X-Message-Number: 32355
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 19:05:53 -0700
Subject: Organic progress model versus the Drunkard's Walk
From: MARK PLUS <>

People have wondered lately why the 21st Century doesn't much resemble
all the speculative literature published about it in the 20th Century.
It sounds to me like a debate about the nature of "progress."

Does human civilization develop organically towards an implicit goal,
analogous to the acorn's "goal" of growing into an oak tree under the
right conditions? Ray Kurzweil and his fans seem to fall into that
camp, with a "singularity" as the implicit goal.

Or does human civilization instead make a drunkard's walk, and we just
impose some arbitrary vector on samples of these steps over a couple
of generations and call it "progress"?

The Obama Administration's relinquishment of manned space travel, a
key component in the progress mythology from way back, suggests that
the drunkard's walk better fits the data than the organic model. Human
civilization has no more inherent reason to keep building rockets and
sending men into orbit than it had to keep building pyramids.

The drunkard's walk model also seems to fit the history of cryonics
better than the organic model. It wouldn't surprise me if cryonics
organizations start to lose members and even fail for financial
reasons in the next couple decades, independently of the merit of the
cryonics idea. Why? Human civilization has no acorn-like imperative to
want to conquer aging and death, either.

Mark Plus

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