1. jamonit said...

I'm posting this here [please forgive if not relevant to main heading] because it was originally writen for a thread that appears, astonishingly, to have been deleted. But I think it needs to be said, and it is tangentially relevant. Here's what I originally posted and managed to copy before the deletion....

You know, S2R gets a lot of flack on here. I can understand why, because his postings [please forgive the 3rd term s2r] can be a bit hysterical and point to sensationalist links. But I don't accept this cynicism that you mostly tend to pour on his observations. I find them interesting. The reason for this is that I acknowledge that all things are subject to cycles. Be it the life of a plant, the waxing and waning of civilisations, the growth and fading of a star, the growth and decline of house prices...everything cycles. This should therefore mean that everything becomes predictable, but in practice it doesn't [unless you believe S2R's links] because there are so many cycles working within cycles that everything starts to appear chaotic to us. So we think anything could happen. But I'm not so sure about that. I think that the idea that we might be entering an age of some sort of phase change is perfectly plausible. If S2R believes that he's discovered some system that has found out how to map the cycles, that's fine. I dont accept it myself but that's not the same thing as rejecting the idea that such cycles exist.

I'm a scientist by training [two MSc degrees]. but I also belive in spirtual intuition.

There are a lot of big things happening in the world at the moment. And they're happening at increasingly rapid rates, partly because they are often exponential in their rates of progression. Population growth for example, and all the other processes that that single process feeds into...environmental degradation, food shortage, energy needs for example. And that's just one process...there are lots of major issues that we're starting to face up to now, because their effects are starting to become apparent. And each 'sub process' generates it's own chain of issues in turn.

Our answer is always to build more complex systems to deal with problems that often emerge from previous solutions to previous problems, but this spiral will inevitably get out of control and become unmanageable.

I accept, almost without reservation, that S2R is right that some kind of evolutionary phase change is coming. How it happens and what form it takes, I don't know, but I suspect that the transition might be quite painful. And those of you who tend to continue to evaluate the universe, or your everyday lives, in terms of learned conventions that have held true for your short experience of life, may be in for a shock.

I also believe that what's going to come out of this transition....and my two sons will experience this....will be better than the mindless, soulless consumerist world that we've built thus far, in this short introductory period that mankind has experienced since he came of age in the industrial revolution.