5G - The New Cellular Network by Steve Yothment

Kudos to Steve Yothment for his October 22, 2019 Owl & Ibis - A Confluence of Minds presentation, "5G - The New Cellular Network."

Steve took us from the first generation of cellular phone technology up to the present in a concise and clear manner. Steve, an electronics engineer, was most patient and accommodating of the attendee's many questions and concerns. Steve also showed six short videos about 5G.

Those who could not attend the meeting may view Steve's slideshow as a PDF document here. Live links to the videos shown are on the last two slides.

Other questions came to mind but there wasn't enough time to discuss them fully. Here's a sampling of thoughts Steve's presentation elicited:

• How did Humankind progress from radar and television as new and awe-inspiring technology around the time of World War II to today and the astonishing capabilities of 5G and other electronic technologies?
• Who exactly is controlling or driving the development of 5G?
• Will 5G replace real-time human interactions?
• Is 5G's promise of selling more phone units that have faster download speeds and that are cheaper a "good" thing?
• Does the world really need robotic surgery, self-driving cars, more service technologies? Shouldn't the best minds and high tech money be used for more practical human and ecological problems?
• Will 5G contribute to hastening the ever-increasing rate at which humans speak to each other, and our reading more broadly and faster, but not necessarily more deeply? And will this thereby lower our ability to understand complex matters, especially social problems and human ethical and moral questions, in more depth?
• Cyber spying and cyber warfare were touched on especially in the videos but just how concerned should Humankind be about these life-threatening, existential matters?
• Will our deepening dependence on 5G and other electronic services make us more vulnerable to personal and social crises under such conditions as power outages and natural disasters?

Although we did not get to cover all of the above questions and concerns, readers are invited to comment on them below and continue the discussion.

Thanks again, Steve. Great job!

}:> ~:)

Going Local, Again: Escaping the Lonely, Destructive Wilderness of Modernity

For over 200,000 years Humankind has made every effort it can to escape its “primitivity” and thereby flourish. These efforts include choosing:

·       Food production over hunting and gathering;

·       Metal over stone tools;

·       Vehicular conveyance over foot travel;

·       Cities over movable campsites;

·       Surplus wealth accumulation over subsistence economics;

·       Tribal state politics over small band egalitarianism;

·       Science and reason over myth and religion;

·       Hydro-power and fossil fuels over human and draught animals;

·       Democracy over autocracy;

·       Nationalism over empire:

·       Globalism over nationalism; and

·       Capitalism over socialism and communism (ongoing).

Now, with the West in a state of full-fledged modernity, many non-Western nations on the verge of joining them, and all the others working hard and dreaming to follow and enjoy the fruits of modernity, there is a big problem.

The West, swaddled in all its financial and material wealth, is suffering from angst, anomie, and xenophobia. Capitalism has led to unsustainable economic inequality and ecological decline tipping points that many believe are immune to reform and amelioration. Many of these points have been reached or surpassed in some parts of the world.

Non-Western nations on the verge of or beginning to solidify their own modernity, as well as the poorest nations envious and hopeful of some day following the more-developed ones, are beginning to see the White Western Way for what it really is – neo-colonial; imperial; self-serving; rigged against them; hypocritical; morally hollow; and ecocidal.

The solution almost all nations are just now seriously beginning to call for is reform while ameliorating the decline and crash of capitalism and its lethal poisoning and climatological disturbance of the environment.

How should Humankind reform and ameliorate its impact on itself and the planet? There are many good ideas out there, some of which are being successfully implemented. But no-one knows if they will work. Regardless, we are right to make the efforts anyway on the slight chance that Humankind and the environment can retain some level of humaneness and livability.

This extended essay is a look at some things to consider as we approach and suffer through the coming collapse; and during which we are forced to peer out from our houses at our neighbors and ask: What must I, we, do to survive?

First, I will present which collapse of all the possibilities I think is preferable and most likely to occur. Then I will look at going local socially, and finally at the personal aspects of the rebuilding and resetting our “modern” psyches that collapse recovery will require. That is, a change in our psyches that have been consumerized, depersonalized, and morally calcified by religion or economic theory, or morally hollowed out by secular modernity. If you’ve ever felt like a shell of a person, you will understand what I’m getting at here.

As reforms and ameliorations pick up pace and kick in, it is becoming clear that if they work, and that is a big if, they will not allow Humankind to return to near unrestricted crony consumer capitalism. Nor will they allow us to continue to live and think of our individual lives within the dreamy, progressive panorama of savagely competitive nationalism; or allow us to return to our hip, chic lives besotted by the myths of consumer abundance and personal exceptionalism pumped through to us by our computer and TV screens.

Humankind will have to revert to thinking of “being” human as something local, very local. Race, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and political and economic ideology cannot be jettisoned. They will have to be “shrunk” to what can be accommodated locally and individually, and into something that will work in our forging relations with other local groups.

Along the way there will come those who want to, through persuasion or force, consolidate groups along the lines of those old familiar divisions – race, nation, etc. - that helped propel modernity. Such occurrences will not be inherently bad. What will be telling is if we return to complex consolidated societies, will we do so based on what we learned from the errors of the ways and means of our first go at modernization.

However, for now, let us consider collapse and the preemptive going local that has already begun.

Brave New World, 1984, or The Handmaid’s Tale?

Which is the greater future Americans should fear, asks Andrew Postman in the Guardian essay cited below: “an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state” as depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 published in 1949; or “a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble” as described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932? Let us also throw in for consideration Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale published in 1985, another dystopian novel set in a near-future totalitarian theocracy or theonomy that overthrows the U.S. government.

The Self is Not an Illusion in Any Meaningful, Useful Sense

“The Consciousness Illusion”

“Phenomenal consciousness is a fiction written by our brains to help us track the impact that the world makes on us.”

by

Keith Frankish

September 26, 2019

The above is a worthless, self-contradictory essay from Aeon, an otherwise good source of information and ideas.

The essay’s argument is an example of thinking that continues to undermine the social sciences and mislead the public, and gives an off ramp and free pass to those who wish to absolve individuals and society of moral responsibility for individual behavior and group action.

This line of thinking goes something like this: “We really can’t help ourselves. What we think and do is determined primarily and at bottom by our genes and physiology, over which we have little to no conscious, volitional control. We need an evolutionary biology of human behavior because religion, secular moral philosophy, and the social sciences have failed to deliver an exact, predictive science of human behavior as physics and chemistry have for matter. As we continue to tease out and get to the real roots of the biological bases of our behavior, that is, in our nerves and brains, and metaphorically in the so-called ‘moral foundations’ of our deep prehistory, let’s turn to medication to fix or ameliorate these material substrates that are the causes of our moral and behavioral failings.”

The British author of the essay in question, Keith Frankish, repeatedly uses the pronouns ‘we, us, I, you’ in his essay, yet blows right by and never directly addresses arguments for the reality of an embodied self as described by the following thinkers, to list only a few: