. My sense of self exists because it gives me an interface with the world. I'm "me" for interactions, but my "I" doesn't substantially exist, in the sense that it can't be localized anywhere. This view, of course, resonates with the notions of the other biological selves I mentioned, but there are subtle and important differences. An emergent property, which is produced by an underlying network, is a coherent condition that allows the system in which it exists to interface at that level — that is, with other selves or identities of the same kind. You can never say, "This property is here; it's in this component." In the case of autopoiesis, you can't say that life — the condition of being self-produced — is in this molecule, or in the DNA, or in the cellular membrane, or in the protein. Life is in the configuration and in the dynamical pattern, which is what embodies it as an emergent property.

I find it fascinating to apply this same line of analysis to my own mind, in the cognitive domain. My own sense of self, "me," can be seen in the same light. I have to be relentless to hold on to my identity. These ideas help us to come to a real appreciation of what it means to have an identity — to comprehend what we think of as our own mind. My mind has the quality of "being here" so I can relate to others. For example, I interact; but when I try to grasp it, it's nowhere — it's distributed in the underlying network.

Let me add that this emergence and nonlocality has nothing to do with the current hype about quantum mechanics and the brain. That stuff is perhaps an interesting hypothesis to entertain, but it has no scientific evidence behind it. On the other hand, I'm talking about thirty years' worth of results in cognitive science. I'd go one step further and dispute the typical physicist, who believes that he or she is dealing with fundamental reality. A physicist will say that we're made of atoms. Such statements, while true, are irrelevant. The statement "You're looking at me" doesn't have the same weight as statements concerning the cellular level. There is a reality of life and death, which affects us directly and is on a different level from the abstractions. We have to abandon the enormous deadweight of the materialism of the Western tradition, and turn to a more planetary way of thinking.


Stuart Kauffman: Francisco Varela is amazingly inventive, freewheeling, and creative. There's a lot of depth in what he and Humberto Maturana have said. Conversely, from the point of view of a tied-down molecular biologist, this is all airy-fairy, flaky stuff. Thus there's the mixed response. That part of me that's tough-minded and critical is questioning, but the other part of me has cottoned on to the recent stuff he's doing on self- representation in immune networks. I love it.

The work Francisco is doing on the core immune network, which is representing self, and the peripheral system, which is responding to an outside world, is very intriguing. I'm not sure whether he's correct in his thesis that the immune repertoire evolved as a means of representing self, and that an evolutionary consequence was the capacity to recognize and ward off nonself. Whether or not one agrees with that sort of ontological and evolutionary argument, the work he's doing is very nice. It's imaginative, it's tied down to facts in places where it can be tied down. He is very smart, utterly charming and graceful, and his capability in any one of a large number of languages astonishes me.

I first got to know Francisco, indirectly, in 1983, when I met Humberto Maturana in India. They'd come up with their theory of autopoiesis, which was considered gobbledygook by many tough- minded scientists if they paid any attention to it at all. After listening to Humberto, I returned to my work on autocatalytic sets, which I'd begun in 1971 and then set aside. I believe that my autocatalytic-polymer-set story is the clearest instance I know of, in terms of a formally described model, of what they mean by autopoiesis.

It's likely that 99 percent of serious biologists have never heard of Francisco. This is for two reasons. First, he's not American or English, and the bulk of serious molecular biology is done in America and England, with some being done in France, Switzerland, and Germany. Francisco, after all, comes from South America. He's not from the "right" part of the world — that is, the kind of place that usually produces biologists. Second, Francisco is a good theoretical biologist, and theory in biology is in low repute. He's done detailed simulations of immune networks and neural networks that actually function — at least on the computer — so it's good solid theoretical biology. It ties in with our work at the Santa Fe Institute on emergent collective phenomena.

I'm less florid than Francisco. Although his theoretical style may appeal to some of us theoreticians, it wouldn't appeal to tough-minded colleagues, or even to more facile experimental colleagues, who wouldn't see what the next experiment is.

This is a problem that's hard to get your mind around, if you aren't trained as a biologist. Unlike physics and chemistry, which are concept-driven and theory-driven, biology is essentially experiment-and grungy-fact-driven. Organisms are complicated, ad-hoc contraptions. That's been our view since Darwin.

Organisms are ad-hoc solutions to design problems. The standard view is that there are no deep theories of the deep meaning of ad-hoc contraptions. You take the things apart and find out how they work. Most biologists adhere to that view. Notions of underlying deep principles are not an anathema to them — they're just considered foolish.

Francisco is a philosopher, in a way. He and Humberto Maturana are right about their idea of autopoiesis. But he hasn't had a large impact in the United States. The main reason he's dismissed is that he's seen just as a philosopher. Along with Francisco, I'm among those who hold that such deep principles exist, and I'm trying to find them. I have a hard time being heard by my experimental colleagues. I would expect that Francisco has almost never been heard. In the pantheon of biological scientists, he's probably unknown.

W. Daniel Hillis: I used to think Francisco Varela was a mystic, because I couldn't understand his ideas. As I came to know him, I began to realize that he's actually fishing for some of the same things I am. He's trying to understand how emergent properties come from simple interactive systems. It's hard to express that question without sounding like a mystic. Cisco does not help things by genuinely being a mystic on some other issues, and hanging out with the Dalai Lama, but he's trying to get at the same issue I am. I think he's on to something, with his theories of the immune system; he's trying to look at network properties — things like attractors of the system, and so on — and trying to get above the level of looking at the chemistry of the immune system. It's yet to be seen whether that approach will actually explain anything, but I'm supportive of his quest.

Cisco clearly is a symbol for Marvin Minsky — a symbol for a set of things that Minsky is angry about. It's true that you lose perfectly good AI people when they go off into philosophy and stop doing anything useful. I think Minsky is very annoyed that one of his favorite students, Terry Winograd, started out by writing perfectly good computer programs and then went off and wrote a book on hermeneutics. That bugs Minsky, because he sees philosophy as a black hole into which his students are falling. In Marvin's mind, Cisco is a symbol of that black hole.

Christopher G. Langton: Varela is one of those people who has such an engaging, articulate style of talking that when you sit and listen to him, you find yourself nodding your head and going, "Yes, yes, yes, this is all great." Then once you get out of the room, and out from under his very significant personal charm, it's hard to figure out exactly what it was he said. This is one of my problems with the field of autopoiesis. The contribution it makes is that it allows you to talk about a set of phenomena known to us from biology in a different kind of language, and sometimes just changing the language can make you look at things in a new way.

Some people who come across phenomena such as self- organization for the first time through the writings of Varela and Humberto Maturana become real advocates of autopoiesis, because it's in the context of that language that they first come across those phenomena. I came across those phenomena in the world of biology, and in the language of biology and physics, and so I'm used to thinking about them in that language, and I don't see any benefit for someone like myself in mapping them over onto the language of autopoiesis. I don't think it adds anything to our understanding of phenomenology. Once one has gone through the translation, there's no value added. It's just another way of describing the same phenomena — a way that's not particularly useful to me.

Varela would claim that he is adding something to the scientific discussion when he casts all these phenomena in his language, but whatever it is he adds always seems to slip away from me whenever I try to pin it down. I was troubled when a friend of mine pointed out that he could go through one of Varela's papers and replace the phrase "autopoietic system" with the phrase "living system" and it wouldn't change anything; in fact, several of the statements simply became tautologies. In other words, autopoiesis doesn't get me anywhere I haven't already been.

I know a lot of people, especially in Europe, who are very influenced by autopoiesis, and who are very careful in the way they describe this principle. However, I've also found that many of Varela's most ardent followers are flaming vitalists, who have found in autopoiesis a way to get beyond what they consider to be the reductionist agenda. They feel that autopoiesis allows for higher-level organizing principles in a way that what they call strict reductionist science cannot. That's epistemology, not science. The question is whether or not it's good epistemology. I don't know. Many people think it's very good, and I can't blame Varela or Maturana for the abuses wrought by their followers.

Daniel C. Dennett: Post hoc ergo propter hoc! "After this, therefore because of this." Francisco Varela is a very smart man who, out of a certain generosity of spirit, thinks he gets his ideas from Buddhism. I'd like him to delete the references to Buddhist epistemology in his writings. His scientific work is very important, and so are the conclusions we can draw from the work. Buddhist thinking has nothing to do with it, and bringing it in only clouds the real issues.

There are striking parallels between Francisco's "Emergent Mind" and my "Joycean Machines." Francisco and I have a lot in common. In fact, I spent three months at CREA, in Paris, with him in 1990, and during that time I wrote much of Consciousness Explained. Yet though Francisco and I are friends and colleagues, I'm in one sense his worst enemy, because he's a revolutionary and I'm a reformer. He has the standard problem of any revolutionary: the establishment is — must be — nonreformable. All its thinking has to be discarded, and everything has to start from scratch.

We're talking about the same issues, but I want to hold on to a great deal of what's gone before and Francisco wants to discard it. He strains at making the traditional ways of looking at things too wrong.

Niles Eldredge: I was driving in a car with Francisco in Italy once. I was just starting to watch birds, partly as a hobby and partly because so much evolutionary biology has been done on birds. I said that one neat thing about birds is that you can hear their songs, and you can also see the same color spectrum they do, so you can look at the differences in their feather patterns, and these are precisely the things that birds use to sort each other out. He got very angry and very firmly and quickly corrected me, because he had been doing a lot of research on the physiology of the vision and hearing of birds. He assured me that birds can see and hear in spectra that are way beyond human capabilities. I said I knew that, but on the other hand it was a levels problem. I was more interested in the fact that we tell the difference between birds by the songs of different species and sometimes individuals, just with our own ears, and birds are indeed using that to sort each other out — to find the correct mate, and all that.

Francisco was very formal, and impatient with the somewhat sloppy level of discourse I seem to be content with. He's interested in physiology and morphology first, and then the transformation of them, in an evolutionary sense. To me, that's where everybody has always started from, and that's why I walked away from that thirty years ago, and only got back to it tangentially. I've been studying adaptation only obliquely, being concerned mostly with the context of adaptive change. I don't intersect with his mode of thought that strongly.

Brian Goodwin: The first time I ever heard of Francisco Varela was when he sent me an article on autopoiesis. He was still in Chile at the time, and I looked at it and thought it was far too abstract. I was obviously in an antiabstract phase at the time, and I put it to one side and paid no more attention to it. Then I met him.

Francisco is extraordinary in terms of the clarity of his thinking and the quality of his research, because he implements his more abstract ideas in very high-quality research work. He's an exceptional combination of a precise thinker and an imaginative thinker. Since he's in theoretical biology, he's not universally known. Anyone working in immunology will be very aware of his important contributions in that context, but his main contributions are in the realm of theory.

Lynn Margulis: I know some of the work of Francisco Varela, but he often talks a language I don't understand at all. I don't know if it's just me, or if he is really obscurantist. His recognition of the importance of autopoiesis, which comes from collaboration with his teacher, Humberto Maturana, involves deep understanding of living systems and how chemical self-maintenance and self- formation intrinsically define life. One part of an organism cannot be privileged over another. DNA can't be more important than membranes, because without either DNA or membranes the cell does not exist. All the components of the living system make and constantly define that system. Autopoietic systems — whether cells, organisms, or communities — are run from the inside.

Autopoiesis, as a series of criteria for defining identity and existence, applies to bacteria as well as to protoctists and people. Some say autopoiesis even applies to social systems; although debatably applied to societies, autopoiesis is a helpful organizing principle. I respect Francisco's role in recognizing the fundamental difference between living systems and engineered or other nonliving systems, but I think he obscures the way he presents his views. I don't know whether the confusion is his or mine. In this regard, Francisco is a language Wunderkind. I always speak with him in Spanish or French if we're alone, but when others are present we revert to English. He's totally comprehensible, articulate, and far more fluent than I am in all three languages. But there's a communication difficulty at a much deeper level. Some spectators call him a phony. I disagree. My interpretation is that he has difficulty translating his concepts into their language-trapped explanations.

[Dig]

Classical medicine remains baffled by the spectrum of diseases known as autoimmune diseases. Why? Because autoimmune disease is outside the paradigm of immunology. There's nothing to vaccinate against; there's no bacteria coming from outside. It's something that the system does to itself. AIDS is a dramatic case of the deregulation of this coherent emergent property, much like ecological dysfunctioning. People think AIDS is an infection. This is, of course, true, but not true in the sense that once the system is infected with AIDS it triggers a condition of self-destruction of the immune system. HIV triggers a deregulation, which then amplifies itself and becomes its own nightmare. Thus when you look at the urine of an AIDS-infected patient, less than 5 percent of the dead lymphocytes are HIV-infected. This is typical of an autoimmune condition: the system eats itself up. Consequently, it's beginning to dawn on people that looking for AIDS vaccines is a complete waste of time. From my point of view, the right approach is first to understand the nature of this global regulation. One hint of how to do this is to look for ways to reconnect the system. In this regard, autoimmune diseases are seen as a deregulation, a condition that cries for more connectedness, rather than as a condition susceptible to treatment with a vaccine. For example, look at drug addiction in terms of a social disease: Drug addicts are in some sense an autoimmune disease of society, because they end up destroying segments of society. What those people need is to be given support, jobs, and family care; you reconnect them back into the society. One approach we study is to provide new, normal antibodies that help to re-create the network. We are researching more sophisticated ways of doing this, but we need to have a pointer on where to go. Vaccines are not the answer. I'm interested in establishing empirical correlations between a long-standing interest in Buddhist practice and scientific work. Western tradition has avoided the idea of a selfless self, of a virtual self. This egolessness, or selflessness, is truly the core of Buddhism. Over the past two thousand years, the Buddhists have developed philosophical, phenomenological, and epistemological sophistication, and they have invoked this intuition in a very hands-on way. We can use these insights much like people in the Renaissance used Greek philosophy to try to understand the science of Galileo.

So basically...if cybernetics are able to introduce the "selfless self" or "virtual self" to the human network and spread a virus...they could create the AIDS epidemic of cells destroying themselves and not fighting back for the entire human species. Cybernetics/nanotech will allow these psychos to fulfill on Prince Philip's dream. The selfless or virtual self indoctination is their answer. They believe free will does not exist and that we have no right as an individual and if we start to object to destruction of individual rights then we will be seen as a threat to the ability for the new scientists to have their new world order. Here come the transhumanists with a cybernetic virus that IBM/Microsoft/RAND/Cisco/SAS/Convergys/Ptech/SAIC/CSIS/NRO/Gingrich are helping to create. The purpose of this "REVOLUTIONARY GAME CHANGER" NATO mandated cyber weaponry is to "transhumanize" us into not having free will so that we will not fight "THE HAPPENING" to come.

[Brocke]

I saw Tron Legacy on Wednesday and I have to admit that the effects were amazing. The animated CLU character was easy to pick as computer generated but the the use of the technology was impressive. The soundtrack was impeccable.

That said, what I think we have here is a complex multi-layered propaganda piece. The ISOs back story seemed to be a key element. There was a double message. On one side is could imply that the ISOs were divine created individuals on the other they could represent the "New Man" that will be the melding of man and machine.

TRON is a debugging command in the BASIC programming language. It is an abbreviation of TRace ON. It is used primarily for debugging line-numbered BASIC GOTO and GOSUB statements. In text-mode environments such as the TRS-80 or MS-DOS/IBM PC-DOS, it would print the current line number which was being executed, on-screen. In a windowed environment, when the TRON command had been executed, a window would indicate the line number being executed at that instant. This command's opposite is TROFF, or TRace OFF, used to turn off command tracing.

Other possible meanings:

The Realtime Operating system Nucleus
Toolkit for Routing in Optical Networks
Target Recognition and Operator Notification
The Realm of the Nebulae
The Return of the Native

The Return of the Native
Hardy's choice of themes - sexual politics, thwarted desire, and the conflicting demands of nature and society - makes this a truly modern novel. Underlying these modern themes, however, is a classical sense of tragedy: Hardy scrupulously observes the three unities of time, place, and action and suggests that the struggles of those trying to escape their destinies will only hasten their destruction.[3] To emphasize this point, he uses as setting an ancient heath steeped in pre-Christian history and supplies a Chorus consisting of Grandfer Cantle, Timothy Fairway, and the rest of the heathfolk. Hardy also pointedly alludes to Oedipus Rex with Clym's blindness and his obsessive grief for his mother.[4] Eustacia, who manipulates fate in hopes of leaving Egdon Heath for a larger existence in Paris, instead becomes an eternal resident when she drowns in Shadwater Weir; Wildeve shares not only Eustacia's dream of escape, but also her fate; and Clym, the would-be educational reformer, survives the Weir but lives on as a lonely, remorseful man.

Some critics – notably D. H. Lawrence – see the novel as a study of the way communities control their misfits. In Egdon Heath, most people (particularly the women) look askance at the proud, unconventional Eustacia. Mrs. Yeobright considers her too odd and unreliable to be a suitable bride for her son, and Susan Nunsuch, who frankly believes her to be a witch, tries to protect her children from Eustacia's supposedly baleful influence by stabbing her with a stocking pin and later burning her in effigy. Clym at first laughs at such superstitions, but later embraces the majority opinion when he rejects his wife as a murderer and adultress. In this view, Eustacia dies because she has internalised the community's values to the extent that, unable to escape Egdon without confirming her status as a fallen woman, she chooses suicide. She thereby ends her sorrows while at the same time – by drowning in the weir like any woman instead of floating, witchlike – she proves her essential innocence to the community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Native

The inverse of TRON is NORT

NORT   Network of Oriental Robotic Telescopes
NORT   Nuclear Ordnance Readiness Test


The trans-humanist theme is impossible to ignore. In my opinion the film presents two "opposing" versions of trans-humanism. One where perfection is the goal and the other where a godlike state of perfect imperfection is spontaneously attained.

There is no third anti-trans-humanist option offered other than living in the "real" world, which itself - as we all know - is a constructed reality.

[Dig]

Classical medicine remains baffled by the spectrum of diseases known as autoimmune diseases. Why? Because autoimmune disease is outside the paradigm of immunology. There's nothing to vaccinate against; there's no bacteria coming from outside. It's something that the system does to itself. AIDS is a dramatic case of the deregulation of this coherent emergent property, much like ecological dysfunctioning. People think AIDS is an infection. This is, of course, true, but not true in the sense that once the system is infected with AIDS it triggers a condition of self-destruction of the immune system. HIV triggers a deregulation, which then amplifies itself and becomes its own nightmare. Thus when you look at the urine of an AIDS-infected patient, less than 5 percent of the dead lymphocytes are HIV-infected. This is typical of an autoimmune condition: the system eats itself up. Consequently, it's beginning to dawn on people that looking for AIDS vaccines is a complete waste of time. From my point of view, the right approach is first to understand the nature of this global regulation. One hint of how to do this is to look for ways to reconnect the system. In this regard, autoimmune diseases are seen as a deregulation, a condition that cries for more connectedness, rather than as a condition susceptible to treatment with a vaccine. For example, look at drug addiction in terms of a social disease: Drug addicts are in some sense an autoimmune disease of society, because they end up destroying segments of society. What those people need is to be given support, jobs, and family care; you reconnect them back into the society. One approach we study is to provide new, normal antibodies that help to re-create the network. We are researching more sophisticated ways of doing this, but we need to have a pointer on where to go. Vaccines are not the answer. I'm interested in establishing empirical correlations between a long-standing interest in Buddhist practice and scientific work. Western tradition has avoided the idea of a selfless self, of a virtual self. This egolessness, or selflessness, is truly the core of Buddhism. Over the past two thousand years, the Buddhists have developed philosophical, phenomenological, and epistemological sophistication, and they have invoked this intuition in a very hands-on way. We can use these insights much like people in the Renaissance used Greek philosophy to try to understand the science of Galileo.

So basically...if cybernetics are able to introduce the "selfless self" or "virtual self" to the human network and spread a virus...they could create the AIDS epidemic of cells destroying themselves and not fighting back for the entire human species. Cybernetics/nanotech will allow these psychos to fulfill on Prince Philip's dream. The selfless or virtual self indoctination is their answer. They believe free will does not exist and that we have no right as an individual and if we start to object to destruction of individual rights then we will be seen as a threat to the ability for the new scientists to have their new world order. Here come the transhumanists with a cybernetic virus that IBM/Microsoft/RAND/Cisco/SAS/Convergys/Ptech/SAIC/CSIS/NRO/Gingrich are helping to create. The purpose of this "REVOLUTIONARY GAME CHANGER" NATO mandated cyber weaponry is to "transhumanize" us into not having free will so that we will not fight "THE HAPPENING" to come.

US Military: War is Good for Iraqi Teens' Self-Esteem
http://www.neatorama.com/2008/03/02/us-military-war-is-good-for-iraqi-teens-self-esteem/
By Alex in Weapons & War on Mar 2, 2008 at 3:18 pm

Here’s an interesting study by the US Army on the effect of war on the psyche of Iraqi teens:

For obvious reasons, few social science researchers have ventured into Iraq since the American-led invasion. However, in 2004, a year into the hostilities, the US Army funded a team of Iraqi interviewers, based at the Asharq Centre for Polls and Marketing Research, to go into ten neighbourhoods of Baghdad to survey the concerns and self-esteem of 1000 teenagers. The results showed that rather than damaging their sense of self, the war appeared to have bolstered the teenagers’ self-esteem, especially in those who felt most strongly that their country was under threat. [...] The researchers said their finding was consistent with Social Identity Theory, which predicts that people will seek to maintain their sense of self when their identity is under threat. It’s also consistent with research on mortality salience, showing that people tend to shore up their sense of self when reminded of, or threatened by, risk of death.

[Dig]

Chemical Hallucinations, Mind Control, and Dr. Jose Delgado
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/delgado.htm
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Updated on October, 1999
   
"Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain."
-Dr. Jose Delgado in front of Congress

"Free Will is the most important law in all of Creation."
-Cassiopaeans

The above quote by Dr. Jose Delgado is quite frightening, isn't it?

[...]

Clearly, "Dr. Delgado" must think that he is somewhere near the top of this foodchain, judging by his published remarks. Well, it seems that, by saying that he is desperately yearning to revert back to the primordial soup, Dr. Delgado DOES have some awareness of his path...

[...]

And here we have the problem. Such individuals not only desperately long to revert to the primordial soup, they want to take everyone else with them! And, in their mode of wishful thinking, they convince themselves that everyone else, in their "heart of hearts," wants the same thing!

But "Dr. Delgado" DOES comprehend. He is CONSCIOUS.

And, apparently, one of the prophets of the Gospel of Devolution is "Dr. Jose Delgado," wishfully thinking that he, and the rest of humanity are merely...

"gobs and gobs of living humanoidal tissue cultures in search of a little bedtime story."




Side note: Dr. Delgado progression of experiments are depicted in the remake of Island of Dr. Moreau w/ Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer.

1896...HG Wells The Island of Dr. Moreau...
http://www.bartleby.com/1001/14.html



  “The stores were landed and the house was built. The Kanakas founded some huts near the ravine. I went to work here upon what I had brought with me. There were some disagreeable things happened at first. I began with a sheep, and killed it after a day and a half by a slip of the scalpel. I took another sheep, and made a thing of pain and fear and left it bound up to heal. It looked quite human to me when I had finished it; but when I went to it I was discontented with it. It remembered me, and was terrified beyond imagination; and it had no more than the wits of a sheep. The more I looked at it the clumsier it seemed, until at last I put the monster out of its misery. These animals without courage, these fear-haunted, pain-driven things, without a spark of pugnacious energy to face torment,—they are no good for man-making.     30

  “Then I took a gorilla I had; and upon that, working with infinite care and mastering difficulty after difficulty, I made my first man. All the week, night and day, I moulded him. With him it was chiefly the brain that needed moulding; much had to be added, much changed. I thought him a fair specimen of the negroid type when I had finished him, and he lay bandaged, bound, and motionless before me. It was only when his life was assured that I left him and came into this room again, and found Montgomery much as you are. He had heard some of the cries as the thing grew human,—cries like those that disturbed you so. I didn’t take him completely into my confidence at first. And the Kanakas too, had realised something of it. They were scared out of their wits by the sight of me. I got Montgomery over to me—in a way; but I and he had the hardest job to prevent the Kanakas deserting. Finally they did; and so we lost the yacht. I spent many days educating the brute,—altogether I had him for three or four months. I taught him the rudiments of English; gave him ideas of counting; even made the thing read the alphabet. But at that he was slow, though I’ve met with idiots slower. He began with a clean sheet, mentally; had no memories left in his mind of what he had been. When his scars were quite healed, and he was no longer anything but painful and stiff, and able to converse a little, I took him yonder and introduced him to the Kanakas as an interesting stowaway.     31

  “They were horribly afraid of him at first, somehow,—which offended me rather, for I was conceited about him; but his ways seemed so mild, and he was so abject, that after a time they received him and took his education in hand. He was quick to learn, very imitative and adaptive, and built himself a hovel rather better, it seemed to me, than their own shanties. There was one among the boys a bit of a missionary, and he taught the thing to read, or at least to pick out letters, and gave him some rudimentary ideas of morality; but it seems the beast’s habits were not all that is desirable.

[...]

  “So for twenty years altogether—counting nine years in England—I have been going on; and there is still something in everything I do that defeats me, makes me dissatisfied, challenges me to further effort. Sometimes I rise above my level, sometimes I fall below it; but always I fall short of the things I dream. The human shape I can get now, almost with ease, so that it is lithe and graceful, or thick and strong; but often there is trouble with the hands and the claws,—painful things, that I dare not shape too freely. But it is in the subtle grafting and reshaping one must needs do to the brain that my trouble lies. The intelligence is often oddly low, with unaccountable blank ends, unexpected gaps. And least satisfactory of all is something that I cannot touch, somewhere—I cannot determine where—in the seat of the emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst forth suddenly and inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate, or fear. These creatures of mine seemed strange and uncanny to you so soon as you began to observe them; but to me, just after I make them, they seem to be indisputably human beings. It’s afterwards, as I observe them, that the persuasion fades. First one animal trait, then another, creeps to the surface and stares out at me. But I will conquer yet! Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say, ‘This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!’ After all, what is ten years? Men have been a hundred thousand in the making.” He thought darkly. “But I am drawing near the fastness. This puma of mine—” After a silence,

“And they revert. As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again.”

Another long silence.     41

  “Then you take the things you make into those dens?” said I.     42

  “They go. I turn them out when I begin to feel the beast in them, and presently they wander there. They all dread this house and me. There is a kind of travesty of humanity over there. Montgomery knows about it, for he interferes in their affairs. He has trained one or two of them to our service. He’s ashamed of it, but I believe he half likes some of those beasts. It’s his business, not mine. They only sicken me with a sense of failure. I take no interest in them. I fancy they follow in the lines the Kanaka missionary marked out, and have a kind of mockery of a rational life, poor beasts! There’s something they call the Law. Sing hymns about ‘all thine.’ They build themselves their dens, gather fruit, and pull herbs—marry even. But I can see through it all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts, beasts that perish, anger and the lusts to live and gratify themselves.—Yet they’re odd; complex, like everything else alive. There is a kind of upward striving in them, part vanity, part waste sexual emotion, part waste curiosity. It only mocks me. I have some hope of this puma. I have worked hard at her head and brain—“And now,” said he, standing up after a long gap of silence, during which we had each pursued our own thoughts, “what do you think? Are you in fear of me still?”     43


Nothing has stopped their plan to eradicate the "animal" in humans.

He is describing a sheep or guerilla, but could this really be a way of hiding a practice by the elites that was exposed 40 years later? The exact type of experiments were done on humans by Dr. Mengele and then the same paperclipped Nazi scientists did it in the US with MK Ultra. Dr. Mengele's patients react to Dr. Mengele just as the animals did to Dr. Moreau with the pain, the fright, the obedience and even the twisted and conditioned sense of "slave love" based on trauma based mind control. Cathy O'Brien and many others have described this precise method of perfecting the super human slave to the elites. The documented project was called "MONARCH" for goodness sake.

Was Mengele just following a secret method of eugenic mind control practiced for over 50 years that Wells was allowed to observe and then begin the conditioning for? No matter if it was 110 years ago, 80 years ago, 50 years ago, or now... These actions are blatant crimes against humanity on its face and these "Dr. Moreau's" that saturate our ramp up to a scientific technocracy must be exposed for the sadistic psychopaths they readily admit they are.

[Dig]

Thanks to Pilikia from another thread ... this post seems to fit here as well:

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=196497.msg1165693#msg1165693

~~~~~~

It's a toss-up. Both are controlled.

"If it was possible to become free of negative emotions by a riskless implementation of an electrode - without impairing intelligence and the critical mind - I would be the first patient." Dalai Lama
(Society for Neuroscience Congress, Nov. 2005)


http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/dvorsky20090502/

In November 2005, at the Society for Neuroscience Congress, the Dalai Lama observed, “If it was possible to become free of negative emotions by a riskless implementation of an electrode—without impairing intelligence and the critical mind—I would be the first patient.”

Note that the Dalai Lama wasn’t announcing his intention to queue-jump. Nor was he proposing that high-functioning bliss should be the privilege of one special group or species. Unlike the Abrahamic religions, but in common with classical utilitarianism, Buddhism is committed to the welfare of all sentient beings. Instead, the Dalai Lama was stressing that we should embrace the control of our reward circuitry that modern science is shortly going to deliver - and not disdain it as somehow un-spiritual.

Smart neurostimulation, long-acting mood-enhancers, genetically re-engineering our hedonic “set-point” (etc.) aren’t therapeutic strategies associated with Buddhist tradition. Yet if we are morally serious about securing the well-being of all sentient life, then we have to exploit advanced technology to the fullest possible extent. Nothing else will work (short of some exotic metaphysics that is hard to reconcile with the scientific world-picture). Non-biological strategies to enrich psychological well-being have been tried on a personal level over thousands of years—and proved inadequate at best.

This is because they don’t subvert the brutally efficient negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill—a legacy of millions of years of natural selection. Nor is the well-being of all sentient life feasible in a Darwinian ecosystem where the welfare of some creatures depends on eating or exploiting others. The lion can lie down with the lamb; but only after both have been genetically tweaked. Any solution to the problem of suffering ultimately has to be global.

In the meantime, I think the greatest personal contribution to reducing suffering that an individual can make is both to:

  1. Abstain from eating meat
  2. Make it clear to his or her entire circle of acquaintance that meat-eating is abhorrent and morally unacceptable

Such plain speaking calls for moral courage that alas sometimes deserts me.

I know many readers of Sentient Developments are Buddhists. Not all of them will agree with the above analysis. Some readers may suspect that I’m just trying to cloak my techno-utopianism in the mantle of venerable Buddhist wisdom. (Heaven forbid!)

In fact the Abolitionist Project is just a blueprint for implementing the aspiration of Gautama Buddha two and a half millennia ago: “May all that have life be delivered from suffering”. I hope other researchers will devise (much) better blueprints; and the project will one day be institutionalized, internationalized, properly funded, transformed into a field of rigorous academic scholarship, and eventually government-led.

I’ve glossed over a lot of potential pitfalls and technical challenges. Here I’ll just say I think they are a price worth paying for a cruelty-free world.