True Left

5.  “Mortals create their own gods.  They worship the demiurge, calling him Lord, and truly he is their Lord, but he has only the power they give him, for he is the projection of their own minds

How two brains can synchronise and why it matters - BBC News

Is collective intelligence more important than IQ and what exactly does it mean?

An internationally acclaimed neuroscientist explains why brain synchronicity - the ability of two different brains to match their electrical brainwaves - is crucial to our future.

This escalated quickly from quite interesting to man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.

This article is not synchronising with modern times, the people to people relationships are based on competition,intolerance and within families it’s bringing discord let alone communities that we represent.😊

I agree. Also, no sooner does it mention the fascinating idea that people who group together solve problems sooner then it suddenly swerves away and hits the garden hedge of rambling on instead about inconclusive lab tests involving mice and people with white coats. Almost as if the producer suddenly realised to their horror that the script was about to endorse socialist ideas about sharing knowledge and investment in educating the masses. Which, of course, is SUCH a dreadful thought...

Those last few lines on a hive mind, collective consciousness are some of thee scariest most dystopian ideas on the right way to take us as a race I’ve ever heard no individualism and further erosion of free will

Maybe you should listen again?

Awesome concept. And, the only question I always have is why should humans who they say is just matter and molecules, care about our species surviving. If there is no purpose why should humans survive, rather than be destroyed by by a more evolved specie; Apex Predator

Why do organisms want to survive ? That’s your question ?

"We are the Borg. We will assimilate you. Resistance is futile". Hive mind. Every real genius in history has been a lone thinker.

Nope. All major breakthroughs in science have come off the back of other people’s work and typically the ‘genius’ you’re aware of is just the better known half of a duo.

Well, I wanted to say that.
Depends on the definition of lone thinker, I guess.
Of course everyone’s educated by our ancestors knowledge.
But you gotta admit that People who had scientific breakthrough did think somehow out of the box, though …
That’s how progress is achieved.
I would say, you’re both right.
It took a lot of people thinking out of the box to build the necessary knowledge for Einstein to come up with the Relativity theory.
But again that depends on the definition of lone thinker.
Many geniuses in their domain were and are absolute idiots when it comes to things out of their area of expertise.
Which may qualify someone as a lone thinker now that I think about it.

Takeaway: adopt the placid, female hive mind (regardless of individual intelligence & productivity) so we can transfer our skills to each other and then to machines (a bit iRobotesque)

A terrifying end to an interesting video. 😬

Consider the following numerous interpretations, starting with Hanson; he has argued that consensual government, civil liberties, decisive warfare, and a free market economy originated in ancient Greece, and “would form the later core foundation of Western civilization” (1999).6 Roger Scruton has emphasized the significance of Rome in its creation of a secular system of governance anchored on the “autonomous principles of judicial reasoning and an explicit statement of the law” (2002: 22). Nemo has highlighted the Roman “invention” of the legal persona together with an intricate system of legal concepts that reflected the individuality of each person by separating “very precisely what is yours from what is mine: to each by right” (2004). Rodney Stark, on the other hand, has insisted that Christianity “created Western civilization” by nourishing a theological outlook of “God’s nature, intentions, and demands” consistent with the rational investigation of nature. The “rise of science, according to Stark, was not an extension of classical learning, [but] the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine” (2003: 157).7 Grant (2001) and Woods (2005), for their part, have emphasized the Catholic ideas, laws, and institutions that “built Western Civilization.” Berman, too, has looked to the role of the Church but has restricted the “crucial” period to the years of the Papal Revolution between 1050 and 1150, which laid the basis for the “modern state, the modern church, modern philosophy, the modern university, and modern literature”(1984: 4). John Hale (1994) has followed an older interpretation in concluding that the Renaissance was a whole new epoch in the way Europeans came to forge a distinctive identity as the inhabitants of “Europe,” a “civilization” that was different from the Greco-Roman past and from the Papal-centered world of Latin Christendom. Similarly, John Headley (2008) has traced the roots of the idea of a common humanity and the principles of political dissent to the Renaissance.8

Every period of Western history has had an advocate: For G.R. Elton it was the Reformation that prepared the ground “for the secularization of Europe” (1963: 279). Steven Ozment (1993) has also reasoned that the Protestants were the true progenitors of such modern values as social reform, individual religious conviction, hard work, and the rejection of corruption and empty ritual.9 Herbert Butterfield, in stark contrast, has estimated that the Scientific Revolution “outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere incidents, mere internal displacements” (1957: 7). Bernard Cohen has agreed, the story of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton are testimony to “the creative accomplishment of the human spirit at its pinnacle” (1960: 190).10 Christopher Hill, for his part, has drawn attention to the “Century of Revolution” between 1603 and 1714, as the “decisive” years in which the principle of “Divine Right” was “fatally wounded,” and men of commercial property “won freedom from arbitrary taxation and arbitrary arrest, freedom from religious persecution, freedom to… elect [their] representatives [and] freedom to buy and sell” (1980: 254–265).11 Paul Hazard, looking at a later period, has argued that “never was there a greater contrast, never a more sudden transition” than the one between 1680 and 1715, when “an hierarchical system ensured by authority [and] firmly based on dogmatic principle” gave way to enlightened inquiry and open debate (1935).12 But Albert Soboul has embraced the French Revolution of 1789 as the “truly” radical one, in “wiping out every surviving feudal relic” and in promulgating the “rights of man” in general and the democratic ideal of “universal suffrage” (1975: 3–19). Cipolla has countered that “no revolution has been as dramatically revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution [which] transformed Man from a farmer- shepherd into a manipulator of machines by inanimate energy” (1973: 7–9). T. S Aston (1948) and W. W. Rostow (1960) have agreed that this revolution broke with a past in which 9 out of 10 Europeans lived in small towns and villages, and in which mortality rates and famines were recurrent realities.

Similar claims have been made about the establishment of a “modern capitalist world system,” the “Military Revolution,” the Romantic Movement, the German Philosophical Revolution from Kant to Hegel, the “Second” Industrial Revolution, and the First World War. The historiography of Western/European civilization is indeed filled with “foundations,” “births,” “origins,” “creations,” and “transitions.”13 What I find restrictive in all these authors is the supposition that Western uniqueness can be comprehended around one or a few turning points. It is not that these scholars have studied new developments or periods in isolation from preceding or subsequent changes. Cipolla has traced the “roots” of the Industrial Revolution “back to that profound change in ideas and social structures that accompanied the rise of the urban communes in Northern Italy, in Northern France and in the Southern Low Countries, between the 11th and the 13th centuries” (1973: 9). Ozment has carefully documented the roots of the Reformation in the spiritual and monastic currents of late medieval times (1980). White has looked back to the “Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature,” to explain Europe’s “unmatched [technological] dynamism” after 1000 AD (1982: 90). Soboul has investigated the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” and the ideas of the philosophes to understand the origins of 1789. Jacob (1997) has addressed simultaneously the Baconian utilitarian ideal of knowledge, the Puritan emphasis on hard work, and the Anglican “liberal” consolidation after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to account for the cultural roots of the first industrial revolution. Toby Huff (1993) has drawn attention to the Papal Revolution of the eleventh century to explain why modern Galilean science emerged in Europe rather than elsewhere.

Other scholars have actually looked across millennia, but only to emphasize the creativity of Europe in one cultural sphere: painting (Gombrich 1950), music (Grout and Palisca 1996); warfare (Hanson 2001) in science (Lindberg 1992), philosophy (Tarnas 1991), or technology (White 1982). What is missing is a full appreciation of the unparalleled degree to which the history of the West was filled with individuals persistently searching for new worlds, new religious visions and new styles of painting, architecture, music, science, philosophy, and literature – in comparative contrast, for example, to the history of China, where artistic and literary styles lasted for centuries (Chow 1994; Sullivan 1999).

I can think of only four individuals, two philosophers of history, one sociologist, and one world historian, who have spoken in a wideranging way of: i) the “infinite drive,” “the irresistible trust” of the Occident, ii) the “energetic, imperativistic, and dynamic” soul of the West, iii) the “rational restlessness” of the West, iv) “the deep-rooted pugnacity and recklessness of Europeans” – Hegel, Spengler, Weber, and McNeill respectively. In the previous chapter, I delineated the essentials of Weber’s thesis on the peculiar form of Western rationalism. I don’t think I was able to extract from his writings an answer for why the West exhibited such a high degree of rationalism in the first place. I drew attention to his ideas on the rationalism of the Old Testament, the Judaic cultivation of a coherent doctrine on the purpose of life here on earth. I made reference to the affinities Weber noted between these Judaic beliefs and certain aspects of the Calvinist/Puritan version of Protestantism, its ascetic “worldly calling” for a methodical style of life. I suggested that Weber, in going back to Judaism, was indeed implying or considering the possibility that in this religion there was to be found the original source of the worldly ethos that promoted modern capitalism. However, I also suggested that the rationalist character of ancient Judaism and its connection to Christianity and Protestantism was one among other unrelated processes of rationalization. As Weber himself insisted, “the history of rationalism shows a development which by no means follows parallel lines in the various departments of life” (in Ritzer: 137). There were other lines of rationalization with independent sources: the rationalization of arithmetical calculations by the ancient Greeks, the systematic ordering of legal norms by the Romans, “the rational utilization of lines and spatial perspective – which the Renaissance created for us,” the “transformation of the process of musical production into a calculable affair operating with known means, effective instruments, and understandable rules” (in Ritzer: 145), and the professionalization of law and administration by nation-states. I could not find in Weber an account of the ultimate sources of these autonomous currents of rationalization. On one occasion Weber did ponder whether it would be “natural to suspect that the most important reason” for the West’s “rational restless” “lay in differences in heredity” but this comment was strictly speculative and marginal.14

What makes Goldstone different from Mokyr, despite their additional agreement that New World products and abundant deposits of coal in Britain were not, on their own, the specific factors that led to the great divergence, is essentially that Goldstone sees England’s adoption of a engineering-oriented practical culture as a “happy chance” made possible by a series of unexpected political events associated with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He contends that England’s engine culture was able to flourish as a result of some “highly contingent circumstances” which led to the liberal revolution of 1688 and created a more open society, in contrast to the anti-Newtonian, pro-Cartesian Catholic “reaction,” which swept much of continental Europe and kept it in a state of industrial backwardness (2002a). The “rather odd and unusual” engine culture of England was “by no means a necessary and inevitable outcome of a broader ‘scientific’ [Europeanwide] revolution” (2002b: 373). “Multiple” scientific renaissances and “modernities” were happening all around the globe in the post-1500 era; the Galilean breakthrough was one of similar scientific advances elsewhere (330, 334). For all her engine culture, England in the 1700s was “undergoing a similar macro-economic pattern as Qing China” (360). It was only after 1830 that England “managed to avoid such a [Malthusian] decline” and achieve self-sustaining growth.25

In developing his “happy chance,” Goldstone draws from Jacob’s carefully constructed work, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (1997), which is an expanded version of her earlier book, Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988), both of which look at the long-term gestation of the scientific culture of Europe. Lest readers be misled, however, Jacob does not argue, in either one of these books, as Goldstone implies, that experimental physics and Newtonian science were “halted” in Continental Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. She says that the timing of this engine culture varied from country to country in Western Europe, and that by the 1720s the Baconian ideal of applied mechanical knowledge was “more visible in Britain than anywhere else in the West.” Absolutism and the power of the Catholic clergy over education in France and Belgium “inhibited” but did “not stop” the introduction of new machines for industrialization. Already by 1800 the mechanical culture England originated was well underway in most of northwestern Europe (1997: 106, 131–164).

Neither does Jacob portray modern European science as one more variant within a common tradition of “Eurasian natural inquiries,” as Goldstone puts it. She writes that the “scientific legacy of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and especially Boyle and Newton” – as popularized and cultivated within English society – “helped to make the concrete applications of [steam] power possible,” and explicitly states that she wants “to debunk the myth about how important inventions in the early stages of industrial revolution had nothing to do [with the Scientific Revolution]” (7, 133).

The key figure of industrial Britain, she explains, was not a semiliterate tinkerer; it was men (and women) who “knew machines from having built them, or from having closely examined them, and knew that machines worked best when they took into account mechanical principles learned from basic theories in mechanics, hydrostatics, and dynamics” (109). Thus, she would not welcome Goldstone’s suggestion that the engine culture of Britain could have been as easily adopted and integrated by other cultures in the world given another set of random circumstances.

Britain’s engine culture was a mentality, an outlook on life brewing for a long time right across Europe. By the eighteenth century this ethos had spread and penetrated deep into British civil society, the schools and textbooks, the academies and journals, the coffee houses and printer’s shops.26 The advantage England enjoyed was in the earlier fusion of theoretical and applied-industrial science. This fusion found its highest expression in the minds of individuals like Henry Beighton (1636–1743), capable both of constructing the self-acting valve (1717) as well as writing about the performance of mine-drainage engines. In his article “A Physico-Mechanical Calculation of the Power of an Engine” (1717), Beighton provided “clear directions as to the quantities of water that could be pumped per stroke, per minute, and per hour, from various depths, according to the diameter of the engine cylinder, strokes per minute, and bore pump.” It was similarly evident in the life of the ironmonger and tinkerer Thomas Newcomen, who, in 1712, succeeded in erecting his first atmospheric steam pump and wrote about “rules for calculating engine power, according to the diameter of the cylinder, including allowance for variations in barometric pressure and also friction” (Musson and Robinson 1969: 47–8). And finally, this engine culture mentality was an obvious feature in the work of John Smeaton (1714–92) – founder of the civil engineering profession and innovator of waterwheels – who conducted scientifically controlled, mathematically-tabulated investigations of the atmospheric steam engine and read numerous papers, as a Fellow of the Royal Society, on mechanics, scientific instruments, and astronomy. Each was committed public participant who rationalized, piece by piece, the entire British economy.

When Jacob says that “no single event in the history of early modern Europe altered the fortunes of the new science more profoundly than the English [1688] Revolution,” she means to re-assert – against Marxists and economists who think that humans are motivated only by the location and prices of resources – the “extraordinary link” between the scientific spirit of utilitarian improvement and the Puritans’ millenarian vision of spiritual redemption thorough hard work and worldly reform (1997: 51). The conduct of British machinists and entrepreneurs in the eighteenth century were not mere responses to institutional incentives. They were authentic values infused with a religious zeal and a spirit of conviction. The ethos Jacob finds in England, and observes in detail in the Watts family as early as 1690, is a Calvinist commitment to undertake rational, arduous tasks, “disciplined labor, and self-examination within a universe framed by piety and science” (119).

It was not that Calvinism as such brought modern science to industry. Jacob knows too well the strong links Britain’s steam engine culture had with the seventeenth century Baconian vision that science could be made useful to ordinary people rather than remaining a monopoly of the “supercilious arrogance” of scholastic culture – as had already been demonstrated by the world of the European Renaissance, by shipbuilding and the voyages of exploration, by cartography and the science of geography, by the use of perspective in painting, by the spread of printing presses, by the rise of a new lay intelligentsia, and by the cultivation of a science of ballistics and a technology of cannon making. But Jacob wants to remind us – in a scholarly tradition that goes back to Max Weber and also Robert Merton’s classic work of the 1930s, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England – how Puritanism, more than any other religious current within Christianity, endowed scientific knowledge with millenarian importance. This religious-utilitarian ethos, preached by Quakers and liberal Anglicans, cannot be ignored in our efforts to understand why the first successful application of modern science occurred in Britain.