Idea Age is here. How can you get yourself ready?
It is not a secret that we are facing exponential threats from resource crunch and environmental degradation. This 5 post series argues that in response, we are inventing a new idea age.
It is not a secret that we are facing exponential threats from resource crunch and environmental degradation. This 5 post series argues that in response, we are inventing a new idea age.
This 5 post series addresses as to how “we are facing exponential threats from resource crunch and environmental degradation and in response, we are inventing a new idea age”.
There are a bunch of reason for us to believe that we have entered a new age of creativity. Another renaissance. But in its scope, this one will be like no other. By the time it has run its course, humankind would have, I speculate, made a clean break with the past.
This 5 post series will addresses as to how “we are facing exponential threats from resource crunch and environmental degradation and that in response, we are inventing a new idea age”.
Before discussing how human creativity is likely to save the day, we must first understand the origin of ideas, either inside a human head, or across a society. After all, there are striking similarities between both types of idea generation.
This 5 post series will addresses as to how “we are facing exponential threats from resource crunch and environmental degradation and that in response, we are inventing a new idea age”.
We (humans) are facing an imminent danger to the present way of life. Something must change. The popular belief is that change will drastically reverse the decades of advances that we have made in obtaining ourselves substantially better quality of living. Whereas, the popular hope is that we will come out on the other side much stronger than we are today.
Given that I am an ever-hopeful, I fall into the second camp and strongly ‘hope’ that some incredible breakthrough will come along (after all, what is the point in living, if one belongs to the ‘hopeless’ camp). The obvious candidate for the ‘breakthrough is coming’ camp is the exponential technology. That may not be the case.
So was Howard Roark. And, very probably, Ayn Rand was a psychopath too. But they were all so called ‘high functioning’ psychopaths. In other words, they have a psychopath’s psychological make up, but they have used the traits constructively.
Killing negative, worrisome and stressful thoughts is simple. If you use a bit of neuroscience.
We are naturally inclined to associate only one idea with one person. This innocuous cognitive limitation called generalization is hugely responsible for decoloring people and societies.
Normal is made by mixing a little bit of each color. It results in a dull gray. Eccentrics, on the other hand, is all of few shades and none of the rest. Eccentrics are like a riot of colors.
4 out of 5 writers are known to have incidence of bipolar disorder in their family. 1 in 2 entrepreneurs are known to have ADHD spectrum disorder. People are known to get powerful religious visions after epileptic seizures.
What is going on here? Why haven’t these conditions go away from human gene pool, even though they usually are detrimental to the carrier’s ability to reproduce?
Whenever a belief or an attitude is shared by all (or most) of humanity, it must have offered us a significant survival advantage in our evolutionary past. After all, people without this belief/attitude were wiped off from the gene pool!
In an earlier post, I discussed about how our sense of spirituality is suspected to be an evolutionary by-product. Scientists working on evolution suspect that our compulsion to subscribe to concepts like God and Life-Purpose might have similar evolutionary origins.
We often confuse the selfish motives of our genes with the motives an the animal. We shouldn’t. We are not our genes. We are not more. We are not less either. We are different.