QUESTION6.com
The world we live in
1-2 Money
An Alien looking at planet Earth through his telescope would see 8 billion individuals moving around like ants. He may be wondering what the cause of all this animation could be. We need food and shelter. That does not explain everything. A couple of centuries ago, approximately 85% of the population was comprised of farmers. Today, they represent less than 5% of the population. We should be free from basic needs 80% of the time. What keeps us so busy?
We have long-term and short-term motivations.
The human body is high maintenance. It must be fed three times a day. It must be kept at the right temperature at all times. It doesn’t smell good unless we keep washing it regularly. We don’t know what happens during our 8 hours of sleep. Even if you spend one hour a day keeping your body in working order, you should have more than 14 hours of leisure per day. Something is missing somewhere.
Behind the short-term motivation of the individual lies the long-term motivation of a society. Civilizations appear and fade away like flowers bloom and wither. We are familiar with the Egyptian civilization, followed by the Greek and Roman cultures. More recently, in the 15th century, Portugal was the leader of Europe. In the 16th century, Spain was the leading power, followed by the Netherlands, France, and England. All those countries seemed to follow the same process. The individuals who lived at the time were not conscious that they served the same purpose. We are not separate individuals. We are a flow of people like a river running across the centuries. We serve a purpose, consciously or not. Something is missing in our understanding of life. Sooner or later, we stop what we are doing and ask ourselves:” What is the purpose of all this? What am I doing here? Is it worth it?” Earth may not be hell, but it is not a paradise either. It looks more like purgatory.
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To answer the question of “What are we doing on Earth?”, some people use religion. Others decided that they will be happy when they have enough money or become famous. We are all looking for love. The problem is that we don’t know where to look. Looking for love cannot be a daily activity.
How is motivation implemented in Nature?
Let’s take a labyrinth.
At first, we sent water to fill the labyrinth. It filled all the dead ends and found its way to the exit. Water is driven by gravity.
The next step is to replace the water with slime mold. It is this gluey thing spreading on dead trees in the forest. It has no head and no brain. However, it is used to improve our computers because it can solve problems faster than we can. The slime mold will fill all the dead ends of the labyrinth. It will also reach the exit. After reaching its goal, the slime mold will remove what is filling the dead ends and could be put to better use elsewhere. Slime mold is motivated by the search for food.
Now, let’s place humans at the entrance of the labyrinth. They are not driven by gravity. They are not looking for food. They lack real motivation. They may not find the exit. Motivation could be the key to success. It lacks shape, color, or weight. You will not find it in the material world. The key to success is in our souls.
Love could be the leading motivation in our lives. Unfortunately, we don’t have the necessary sense organs to guide our search. All we know is that we will not find it in money or in the material world. The answer will come from our soul and our motivation.
14 From Helena to Robert Check the NDE
Our grandparents are telling us of a world without TV, without plastic, satellites, vaccines, MRI, planes, internet. They did not even have computers! It is true that they did not have pollution and global warming, but we are glad that we were not born 200 years sooner. That does not mean that we don’t have problems. Grandad could use the same garden tools all his life. Our computers last only a few years. In our 21st century changes are accelerating. We know of civilizations like the Egyptian, the Greek and the Roman that lasted for centuries. The Roman decline alone took 400 years. In the 15th century Portugal was leading the western world. In the 16th century it was Spain, followed by Holland in the 17th , France in the 18th and the UK in the 19th. Today a country can rise, reach its apogee and decline in less than a century. We talk about one industry in one country, being 5 years ahead of the same industry in another country. It seems that we are caught in an avalanche.
Our last upheaval is AI and robots. This is more than a new tool at our disposal. We want to improve our robots and get them closer to the possibilities of human beings. We are going to share our life with them. Did you notice that we don’t talk about the robot itself? We talk about the difference that remains between a robot and a human. Unconsciously, we want to fill that gap. We will not meet the robot halfway. We are willing to go all the way, even if we have to face serious questions about ourselves.
Are we sure of what a human being is? Parents educate their children until they realize that their children are educating them. We use the world as a screen on which we project our own film. When the world looked flat, we decided that the universe was turning around our flat Earth. For 300 000 years the Homo sapiens (that’s us) believed that the universe was limited to what they could see. Today we discover that our material world represents only 5% of reality. What a disappointment! We are far from dominating the universe with our thinking. We are only getting acquainted with the remaining 95% made of dark matter and dark energy. If some Aliens were made of dark matter, they could already be among us, and we could not see them!
If we share our life with robots, we will get attached to them like we get attached to our pets. Robots we can talk to are not a machine anymore. We will assume that there is life in them. What are we going to decide when the new model is a better cook and knows how to avoid inheritance taxes?
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Should we kick the old robots out of the house and let them join the many homeless robots wandering all over town?
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How is our life going to change when we can choose between talking with robots and talking with people?
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Could we bury an aging robot ‘alive’ in our backyard like we buried a dead dog?
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Should we have retirement homes for aging robots, or should we have graveyards and stack them up like we stack old cars?
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Generals may prefer an army of robots to an army of soldiers. Could governments prefer robots over citizens and give them the right to vote?
We are entering a new era. The more we learn about robots, the more we will learn about ourselves. We don’t pretend to play God and create life, but we wouldn’t mind getting a bit closer. We have a body and a soul. They give us two ways to communicate with the world around us. Our body is our link with the material world where everything has weight, shape, color, and scientists can do experiments and take measurements. Our soul is where we keep feelings, love, consciousness, harmony and whatever is important in our life but does not have weight, shape and color.
In the past 200 years we have been focusing on the material world. Our main concern was to make our body more comfortable. We cannot be blamed for remodeling our environment and making machines that amplify the work a human body can produce. We were so proud of our achievements that we believed that the human brain was going to dominate the universe. Today, AI is going to amplify the thinking a human brain can generate. It is introducing us to a different world where we cannot assume that everything is under our control. This is the immaterial world of the soul. We don’t want to repeat in that world the mistakes we made in the material world. Radioactivity could be used to make electricity and make atomic bombs. We started with the bomb and created a problem that will stay with us for centuries. The problems that AI could produce are much worse. Atomic bombs destroy a city. AI could ruin the lives of people all over the world. The problem is not in our environment. It is inside us.
There is something else. In the last 200 years we have moved from small villages to big cities. We have, so far, 45 cities with more than 10 million inhabitants from Tokyo in Japan (37 million) to Harbin in China (10 million). We can understand young people looking for other possibilities than being a farmer. The city offers them many new professions and a different life. The main concern of the Homo sapiens for 300 000 years was to find food and survive. Today, we can get out of that jail. Unconsciously, we associate the possibility to move to the city with ‘Freedom at last’. That does not mean that we found perfect happiness and Nirvana.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana
The survival of many people in a small area is not possible without some rules. Everybody must drive on the same side of the road. Everybody must renounce some of his freedom. The individual still wants to preserve his individual freedom but must accept a freedom within limits.
We cannot go back to life as usual. Robots and AI oblige us to face the real nature of human beings. At the center of our soul is a need for individual freedom that must accept some limits. This is not simple evolution. We are in the situation of the caterpillar being changed into a butterfly, with the difference that we can participate in our own evolution.
We can avoid a lot of pain, hardship and tribulations by facing the dangers and taking our responsibilities. Let’s not wait for the governments. The changes will come from individuals, and the governments will implement the changes.
What was the reaction of your friends when you told them about love? Keep in mind that your friends are in a dark cave, and you don’t even know, yourself, how you got out of that cave.
Fortunately, there is a way out of our predicament. Our consciousness may be limited, but it can be amplified. We have been working on that problem for a long time already. To love people is to be conscious of them. It is more than being mindful of their presence. It is being conscious of their state of mind. You find this between a mother and her baby. She knows why the baby is crying. No need for words and reasoning. She is conscious of what needs to be done. Between adults, you may not know the details of their past, but you are conscious of the influence that their past had on their soul.
You can get some idea of what an increased consciousness is like by talking to people who have gone through a near-death experience. Many of them have new abilities that they kept after this experience. The most common one is that they know what people around them are thinking. Be careful of what you are thinking if you go to one of their meetings. (There is one every month in most big cities.) If you see a big nose, try to think, “What beautiful hair”. You are swimming in increased consciousness. They may be aware of something about you that you forgot. Search ‘Near Death Experience’ and you will find hundreds of people of all ages who have surprising stories. Most of the time, it happened during surgery. This is not something I would recommend! We say that they lost consciousness. I would rather say that they were not conscious of their physical body. Do we need a physical body to be conscious? This is not on my list of sense organs.
What happened to both of us is that we became conscious of one another. After a big hug, there is not much more to talk about. This is what could help your friends.
15- From Robert to Helena – Critical mass
Helena, I keep thinking of what transformed our relationship. The only explanation I could find comes from the atomic bomb! No mathematics. I promise!
Take a small sphere of radioactive material. The energy generated varies with the volume of the sphere (4/3π R³). The energy lost varies with the surface area (4πr²). As you increase the size of the sphere, the volume increases faster than the surface area. You reach a point where there is more energy generated than energy lost. You have an explosion. This is called “the critical mass.”
Are you still there? Something similar could happen to people. As long as they are separated, nothing much happens. It is only when they get together that they can reach a certain “human critical mass”. The problem is that there may not be enough energy between the two of them to reach that point.
The idea is simple but difficult to believe. Look at the people around you. Each one can generate some love, but not enough to elevate himself to another level. Take two of them at random, and most of the time, their total energy is too small to reach the ‘critical mass’.
Let’s see what could be missing in many people. One possibility is that they are still attached to the material world. They cannot detach themselves from their own body. Most people struggle to make the transition from being a separate individual to becoming half of a couple.
Another possibility is a lack of freedom. Love and freedom come together. When I was a teenager, I was saving my money to buy a record player. Thanks to inflation, the price of the record player increased faster than my savings. It was a race I could not win. Soon after I abandoned any hope, a neighbor bought himself a new record player and gave me the old one. It seemed to me that renouncing reaching a goal in a specific way opens the possibility that it can be reached another way. By detaching myself from using my savings, I introduced freedom into the system. That opened new possibilities.
The general idea is that many people are still prisoners in Plato’s cave. The more knowledge they acquire in the material world, the more they become prisoners of that knowledge. It is more difficult for a surgeon to change professions than it is for a blue-collar worker.
Before you dismiss my critical mass as a crazy idea, let me tell you how it can also be found in human history. The homo sapiens have been on Planet Earth for more than 300,000 years. How come nothing much has happened until the last two centuries? How come the steam engine, the planes, GPS, the computers, and AI did not appear 100 000 years ago? The answer could be that humans were dispersed on the surface of the Earth. There was too much distance between them. The invention of agriculture allowed people to move to cities. Over the past 200 years, the population of cities has continued to increase. A computer is composed of millions of simple ideas contributed by millions of different people. The computer made the internet possible, which further enhanced communication between individuals. More and more brains are becoming increasingly interconnected. That should lead to human beings achieving their critical mass and a higher level of consciousness.
Helena, I predict that more and more people will find their puberty of the soul together.
I would go even further. We will become conscious that Homo sapiens is the seventh stage of human evolution. It is not a question of selecting one race or one religion. Dividing the world’s population into countries fighting one another does not make sense. Either the seventh attempt of Homo sapiens will succeed, or they will disappear from the Earth’s surface like the dinosaurs.
Instead of fighting one another, we’d better unite and look for a way to get out of Plato’s cave. The love between two human beings is pointing in the right direction.
1 - Introduction