Cognitive Thrift 22 – Liberalization
Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner
June 1, 2017
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We have discussed a little bit of Dogma, not necessarily in beliefs systems alone. For instance, as after that great Kevin Smith movie, we can look at the Catholic Church and the way that it’s standard dogmatic positions of a lot of things have been in many, many ways been liberalized in many, many parts of the world. It’s a softening of the belief system. In an analogous manner, the way people interact with the world will have to become less rigid with respect to their heuristics in terms of interacting with the world, and that seems in line with the erosion of dogmatic or static thought in general. Can you expand on that a bit?
Rick Rosner: We’re lucky to have the current Pope who seems to be less dogmatic than a lot of previous popes, but he’s still strict about some stuff, but Catholic Church has gone through periods of greater and lesser rigidity. The doctrine of Papal infallibility is only about a 150-year-old, but what we’re looking at in our future is as we gain control over our thought processes.
As we learn more and more how our brains work and thought works mathematically, we will be able to re-direct our priorities and we will as we design artificial intelligence or adjunct intelligence must decide what our priorities and those thinking entities’ priorities are, which means will have to decide what is important about being human.
Science fiction generally comes to glib conclusions about what being human ultimately is, at the end of a lot of lazily written movies and TV show humanity is love, but that doesn’t tell you with how we will change over the next few centuries. Many of the things that defines use: being driven by reproduction, to some extent by the amassing of wealth, preserving the physical integrity of our bodies. All those things are going to be under attack via the marketplace, via theoretical considerations.
I suspect that once we understand consciousness more thoroughly we’ll find out that our version of consciousness is a bit overrated because it’s an evolved consciousness that is a bit threadbare and is weighted in ways that we might not it to be weighted. My example is the fascination with butts and to some extent with boobs and facial features because all those things biology wants us to be interested in because they represent reproductive fitness.
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Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Endnotes
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Rick Rosner 