thin film of life

I love the coincident cosmopolitan serendipity of today's two FoL reports, converging as they did on Carl Sagan and Pale Blue Dot on our first day with Bill McKibben's Eaarth. Marie commented on Jeremy Rifkin's "empathic civilisation" and quoted the passage beginning: "There are places... where the natural world has all but disappeared." Our "thin film of life" is all we've got. Why do we fight over it so incessantly?


Then Jason played the Symphony of Science's "unbroken thread"... 





...heralding a more "glorious dawn."


Is there intelligent life on earth? Well, there was. Maybe there will be again, in the future.  


Or, maybe we should just say: there can be a future only if there is... only if we're still evolving.





P.S. I hunted for the Flaming Lips Bonnaroo video you said I'd like, Harrison, is this it? Guess you had to be there. But the Alan Watts "conversations" are unquestionably great.

"circle of empathy"

The phrase is commonly associated with ethicist Peter Singer, but Jaron Lanier uses it too.

You have to draw a Circle of Empathy around yourself and others in order to be moral. If you include too much in the circle, you become incompetent, while if you include too little you become cruel. This is the "Normal form" of the eternal liberal/conservative dichotomy.

Lanier's Third Law: You can't rely completely on the level of rationality humans are able to achieve to decide what to put inside the circle...

Best guess for Circle of Empathy: Danger of increasing human stupidity is probably greater than potential reality of machine sentience. Therefore choose not to place machines in Circle of Empathy. edge.org

Empathy is essential, but it's essential to extend it in the right directions.