Thanks Jim,

Glad to see from your essay that you look to history as well...

Best of luck!

Rick Searle

Hi Rick,

I find some similarities between our positions, and you've convinced me (together with Sabine Hossenfelder) that I should take a look a Smolin's new book - I was avoiding it because I think he misunderstands what the block versus flow of time pictures imply vis-a-vis free will and fatalism. However, your concluding statement is very close to various themes in my essay:

"The future is neither completely ours to shape nor something we are subject to without room for maneuver. For, continuing to think that our world cannot be made to better conform to our ideals is one of the surest ways to insure that what lies in our future is the farthest thing from Utopia. And so, if I were to answer the question that inspired this essay "how should humanity steer the future" directly, I would say that the question has no definitive and final answer but begins with the rediscovery that it is us with our hands behind the wheel."

I concur.

Best,

Dean

    Hi Rick,

    I think that steering the future is as difficult as steering the past, there are so many coincidences that influence the future (see my essay : "STEERING THE FUTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS") that it is even impossible to predict our second generation. It is not only the influence of for now unknown (unborn) individuals, that blur the future but also the difference of view of our participating individuals here and now.

    So "Utopia" can only be a subjective ideal, that is why so many religions are existing all with their own interpretation of a future "kingdom of heaven" , the subjective ideas are coupled and became rules to be lived in.

    It is in my opinion the overall "mentality" that has to change from egoistic short term profit ideas to a long term non-profit sharing our potentiality mentality. The average age of a human being is just 80 yers and that also influences his actions when they are influencing his wellnes during this time, if we would age longer then we would perhaps have more attention for a future that is longer away as those 80 years...

    I hope that you will find some time to read and leave a comment on my thread (link is above) and eventually give it a rating that is in acoordance with your personal valuation.

    Good luck and best regards

    Wilhelmus

      Anselm,

      I understand from a German perspective I might seem so, but please offer something to make you case.

      Rick,

      It is an observant and well thought out perspective, but I think the issues which need to be dealt with are more a matter of process, than objectives. We first really need to figure out what we are doing, before considering where we might be going.

      One point I keep making in various conversations on the FQXI forums, as well as prior contests is that we experience time as a sequence of events and so think of it as the present moving along a vector from past to future, which physics distills to measures of duration, but the underlaying reality is of the changing configuration that turns future into past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the world turns, not that there is some extradimensional flow from yesterday to tomorrow. So while the past has certainly been determined, the future remains probabilistic, because the input into any particular event only coalesces with its occurrence. We affect our world as it affects us. It is just the opportunities for greatest change are in times of maximum chaos. The punctuations of the equilibrium.

      A more specific problem with the concept of utopia goes to the heart of our current philosophic and religious assumptions, in that the universal state of the absolute is basis, not apex. It is the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell. The nature of complex systems is that the more complex they are, the more inherently unstable they are. Just look at the periodic table. So as we build out these social systems, they exhibit a wave pattern of compounding and then collapsing complexity. Nature incorporates this by having individuals be born and die, which the DNA slowing evolving as the stable state.

      In my own entry I focus on our treatment of money as a form of commodity, rather than the contract it is, as the most resolvable source of our inability to exist in a stable form of society. A currency is a promise by a community to its members and its value is entirely dependent on the health of that community, not how many such notes are in circulation, so when we sacrifice inter-communal relations and other resources in order to create and collect these notes, it is counter-productive.

      Regards,

      John Merryman

        John,

        Thank you for taking the time to read my essay and for your thought provoking comments. I am actually a great fan of Joesph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies which I've written about here:

        http://utopiaordystopia.com/2013/03/10/immortal-jellyfish-and-the-collapse-of-civilization/

        We are actually largely in agreement.

        In my post I was really trying as the title suggests re-conceptualize the idea of Utopia. It's not that I think Utopia will solve our problems, I just think reviving it as a practice might be helpful. It might help us in the form of actual experiments that would give us examples of how societies might be differently organized- one of the vulnerabilities of our current global industrial society being its lack of diversity.Some of this lack of diversity might be traced to versions of determinism at least that's the way I interpret thinkers like Kevin Kelly.

        As an intellectual practice Utopia might remind us what societies are actually for, which is to act as a vehicle through which we can actualize our full humanity.

        Reading and voting on your essay is the first thing on my agenda tomorrow. I want to give it all the time (and wakefulness) it deserves.

        Best of luck!

        Rick Searle

        Sure, Mike. Freely state whatever you think. I am here to learn. And I am eager to read, comment and vote on yours once I have the proper sleep.

        Rick

        Rick --

        Excellent essay, and I'm much in tune with your way of thinking. The last sections of my own essay on communications technology develop the same thought, that as "technology is moving intimately closer to our humanity... we really do have choices regarding how this particular phase of technological evolution will unfold, in a way we have not before."

        Your argument about technological determinism makes sense, though of course it's one aspect of a bigger picture. Part of the reason utopian thinking died out is that by setting up a vision of how things should be in contrast with how they actually are, it implies that we can just switch over from the wrong way of doing things to the right one. That seemed sensible in the 18th century, but didn't fit as well with the 19th-century realization that our history goes back a long, long way, and passed through many evolutionary stages. That also gave us the longer-term, progressive view of our future that made utopianism seem shallow and naive.

        Yet you're completely right about the importance of a "cartography of the future" in the utopian spirit. We badly need to develop new pictures of what it looks like when we've got it right. This is something I didn't attempt in my essay -- under present conditions I find it hard to envision hopeful scenarios. But some of the contest entries, including yours, are making me want to try.

        I'll have to check out some of your footnotes. It's very encouraging to think that "many are asking fundamental questions not so much about what it means to be human as what we want being human to mean..."

        Thanks -- Conrad

        Rick,

        The only reason I take issue is that utopia is a social idealization and I find there is a dangerous tendency to conflate ideals with absolutes. If we can first understand that what gives rise to form is context, so when we start distilling away and generally sterilizing the messy aspects, we don't want loose sight of the reasons for the forms in the first place. Otherwise there becomes that overpowering pull to the center, as the elementary fabric is weakened.

        So yes, we very much need our goals, desires and standards, but also a sense of proportion and balance have to be part of the mix as well.

        Looking at the way the world is going today, that sense of proportionality and equilibrium seems to be lost, as the various factions express their deep desires and apply standards they themselves might not uphold.

        Regards,

        Wilhelmus,

        I have read your essay and tend to leave a more extensive comment there, the long and short of which is I have my doubts as to if quantum fields,the nature of consciousness or theories of the multi-verse are as important as more mundane goal setting at least in terms of the near-term future.

        Where I think you and I are in solid engagement is that deterministic ideas of the future that follow only one path are not only socially dangerous but scientifically inaccurate as well.

        Best of luck on your essay!

        Dear Mr. Searle,

        A nice change of pace. I found your essay a joy to read, and not as outrageously oversimplified as one would tend to think.

        Regards,

        Joe Fisher

          Thanks, Joe. I'm a utopian with a lower case u.

          I intend to read and vote on your essay tonight. Please grade my essay if you haven't done so already.

          Best of luck!

          Rick

          Rick -

          Great essay, thanks. In my essay, The Tip of the Spear, I only make an oblique reference to the way technology has shaped our human imagination for the worse (by promoting determinism, commercialism) - you have tackled this issue head-on. Bravo.

          However, are we not looking in the rear view mirror? Determinism as a world view was promoted by Newtonian science and 19th/20th century technological enthusiasm. But the convergence of scientific theory and technological advance is now split. For the past century, fundamental science has grappled with an increasingly opaque and obscure landscape - relativity, quantum mechanics, complexity, and arcane specialization. These are existentially unsettling and seem to have led to an erosion of confidence and optimism in the scientific enterprise - just look at the climate change debates, or the new creationism for that matter.

          I would also say (Kurzweil to the contrary notwithstanding) that most humans are not particularly comfortable with all that the digital etc. world has brought with it. While technology, productivity and standard of living may have climbed, so has the sense of alienation and stress. That incessant beeping!

          I worry that we have yet to see the full impact of 20th century science and 21st century technology on the human imagination. It is playing out as we write. I hope that out of the ashes of 20th century determinism and progressivism we will see a new, positive, shared moral framework arise, rather than greater discord.

          Best - George

            Thanks Rick, when you have time.

            At the end of your essay, you imply that you haven't so much answered the question as agreed with its premise; as though to say, "Yes indeed, let us steer the future." But I disagree. I've long thought that utopianism could be (and has been) employed as an actual means of steering; so that any general description of utopian thought, including an historical one such as yours, is indeed a description of "how to steer". I came to this conclusion while reading Howard P. Segal's (1985) Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Segal looks at the present value, the "contemporary usefulness" of utopian thought, particularly of a category he labels "serious utopian visions", those which "play a vital role as vehicles of social criticism and, sometimes, of actual social change." (p. 155) Such a vision "functions properly not as a literal blueprint for the future but as a take-off point for reconsidering and possibly altering existing society." This surprisingly practical (almost mechanical) view implies the possibility of deliberately grabbing hold of utopian literature, etc., and continually, consciously manipulating it for the steering mechanism it "properly" is. It's an image that's stuck with me ever since.

            So I think your essay is completely on topic insofar as I'm concerned, and definitely interesting, too. My main complaint is that I wanted to learn more about the specific device you suggest at the end (p. 8), based on small-scale experimentation in utopian communities. How would the steering effect of that be conveyed "piecemeal" from the successful community to the larger society? What aspects of the society (and the future) could be steered in this way? Has this been attempted before?

            Mike

            Dear Rick,

            It was a pleasure reading your scholarly essay. If I understood you right, you advocate moving away from technological determinism, and towards a new exploration for a Utopia. I am very interested in knowing what practical steps you have in mind with regard to moving in this new direction.

            My best regards,

            Tejinder

            Thank you very much for the question, Tejinder.

            I had to cut a good bit of my original text to meet the length requirements, so below I'll paste some of my thoughts from there which I hope will answer your question.

            Please let me know what you think, and if you have not graded my essay already, please do so.

            All the best,

            Rick Searle

            ______________________

            The major problems the world faces over the next century are not hard to identify. How do we support and continue to spread generalized human prosperity in light of their overwhelming pressures on the biosphere? How do we respond to climate change that is already guaranteed to take place over the next few centuries despite what we do today? How do we make our society more equitable and democratic? How do we respond to unprecedented demographic changes? What kind of society can we build around the rise of increasingly intelligent machines? How do we use our increasing powers over the workings of life being granted to us by the biological sciences?

            We need more political, socio-economic and environmental innovation if we are to find ways to confront these problems. Our political institutions are in some cases centuries old, the structures of our socio-economic life not much younger, and the ways we relate to our physical environment legacy practices stretching in some case deep into our history.

            It isn't the case either that we are bereft of possible solutions that range from the statist to the anarchist, the bio-conservative to the transhumanist. Still, the application of these solutions faces the high wall of human inertia, better the devil that you know, as the saying goes. As Laplace knew, public caution when it comes to radical change has a great deal of wisdom in it. We don't what solutions will work and what they will look like in the real world, or if the cure will end up being worse than the disease. Indeed, the very non-deterministic, non-linear nature of human affairs ensures that we cannot know the answers to these questions beforehand.

            What we need is ways to test our ideas and examples of solutions that people can actually see and visit, to move to if they so chose, and best of all, apply what has been shown to work in their own society. Small scale utopian experiments can radically innovate while the larger society can use these innovations to engage in what Popper called "piecemeal social engineering".

            Thus, we need a real research and development budget for innovation beyond the merely technological and scientific. Social innovation as a major solution for the world's problems gets almost no notice because it is vastly overshadowed by much faster technological innovation. Yet, as noted, most of our social problems are at root problems of political and economic organization as much as they are technological in nature.

            BREAK

            In some ways we already have such broad experimentation as a consequence of our fractured political world. American states in its federal system are famously thought of as "laboratories". Mayors are among the most innovative figures in the US at least. (Barber) Countries with similar histories, cultures and ecologies that at some point diverged such as North Korea and South Korea offer running experiments contrasting alternative political and economic systems (Romer). Some cities have been developed precisely so as to be experiments in green technologies (Dubai). Religion and culture can be considered long running experiments in cultural evolution whose very longevity shows they helping human beings to successfully navigate their way in the world. (Wired for Culture)

            All this knowledge, along with sector specific innovation in areas such as policing, public health, education etc needs to be better collected and made available for policy makers and citizens, but we also need more radical experiments. There are many possible examples: small, self-sufficient cities in ecologically extreme habitats such as deserts, or arctic zones, communities with radically different forms of governance, economy, and relationship to technology and the natural world. For those who wish to secure the future of democracy, what is especially needed are ways to bring democratic governance into the hands of citizens. (NAAM) At the moment popular technology is better at helping overthrow governments rather than democratically govern them. (Naam Atlantic).

            Almost all of these experiments will fail. Yet their failure is almost the point. Small scale utopian experiments would give us a place to tap into the energetic idealism of youth and would provide a school of politics and policy better than even the most sophisticated computer simulation. We might create a much wiser generation of politicians if we gave them the opportunity to crash a whole (if very small) society by their mistakes rather than just corrode our much more weighty and resilient society where the consequences of bad judgement and short-sighted corruption are handed off to future administrations and even generations not yet born. Future politicians and policy makers would have be honed by a kind of evolutionary process to in some sense resemble Burke's political classes whose wisdom was shaped by history and party politics. His charge against French revolutionary utopians being that they lacked the sort of political wisdom that only came through experience.

            Even the suggestion that a small effort at social experimentation would be publicly funded in itself seems utopian in the pejorative sense of the word in today's age of austerity when governments have trouble even investing in eminently more practical social goods. I have no answer to this charge than to say that even where something looks utopian it is our responsibility to put our efforts behind it as long as we find it the smart and good thing to do.

            A modest step that might be a necessary prelude to any broad ranging support for any real world Utopian experiments might lie encouraging the use of Utopia as an organizing concept in secondary and postsecondary institutions of learning. In secondary education the concept of Utopia combined with the use of increasingly sophisticated simulation and gaming tools might be used being to revive in the young a sense of the holistic and independent nature of their societies, a commitment to the general good of the community, and above all a sense of the future that can be shaped by human agency, and which we are thus ultimately responsible for.

            At the university level Utopia might also be used as a way to bridge the increasingly specialized nature of our society. All Utopias are to some degree architectonic and aim at being holistic with everything meant to fit together just so. A truly architectonic society is an illusion, but the fact that communication between different segments of society might be said to be weak, and that specialists spend most of their time interacting with specialist in their same field, means that our view of society is more kaleidoscopic than the reality. As just one example, one needs to get education, the economy, mental health, and law enforcement right all at the same time, for all interact with one another and have feedback effects. Utopia as a concept can get these various specialists, or budding specialist in the form of undergraduate and graduate students, in the in the same room preferably not only in interdisciplinary exercises at the university level, but in real communities as well.

            So what we need is a return to the Utopian tradition, but one that is also in many ways new. This reconceptualized utopianism would be supremely conscious of its epistemological limits, and less centered on technological solutions as the cure-all for social ills. A new utopianism aware of itself and its limitations might be a way of breaking free of the unconscious utopianism that surrounds us- ideologies which claim to have uncovered the direction of history and simplify reality in order to subject it to their narrow interpretations of the world. It might show us new ways of living in the world, novel approaches which we will increasingly need in light of looming demographic, technological and economic change.

            That's a great question, George.

            I think you're right on two fronts- science grew out of determinism along time ago, and the public in general is certainly far more cynical of the promises of technology than in the middle of the last century.

            Still, the people I continue to see adhering to a version of determinism are pretty powerful- they own and run some of the richest companies in the world, and/or adhere and promote an ideology that is currently rooted in Silicon Valley.

            Here are some links to just a few of the posts I have written on the subject:

            http://utopiaordystopia.com/2011/12/29/what-humanity-wants/

            http://utopiaordystopia.com/2013/05/09/reflections-on-abundance/

            http://utopiaordystopia.com/2013/08/13/the-terrifying-banality-of-humanity-2-0/

            http://utopiaordystopia.com/2013/09/14/betting-against-the-transhumanist-wager/

            http://utopiaordystopia.com/2013/12/14/dont-be-evil/

            http://utopiaordystopia.com/2014/03/02/cracks-in-the-cult-of-radical-transparency/

            I intend to read the Tip of the Spear tonight. Please give me your grade if you haven't done so already.

            Best of luck,

            Rick Searle

            Thanks Mike for your very thought provoking question.

            Length constraints prevented me from fully fleshing the concept out, but I also want the idea to be as opened ended as possible- Utopia as a kind of Swiss Army Knife.

            Here's just one way it might work:

            One of the benefits of Utopia is also one of its greatest weaknesses- it gives you a sort of Tabla Rosa by which you can redesign society at will. This is dangerous in the larger society because you have to level the existing order to start afresh, which is why I think Utopias should be used as a "proof of concept" with which you can tweak the overall society.

            Imagine being able to design an energy system, employment system, justice system

            all from "scratch" without legacy distortions and institutional interests based on the best knowledge we have? People would be given real life examples of what a society would look like if we, just as examples, built modern communities with almost zero carbon footprint, went to a 35 hour work week, replaced most incarceration with community imprisonment and re-conciliatory justice, broke down walls between subjects such as art and science during elementary education.

            We could then argue around these real world examples rather than our respective ideologies- is this the type of world we want.

            That's just one version of how a revived concept of Utopia might work. There are many many others.

            Off to read your essay. Please give me a grade if you have not done so already.

            Best of luck!

            Rick Searle