Decentralization

The decentralization of the production and distribution of energy will lead to a watershed in the existing social, political and economic power structure. There is a tremendous inertia behind the current production and distribution of energy because it maintains a self perpetuating hegemony where a very small group of people (relative to the entire population of the earth) control the means of production of energy. Energy makes all human endeavors possible, since all human endeavors are far from "thermodynamic equilibrium." In other words, practically nothing anyone is able to do in this modern age would be possible without utilizing energy resources. Because of this fact, people who control the energy have an undue influence on the way in which any particular subjectivity can participate in making a living. The decentralization of energy production and distribution will illuminate cracks in this hegemony that will lead to greater freedom among all humanity to participate in endeavors of their choosing. This will occur along social, economic and political dimensions. Anyone will be able to produce enough energy to engage in most activities of their choosing, with the ability to sell that energy to other people who need it or want it for other purposes. From a social perspective, this means that people will be able to be more self-sufficient, and hence class lines will be diminished because people will not be constrained to choose a particular lifestyle because of constraints on their energy usage. From an economic perspective, the greater independence will allow people to get more in return on almost all of their activities and aspirations, since decentralization will decrease dramatically the cost of all human endeavors. From a political perspective, the decentralization will be a stake in the heart of an antiquated idea of a rigid and controlling power structure that determines the production and distribution of energy resources. There will probably be a strong backlash, but this will not be able to forestall the march of progress towards a more robust and egalitarian political dimension for the utilization of energy.

Decentralization will not stop merely at energy production and distribution. Knowledge (as shown by the internet...and such phenomena as wikipedia) will also become decentralized to a greater and greater degree, which will also have a profound influence on the way in which people can make a living, since the current economic system is set up in a way such that specialists can perform a service or function that is a benefit to someone else. By having specialized knowledge and performing a service specialists make a living (e.g. doctors, lawyers, mechanical engineers, etc...). If this specialized knowledge is available to everyone, there will be pressure towards a greater human dimension (e.g. the quality of human interaction for any particular specialist) and the production of new fields in which to specialize (e.g. computational biology).

Eventually the means of production will become completely decentralized as molecular manufacturing becomes a reality. This will have a similar effect as the decentralization of energy production and distribution, except to a much larger degree. By decentralizing the means of production, every individual will be able to make a living in practically whatever way they choose, as all personal economic and social constraints (as we know them now) will be effectively lifted. Along with the decentralization of the means of production, there will be a revolution in medicine, with the advent of completely personalized medicine (along genomic, proteomic, molecular, metabolic, etc... dimensions) as well as personalized education.

I am fairly confident that new constraints will be developed, but these constraints will very likely be of a very different nature than the constraints people face today, such as not having enough food to eat or being stricken by horrible sickness. I am cautiously optimistic that most ills we face, along both personal and social lines, will be solved to some degree though I am sure that new problems will be generated. I am hopeful that we as a human race will be able to engage in a deep and introspective dialogue as to the profound moral and ethical implications of this continually cascading wave of change, and be able to anticipate and prevent the greatest falls into whatever abyss we teeter over along the way outward into the adjacent possible.

Local minima

Consider that the space in which the mechanistic basis (purely psychological, not phenomenological) for the mind resides could be described by an energy landscape. Any particular thought, and more importantly any particular combination of thoughts would have associated with it a particular energy. This energy would be proportional to the amount of "mental work" associated with that particular combination of thoughts.

For example, if one does not know how to play the piano, one can learn how to do so, but in doing so one has to expend mental work to learn that skill, and actually go through the appropriate motions. By learning that skill a person is changing the energy landscape, by lowering the energy of a particular coordinated series of actions. Mental work can actually be quantified by the degree in which it affects the measurable behavior of a system.

This energy landscape dictates the way in which a mind can influence the behavior of the body in which it resides. One of the major problems for a mind trying to have an effect on the way in which the body behaves is that it can get stuck in local minima. This means that the mind can not overcome a previous series of thoughts that lead to a series of actions which the mind does not believe is as important as an alternative series of thoughts that lead to an alternative series of actions. Hence, why it is so hard for people to change once their energy landscapes have conformed to a particular configuration whose central structure is very rigid, with only slight gray areas on the fringe.

There really is no objective goodness inherent in any of these processes...or in other words, associated with any particular thought-action coupling there is no value. We assign value to the couplings based upon the phenomenological experience we have while going through the process of traversing the energy landscape and acting upon the traverse of the energy landscape. What causes this phenomenological experience is a mystery, all we can say is that as an individual traversing an energy landscape we not only think and do things, we also have subjective experiences associated with thinking and doing things. This subjective experience is probably by definition not reductively explainable.

Pragmatism

Are "abstract" ideas like truth or justice any more significant than apparently mundane objects like a fork or a spoon? Truths and spoons serve their own respective purposes that only really matter when something is done with them or someone or something uses them. There seems to be an arbitrary and false hierarchy that assigns greater significance to certain ideas because of their purported significance to the human condition. Yet any particular idea can not be any more powerful than how useful it is to what happens in the moment. An idea or thought that does not somehow influence some one's or some thing's actual day to day experience of life has no power.

This makes intuitive sense from a Darwinian perspective. Neutral variations (or variations that have no effect on the fitness of an organism) have no power in determining what happens to an organism in two distinctive ways. First, they have no power to determine an organism's purpose (way of making a living/experience) in whatever context it exists within. Second, neutral variations have no power to change the entire purpose/structure (ways in which to make a living) of the context itself. In any particular context there are many ways of making a living. One could view a multicellular organism as a society of many different cell types, where each cell ends up making a living in a certain way by being one cell type or another based upon its neighbors as well as its overall position in the organism, and its developmental history (or a history of salient variations that had power in determining the way in which the cells develop). Yet variations can also affect the entire context...which in turn could conceivably flip good and bad for any particular organism in an environment. For example, if a meteor hits the earth, large organisms will suddenly find it very hard to make a living.

One consequence of only being concerned about variations that have an effect on the way in which life exists is that there are no absolutes. This may be a disquieting thought at first, but this appears the most internally consistent view of any "belief" structure. Ideas only exist so long as they are useful in perpetuating any particular mode of existence. Obviously such a philosophy can not answer questions such as how does one define the purpose of a particular mode of existence independently from experience (which is what a lot of philosophy tries to do). But it does not restrict the modes of existence and ways in which to make a living into an artificially superimposed hierarchy based upon rules or beliefs that may or may not be actually true. In essence, the philosophy of pragmatism allows for a infinite multitude of possible variations which have an effect on the way in which humans and other organisms make a living. The definition of pragmatism is somewhat circular (since it assigns meaning to ideas that affect the way in which one makes a living, and the way in which one makes a living affects the ideas one assigns meaning to), but this circular nature can be found in many physical systems, such as natural selection's "survival of the fittest" (who else would survive?) Within the context of any particular system there is no way to define a true golden standard (generalization) about what is good or best without imposing an artificial human value system. Since we'll never know what is actually true or best, or if either of those two ideas have any meaning whatsoever, it seems senseless to impose artificial rigid belief systems, and more internally consistent to allow for a more pragmatic and plastic belief systems.

This is of great importance to every living organism right now, because the world (the environment and ourselves) change whether we like it or not, and unless we recognize that fact and embrace it we will be forever fighting demons we do not even understand.