Progress terminated.

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
41

Health care is becoming very interesting in the USA. Anything that happens to you is always “your fault”, there is a guilt ridden culture where you are totally “responsible” for your health, there is this idea that you must “make the effort” to remain sane, to not get sick, if you don’t have health care because they laid you off “it is your fault, you didn’t work hard enough, or you didn’t have enough skills, or you didn’t study enough, etc. etc.”. This works well with the “work ethic”, with the idea that you must always manipulate things, you must try to change your destiny, that you must put in effort to obtain results, that there is always something that you can do.

So you have to go through screenings of all kinds many times a year, you got to go through check ups and procedures that cost time and money (money you probably don’t have, since you can’t afford expensive checkups), you have to take all kinds of pills to protect yourself against all kinds of sicknesses, they advertise all kinds of sicknesses you probably have, all kinds of pills and procedures and checkups and all this costing money, time etc. You have to have a “healthy lifestyle, exercise, eat the right things” etc. All of this creates a situation that when you do get sick it is totally your fault, you deserve it, you have to pay for your sins, that is why religions, especially the ones where the wrath of god punishes you for all your sins is so popular in the US. You have to screen every cell in your body to be sure there isn’t some cancer lurking around, how many screenings, CTs, X-rays etc. must a man do ?

This system serves simply to give a bunch of money to doctors, health insurance agencies, big pharma, it is a subtle form of psychological warfare, an ideology that people don’t notice. They are brainwashing everyone that they are sick, that they have to control everything in their body, that they must be in control of their destiny. There is something evil in all this, because sickeness is something that usually just happens, it is part of natural evolution, but if it happens to you in the USA, it is your fault, you shall be punished, you didn’t do enough to avoid it. This is part of the general culture of always having to do something about things, always having to be active, to create innovation, constant activity. But this deception has been exposed, there is no innovation, it is all false, science has been still for years, this is only psychological violence against a commercial saturated and pill filled people in the USA.

42

The conglomerates are prepared for when current energy methods cease - they are not stupid!

43

Science and Technology gives me the creeps. Seems like that for each step forward, we take two steps backwards. Who is “WE” anyways ? Isn’t it everyone out for themselves ultimately ? When you really take off all the masks, it is simply everyone trying to get as much as possible against everyone else, there probably is no such thing as a common good, it is probably just an imaginary construction used by ideologies and politicians and marketing schemes.

44

Probably. But in the hunter-gatherer sense the “we” is vital for survival. Hobbes I think tackled this, that even if man can be a wolf to another, he still needs to join a society to guarantee his survival.

45

The housing problem is another of those things that can’t really be changed or improved in anyway. It is very easy to build homes, all kinds of homes at most price levels in the US and EU and probably also in Japan can be built, but there is always some shortage, they always tend to become expensive both in price and rent. This can be explained by a very simple positive feedback mechanism. A given area starts to have more jobs, more people move into that given area, there is more pressure on the prices of homes and rents, more people come in the area, prices keep on going up , etc. The farther away from the area, the cheaper, but even the far ones start catching up in price and so on. Now in the US, being that the job market is more fluid, a group of companies can leave an area and you get those old houses starting to cost less. In EU and Japan, the market is much more rigid, companies don’t easily leave an area, so you get a kind of status quo, prices just keep on going up in those popular areas like Tokyo or London or Paris.

But the problem isn’t solved by building more houses (aside from the fact that an area gets saturated), but by distributing jobs across a very large area, so most homes are relatively near the jobs, but this is never done, there are only constant instabilities and extreme cases of high price - rent homes and areas where there is almost nothing workwise and low cost homes - rent. But maybe no matter how large an area, they all get saturated by the continuous increase of worldwide population. If housing prices and rents were more manageable, people would have much more disposable income for optional goods, or arbitrary goods, and the economy would grow at a much higher rate in the old west (USA, EU, JAPAN). But the system will just make new countries grow and saturate like China, India, Brazil and Indonesia.

46

Too many egos, too many bodies, too few resources, and too little cooperation, the dam will break somehow. Until people are content in not getting a voice we will have problems. But go communist or socialist? No thanks, I would rather put my back to the wall and fight.

47

It may even be much worse than this; companies creating pills that make you sick to create pills that solve that sickness but make you even more sick, etc. Innovation for “innovation’s” sake, meaning creating false products, false medicine to show that the companies are actually producing something new, when the science dictates that there is no improvement and nothing new can be created, etc. Always increasing expectations in profits, so companies invent useless (in the best case) and very damaging products (in most cases) to sell to get a profit, to justify the research spending and trying to get some return, as if science is a kind of fairy tale where a given research spending must at all cost produce a given return, etc.

Notice how marketing costs are always much higher than research costs, because the whole deal is mostly political, human based and not science based. The markets of so many innovations are simply a scam, they are technology driven meaning that the companies try to shove products down your throat to make money, not because you need them. Hence all the talk of always changing things, always innovating, always actively searching for “new” things. It is an ideology all and all, a true total deception. Maybe the whole deal of science and technology worked well in a very narrow range of circumstances and at a very precise time in its evolution, say from 1900 to 1990, but from 1990 on, very few results and alot of deceptions have been produced.

What is frightening is that all the companies in technology have thousands of researchers trying to create innovation and new products, when all this innovation will be increasingly damaging, increasing complex and confusing and will generate increasing general loss of wealth. All those tehcnicians and scientists should stay at home and remain in bed from now on.

48

in fact, cell phones suck.

49

if Peak Oil, Peak Work, Peak Science-Technology all really kick in, in the sense that all these things are ending, if this theory is somewhat true, that we have lived in an ideology - illusion just like the Soviet Union, then it will mark the end of our civilization. The concept of entitlements, of the future, of having dreams, the expectations of a future will melt down completely, we will live day by day, simply searching for water, we will sleep more, all activities will halt, even our internal memory systems will change, the future and past will disappear, only a constant present will be perceived. it will be a very slow life …

50

Science is over therefore it is not

It seems that in many areas science has hit a wall. Three body problems can’t be solved. So since it will remain forever a mystery, it allows us to continue to do science forever, to invent new setups, experiments and theories that pretend to go forward when in reality we are mostly staying still. So science is over, but exactly because it is over, it has the potential to expand hugely given its incapability to solve even the three body problem. So we will invent ever increasing complex theories, simulations, experimental apparatus, but all of this will be mostly self referential, will be mostly an excuse for a mostly human generated activity, a “culture”, a “civilization”, in the anthropological sense.

In fact our civilization, from an anthropological point of view, is just one small quirk, that has developed this activity of scientific research and technological manipulation of matter - reality, but it will probably be a short lived civilization, that doesn’t really have any real or deeper knowledge than any other of the hundreds of quirk civilizations that have populated the earth. Actually ours, seen from another civilization - culture, which is always a totally arbitrary ensemble of activites, thought patterns, connections between rituals and symbols and emotional states, in short a set of experiences, well ours seen from any other would appear funny and irrelevant just as we view other “primitive” peoples cultures and activities funny.

But even if our science could become omnipotent, and do everything and anything it wanted, it would still be just a quirk civilization, just a one shot particular way of experiencing life. Any other culture, no matter how primitive or “ignorant”, no matter how little they know, would experience life in a very different but just as valid way, and would probably have many experiences and situations, emotional states and mental states that we could never have, given that our technological civilization already programs on the outset exactly what we want and what experiences we can possibly have.

51

A physical system is first translated into a physical problem, since the fundamental assumption is that the physical system will be “manipulated”. Science is ultimately based on the intentionality of manipulation of the physical system.

The mathematical translation of a physical problem is the only way we know how to see it and manipulate it. This translation and decoding is not guaranteed to be true, may not have any relationship with the physical system, and has everything to do with how we intend to manipulate said physical system. The mathematical translation is a kind of self referential program that we use to visualize how we intend to manipulate and measure a physical system, IT IS NOT THE PHYSICAL SYSTEM. It is a partial and very biased painting of a physical system. How partial and how biased, how far away from a complete description of the physical system is not only unknown, but cannot be known in any way since we are always using the only painting we know how to use, our always self referential model of the physical system.

Any model of any physical system is always a distortion, an invention, a false painting of something that is intrinsically unknowable.

52

With all this effort and excess capacity, it seems that progress is not so much irrevocably terminated as it is diverted, or perverted, or something.

This is kind of a surprising sentiment from you, I’m not sure how facetious your intent.

The basic needs are a given, and in this context, progress certainly seems to be diverted from providing these basic needs to all, which I believe to be a reasonable aspiration.

Of course I disagree that a communist dictatorship is required to provide basic needs, because I advocate Universal Enfranchisement and the accompanying basic income.

Why decry communism and then lean on a tired communist mantra?
Will you eliminate all inheritances and trust funds? Shall the infirm, disabled, and old be pushed out to starve?
Will you determine what adequate or appropriate work is?

Man can and will grow with a reasonable level of ownership, enfranchisement in the planet, society. This is not begging and dependence any more than an inherited trust fund, and recipients of trust funds have more often than not been reasonably productive, and at least somewhat more successful.
So how does it harm you if everyone inherits a basic share in the planet?

Yeah, this is sort of obvious. We have more problems than just the warmongering though.

If you can truly accept the positive qualities of humanity as a whole, please give reasonable consideration to the effect of the individual sovereignty and potential for self actualization provided by U.E. and a basic income.

53

The author of this post talks with such authority and hubris. It sounds a lot like the talk from the Bush administration and neocons about the war in Iraq, that it would be a piece of cake.

Predictions about the end of science and inventions have been made before.

54

Its absurd.

They can make heart muscles/valves from stemcells and an entire stomach (or whichever organ it was) from a single stemcell over bio-degradable mold, an organ which they transplanted. Theres so many insane medical innovations appearing rapidly that its complete nonsense to claim what these people do.

Check out a new hospital in ten-twenty years, tell me scientific progress has stopped then.

A new surgery arm developed by a canadian team in the last few years^

55

technology isn’t stopping.

Haha, I guess you don’t own a playstation 3. and ignored everything from mario up till date.

56

yay! destruction

57

Is Starcraft 2 already in the market?

58

well it might not be in time but actually aternative “clean” energy is on the rise

There is enough food, as therre has always been, the problem (as it also always has been) is distribution. On to biofuel, that was always doomed to failure, Hydrogen power is the way forward, or conversion using only reused cooking oil, though we will have to eat more chips if this became widespread

I dont think thats true, the billions beign spent on it a year would also disagree with you

Your points dont seem to follow on, here you talk of bank robbers and scientists, is there a correlation here, you neesd to clarify this point.

Population does cause problems, so we need to work on birth control in problem areas, However there is plenty of food for these people, its simply poorly distributed, look at americas wastage and see what i mean.

wealth is relative, if the whole world becomes poor then the ballence actually becomes better

You have a choice to be a part of the solution or a part of the problem, no one ever got anywhere by giving up, the war isnt over yet, why give up ahead of time?

dopnt quote bush, it makes you look like an idiot, no offence intended. But the sad think is that it will continue, or they will die, this obviously needs changing but moaning like this will not acchieve that

59

Many of these arguments are interesting from a theoretical perspective, but when judged against the evidence of history, they are less compelling.

Thomas Malthus famously raised the issue of overpopulation in 1798 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_o … Population). 200 years later the evidence has still not emerged that his theory is correct.

Recent history shows little evidence of a coming population catastrophe. The average person (and the average poor person) in the world is getting richer, not poorer (even though the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting richer). Poverty is decreasing. From Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_poverty

Scientific progress has also been accelerating, not decelerating. If you look at the technological state of 1790 versus 1808, the progress was small compared to the differences between 1990 and 2008. Also, if technology is dead, then why are scientists and engineers among the highest-paid workers in our societies? Are they not creating value? Are companies, universities and governments simply paying them out of compassion? I doubt it.

Also, new technologies often reduce the strain on resources. In the 70’s, when oil was at similar inflation-adjusted prices as today, there was rationing and a national crisis mentality about oil. Today our economy is less dependent on oil.

Fiber optics cables use far fewer resources per MB data transfer than copper. Email is more efficient than snail mail. Etc. Etc.

Another piece of good news is that, for some reason, as nations get richer their populations have fewer children.

My last point is that there is a large, untapped resource that is exceptionally important: Human potential. As a child, the users of this site were invested in through education. This has yielded exceptional positive returns. If we as a world invest in education we will be able to do more with less.