I hope your homecoming is a relief and reward from a wonderful journey that even adds to your appreciation of home.
"...if we look back at past technological achievements, [they] clearly refute such bliss or abundance for "all"... Every technology carries its own contradictions and shadows... While I agree that every technology has and has had certain advantages for certain people, it is equally true that it has been and will be detrimental to others."
I have reread our conversation this morning, as I drink my coffee, and saw I had not substantively addressed this sentiment in our discussion, which I think is fundamental and upon which many other aspects of our considerations depend. You might be very gratified to know the depth of impact your discussion has on me. While we are having this conversation I carefully consider for hours how to address issues you raise. My dishes are undone, my grass uncut, bills are unpaid, and my laundry exemplifies erosional processes that blunt majestic peaks. On reflection, you might be alarmed at my autistic focus on our being 'opinion agents', but I am not at all distracted by potential opinions of hypothetical observers as I struggle to learn the lessons you provide me.
I pointed out earlier that I have lived in wilderness, alone, unavailed of company and immediate assistance in any of the work necessary to daily life. I had only technology, that was the assistance of my fellows, and provided me great ease in doing many of the essential tasks I was required to undertake alone, such as cooking, making shelter, clothing myself, and securing my personal safety.
One of the most important things I gained from such experiences is an appreciation for technology. I remember returning to town after spending months alone and sincerely rejoicing at hot and cold running water, electric light, and much, much more. It's impossible to properly appreciate cloth garments until we skin a porcupine. After water plunging off the glacier a stone's throw upstream was my sole recourse for bathing, I have composed heartfelt odes of undying love for indoor plumbing, cloth, and light switches.
That profound appreciation has informed my life ever since, and I cannot overstate that technology is a blessing. I also note that very few people have such basis to appreciate just how vital technology is to their enjoyment of their lives, because they have never been without needle and thread, or any number of other blessings that similarly make trivial some essential comfort.
I recall reading as a child that medieval peasants slept in compost heaps, literal piles of poop that bacterial decomposition caused to release significant heat, and how I recoiled in horror at that thought. Not until I slept in primeval forest and was blessed with the incredible comfort of a down sleeping bag, unlimited wood to burn, and a stout tent that kept inclement weather out, did I come to some accord with that horrific necessity faced by peasants that could attain none of the treasures I enjoyed. That compost was an alternative technology to blankets, mattresses, and fireplaces their circumstances caused their lives to depend on, and they were so indomitable that such deprivation did not prevent their survival.
Recently I read that a needle was left in Denisova cave ~50kya by Denisovans, since other hominins didn't live there at that time. I was struck by the fact that Denisovans and Neanderthals lived in subarctic climes for hundreds of thousands of years that were impossible for hominins to live in without tailored clothing, and I would not have understood that impossibility without having lived innawoods.
We think of our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago draping furs loosely over their shoulders as a given. All the visual images we are provided show ragged furs draped over shoulders, bare feet, and a loin cloth tied at the waist. Such clothing is only suitable in temperate climates.
It is impossible to do the many tasks Denisovans and Neanderthals had to do to live without tailored clothes where they lived. Mere ponchos or robes without careful tailoring would not have protected them from freezing, as they had no fur and blubber, just as we do not, while they did essential work. I now suspect that this is the primary reason Sapiens didn't live further north until we had acquired that technology from them, ~45kya.
We had to have good boots, mittens, robes, tunics, hoods, and firmly laced leggings to live there, as did Neanderthals and Denisovans. That needle may be the earliest example we have of needle technology, but the mere fact of the subarctic climate they lived and hunted in is proof tailored clothes were in use hundreds of thousands of years ago by those people.
Their superlative achievements are largely incomprehensible to us today. A site in Europe reveals that Neanderthals hunted P. antiquus bulls preferentially for thousands of years at a specific site. These elephants were ~double the size of African elephants, and the bulls were the largest and most dangerous. Neanderthals also lived in family groups, limiting their hunting party size potentially to a single man. They didn't have projectile weapons, didn't use pit traps, fire, or dogs. They manually poked pointy sticks into ~10 ton enraged murder machines habitually for a living.
Neanderthals averaged ~164cm, and standing flat footed reached about the knees of P. antiquus bulls, that were ~4m at the shoulder. Neanderthals did not have the slow twitch muscle fibers we do. All their muscles were fast twitch fibers, those used by sprinters. I hunt stag by finding a fresh track and jogging until I catch up to the herd, but Neanderthals couldn't do that. They were instead acrobatic and quick, and their skeletons reveal they were enormously muscled. This constrains how they hunted, as well as shows that they evolved to take the largest prey available, such as P. antiquus was.
There are physiological features animals have that create points of vulnerability, where a killing blow can be struck. The brainstem, or the jugular, can be struck once and quickly cause death. Given the thousands of years over which these kills are shown to have been committed at this one site, it is certain those men gained a body of knowledge about how these animals were killed most quickly and safely. Such traditions and passing them down from generation to generation is well demonstrated across cultures. I taught my own sons to aim at the center of a stag's chest to kill quickly and humanely as possible.
I am pretty confident that for thousands of years, men took P. antiquus bulls by striking a killing blow they taught to their sons, creating a tradition that perhaps depended on features of the site. "From this position, when the bull steps there, you step here..." There is a sort of ritual, a dance of death, in such tradition.
It also depends on one man striking one blow, making a group of hunters of little use, except in distracting the attention of the prey while it was struck. Someone had to individually strike that killing blow. Poking it in the knees, ribs, or belly would start a fight, one that even mighty Neanderthals couldn't meet with their great strength, nor outlast with endurance.
For that task, requiring Neanderthals to leap up high enough to reach the throat or the back of the neck of a 4m tall animal and strike deeply with great force, it is very obvious that extraordinary courage, intelligence necessary to plan such a hunt, and athletic skill was necessary. It is just as true that they had to be wearing clothes that were up to such feats. They could not abide a flimsy seam, a floppy sole, or loose, flapping material to alert their prey, impede their grace, or obstruct their vision to even the slightest degree.
Not only did they have tailored clothing, but the extremity of the difficulty and incredible athletic ability necessary to that almost unimaginable task required extraordinary attention to that clothing and it's construction. Fast fashion would not apply.
It's likely that over the aeons that their clothes were made, that equally rigorous rituals and traditions governed every stitch. Every bit of it's construction was just as vital as every plate and strap in a knight's armor, as every layer and seam in a spacesuit. We think of attire as simple technology, but we do not put our clothing to such tasks as men must have aeons ago.
I bring up all this because it reveals that archaeologists have little grasp of how these people lived and how that impacted their technology, which mirrors how we can neglect how vital technology is to we ourselves. We see representations of Neanderthals as brutes, with loose skins draped over them, because scientists don't understand how to live in the tundra wilderness, nor how a man with a pointy stick must kill such prey. No modern man, however Olympian their strength and grace, could even do what they routinely did, and this delimits the technology they had to have.
They couldn't do it naked because they'd have frozen to death, so they had to have exquisitely tailored garb to manage such Herculean feats in, or they'd have been killed by their sloppy clothes.
Such basal technologies are underappreciated by people that have not lived without them. It is almost impossible to meaningfully appreciate them when every moment of our lives is eased and made more comfortable by them. It is such a significant matter that I considered taking my sons camping and abandoning our gear, all our clothes, and every item we carried, and then camping for a few days, so that they would gain that insight, so profoundly informative. I am either too merciful, or too averse to suffering, to have done it, to my enduring ambivalence.
It just isn't true that technological advances do not benefit us all, to think that only some profiteers benefit while the rest of us do not, or are even harmed by technological advance. While more advanced technology than needles and fire seem less fundamental to our survival, in reality very substantial benefits critical to our lives come from esoteric inventions like alternating current, PVC plastic, and LEDs.
When we consider data harvesting, facial recognition, and AI as they exist today, we are just considering how those that possess them first use them against us, and not grasping how they will aid us when we wield them against our enemies. These latter three particularly have enormous potential to prevent corruption, covert crimes, and to automate our personally possessed means of production, which will benefit us far more than the overlords who paid to develop them.
Technology disperses, as I have shown by promoting distribution of AI software. The more advanced it is the faster it gets more advanced, the faster it disperses, and the harder it is to prevent us from making it ourselves. Overlords have a very limited window during which centralization enables them exclusive use of technological advance, and decentralization is eliminating that window. Decentralization is, in fact, the elimination of that window.
I return to your above most recent comment now.
"If you were to set up your own company, would you hire people who had no professional references but only said that they got their knowledge from the internet?"
In 2001 I applied for a job as an experimental biologist at a state agency. As a child I dreamed of being a biologist, and I sought to fulfill that dream although I do not have any degree or formal scientific training. In a one page cover letter I described my youth and the knowledge I gained thereby of the species under study in that position, and pointed out they could never find a candidate more motivated to do the necessary work, sprinkling in species names and pointing out my familiarity with the scientific method.
They hired me, and I worked in the field as an experimental biologist on a population dynamics study. While I was afflicted by the institutional structure of the agency, I remember Don Bodenmiller, who took the samples and data I collected and analyzed them to arrive at relevant conclusions, telling me he had not before been availed of more meticulous and carefully recorded data. I suggested other research which was also undertaken, and struggled to manage my aversion to the governmental institution itself, that often obstructed doing science. I may not have to describe how strangely money flows in such institutions, or how petty bureaucrats protect their turf regardless of other matters, but these, and more, continually impacted my ability to do the work necessary to understand where the species we were studying lived, and to gather the other information we needed to understand how their populations were sustained.
I recall at one point recommending they give me a badge and a gun so that I could handle some business that impeded my ability to collect data, facetiously mocking monumental bureaucratic impediment. Not everyone in the agency was as happy with me as other scientists, and I was aghast at how few scientists actually existed in the agency, supposedly dedicated to science. By far the majority of the funding intended to do science was instead absorbed by the institutional structure.
Suddenly 9/11 sucked all grant funding out of scientific research in the USA, and my career as a scientist was instantly over. Without a degree, competing in a funding starved environment with scientists having strings of letters after their names hanging on the walls of their offices, faced with the bureaucracy entrenching their niches which they would defend to the death, the miracle that had occurred when I was hired would not happen again.
That's when I turned to carpentry exclusively, quite disenamored with the institutionalization of science, and have since remained almost exclusively self-employed. That aversion to institutions has only become more pronounced thereafter, and today I seek to eschew money itself and work for goodwill, which cannot be taxed, stolen, or degraded by inflation.
I mention these experiences to support my assertion that it is possible to overcome biases we inherit culturally that profoundly impact our understanding. Because I grasp how degrees and formal education are almost exclusively about institutionalization, rather than knowledge, I am only willing to hire people that demonstrate learning outside of formal education - I care that they are competent to learn, intelligent, and inclined to beneficence, almost exclusively.
However I have seen that these very things fundamental to work and science are not the primary needs of institutions that have been imposed on scientific research, or construction, today. Institutions are the most advanced centralization technology ever designed to funnel wealth in the form of money to majority stockholders. That, I suspect, is the reason you can perceive technology itself only rewards some. It is also why I don't build a company or hire employees and create an institution. I just do work, because I am well acquainted with peers that have grown businesses on their competence until they become slaves to those institutions and hate life, yearning to do what I do instead of making money. I have seen grown men cry like babies, throw their phones off structures in rage, and die of afflictions they only suffered because of their institutionalization.
The worst hazard I face is ladders, in contrast.
That remains fundamental to my understanding today, and I treat institutions as the ultimate expression of evil, aware the love of money is their cause, and seek to undertake every action as independently of institutions - but not community, society, and people - as I am able.
"Have your sons ever listened with interest to you when you where theorizing?"
As I have here, I undertake to relate theory to experience, and have been able to convey such understanding to my sons. I am quite put out that in a variety of matters they prefer their own counsel, because of that very success I have had in imparting to them the theory that their own understanding is what they should act on, and my dismay that they do not (being adults) simply do what I recommend is perhaps one of the most difficult rewards of their independence and greater success than mine to rejoice in.
I consider that difficulty a personal failure of mine, although endemic to our species. Managing to successfully breed can be reduced to extreme simplicity, as my own father conveyed to me when he told me that I had a roof over my head, a shirt on my back, and food in my belly, so his job was done. It is extraordinarily difficult to parent well, mostly because we don't know who or what we actually are.
RE: Quantum Consciousness