| | Fred,
Very astute observations on complexity and how it is always liable to befuddle us on the details. I agree.
I felt his writing was a bit evangelical, even when I agreed with a conclusion, and I thought that it colored him optimistic - even in areas that had me worried.
I know that others were often either cheerleaders or thinking, "You've gone to far this time - no way those conclusions are justified by any research!" (Followed by turning a sharp eye to his evidence.)
But I couldn't get into either camp because I was stunned by an insight he triggered in me (which I'll get to in just a second).
I really liked his grasp of the way we can't "sense" a passage of time in a way that is akin to the pace of technology - instead we frame things in a linear fashion (and in our personal, biological time-frame) - where what we need to see is the exponential effect driving technology.
But it isn't just a matter of improvements in technology - it is to everything we do.
What I suddenly started thinking was that the very heart of human nature isn't just our rational faculty (as in reasoning true from false, as in critical examination), nor in the issue of volition - of choosing (which is also a prerequisite of reasoning), but in something that requires both of those abilities - something they serve. It is our "What if?" faculty. We imagine some future we've never seen, never experienced, and we ask our-self "What if?" (Clearly, this is simple-minded nick-name of the mechanism whereby we implement purpose.)
Here is the difference between us and all else. We have the capacity to drive our lives as opposed to passively or automatically reacting to what the world presents us.
We all have different personalities, orientations to the world, skill sets, etc. Someone might be a grumpy trouble-maker, and, if so, some part of their mind will be creating "What if's" that will help them irritate their companions. If someone is an engineer, then whatever they look at might generate a "What if this part were...?" We could be commuting to work and hit the normal slowdown at a certain point and wonder if it would be faster to take a side street for a few blocks as our normal drive pattern.
To me, this is human nature. This is our key survival (or flourishing) mechanism. This is our uniquely human approach to life - we create, we evaluate, then we choose and act.
Of course it sounds so obvious, and it must have been an idea in the minds of thousands before mine, and those better read than I are invited to point me this way or that... It just seems so fundamental that we must have reason, and we must have choice, or we couldn't cast out in front of us an imaginary future to test run as a virtual reality before doing it.
This is the foundation of risk-reduction - clearly a huge evolutionary advantage.
Look at the implications this has for education. The more we know, the less our training is tightly closeted as vertical studies, the better our future casting will be.
Look at the value it brings to a better understanding of consciousness. This is an area I'm pretty excited about and the tie between human nature (seen this way) and motivational psychology really fires me up! :-)
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