Wiki democracy is on the way

Representative democracy is sooo last century.

What should democracy look like? There is no standard set of features that comprise a “democracy,” though literally thousands of years of debate regarding what constitutes true democracy lie behind us.

A recent effort to quantify and classify democracies and non-democracies is the The Economist magazine’s biennial Democracy Index. It’s worth perusing as there are some surprises. The United States is in tier one, a “full democracy,” but not at the top. The Scandinavian nations are perennial chart-toppers. The top four are Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden. The U.S. is 19th on the list, just below the UK and just above Costa Rica.

Tam Hunt

Iraq, a fledgling “democracy,” according to our mainstream media spin, is 112th on the list and is a “hybrid regime,” only four spots above the lowest category, “authoritarian regime.” Russia doesn’t even do that well and is categorized as an authoritarian regime, at 117, despite its trappings of democracy. China does even worse, at 141, with its one-party state. Saudi Arabia worse still, at 161, lacking even a pretense of democracy. North Korea bottoms the list at 167.

The Economist ranks countries based on five dimensions: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Clearly, these are not easily quantifiable and there is certainly room for debate on each dimension.

Anyway, this is just one effort among many ways to categorize democracy. This essay focuses on ways to improve even the best democracies, but also looks forward to the next few decades in terms of how even the worst countries may evolve eventually into a generally borderless and peaceful world.

We now have the tools, with the Internet, mobile computing, and many software platforms, to bring about more direct democracies in many ways – instead of the representative democracy or republic forms of government that have passed for the best type of democracy to date. The rise of “wiki government” – also known as e-democracy, wiki democracy, liquid democracy, and many other terms – is among other benefits an antidote to corruption. We can at this point in time transition to online voting for all elections, while ensuring maximum security as we do so. We can also expand the types of issues that we can vote on far beyond the traditional voting categories of voting on elected officials and, in states like California, initiatives, and occasional recalls.

Read the rest here. 

In Defense of Philosophy

Philosophy has come under attack by various scientists in recent years, generally because, well, they just don’t get it. This little essay is my attempt to show why.

Lawrence Krauss, an American physicist at Arizona State University and author of a number of books, stated recently that “philosophy hasn’t progressed in two thousand years.” He clarified in an Atlantic Monthly interview that he was being purposefully provocative in this statement, but this is a clear example of those scientists who just don’t get it. Krauss’s point was that whereas science progresses through the creation of hypotheses, experiments, and falsification, philosophy amounts to little more than word games that don’t really go anywhere.

Tam Hunt

This is unfortunately a rather common attitude among working scientists and even among laypeople. Richard Dawkins, the well-known British evolutionary biologist and author of numerous popular books on evolution, wrote the afterword for Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing. Dawkins likens Krauss’s book to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in terms of its potential importance in de-throning supernatural views of the world in favor of purely naturalistic explanations.

The bottom line is that the boundaries between philosophy and science are rather arbitrary and arguably even illusory. There is, perhaps, a continuum of changes in methodology that separates the two.

Read the rest here. 

Principles of Beauty

My latest song and video production, featuring my father on vocals and wisdom.

You Are Love

This is my latest music and video project, a little love letter to the universe, featuring my good friends Aranza Owen and Justin Stark, as well as my nephews Camden and Berkley Thompson.

On Time and Free Will

In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of our nature, time occupies the key position.
—Arthur Stanley Eddington, 1928

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
—Albert Einstein

Even very smart people can be wrong. After all, Einstein showed with his theories of relativity that Newton, another very smart guy, didn’t have the whole picture on the nature of space or time. But nor did Einstein, it seems, as I’ll describe. It is becoming increasingly clear that Einstein was wrong about the nature of time and determinism.

What is time? For Einstein and most physicists, time is considered an additional dimension akin to a spatial dimension — sometimes described as “the spatialization of time.” We arrive at a four-dimensional universe in which time is reversible and there is no real difference between past, present, and future. Past, present, and future are all just different coordinates in an unchanging and eternal “block universe.” Einstein made this view explicit in a 1955 letter to a friend; the appearance of past, present, and future as distinct features of our experience, he wrote, is a “stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Sometimes, developments that seem like advances can actually be setbacks. Einstein’s views on time have become prevalent in science and philosophy, but what is far less prevalent is the understanding that in a world where time is an illusion and the universe is deterministic, there is no room for free will.

Free will is an active area of interest in psychology and philosophy. There is an increasing — and disturbing — trend toward a kind of hard-nosed acceptance that we don’t have free will. The attitude is something like: “Science is increasingly showing us that we are not that important. Copernicus showed us that we’re not at the center of the universe, Darwin showed us that we’re just another animal, and physics has shown us that there is nothing special about consciousness and that we suffer from an illusion of free will because past, present, and future all exist at the same time.”

This attitude, while increasingly pervasive, goes too far in my view. Much of it is, of course, correct: We are not at the center of the universe, and we have evolved just as all other creatures have evolved on this blue/green planet of ours. But we are also the leading edge of that creative process, with our highly complex consciousness and associated attributes. Even though many things are indeed beyond our conscious control, it is not the case that we are conscious automatons in a deterministic world. New physical ideas support this view, and we are now seeing the dissemination of these ideas slowly but surely, steadily eroding Einsteinian determinism.

Read the rest here.

One Solution For High Gas Prices

It is common knowledge that “there is no quick fix” for high gas prices. It’s going to be a long-term effort to reduce our reliance on oil and we’re probably in for higher prices no matter what we do in the short term or long term because we’re facing a number of macro trends, such as systemic tightness in global supplies (peak oil), ongoing international tensions with Iran, etc., and perhaps also some amount of speculation in oil prices.

But is it really true that we can’t do anything to bring down gas prices in the short term? Maybe not. There are in fact a number of policies that could have a rapid impact on demand and possibly even bring down gas prices dramatically.
One policy, in particular — banning U.S. exports of gasoline — could result in significantly lower prices for gasoline almost overnight. As far as I can tell, this policy is not being talked about at all, and it should be.

The United States became a net oil-product exporter in February 2011 for the first time since 1949. It’s important to stress, however, that “net oil products” refers to refined oil products, not to crude oil itself, which dwarfs net oil products. We still import about half of the liquid fuels we consume each year and, as I wrote recently, we only produce about 6 million barrels of crude oil per day and we consume about 19 million barrels of all liquid fuels (including biofuels and natural gas liquids, etc.).

Read the rest here.

Toward Energy Literacy

"Energy literacy" and "peak oil literacy" should be requirements for pundits – and for citizens more generally. I've followed these issues for many years now, and the poor energy knowledge among even the chattering classes and punditry still amazes me.

A recent MSNBC show allowed a guest to state, without challenge, that U.S. oil production is now at an all-time high. No one, including the host and three other guests, objected to this statement. Many articles in various media outlets are now trumpeting the new “oil boom” in the U.S.

The fact is that U.S. oil production is a bit more than half of what it was at its peak in the early 1970s. It is not even close to an all-time high. This is not a small discrepancy in facts — every pundit should know this information when discussing our current and future energy needs. Read the rest here.

This is the introduction to my in-progress documentary about modern spirituality. Key themes will be the increasing departure from organized religion, but an abiding and perhaps growing concern about spirituality; integration of science and religion; meditation; panpsychism; eastern philosophy; ethics; environmentalism, and many others. Watch the video here and if you're inspired please donate using the button at the top right of my blog.

The Slow Beauty of Plants

This video is simply amazing. Profoundly beautiful in every way, with music of the same caliber. It makes me realize that plant and animal intelligence may differ mostly only in the time-scale in which they operate. How are these little plant fingers, shown in time lapse video here, different qualitatively from primate fingers?

http://vimeo.com/33347421

A Postmortem on the Iraq War

"War waged without a clear mandate from the United Nations Security Council would constitute a flagrant violation of the prohibition of the use of force. We note with deep dismay that a small number of states are poised to launch an outright illegal invasion of Iraq, which amounts to a war of aggression."

International Commission of Jurists, 2002

"Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over."

President Barack Obama, October 21, 2011

President Obama announced on October 21 that the U.S. would be withdrawing all but a handful of troops from Iraq at the end of the year. Despite taking credit in his brief speech for a new war strategy in Iraq following his election, Obama also reminded us that President Bush set the troop withdrawal deadline back in 2008. So the withdrawal deadline was not new, nor was it a surprise.

Obama put a positive spin on the war itself and its end. It would be hard for a sitting president, as Commander in Chief, to criticize the war itself as unjust and not worth the loss in life and treasure, particularly considering the harm our actions have wrought in Iraq. Candidate Obama did say as much, however, in 2007: “I am proud of the fact that way back in 2002, I said that this war was a mistake.”

Read the rest here.

The Anatomy of God, Part II: The Summit

“[God] has a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The consequent nature of God is conscious; and it is the realization of the actual world in the unity of his nature, and through the transformation of his wisdom.”

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929)

What is the ultimate nature of reality? And how does it interact with each of us?

Part I of this series introduced the idea of “twin ultimates,” the notion that there are two types of divinity worthy of our consideration. The first, the more fundamental type of divinity, may be referred to as the ground of being, the Source, God’s “primordial” nature (as in the Whitehead quote above), or any of a number of other names from various philosophical, scientific or spiritual traditions. The ground of being is the metaphysical soil from which all actuality grows.

The other ultimate, the Summit, lies at the opposite end of the spectrum of being and becoming. The Summit is closer to traditional western notions of God, and God is as good a name as any other for this ultimate.

This essay will explore the Summit in more detail and compare Source and Summit. As with all of my essays, I appeal both to science and spirituality in my explanations. This is the case because I don’t believe there is any fundamental distinction between science, philosophy and spirituality. To be sure, there are differences in current practice and focus, but in terms of conceptual structures—if not all their methods—these endeavors should be essentially the same (“should” being the essential word here). By this I mean that the “deep science” (to use Ken Wilber’s term) that meshes science, philosophy and spirituality together relies on logic, intuition, faith, and facts — recognizing that all human endeavors are a mix of these tools.

The deep science that reconciles science and spirit doesn’t ignore inconvenient facts, nor does it elevate reason above all other tools as the only source of legitimate knowledge. Deep science recognizes that all our attempts at understanding should be empirically based as much as possible, but it also recognizes that some sources of knowledge lie beyond empiricism and even beyond logic. Defining the contours of where facts and reason should give way to intuition and faith is an entirely personal matter. I tend to the intellectual and rational approach in my own explanations (particularly in these essays), while acknowledging that logic has limits; but I have no independent basis for preferring this prioritization. It’s entirely personal.

Read the rest here.

The Anatomy of God, Part I: The Source

“The search for the ‘one’, for the ultimate source of all understanding, has doubtless played a similar role in the origin of both religion and science.”

—Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), Nobel Prize winner for physics

When, as a teenager, I first began engaging intellectually with the world, I often perused the philosophy sections of bookstores and libraries, avidly inspecting books for pearls of wisdom. If a philosopher dared to mention spirituality or God, I would consider the book misplaced and not relevant to my philosophical questions – it should have been in the religion section, an area for individuals with weaker minds and weaker stomachs. I was, for some time, an avid atheist, embracing the modern scientific and philosophical trend that has become quite pervasive.

My how things change.

I have realized in my own personal journey that examinations of God and spirituality are part and parcel of philosophy – if we define philosophy as the broad endeavor to understand the universe and our place in it. There are many functions of philosophy, to be sure, but this is as good a definition of philosophy as I have found.

Any rational inquiry into the nature of the universe – which includes science as a more specialized form of philosophy – and our place in it must face one of the most basic questions: How does complexity arise? It seems that it must arise from simplicity – this is, at least, the phenomenon we see all around us: Simpler constituents generating more complex forms through combination, separation, and emergence. What place should God have in this story of simplicity producing complexity? Can’t we explain the universe in terms of merely matter, energy, and space? In a word, no.

The modern trend has generally been to whittle away God’s role in the world and in philosophy. Modern science, with Galileo, Newton, Descartes, etc. began this trend by defining the scientific pursuit as rational inquiry into God’s work. This inquiry was, and is, all about discovering the rules that govern the world.

Read the rest here.

Aranza Me Gusta

A new movie and song project I made with my artistic partner in crime Aranza.

A Science of Beauty, Part II

For he who would proceed aright in this matter … will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love and wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere. ~Plato, Symposium

Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.~Michael Shermer, Scientific American

Why do we need a science of beauty? Haven’t science and art done just fine in their own domains over the last few millennia? Yes, but…

My attempt, in this and my previous column, to meld science, beauty, and art is prompted by thinking about the nature of mind. I’ve written a number of essays explaining my view of mind in nature, nature in mind. I highlighted what I view as fatal problems for the prevailing materialist conception of mind, in which mind is regarded as emerging somehow from what is generally viewed as entirely mindless. Mind is, in the alternative panpsychist philosophy that I support, ubiquitous because mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing. Where there is mind there is matter and where there is matter there is mind. As matter complexifies, so mind complexifies.

This vision of mind and matter has important ramifications also for biology and evolution because if mind is ubiquitous we realize that mind must have an important role (perhaps the starring role) in evolution, which is just another word for complexification - even though evolution can lead to simpler forms in some situations. “Sexual selection” was the term Darwin gave to the evolutionary effects of female choice in mate selection and male-male competition for mates. Many traits in the animal kingdom (and probably in other kingdoms also) stem from sexual selection, including the oft-mentioned peacock’s tail. This showy and overly large tail, it is thought, resulted not from its role in helping its owner to survive (its effect is the opposite in this regard), but to help it gain more mates and thus spread its genes to the next generation. If its role in producing more offspring outweighs any harm to its owner’s survival, it will spread as a trait.

Read the rest here.

A Science of Beauty, Part I

There’s no accounting for taste. ~ Folk saying

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. ~ Alfred North Whitehead (1943)

A photographer friend of mine told me years ago that the “world just looks better through a camera lens.” Indeed it does—to most of us. The camera viewfinder adds a frame to a part of the world and allows the photographer to focus her attention. In short, the camera’s frame allows a photographer to create art.

But what the heck is art? What is beauty? Do these questions matter to anyone beyond the photographer, art lover, art historian, or philosopher of art?

I’ll attempt to show in this two-part essay why these questions—and their answers—should be important to practically every field of human thought.Art has been around for as long as humans have been around and it seems that thinking about art—the philosophy of art—has been too.

Plato, as with practically every topic in philosophy or science, had some relevant insights. Though the topic was discussed in many different Platonic dialogues, Plato’s idea of art was never clearly spelled out by the master.The simplest summary of Plato’s feelings on the matter is that he viewed beauty as the perception of eternal Forms that exist as a substrate to reality. Actual (physical) forms are imperfect reflections of the deeper Forms; the artist enjoys most the art that most fully reveal the Forms. These ideas are strange to us today and this kind of thinking (sometimes known as “essentialism”) has been dispelled in most areas of thought over the course of the last couple of centuries.Read the rest here.

On Self and Soul

Imagine you are in an isolation tank. All you can sense (barely) is the lukewarm water in which you float. You hear nothing except the slightest movements of water against the side of the tank. You see nothing. You smell nothing. And you taste nothing but your own saliva.

Now imagine that a video screen is added to your isolation tank connected to a camera outside the tank that shows you an image of the world around your tank. And a microphone is added. Then, with some cool new technologies, scents are wafted to your nostrils. You begin to get an idea of what the outside world is like from the vantage point of your isolation tank.

Now imagine that your isolation tank is mobile – it is re-engineered to be small enough that you can walk around in a roughly body-shaped tank even though you remain immersed in water. Servos help move your massive limbs, which articulate your strange machine torso and limbs. The technologists add even niftier gadgets that allow you to feel the outside world from the “skin” of your isolation tank, based on contact with the outside of the tank. And a tube is added that allows food to enter your mouth from the outside and another tube for waste. You now have almost normal access to the outside world from within your isolation tank. You could remain perhaps indefinitely in this unnatural environment.

Now imagine that this scenario is real. In fact, little imagination is required. We do exist in biological isolation tanks that we call our bodies. Literally all we know about the external world comes from various sensory “windows” we have to the external world. The world we know is entirely a creation of our brains, our nervous systems, with its various perceptual abilities. We can never know what really is the cause of our perceptions. All we know directly are our perceptions.

Read the rest here.

The Good News: Climate Change Doesn't Matter Anymore

My provocative title represents the increasing awareness that we don't need to believe in climate change to do the right thing when it comes to energy. Of course, climate change is a real threat to us and our environment. But there are many highly valid reasons to become more energy efficient, conserve energy through behavior change, and transition to renewables – entirely independent of climate change concerns.

I raise this point because there is an increasing backlash to the idea of climate change as a serious threat. Concern about climate change has been diminishing rapidly in the U.S. over the last few years, for a variety of reasons, including the poor economy (and the wrong perception that mitigating climate change will harm the economy), the “climate-gate” affair resulting from hacked emails from climate scientists, and a very aggressive campaign by corporate and conservative interests that just don’t want to believe that humans can impact global climate.

A Yale 2010 survey found that those who believe human activities are primarily responsible for climate change dropped from 57 percent in 2008 to 47 percent in 2010. And it’s probably dropped further since. US News & World Report mused about this trend in a recent article, asking rhetorically whether Americans care about climate change anymore.

Now for the good news. I believe that declining public belief in climate change as an important issue doesn’t matter because there are many very positive trends with respect to energy that are here today and will only increase in the future. These trends will mitigate climate change, but will also greatly enhance energy independence, reduce traditional air pollution, create millions of new jobs, and will actually save us all a lot of money through decreased electricity costs.

These very encouraging trends are: 1) an ongoing improvement in global energy intensity, leading to far fewer emissions per dollar of GDP in coming decades; 2) price-induced conservation; 3) a dramatic increase in global wind power over the last decade; 4) and, perhaps most importantly, the growth in global solar power may lead to an incredibly rapid transformation in how we produce energy.

Read the rest here.

Paths to Immortality

Imagine you wake up in a room with no doors and no windows. You are lying on a stone slab of a bed that meets the floor seamlessly. The room appears to be carved out of a single piece of stone that looks like granite. The room is quite large, many hundreds of feet long and about twenty feet high. An eerie glow emanates from the stone, in a manner that appears to defy your understanding of light and electricity.

As you stand up and explore the room’s contours, you grow increasingly alarmed about your predicament, realizing that there appears to be no way for air to circulate from outside into the room. How on earth did you get in here and, more importantly, how do you get out before your oxygen runs out?

Hold that thought.

Who wouldn’t want to live forever? Who would?

This is largely an academic debate for now, but perhaps not for long. We seem to be at a point in our technological and medical knowledge where some type of physical immortality may become possible in a couple of decades or so. But there are many paths to immortality, some of which are here now.

Read the rest here.

Mind and World

This is a presentation I gave to a group of faculty and grad students at UC Santa Barbara, which meets monthly to talk about neuroscience, Buddhism and Western science. My talk was on "Mind and world: the philosophy of mind and synchronicity." It was a practice talk for the same talk I'll be giving at Burning Man this year at the Port11 camp on Friday.

On Lucifer

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Mangled quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.


This quote has achieved instant fame/notoriety on the Internet in recent days because of the powerful virality of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.

It turned out, after some Internet sleuthing by various intrepid journalists, that one Jessica Dovey, a teacher based in Japan, had posted these words on her Facebook status update, expressing her own sentiments in the first sentence and then following with an actual quote from King. Others inspired by her words copied the paragraph in full as though it were all from King. And thus it spread.

Despite the mangled nature of the King quote, did it express a wise and compassionate sentiment even with respect to the world’s most notorious terrorist, a modern-day Lucifer?

This brief history is meant to be a light introduction to a heavy topic: Lucifer, the devil, Satan, evil. What do these words mean? Why is there evil? Is there evil?

Read the rest here.