Human Environment Interaction Quotes

When we're able to communicate in nature's language; when we're able to transcend the view that nature is a boundless entity; even transcending the building as the kernel of the architectural project; when we invite scientific inquiry and technological innovation, fusing atoms with bits and bits with genes - only then will the art of building enable new forms of interaction between humans and their environment. Only then will we be able to design, construct and evolve as equals.

Earth’s suitability for human life was no coincidence, much less an effect of the anthropic principle, but rather was an outcome of the long-term interaction between the biosphere and the natural environment,

When we're able to communicate in nature's language; when we're able to transcend the view that nature is a boundless entity; even transcending the building as the kernel of the architectural project; when we invite scientific inquiry and technological innovation, fusing atoms with bits and bits with genes - only then will the art of building enable new forms of interaction between humans and their environment.

Every living creature on this planet, has a conscious subjective perspective of the world. Even the plants may seem to us as standing indifferent to the human sufferings, but even they have their own unique mental universe. They have their own way of interacting with the environment.

It might not be immediately obvious to some readers why the ability to perform 10^85 computational operations is a big deal. So it's useful to put it in context. [I]t may take about 10^31-10^44 operations to simulate all neuronal operations that have occurred in the history of life on Earth. Alternatively, let us suppose that the computers are used to run human whole brain emulations that live rich and happy lives while interacting with one another in virtual environments. A typical estimate of the computational requirements for running one emulation is 10^18 operations per second. To run an emulation for 100 subjective years would then require some 10^27 operations. This would be mean that at least 10^58 human lives could be created in emulation even with quite conservative assumptions about the efficiency of computronium. In other words, assuming that the observable universe is void of extraterrestrial civilizations, then what hangs in the balance is at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 human lives. If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth's oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy.

But the self is precisely the integrator; it is the synthetic unity, as Kant said. It is the artist of life. It is only a small factor in the total organism/environment interaction, but it plays the crucial role of finding and making the meanings that we grow by.

How we interact in our world that we inhabit determines how much happiness human beings enjoy. The ego guides human beings in performing their practical activities, and egotistical utility in turn motivates human behavior. An inflated ego can cause human beings to live in a corrupt and unethical manner that is hostile to other humans and the environment. A person’s passions can imprison them.

Every living creature on this planet, has a conscious subjective perspective of the world. The plants may seem to us as standing indifferent to the human sufferings, but even they have their own unique mental universe. They have their own way of interacting with the environment.

I am no ecological Pollyana. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some environmental 'realists' seem to believe is the more mature posture. Instead, I choose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, in possibility, where we cannot predict what will happen but we make space for it, whatever it is, and realize that our participation has value. This is grown-up optimism, where our bondedness with the rest of creation, a sense of profound interaction, and a belief in our shared ingenuity give meaning to our lives and actions on behalf of the more-than-human world.

I’m encouraging mine to go into professions that machines are currently bad at, and therefore seem unlikely to get automated in the near future. Recent forecasts for when various jobs will get taken over by machines identify several useful questions to ask about a career before deciding to educate oneself for it. 48 For example: • Does it require interacting with people and using social intelligence? • Does it involve creativity and coming up with clever solutions? • Does it require working in an unpredictable environment?

Sullivan became increasingly convinced, the individual is simply not the unit to study. Human beings are inseparable, always and inevitably, from their interpersonal field. The individual’s personality takes shape in an environment composed of other people. The individual is in continual interaction with other people. The personality or self is not something that resides “inside” the individual, but rather something that appears in interactions with others. “Personality . . . is made manifest in interpersonal situations and not otherwise” (1938, p. 32), Sullivan suggested. Personality is “the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which characterize a human life” (1940, p. xi).

Diamond writes, can be summarized in a single sentence: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.” 7 Geographic determinism, however, is as absurd a position as genetic determinism, given that evolution is about the interaction between the two.

The important concept of the solar wind is that Space is not empty. It is an energy and particle filled environment that interacts with whatever is in it! Astronomers call this 'Dark Energy'.

Cognition and emotion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts. The brain is structured to act upon the world, and every action carries with it expectations, and these expectations drive emotions. That is why much of language is based on physical metaphors, why the body and its interaction with the environment are essential components of human thought. Emotion is highly underrated. In fact, the emotional system is a powerful information processing system that works in tandem with cognition. Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value. It is the emotional system that determines whether a situation is safe or threatening, whether something that is happening is good or bad, desirable or not. Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments. A human without a working emotional system has difficulty making choices. A human without a cognitive system is dysfunctional.

MAO-A variants show other important gene/environment interactions. For example, in one study the low-activity MAO-A variant predicts criminality, but only if coupled with high testosterone levels

Nature’s ultimate goal is to foster the growth of the individual from absolute dependence to independence — or, more exactly, to the interdependence of mature adults living in community. Development is a process of moving from complete external regulation to self-regulation, as far as our genetic programming allows. Well-self-regulated people are the most capable of interacting fruitfully with others in a community and of nurturing children who will also grow into self-regulated adults. Anything that interferes with that natural agenda threatens the organism’s chances for long-term survival. Almost from the beginning of life we see a tension between the complementary needs for security and for autonomy. Development requires a gradual and ageappropriate shift from security needs toward the drive for autonomy, from attachment to individuation. Neither is ever completely lost, and neither is meant to predominate at the expense of the other. With an increased capacity for self-regulation in adulthood comes also a heightened need for autonomy — for the freedom to make genuine choices. Whatever undermines autonomy will be experienced as a source of stress. Stress is magnified whenever the power to respond effectively to the social or physical environment is lacking or when the tested animal or human being feels helpless, without meaningful choices — in other words, when autonomy is undermined. Autonomy, however, needs to be exercised in a way that does not disrupt the social relationships on which survival also depends, whether with emotional intimates or with important others—employers, fellow workers, social authority figures. The less the emotional capacity for self-regulation develops during infancy and childhood, the more the adult depends on relationships to maintain homeostasis. The greater the dependence, the greater the threat when those relationships are lost or become insecure. Thus, the vulnerability to subjective and physiological stress will be proportionate to the degree of emotional dependence. To minimize the stress from threatened relationships, a person may give up some part of his autonomy. However, this is not a formula for health, since the loss of autonomy is itself a cause of stress. The surrender of autonomy raises the stress level, even if on the surface it appears to be necessary for the sake of “security” in a relationship, and even if we subjectively feel relief when we gain “security” in this manner. If I chronically repress my emotional needs in order to make myself “acceptable” to other people, I increase my risks of having to pay the price in the form of illness. The other way of protecting oneself from the stress of threatened relationships is emotional shutdown. To feel safe, the vulnerable person withdraws from others and closes against intimacy. This coping style may avoid anxiety and block the subjective experience of stress but not the physiology of it. Emotional intimacy is a psychological and biological necessity. Those who build walls against intimacy are not self-regulated, just emotionally frozen. Their stress from having unmet needs will be high.

In most cases the correct explanation will invoke a complex interaction between heredity and environment: culture is crucial, but culture could not exist without mental faculties that allow humans to create and learn culture to begin with. My goal in this book is not to argue that genes are everything and culture is nothing—no one believes that—but to explore why the extreme position (that culture is everything) is so often seen as moderate, and the moderate position is seen as extreme.

McKusick's belief in this paradigm-the focus on disability rather than abnormalcy-was actualized in the treatment of patients in his clinic. Patients with dwarfism, for instance, were treated by an interdisciplinary team of genetic counselors, neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, nurses, and psychiatrists trained to focus on specific disabilities of persons with short stature. Surgical interventions were reserved to correct specific deformities as they arose. The goal was not to restore "normalcy"-but vitality, joy, and function. McKusic had rediscovered the founding principles of modern genetics in the realm of human pathology. In humans as in wild flies, genetic variations abounded. Here too genetic variants, environments, and gene-environment interactions ultimately collaborated to cause phenotypes-except in this case, the "phenotype" in question was disease. Here too some genes had partial penetrance and widely variable expressivity. One gene could cause many diseases, and one disease could be caused by many genes. And here too "fitness" could not be judged in absolutes. Rather the lack of fitness-illness [italicized, sic] in colloquial terms- was defined by the relative mismatch between an organism and environment.

A healthy corporate culture is built through proper man-management techniques put into action, which in turn aids in shaping a peacefully coherent work environment with healthy interactions capable of drawing out the maximum potential from the employed.

if our genes are inherited and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment.

Another gene/environment interaction pertains to depression, a disease involving serotonin abnormalities.33 A gene called 5HTT codes for a transporter that removes serotonin from the synapse; having a particular 5HTT variant increases the risk of depression … but only when coupled with childhood trauma.fn23 What’s the effect of 5HTT variant on depression risk? It depends on childhood trauma exposure. What’s the effect of childhood trauma exposure on depression risk? It depends on 5HTT variant (plus loads of other genes, but you get the point).

every moment. The implications of this new story to our understanding of life and the design of our society are extraordinary. If a quantum field holds us all together in its invisible web, we will have to rethink our definitions of ourselves and what exactly it is to be human. If we are in constant and instantaneous dialogue with our environment, if all the information from the cosmos flows through our pores at every moment, then our current notion of our human potential is only a glimmer of what it should be. If we’re not separate, we can no longer think in terms of “winning” and “losing.” We need to redefine what we designate as “me” and “not-me,” and reform the way that we interact with other human beings, practice business, and view time and space. We have to reconsider how we choose and carry out our work, structure our communities, and bring up our children. We have to imagine another way to live,

Physiological stress, then, is the link between personality traits and disease. Certain traits — otherwise known as coping styles — magnify the risk for illness by increasing the likelihood of chronic stress. Common to them all is a diminished capacity for emotional communication. Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biological events when human beings are prevented from learning how to express their feelings effectively. That learning occurs — or fails to occur — during childhood. The way people grow up shapes their relationship with their own bodies and psyches. The emotional contexts of childhood interact with inborn temperament to give rise to personality traits. Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood. There is an important distinction between an inherent characteristic, rooted in an individual without regard to his environment, and a response to the environment, a pattern of behaviours developed to ensure survival. What we see as indelible traits may be no more than habitual defensive techniques, unconsciously adopted. People often identify with these habituated patterns, believing them to be an indispensable part of the self. They may even harbour self-loathing for certain traits — for example, when a person describes herself as “a control freak.” In reality, there is no innate human inclination to be controlling. What there is in a “controlling” personality is deep anxiety. The infant and child who perceives that his needs are unmet may develop an obsessive coping style, anxious about each detail. When such a person fears that he is unable to control events, he experiences great stress. Unconsciously he believes that only by controlling every aspect of his life and environment will he be able to ensure the satisfaction of his needs. As he grows older, others will resent him and he will come to dislike himself for what was originally a desperate response to emotional deprivation. The drive to control is not an innate trait but a coping style. Emotional repression is also a coping style rather than a personality trait set in stone. Not one of the many adults interviewed for this book could answer in the affirmative when asked the following: When, as a child, you felt sad, upset or angry, was there anyone you could talk to — even when he or she was the one who had triggered your negative emotions? In a quarter century of clinical practice, including a decade of palliative work, I have never heard anyone with cancer or with any chronic illness or condition say yes to that question. Many children are conditioned in this manner not because of any intended harm or abuse, but because the parents themselves are too threatened by the anxiety, anger or sadness they sense in their child — or are simply too busy or too harassed themselves to pay attention. “My mother or father needed me to be happy” is the simple formula that trained many a child — later a stressed and depressed or physically ill adult — into lifelong patterns of repression.

Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood … but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse. And if there was no such history, the variant was not predictive of anything. This is the essence of gene/environment interaction. What does having a particular variant of the MAO-A gene have to do with antisocial behavior? It depends on the environment.

try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.

If ensuring the survival of the body proper is what the brain first evolved for, then, when minded brains first appeared, they began by minding the body. And to ensure body survival as effectively as possible, nature, I suggest, stumbled on a highly effective solution: representing the outside world in terms of the modifications it causes in the body proper, that is, representing the environment by modifying the primordial representations of the body proper whenever an interaction between organism and environment takes place.

Individual free choices” can only be the expression of an “individual free will”. The notion of an “individual free will” generating “individual free choices” creates a much needed consequence: personal accountability. Personal accountability is vital for a primitive, immature human organization based on reprehension or praise. The permanent interaction of a unique inherited Nature (and maybe a unique “soul”) with a unique nurture (environment), will always determine all our “individual free choices”, from cradle to grave. It is impossible for the individual to be sentient before birth and choose these two or three unique factors. The logic of holding someone personally accountable for a “non-chosen” choice eludes me. The notion of individual free will can at best be a “gut felt” illusion, but can never have logical relevance. What sort of human (and divine!) organization can be based on the consequence of a “gut felt” illusion? -Our current one; primitive, illogical, unstable and permanently conflictual. Be it for all individual choices or all differences, the definitive ban of the illusionary notion of personal accountability is the missing step that will lead to human maturity. How’s your “gut” now?

People's emotional states have a huge impact in their physiology. The interaction between emotions and physiology is 24/7, whether we are aware of it or not. But that means to say that we can't separate the mind from the body. And to understand any physiological process in the body you have to understand not just the physical aspects of it, but also the emotional and the environment in which it takes place. That's the first point. The second point is....so that people are bio-psychological creatures. Our biology cannot be separated from our psychology. But if you look at the stressed parents.. why are they stressed? Because they're unemployed. Because their communities are falling apart. Because their marriage might be in trouble. So we are not just bio-psychological creatures, we are bio-psycho-social creatures. In other words, our biology is significanty affected by the emotional environment which exists in a cultural, social environment. You simply cannot separate physiology, including the brain physiology and including the circuits of the brain from the psychological, emotional and social environment. You cannot do that. Not in real life. So that unity, that interconnectivity, interactivity of human beings is what missing from the conversation.

Virtually all the authors of popular books on the subject assert that ADD is a heritable genetic disorder. With some notable exceptions, the genetic view also dominates much of the discussion within professional circles, a view I do not agree with. I believe that ADD can be better understood if we examine people’s lives, not only bits of DNA. Heredity does make an important contribution, but far less than usually assumed. At the same time, it would serve no purpose to set up the false opposition of environment to genetic inheritance. No such split exists in nature, or in the mind of any serious scientist. There are many biological events involving body and brain that are not directly programmed by heredity, and so to say that ADD is not primarily genetic is not in any sense to deny its biological features — either those that are inherited or those that are acquired as a result of experience. The genetic blueprints for the architecture and the workings of the human brain develop in a process of interaction with the environment. ADD does reflect biological malfunctions in certain brain centers, but many of its features — including the underlying biology itself — are also inextricably connected to a person’s physical and emotional experiences in the world. There is in ADD an inherited predisposition, but that’s very far from saying there is a genetic predetermination. A predetermination dictates that something will inevitably happen. A predisposition only makes it more likely that it may happen, depending on circumstances. The actual outcome is influenced by many other factors.

Self-organizing Systems Biologists have long given up the idea that living organisms are just like machines. Medical practitioners today recognize the ineffectiveness of treating the human body as a separate mechanism. They speak about holistic healing, treating the whole person, and including the person’s social and physical environment. Today living organisms are described as self-regulating systems. They organize themselves, nourish themselves, heal themselves, propagate themselves, protect themselves, and interact creatively with other systems. We used to call this instinct—in animals if not in plants. Today we talk about genes that have coded messages or instructions that connect with one another in a DNA spiral in the nucleus of every living cell. If we were to write out the instructions contained in any one tiny DNA spiral we would fill about a thousand books of six hundred pages each.

It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing; rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we further deplete our ability to name, describe and figure particular aspects of our places, our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. The ethno-linguist K. David Harrison bleakly declares that language death means the loss of ‘long-cultivated knowledge that has guided human–environment interaction for millennia … accumulated wisdom and observations of generations of people about the natural world, plants, animals, weather, soil. The loss [is] incalculable, the knowledge mostly unrecoverable.’ Or as Tim Dee neatly puts it, ‘Without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds or our hearts.

We have been removed from the environment within which we evolved and with which we are uniquely designed to interact. Now we interact and coevolve with only the grosser, more monolithic, human-made commercial forms which remain available within our new laboratory-space station. Because we live inside the new environment, we are not aware that any tradeoff has been made. We have had to sacrifice the billions of small, detailed, multispectral experiences—emotional, physical, instinctive, sensual, intuitive and mental—that were appropriate and necessary for humans interacting with natural environments. Like the Micronesian islander in Chapter Four trapped between two modes of experience, we have found that functioning on an earlier multidimensional level has become not only useless but counterproductive. If we remained so attuned to the varieties of snowflakes that we could find fifty-six varieties as the Eskimo can; or to dreams so that we could find hundreds of distinct patterns as the Senoi Indians can; or to the minute altitude strata, inch by inch above the ground, occupied by entirely different species of flying insects as the California Indians once could; all this sensitivity would cripple any attempt to get along in the modern world. None of it would get us jobs, which gets us money, which in turn gets us food, housing, transportation, products, or entertainment, which are the fulfillments presently available in our new world. We have had to re-create ourselves to fit. We have had to reshape our very personalities to be competitive, aggressive, mentally fast, charming and manipulative. These qualities succeed in today’s world and offer survival and some measure of satisfaction within the cycle of work-consume, work-consume, work-consume. As for any dormant anxieties or unreconstructed internal wilderness, these may be smoothed over by compulsive working, compulsive eating, compulsive buying, compulsive sex, and then our brands of soma: alcohol, Librium, Valium, Thorazine, marijuana and television.

Narrow behaviourist thinking permeates political and social policy and medical practice, the childrearing advice dispensed by “parenting experts” and academic discourse. We keep trying to change people’s behaviours without a full understanding of how and why those behaviours arise. “Inner causes are not the proper domain of psychology,” writes Roy Wise, an expert on the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seems astonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be no understanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings, without looking at “inner causes,” tricky as those causes can be to pin down at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, are often the active representations of emotional states and of special kinds of brain functioning. As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brain patterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment. Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with various social and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must strive to change not them but their environments. These are the only things we can change. Transformation of the addict must come from within and the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is much that we can do.

The good news was that he wasn't sixteen anymore and he had this, his art. His food. And if this dinner continued to go the way it was going, if Mrs. Raje stood by her word and gave DJ the contract for her son's fund-raising dinner next month based on tonight's success... well, then they'd be fine. Mrs. Raje had been more impressed thus far. Everything from the steamed momos to the dum biryani had turned out just so. The mayor of San Francisco had even asked to speak to DJ after tasting the California blue crab with bitter coconut cream and tucked DJ's card into his wallet. Only dessert remained, and dessert was DJ's crowning glory, his true love. With sugar he could make love to taste buds, make adult humans sob. The reason Mina Raje had given him, a foreigner and a newbie, a shot at tonight was his Arabica bean gelato with dark caramel. DJ had created the dessert for her after spending a week researching her. Not just her favorite restaurants, but where she shopped, how she wore her clothes, what made her laugh, even the perfume she wore and how much. The taste buds drew from who you were. How you reacted to taste as a sense was a culmination of how you processed the world, the most primal form of how you interacted with your environment. It was DJ's greatest strength and weakness, needing to know what exact note of flavor unfurled a person. His need to find that chord and strum it was bone deep.

So what you've actually got is traumatized children. When children are traumatized that affects how they feel about themselves, which is deeply ashamed because a child always believe that it is about himself. So if I am being hurt like this, I got to be a terrible person. Or.. if I was sexually abused, why didn't I fight back, I must be a very weak person. So there's a deep sense of shame. Then there's tremendous emotional pain that accrues from abuse and neglect. Tremendous emotional pain that is hardly possible for people to bear. Now they have to soothe their pain with substances or other compulsive behaviors. Then the trauma itself, given that the human brain develops in interaction with the environment, shapes the brain circuitry in such a way that the person will be more likely to find relief from the drugs. So the very phisiology of the brain is affected by early trauma. So then you take these traumatized people and you make their habit illegal... It is not illegal to drink yourself to death. It is not illegal to make yourself sick with emphyzema or lung cancer by means of cigarettes. But it is illegal to use other substances. So now you take these abused, traumatized people you place them outside the law, you put them in jails and you hound them all their lives, treating them like criminals and bad people and failures and rejects and less-than-human. And then we wonder how come they don't get better. So.. it is a self-perpetuating cycle of taking traumatized people and then re-traumatizing them. And then hoping at the same time: "why don't they listen? Why don't they get better? Why don't they give it up?". Well, they don't give it up because the more hurt they are, the more they need to escape.

It's not that we're dumb. On the contrary, many millions of people have exerted great intelligence and creativity in building the modern world. It's more that we're being swept into unknown and dangerous waters by accelerating economic growth. On just one single day of the days I have spent writing this book, as much world trade was carried out as in the whole of 1949; as much scientific research was published as in the whole of 1960; as many telephone calls were made as in all of 1983; as many e-mails were sent as in 1990.11 Our natural, human, and industrial systems, which evolve slowly, are struggling to adapt. Laws and institutions that we might expect to regulate these flows have not been able to keep up. A good example is what is inaccurately described as mindless sprawl in our physical environment. We deplore the relentless spread of low-density suburbs over millions of acres of formerly virgin land. We worry about its environmental impact, about the obesity in people that it fosters, and about the other social problems that come in its wake. But nobody seems to have designed urban sprawl, it just happens-or so it appears. On closer inspection, however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand-but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. "Out of control" is an ideology, not a fact.

Slavery has a special interaction with the normal structures of being a human being. So a human being is sort of a generalist creature with a capacity to have its software re-worked for different habitats. The reason that human beings are able to exploit every terrestrial habitat where plants grow is that they don't all have the software program that's the same, right? You can have a software program for hunting in the Calihari, you can have one for terracing the Andes to grow potatoes, you can have any one of a number of software programs. Well, slavery took the software program that Africans who were brought into the slave trade had, and it did its best to erase that program – and to render that program non-functional. It rendered it non-functional by combining people from different places who didn't even necessarily speak a language so there was not one culture available. And it sort of forces the bootstrapping of a new culture, which was composed of various things but of course it was, you know, prohibition against teaching slaves to read and things like that, and so there was a systematic breaking of the original culture that Africans had during the New World, and a substituting of a version that was not a much of a threat to the slave-holding population, right? And at the point that slavery comes to an end, it is not as if, frankly, even, you know, we didn't even have the tools to talk about these things in responsible terms. There wasn't enough known about how the mind works and what its relationship is to the body and all...so, the thing that makes the black population and the Indian population different, I would argue, is the systematic hobbling of the on-board, the inherited, evolved culture in the case of Indians by transporting them to reservations and by putting them in schools that disrupt the passage of normal culture and in the case of Africans, it was breaking apart of families, keeping people from being in contact with others they had the right language to talk to and all...so in any case, that carries through to the present: it creates a situation where there has not been access to the materials to fully update software.

Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago—and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and—some would argue—promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankind, it can be, and is, used for evil as well as good purposes. And as always, it is up to us—particularly those of us who live in a democracy—to make intelligent choices about how and for what we use this incredibly powerful tool.

All addictions — whether to drugs or to nondrug behaviours — share the same brain circuits and brain chemicals. On the biochemical level the purpose of all addictions is to create an altered physiological state in the brain. This can be achieved in many ways, drug taking being the most direct. So an addiction is never purely “psychological” all addictions have a biological dimension. And here a word about dimensions. As we delve into the scientific research, we need to avoid the trap of believing that addiction can be reduced to the actions of brain chemicals or nerve circuits or any other kind of neurobiological, psychological or sociological data. A multilevel exploration is necessary because it’s impossible to understand addiction fully from any one perspective, no matter how accurate. Addiction is a complex condition, a complex interaction between human beings and their environment. We need to view it simultaneously from many different angles — or, at least, while examining it from one angle, we need to keep the others in mind. Addiction has biological, chemical, neurological, psychological, medical, emotional, social, political, economic and spiritual underpinnings — and perhaps others I haven’t thought about. To get anywhere near a complete picture we must keep shaking the kaleidoscope to see what other patterns emerge. Because the addiction process is too multifaceted to be understood within any limited framework, my definition of addiction made no mention of “disease.” Viewing addiction as an illness, either acquired or inherited, narrows it down to a medical issue. It does have some of the features of illness, and these are most pronounced in hardcore drug addicts like the ones I work with in the Downtown Eastside. But not for a moment do I wish to promote the belief that the disease model by itself explains addiction or even that it’s the key to understanding what addiction is all about. Addiction is “all about” many things. Note, too, that neither the textbook definitions of drug addiction nor the broader view we’re taking here includes the concepts of physical dependence or tolerance as criteria for addiction. Tolerance is an instance of “give an inch, take a mile.” That is, the addict needs to use more and more of the same substance or engage in more and more of the same behaviour, to get the same rewarding effects. Although tolerance is a common effect of many addictions, a person does not need to have developed a tolerance to be addicted.

The human brain is the most complex entity in the universe. It has between fifty and one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons, each branched to form thousands of possible connections with other nerve cells. It has been estimated that laid end to end, the nerve cables of a single human brain would extend into a line several hundred thousand miles long. The total number of connections, or synapses, is in the trillions. The parallel and simultaneous activity of innumerable brain circuits, and networks of circuits, produces millions of firing patterns each and every second of our lives. The brain has well been described as “a supersystcm of systems.” Even though fully half of the roughly hundred thousand genes in the human organism are dedicated to the central nervous system, the genetic code simply cannot carry enough information to predetermine the infinite number of potential brain circuits. For this reason alone, biological heredity could not by itself account for the densely intertwined psychology and neurophysiology of attention deficit disorder. Experience in the world determines the fine wiring of the brain. As the neurologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts it, “Much of each brain’s circuitry, at any given moment in adult life, is individual and unique, truly reflective of that particular organism’s history and circumstances.” This is no less true of children and infants. Not even in the brains of genetically identical twins will the same patterns be found in the shape of nerve cells or the numbers and configuration of their synapses with other neurons. The microcircuitry of the brain is formatted by influences during the first few years of life, a period when the human brain undergoes astonishingly rapid growth. Five-sixths of the branching of nerve cells in the brain occurs after birth. At times in the first year of life, new synapses are being established at a rate of three billion a second. In large part, each infant’s individual experiences in the early years determine which brain structures will develop and how well, and which nerve centers will be connected with which other nerve centers, and establish the networks controlling behavior. The intricately programmed interactions between heredity and environment that make for the development of the human brain are determined by a “fantastic, almost surrealistically complex choreography,” in the apt phrase of Dr. J. S. Grotstein of the department of psychiatry at UCLA. Attention deficit disorder results from the miswiring of brain circuits, in susceptible infants, during this crucial period of growth.

The traditional hospital practice of excluding parents ignored the importance of attachment relationships as regulators of the child’s emotions, behaviour and physiology. The child’s biological status would be vastly different under the circumstances of parental presence or absence. Her neurochemical output, the electrical activity in her brain’s emotional centres, her heart rate, blood pressure and the serum levels of the various hormones related to stress would all vary significantly. Life is possible only within certain well-defined limits, internal or external. We can no more survive, say, high sugar levels in our bloodstream than we can withstand high levels of radiation emanating from a nuclear explosion. The role of self-regulation, whether emotional or physical, may be likened to that of a thermostat ensuring that the temperature in a home remains constant despite the extremes of weather conditions outside. When the environment becomes too cold, the heating system is switched on. If the air becomes overheated, the air conditioner begins to work. In the animal kingdom, self-regulation is illustrated by the capacity of the warm-blooded creature to exist in a broad range of environments. It can survive more extreme variations of hot and cold without either chilling or overheating than can a coldblooded species. The latter is restricted to a much narrower range of habitats because it does not have the capacity to self-regulate the internal environment. Children and infant animals have virtually no capacity for biological self-regulation; their internal biological states—heart rates, hormone levels, nervous system activity — depend completely on their relationships with caregiving grown-ups. Emotions such as love, fear or anger serve the needs of protecting the self while maintaining essential relationships with parents and other caregivers. Psychological stress is whatever threatens the young creature’s perception of a safe relationship with the adults, because any disruption in the relationship will cause turbulence in the internal milieu. Emotional and social relationships remain important biological influences beyond childhood. “Independent self-regulation may not exist even in adulthood,” Dr. Myron Hofer, then of the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, wrote in 1984. “Social interactions may continue to play an important role in the everyday regulation of internal biologic systems throughout life.” Our biological response to environmental challenge is profoundly influenced by the context and by the set of relationships that connect us with other human beings. As one prominent researcher has expressed it most aptly, “Adaptation does not occur wholly within the individual.” Human beings as a species did not evolve as solitary creatures but as social animals whose survival was contingent on powerful emotional connections with family and tribe. Social and emotional connections are an integral part of our neurological and chemical makeup. We all know this from the daily experience of dramatic physiological shifts in our bodies as we interact with others. “You’ve burnt the toast again,” evokes markedly different bodily responses from us, depending on whether it is shouted in anger or said with a smile. When one considers our evolutionary history and the scientific evidence at hand, it is absurd even to imagine that health and disease could ever be understood in isolation from our psychoemotional networks. “The basic premise is that, like other social animals, human physiologic homeostasis and ultimate health status are influenced not only by the physical environment but also by the social environment.” From such a biopsychosocial perspective, individual biology, psychological functioning and interpersonal and social relationships work together, each influencing the other.

Empiricism is not just an empirical method but also a theory of experience. Essentially, it conceives of human beings as passive and sense perception as providing replicas or copies of reality that are based on association. As key proponents of empiricism, Piaget identified Hume, Locke, and behaviorist stimulus-response theories, but he also thought that empiricism is trenchant in psychology (and, one might add, even today, see Müller & Giesbrecht, 2008). According to Piaget, empiricists misconstrue the fundamentally active relation between infant and environment as a passive, causal relation: “Even before language begins, the young infant reacts to objects not by a mechanical set of stimulus-response associations but by an integrative assimilation to schemes of action, which impress a direction on his activities and include the satisfaction of a need or an interest” (Piaget, 1965/1971, p. 131; see also OI, p. 411). Furthermore, Piaget (1970) rejected the idea that knowledge is a copy of reality. Rather, he was influenced by Kant's (1787/1929) idea that objectivity is constituted by the subject (see Chapter 3, this volume). Kant argued that our intuition (i.e., sensibility) and understanding use a priori (i.e., independent of all experience) forms and categories, which are the condition of the possibility for experiencing objectivity. Piaget subscribed to the ordering and organizing function of the mind, but he believed that the forms and categories are not a priori but undergo development as a result of the subject's interaction with the world (OI, pp. 376–395).

This is a miracle of coevolution—the bacteria that coexist with us in our bodies enable us to exist. Microbiologist Michael Wilson notes that “each exposed surface of a human being is colonized by microbes exquisitely adapted to that particular environment.”21 Yet the dynamics of these microbial populations, and how they interact with our bodies, are still largely unknown. A 2008 comparative genomics analysis of lactic acid bacteria acknowledges that research is “just now beginning to scratch the surface of the complex relationship between humans and their microbiota.”22 Bacteria are such effective coevolutionary partners because they are highly adaptable and mutable. “Bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus,” explains bacterial geneticist James Shapiro, who reports “multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules.”23 In contrast with our eukaryotic cells, with fixed genetic material, prokaryotic bacteria have free-floating genes, which they frequently exchange. For this reason, some microbiologists consider it inappropriate to view bacteria as distinct species. “There are no species in prokaryotes,” state Sorin Sonea and Léo G. Mathieu.24 “Bacteria are much more of a continuum,” explains Lynn Margulis. “They just pick up genes, they throw away genes, and they are very flexible about that.”25 Mathieu and Sonea describe a bacterial “genetic free market,” in which “each bacterium can be compared to a two-way broadcasting station, using genes as information molecules.” Genes “are carried by a bacterium only when needed . . . as a human may carry sophisticated tools.”26

-the future is a most marvellous creation. For in it lies all the mystery of raw potentiality-a boundless reservoir of all that could be-formed by the illimitable interactions of conscious human beings with their individual environments, circumstances, and conditions, and in concert with their fellow humans.

Conversely, we humans are born premature and highly dependent newborns whose brains are shaped through years of interactions with our caretakers and the environment.

The human mind is an open network of complex softwares working together.

Our basic understanding of evolutionary theory (how evolution works) in the early twenty-first century may be summed up as follows:   1. Mutation introduces genetic variation, which may introduce phenotypic variation. 2. Developmental processes can introduce broader phenotypic variation, which may be heritable. 3. Gene flow and genetic drift mix genetic variation (and potentially its phenotypic correlates) without regard to the function of those genes or traits. 4. Natural selection shapes genotypic and phenotypic variation in response to specific constraints and pressures in the environment. 5. At any given time one or more of the processes above can be affecting a population. 6. Dynamic organism-environment interaction can result in niche construction, changing pressures of natural selection and resulting in ecological inheritance. 7. Cultural patterns and contexts can impact gene flow and the pressures of natural selection, which in turn can affect genetic evolution (gene-culture coevolution). 8. Multiple inheritance systems (genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic) can all provide information and contexts that enable populations to change over time or avoid certain changes.

Sadly, history shows us that people literally scrambled their children's brains with heavy exposure to screens at young ages. Developing primate brains are wired to interact with others in a real environment, learning the enormous range of human behaviours from copying the people they love and trust, not staring mindlessly at images.

Some of the problems that are causing the environmental disasters we are experiencing are easy to fix, while others are more difficult. Ultimately, what humanity needs to accomplish is a dramatic change in our lifestyle. We need to change the way we view the world and the way we interact with it. We must also encourage corporations, governments, and politicians to realize the threat they pose to our environment and change the way they obtain and manage natural resources.

We could learn a lot from the philosophy of Shaolin. Their belief that the ego must be transcended in order to focus on reality is an essential lesson that applies to all of humanity. We could also benefit greatly from their philosophy of independence, individualism and self-reliance. Instead of depending on governments and corporations, we should depend on our environment, our compassionate human interaction, and ourselves. To do this, we must practice what we preach. It is easy to speak of ways to heal the world, but to actually act accordingly is much more difficult.

We didn’t evolve to be healthy, but instead we were selected to have as many offspring as possible under diverse, challenging conditions. As a consequence, we never evolved to make rational choices about what to eat or how to exercise in conditions of abundance and comfort. What’s more, interactions between the bodies we inherited, the environments we create, and the decisions we sometimes make have set in motion an insidious feedback loop. We get sick from chronic diseases by doing what we evolved to do but under conditions for which our bodies are poorly adapted, and we then pass on those same conditions to our children, who also then get sick. If we wish to halt this vicious circle then we need to figure out how to respectfully and sensibly nudge, push, and sometimes oblige ourselves to eat foods that promote health and to be more physically active. That,

In conclusion, human bodies were not engineered like the Brooklyn Bridge but instead evolved to grow by interacting with their environment. Because of millions of generations of natural selection on these interactions, every body needs appropriate, sufficient stresses to tune its capacities. The old adage “no strain, no gain” is profoundly true. Allowing our children to ignore this adage leads to a pernicious feedback loop in which problems like osteoporosis become more prevalent, especially as people live longer. Maybe

Of the processes that alter environments to cause evolutionary mismatches, the most common and powerful occur because of cultural evolution. Technological and economic changes over the last few generations have altered the infectious diseases we contract, the foods we eat, the drugs we take, the work we do, the pollutants we ingest, how much energy we spend and consume, the social stresses we experience, and more. Many of these changes have been beneficial, but as the following chapters will outline we are poorly or insufficiently adapted to handle others, contributing to disease. A common characteristic of these diseases, moreover, is that they occur from interactions whose cause and effect are not immediate or otherwise obvious. It takes many years for pollution to cause some illnesses (most lung cancers develop decades after people begin smoking), and when you’ve been bitten thousands of times by mosquitoes and fleas, it can be hard to realize that

What is human is to make a difference to the world, to act on it, to interact with others, and, together, to transform the environment and themselves. If this process is prevented, we become less than human; we are harmed.

What we have learned about genes has allowed us to understand that we are not so much things merely existing in the world as beings in constant interaction with the world. If you took this idea to an extreme and imagined that you grew up on another planet, the essentially dynamic nature of animal building by genes and environment might mean you'd look very different. Cloned plants that have exactly the same genome can look like very different specimens if planted at different altitudes. In the same way, if you had grown up on a planet with lower gravity or one that was more distant from the sun and had a lower oxygen concentration, you might be incredibly tall, or short, or weedy, or blind...or maybe you'd have a supersized brain. If you took your African ape genome and cultured it on yet another planet, maybe the resulting you would have translucent skin. The point is that although we experience ourselves in some sense as finished or perfected, we are not in any way intended. There is no blueprint for what humans are meant to be. And as this moment is merely one moment in the past and future history of our evolutionary lineage, your life right now is merely an instant in the past and future history of the interaction between your genome and your environment.

This tendency has led to the suggestion that humans are paedomorphic primates. It’s not necessarily a new hypothesis—a man named John Fiske made the argument as early as 1884—but it continues to be a reasonable one. There’s more than just our playful nature that suggests eternal youth has played a role in our evolution. One of the defining characteristics of humans is our creativity, our willingness to try new things and new ways of interacting with our environment—all traits normally associated with youth.

Unravelling the complexity of human development is a daunting task and it is unlikely that scientists will ever be able to do so for even one individual, because the interactions of biology and environment are likelihoods and not certainties. There are just too many ways that the cards could stack up. More importantly, as the vernacular saying goes, "Shit happens", which is a very succinct and scientifically accurate way of saying that random events during development can change the course of who we become in unpredictable ways.

The body is a colony of genes. Of course, it acts and moves and procreates as a unit, and furthermore, in the case of at least one species, it feels itself, with impressive certainty, to be a unit. The gene-centered perspective has helped biologists appreciate that the genes composing the human genome are only a fraction of the genes carried around in any one person, because humans (like other species) host an entire ecosystem of microbes—bacteria, especially, from our skin to our digestive systems. Our “microbiomes” help us digest food and fight disease, all the while evolving fast and flexibly in service of their own interests. All these genes engage in a grand process of mutual co-evolution—competing with one another, and with their alternative alleles, in nature’s vast gene pool, but no longer competing on their own. Their success or failure comes through interaction. “Selection favors those genes which succeed in the presence of other genes,” says Dawkins, “which in turn succeed in the presence of them.” The effect of any one gene depends on these interactions with the ensemble and depends, too, on effects of the environment and on raw chance.

But there is more to a feeling than this essence. As I will explain, the qualifying body state, positive or negative, is accompanied and rounded up by a corresponding thinking mode: fast moving and idea rich, when the body-state is in the positive and pleasant band of the spectrum, slow moving and repetitive, when the body-state veers toward the painful band. In this perspective, feelings are the sensors for the match or lack thereof between nature and circumstance. And by nature I mean both the nature we inherited as a pack of genetically engineered adaptations, and the nature we have acquired in individual development, through interactions with our social environment, mindfully and willfully as well as not. Feelings, along with the emotions they come from, are not a luxury. They serve as internal guides, and they help us communicate to others signals that can also guide them.

And here a word about dimensions. As we delve into the scientific research, we need to avoid the trap of believing that addiction can be reduced to the actions of brain chemicals or nerve circuits or any other kind of neurobiological, psychological, or sociological data. A multilevel exploration is necessary because it’s impossible to understand addiction fully from any one perspective, no matter how accurate. Addiction is a complex condition, a complex interaction between human beings and their environment. We need to view it simultaneously from many different angles—or, at least, while examining it from one angle, we need to keep the others in mind. Addiction has biological, chemical, neurological, psychological, medical, emotional, social, political, economic, and spiritual underpinnings—and perhaps others I haven’t thought about. To get anywhere near a complete picture we must keep shaking the kaleidoscope to see what other patterns emerge.

Registering different flavours is one of the main ways that our bodies interact with the world around us. Amazingly enough, the human olfactory bulb is the only part of the central nervous system that is directly exposed to our environment, through the nasal cavity. Our other senses - sight, sound and touch - need to travel on a complicated journey via nerves along the spinal cord up to the brain. Smell and flavour, by contrast, surge direct from plate to nose.

Or think of Goodman's own example: the shift from the analogue to the digital should be regarded as a veritable worldmaking. In this process, continuities are deleted. We are now in the domain of pure mechanizability: discrete inputs, discrete states, and discrete outputs. This shift realized by deletion is a radical one. The very distinction between human and machine collapses. The human world will be revealed as nothing but a special qualitative kind of integration of computational algorithms. As an alternative to this digital world, we can imagine a computational world where continuity, and above all the realtime interaction between the system or the abstract machine and its environment, is restored (supplemented). This is a new computational world in which the system and the environment interact without any pre-given limitations. The interaction is computation itself in a truly concurrent sense, to use the idiom of today's theoretical computer science. The prospects of such a paradigm of computation for remodelling the very notion of spirit or geist as a multi-agent system (interacting computational processes) is beyond our acquired practical reason, if not truly theoretically and practically unbound.

You see, a truism of relationships, human interactions, and of course polyamory, is that if you don’t create an environment that’s receptive to the truth, people will simply stop offering their truth.

... walking has always been more than merely a well- coordinated movement of body parts. As an expression of the human will to explore, interact with, and ultimately transcend the limits of the physical environment, it has served as a motor of progress, a relentless force of change and transformation.

The technosphere is described here as if neither history nor social or political dynamics mattered. It does not take into account collective agency or political, economic, and social structures, let alone the evolution of knowledge with its powerful impact on shaping technological systems. Has human technology now reached a stage (or will it any time soon) at which it attains the autonomy of an organism with its own agency - an autopoietic structure reproducing its own organization? Such generalizations tend to overlook some essential features of human interaction with the global environment. For instance, while the biosphere has proven its resilience over the course of at least 3.5 billion years of evolution, the technosphere may turn out to be a rather fragile scaffolding for human existence. While it is quite conceivable that the sum total of the unintended consequences of our actions has developed its own dynamics, even in the age of the Anthropocene escape routes may still be left to us - an observation, however, that does not imply, vice versa, that there will be a guarantee for the existence of an escape route. It rather appears that the dynamics underlying the Anthropocene might well enhance both the challenges with which we are confronted and our opportunities to react to them, leaving the question open as to whether the latter will always be sufficient to match the former. Is it possible, for instance, that geoengineering can intervene in the planetary system to the point that a new state of the planetary system would be reached in which high carbon dioxide concentration, radioactive pollution, and other unintended consequences of industrialization are no longer challenging problems but can be safely kept under control by novel technologies? Given the fact that macro-scale interventions in the Earth system are beyond anything that human engineering has achieved so far, and given the fact that there are still important gaps in our knowledge about our planetary system, we are certainly on the safer side to prioritize, at least for the time being and to the extent that it is possible at all, the preservation of our existing Earth system and damage control.

Based on what we know today, the environment conducive to optimal experience should: Provide a high intensity of interaction and feedback Have specific goals and established procedures Motivate Provide a continual feeling of challenge, one that is neither so difficult as to create a sense of hopelessness and frustration nor so easy as to produce boredom Provide a sense of direct engagement, producing the feeling of directly experiencing the environment, directly working on the task Provide appropriate tools that fit the user and task so well that they aid and do not distract Avoid distractions and disruptions that intervene and destroy the subjective experience

Far from being the timeless, million-year-old wilderness portrayed on calendars, these scientists say, today’s forest is the product of a historical interaction between the environment and human beings—human beings in the form of the populous, long-lasting Indian societies described by Carvajal.

The fervour accompanying these events may be deceptive. If it expresses nothing more than the zeal with which the countries of the East are casting aside the bonds of ideology, or if it is a mimetic fervour - a tribute, as it were, to those liberal countries where all liberty has already been traded in for a technically easy life - then we shall have found out definitively what freedom is worth, and that it is probably never to be discovered a second time. History offers no second helpings. On the other hand, it could be that the present thaw in the East may be as disastrous in the long term as the excess of carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere, that it may bring about a political greenhouse effect, and so overheat human relations on the planet that the melting of the Communist ice-sheet will cause Western seaboards to be submerged. Odd that we should be in such absolute fear of the melting of the polar ice, and look upon it as a climatic catastrophe, while we aspire with every democratic bone in our bodies to the occurrence of just such an event on the political plane. If in the old days the USSR had released its gold reserves onto the world market, that market would have been completely destabilized. Today, by putting back into circulation their vast accumulated store of freedom, the Eastern countries could quite easily destabilize that very fragile balance of Western values which strives to ensure that freedom no longer emerges as action but only as a virtual and consensual form of interaction; no longer as a drama but merely as the universal psychodrama of liberalism. A sudden infusion of freedom as a real currency, as violent and active transcendence, as Idea, would be in every way catastrophic for our present air-conditioned redistribution of values. Yet this is precisely what we are asking of the East: freedom, the image of freedom, in exchange for the material signs of freedom. This is an absolutely diabolical contract, by virtue of which one signatory is in danger of losing their soul, and the other of losing their creature comforts. But perhaps - who knows? - this may, after all, be the best thing for both sides. Those societies that were formerly masked - Communist societies - have been unmasked. What is their face like? As for us, we dropped the mask long ago and have for a long time been without either mask or face. We are also without memory. We have reached the point of searching the water for signs of a memory that has left no traces, hoping against hope that something might remain when even the water's molecular memory has faded away. So it goes for our freedom: we would be hard put to it to produce a single sign of it, and we have been reduced to postulating its infinitesimal, intangible, undetectable existence in a (programmatic, operational) environment so highly dilute that in truth only a spectre of freedom floats there still, in a memory every bit as evanescent as water's.

The strategies we devise, however, must obey one overriding criteria – they must introduce a tangible degree of novelty into our life. More of the same will only perpetuate our problems and therefore our goal at this stage is to search for techniques and tools that change the way we experience and interact with our inner world. But what tools will work best for us can never be known in advance. Far too often people view psychological ailments exactly as they do those of the physical body. We all share the same general structure of the body and so the cure for a broken leg, an infection, or a virus will require similar steps for each of us. But in searching for ways to overcome the conflicts of our inner world, we need to recognize that while there is a uniformity to our psyche, there is no unity. For on the one side, our psyche is sculpted by our human nature and this produces the collective side of man. But we are also individuals. No two people share the same environment, genes, life history, goals, or innate strengths and weaknesses, and this individuality produces a unique configuration to the terrain of our inner world and necessitates an idiosyncratic, trial-and-error approach to the mastery of our psyche. For as Jung never tired of stating, there is no one psychology that defines us all, nor is there one set of psychological techniques that will be universally effective.

For me, radio was a space for reflection. On the air, I submerged myself in music and literature. I listened along with my audience; I read to myself and to them, I discussed all kinds of ideas with total strangers. It was the perfect medium: intense, warm, interactive, and highly volatile. From my very first session in the broadcast studio, I felt like I was in a time capsule, a sensory-deprivation chamber. It was a protective bubble where nothing and no one could touch me. The semidarkness, the illuminated panel, and the on-air light combined to create a cozy, womblike environment, a sort of cosmic solitude. I had the sensation of floating in space, completely isolated from the real world. My only human contact was with the disembodied voices of callers. Everything seemed dusted with an ethereal—yes, I'll say it—ghostly quality. I could touch and hear the whole world, while no one could be sure of my existence; I was just one more voice in the teeming concert of hertzian waves. It was a land of the blind, where we were guided by sounds and voices, and space took the shape our words gave it. We transformed it with every description, comment, insult, or digression. It was almost like death, floating aimlessly at night, listening to spectral voices that in turn spoke about specters, indifferent to their own condition.

Living systems are open systems; closed systems are non-living systems. Point: If we don’t communicate with outside world—to gain information for knowledge and understanding as well as matter and energy for sustenance— we die out to become a non-discerning and uninteresting part of that world.” And comes to the conclusion that, “Simply stated: As human beings, we cannot exist without an external or surrounding environment from which we can draw sustenance, nourishment, or support. In other words Interaction permits vitality and growth while Isolation leads to decay and disintegration.

We have already seen how pliable the microbiome can be. It can change with a touch, with a meal, with a parasitic incursion or a dose of medicine, or simply with the passage of time. It is a dynamic entity that waxes and wanes, forms and re-forms. This flexibility underlies many of the interactions between microbes and their hosts. It means that symbioses can change in positive ways, as new microbial partners offer fresh genes, abilities, and evolutionary opportunities to their hosts. It means that partnerships can change in negative ways, as dysbiotic communities or missing microbes lead to disease. And it means that partnerships can change in deliberate ways-ways that we choose. Theodor Rosebury recognised this back in 1962. Our indigenous microbes are "no less subject than the rest of our environment to manipulation for human benefit", he wrote. We should accept them as a natural part of our lives but acceptance "need not be passive or resigned".

Why are surprise and consolidation both important to knowledge evolution? Because exploration and exploitation are both important as we create new, and make use of existing, knowledge to interact with the world around us. Surprise emphasizes exploration, the creation of new paradigms; consolidation emphasizes exploitation, the use and extension of existing paradigms. While both are important, the balance between exploration and exploitation, surprise versus consolidation, is not governed by a hard-and-fast rule. In an approximate way, the balance depends on the kind of world in which the evolving knowledge system is embedded and the speed with which evolution for survival must occur. The more complex and changing the world, the more reason to emphasize and incur the cost of exploration; the simpler and more static the world, the more reason to emphasize exploitation and avoid the cost of exploration. In biological evolution, when organism variants are generated, those variants are tested in and by their world. Those that survive go on to reproduce, inheriting the original variation but also adding yet new variations. As formalized in Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, the greater the variance in properties across organisms within each generation, the faster the rate at which the organismal population evolves, becoming fitter generation to generation. Variation, however, is costly, as most variants are less fit and die before reproducing, so the degree of variance is itself an optimizable and evolvable trait. The more complex and changing the world, the more reason to incur the cost of variance; the simpler and more static the world, the less reason to incur the cost of variance. The optimal rate of evolution or 'evolvability' depends on the kind of world in which the organismal population is embedded. In knowledge evolution, analogously, potential paradigms are generated, and those paradigm variants are tested by being played out in the real world. The measure of variance here is the degree to which the paradigm differs from or contradicts conventional wisdom, hence the degree to which one anticipates surprise. Thus, the paradigm generation process can be skewed either toward anticipated surprise or anticipated consolidation. Skewing toward surprise, however, is costly, as most potential paradigms that disagree with conventional wisdom are wrong and will have low utility. Thus, the optimal degree of variance depends on the kind of world in which the cognitive entity is embedded. At one extreme, if the world is complex or changing rapidly, then the optimal variance might weigh anticipated surprise more heavily. Indeed, at this extreme, it might be optimal to explore new paradigms simply for their novelty and potential for surprise. At the other extreme, if the world is simple or changing slowly, then the optimal variance might weigh anticipated consolidation more heavily. Why not make use of conventional wisdom rather than make a risky attempt to overturn it? Thus, there is a balance between paradigm creation and extension, but the precise balance is situational. Human societies and organizations might adopt the balance appropriate for world to which they had to adapt during the long-term course of human evolution. An engineered or augmented human cognition might adopt a balance more appropriate to the current world, and a purely artificial cognition might adopt whatever balance is appropriate to the world into which humans have embedded it. Most importantly, a human society with sufficient self-understanding might adopt a balance that is optimal for its environment and them might implement that balance in its public polocy that determines relative investment in the two - relative investment in research versus development.

IA automates knowledge workers’ activities by mimicking four main capabilities: Vision (e.g., viewing the environment, recognizing objects and signs), Execution (e.g., typing, clicking, filling in forms, and authenticating), Language (e.g., using language to read, speak, write, and interact), and Thinking and learning (e.g., analyzing, creating insight, predicting, making decisions, and adjusting).

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Never limit your ambitions.” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.” “Raising your voice is not an argument.” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!” “Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Never limit your ambitions.” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Be careful what you tolerate in your company, you are teaching levels of the pyramid how to treat your business Culture and Core Values.” “Raising your voice is not an argument.” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Authenticity in the workplace is not define as making yourself difficult to manage – Be positively authentic!” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Biases can trick us as humans and have a negative impact on our emotions – Be positively curious!” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Beware of the individualism culture. If you are in a people management/leadership position, remember the following: IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “A leader should trigger positive emotions and it all starts with you!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “Being curious is best practice – Be positive curious, meaning, with positive emotions. Your inner sweetness will be felt with this approach” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “The art of managing with discipline emotional challenges and a sign of a mental strength is when many appreciate what you do in the shadow and in silence, and you still do more than expected.” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!” “Look and listen without biases – Be positively curious!

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Do the right thing even when no one is watching, not because you have too, but because you can!” “You are who you choose to be!” “The only thing that can’t change in a human’s life is its birth – If you think there’s death -there no death if you have a legacy.” “I will because I can!” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!

When you’re inspired, you become inspiring.” “Before building walls, build a foundation, make sure it’s solid and that it remains solid.” “Do the right thing even when no one is watching, not because you have too, but because you can!” “You are who you choose to be!” “The only thing that can’t change in a human’s life is its birth – If you think there’s death -there no death if you have a legacy.” “I will because I can!” “If you want to shine like a star, care to make others shine like stars.” “Someone’s respect for the environment will likely reflect his truest respect for others.” “Learn to recognize and celebrate your personal milestones. It will trigger positive emotions in you.” “Make peace with your past. You’ll emotionally be more positive. You’ll improve your wisdom. You’re inner sweetness will breathe out more efficiently.” “When you emotionally manage the fact that perfection does not exist and only reaching excellence does, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently.” “We all have emotional batteries. We are all energy. Your positive energy can help someone else recharge.” “Humans are responsible for nearly all problems and are the solution for everything - Be positively, the solution!” “Feed positively your roots. As a result, your inner sweetness will breathe efficiently thru your shell.” “Be positively the influencer, not the follower.” “Never make someone emotionally pay the price because of how you were not able to manage positively your own emotions.” “If you want your team to improve their technical skills, make sure to improve your interpersonal skills first.” “Like the roots of a human’s mind, feed social media positively. It will feed a large scale of humans mind!” “Like an upside-down pineapple fruit, the inner sweetness of a company becomes sweeter when you flip upside down the position level pyramid!” “Do not wait for someone to harvest you. Build your own path!” “Earth is more beautiful than we think – Imagine how splendid it would be if we were all interacting positively on it!” "Communication becomes efficient when it’s done we positive emotions – Be positively curious!” “Having excuses for everything is the roadblock of self-awareness and inner growth” “Don’t limit your challenges – rather – Challenge your limits!” “The pineapple - from all fruits – looks authentic. The great thing about it is no matter its shape – size - high – and color, one thing remains the same: Its inner sweetness! A pineapple = a pineapple. A pineapple = a human” “Often, what we think we know - what we think is - and what we think should are our biggest obstacles in life. Be positively curious!” “The higher the position level you’re ambitious to reach, the less about you it should be. In life, you’re already at the top, therefore, it starts with you because it is not about you!” “I’m realistically optimistic!” “Keep it sweet with yourself, not everything is suited for everyone!” “Beware of the time is money mindset blind spots, respectful interactions and good social etiquettes are not to be served like an American fast food!

[O]nly certain kinds of interactions with the environment are recognized as such; swimming in the ocean and wading in mountain streams are more likely to be understood as meaningful ways to interact with water, while running one's fingers under a faucet is not. But why not? The answer lies partly in long-standing assumptions that nature and the environment only exist “out there,” outside of our houses and neighborhoods; the answer lies, too, in long-standing—and even less visible—assumptions that only certain ways of understanding and acting on one's relation to the environment (including other humans) are acceptable. These assumptions have significant material effects. Seeing nature as only “out there,” or faucet water as categorically different from ocean water, makes environmental justice work all the more difficult.

The fact that awareness has no boundaries does not mean that in our human interactions we do not sometimes need boundaries. Our inner knowing will sense when the well-being of the body-mind requires our moving away from toxic environments, whether physical or psychological.

we do not know how to survive without other people to care for us and to teach us. Therefore, humans must discover ways of effectively interacting both with their environment and with each other. They must learn how to construct the knowledge, including rules of living, that will enable them to survive. This knowledge, the manner in which it is presented (in the family, in the neighborhood, in literature, art, school lessons, etc.), and the meaning it has for us is called culture.

There's more than just our playful nature that suggests eternal youth has played a role in our evolution. One of the most defining characteristics of humans is our creativity, our willingness to try new things and new ways of interacting with our environment -all traits normally associated with youth.

I call the metaverse, the virtual state and space in which humans interact, play, work, and socialize in a fully immersive and interconnected environment.

To say that the wiring in your visual centres embodies universal laws does not negate the critical role of culture and experience in shaping your brain and mind. Many cognitive faculties that are fundamental to the human way of life are only partly specified by your genes. Nature and nurture interact. Genes wire up your brain’s emotional and cortical circuits to a certain extent and then leave it to faith that the environment will shape your brain the rest of the way, producing you, the individual. In this respect the human brain is absolutely unique- as symbiotic with culture as a hermit crab is with its shell. While the laws are hardwired, the content is learned.

Information that we inherit from others through social interaction (via certain kinds of social learning) has such powerful effects that this information—“culture”—ranks alongside “nature” (genetically inherited information) and “nurture” (information derived from direct interaction between the developing system and its environment) as a determinant of human development.

The first part of the equation, the core role of our genomes in how we function, is already on the way to becoming comprehensible. There remains a secondary layer of genetics, of perhaps even greater effect: epigenetics. This is the study of how gene function is affected by interaction with the human body, the environment, and other stimuli.

The idea for this book came to me in 1985 in Venice as I watched that city interact with sea, sky, and wind.

Within the practice of contemporary geography, many traditional components such as maps are still important, though satellite remote sensing, sometimes known as Earth Observation (EO), Geographical Information Systems (GIS), and other powerful quantitative methods have been added to traditional fieldwork and the comparative method. Established core concepts of space and place have been transformed, in human geography at least, by modern social and cultural theory. The need to understand the biophysical and human environments of people and their interactions is becoming increasingly urgent as issues of sustainability and the protection and preservation of planet Earth become imperative. As integration within geography as a whole has weakened, both physical and human geography have become more specialized and have adopted different approaches to many of their research problems. Most importantly, physical geography is asserting its scientific credentials, while human geography emphasizes critical theory, values, and ethics.

Studies have found that people learn more from coordinated words, diagrams, and sounds than from text alone. The human-computer interaction experts came to understand that the best designs carefully engaged multiple human senses, which are neurologically designed to receive and integrate information in parallel. Other researchers focused on how computers allow people to connect with one another, and how people connect with information about themselves that we increasingly store in digital form. All of this greatly increased the potential for using computers to help students learn. Yet despite those decades of technological progress and mounting evidence that students learned perfectly well in a variety of technology-aided and mediated environments, it did not change the nature of the hybrid university in any important way.

Moravec’s Paradox: it’s from the 1980s. Some computer scientist guy realized that, for computers, the hard stuff is easy and the easy stuff is hard. It’s trivial to teach a computer to win at chess. It’s insanely difficult to teach a computer basic common sense, or how to walk through unfamiliar environments, or have a normal conversation. The Spindle solved that: it’s a broadcast network of common sense and common processing skills for AI systems. It lets a robot walk around and interact with humans without needing, you know, a warehouse full of mainframes plugged into it at all times.

The term “real” is a misnomer. You could say that the life forms that occupy earth are real. They appear as physical structures and they are based on mathematical formula and geometry. We are, in a sense, code. This code interacts with the physical senses, which decodes the formula and we are transformed to flesh and blood “life forms.” But at a quantum level we are, as I said, code. Underneath or beyond the quantum level—call it the pre-quantum level—we are infinite beings. We are Sovereign Integrals. What I am suggesting is that the term real, applies to the Sovereign Integral state of being and consciousness. The term is relative, however, because the Sovereign Integral consciousness is not considered real in the three-dimensional plane, and the human instrument is not real in the Domain of Unity. It is the reality of the dominant environment that determines the reality of the subjects and objects of that environment. The environment of three and four dimensional planes like earth, establishes a consensual, subjective reality—propagated by our unconscious and genetic mind. The environment of the infinite establishes a reality that has no mediation or signal transformation. It is elemental and core. There is no sensory “middleman” or propagation of perception. It is one and all in action. The individual is allowed to decide what is real and what is not. Illusion is a Russian doll; it has many layers, some of which transmit a sense of true awareness. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase: Perception is reality. The subjective realm defines the seemingly objective. Illusion, the outermost doll, is the only one that is seen and therefore, known. However, if you open the outermost doll, you find another, albeit smaller one waits. This repeats seven times until you find the indivisible. We would call this core, innermost doll: the Sovereign Integral. This is where you want your imaginative faculty trained and honed in. This is where you want your life to progress, not satisfied that perception is reality, or that the outermost “doll” is real and worthy of your devotion. All of that said, it does not mean that the outer world—physical reality—is a waste of time or so mired in illusion that it isn’t worth developing. Quite the opposite. The outer world is your workshop, the place you can experiment, build things, create, try and fail, and so on. It is a place of severe challenges at time, but also of beauty and joy. The illusion isn’t in the physical things of this world. The illusion is in the self-perception of the individual life form.As long as the individual perceives themselves as a human instrument, maybe with a soul, maybe not, they will see all life as a place of separation and disunity. They will accept the illusion that life emits, which is one of separation. In this, they become lost, lost to themselves as infinite beings, and unable, as a result, to generate and sustain the vision into their true self.

The human brain evolved in an environment that was local and linear. Local, meaning most everything that we interacted with was less than a day’s walk away. Linear, meaning the rate of change was exceptionally slow. Your great-great-great-grandfather’s life was roughly the same as his great-great-grandson’s life. But now we live in a world that is global and exponential. Global, meaning if it happens on the other side of the planet, we hear about it seconds later (and our computers hear about it only milliseconds later). Exponential, meanwhile, refers to today’s blitzkrieg speed of development. Forget about the difference between generations, currently mere months can bring a revolution. Yet our brain—which hasn’t really had a hardware update in two hundred thousand years—wasn’t designed for this scale or speed. And if we struggle to track the growth of singular innovations, we’re downright helpless in the face of converging ones. Put it this way, in “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” Ray Kurzweil did the math and found that we’re going to experience twenty thousand years of technological change over the next one hundred years. Essentially, we’re going from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the internet twice in the next century. This means paradigm-shifting, game-changing, nothing-is-ever-the-same-again breakthroughs—such as affordable aerial ridesharing—will not be an occasional affair. They’ll be happening all the time. It means, of course, that flying cars are just the beginning.

Does it require interacting with people and using social intelligence? Does it involve creativity and coming up with clever solutions? Does it require working in an unpredictable environment?

For me, politics are a fundamental element of being human. They are the process by which we collectively interact with each other, resolve conflicts and try to solve larger social or environmental problems. There are family politics, neighborhood politics, local politics, national politics and international politics. Humans are political animals and I find those interactions interesting, amusing and important. (2014 interview with iamhiphop)

We live in an environment that is mostly human. It consists of the people that we interact with day in and day out. These humans come from many varied backgrounds and cultures. They are individuals with their own unique experiences. To know people well—their differences, their nuances, their emotional life—would give us a great sense of connection and power. We would know how to reach them, communicate more effectively, and influence their actions. But so often we remain on the outside and lack this power. To connect to the environment in this way would mean having to move outside ourselves, train our eyes on people, but so often we prefer to live in our heads, amid our own thoughts and dreams. We strive to make everything in the world familiar and simple. We grow insensitive to people’s differences, to the details that make them individuals.

The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent intelligences: This agency is colloquially known as “Hello Kitty,” “Beautiful Cat,” or “Aineko,” and may manifest itself in a variety of physical avatars if corporeal interaction is desired. (Prior to the arrival of “Hello Kitty,” the city used a variety of human-designed expert systems that provided suboptimal performance.) The city’s mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the ongoing political processes of determining such responses. Citizens also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial service), and to defend the city.

The genetic blueprints for the architecture and the workings of the human brain develop in a process of interaction with the environment. ADD does reflect biological malfunctions in certain brain centers, but many of its features—including the underlying biology itself—are also inextricably connected to a person’s physical and emotional experiences in the world.

Colonization has changed everything about the way we live our lives. Our nations were made up of strong families that supported each other by intense extended affiliations and supportive networks of clans. Our people put a priority on knowledge and indigenous intelligence; there were always thinking and constantly assessing the possibilities of growth and adaptation to new realities. They possessed spiritual power and were guided in the conduct of their lives by their indigenous customs and religious beliefs. They were unified in their communities and interactions. This sense of unity was especially important to them because they understood the disunity degraded not only their existence as collectives but also their spiritual power as persons. Reciprocity and mutual obligation were the foundations of human interactions and of relationships with other elements of creation. This created the kind of solidarity that allowed them to withstand the challenges of survival in hard physical environments and against evil forces—that allowed them to survive intact as those nations. Most clearly different from the way we live our lives, our ancestors lived in a culture and society of warriors; there was social pressure for men to walk the warrior’s path, and women's roles were defined in accordance with their power and responsibility to maintain the culture and care for the families and to enable the men to defend the nation. … we cannot hold on to a concept of the warrior that is gendered in the way it once was and that is located in an obsolete view of men's and women's roles. The battles we are fighting are no longer primarily physical; thus, any idea of the indigenous warrior framed solely in masculine terms is outdated and must be rethought and recast from the solely masculine view of the old traditional ways to a new concept of the warrior that is freed from colonial gender constructions and articulated instead with reference to what really counts in our struggles: the qualities and the actions of a person, man or woman, in battle.

In the 1980s, worried professionals began to come together to compare notes and create visions of new ways of living that would offer a better quality of life.5 Although many of the professionals were architects, their focus was on people and human interactions, more than on buildings. They imagined neighborhoods where people would be out on the streets, walking to stores and school and work, running into each other, and stopping to chat. They envisioned streets that would be safe for joggers and bicyclists, and be visually interesting. They thought that communities should have a sense of place unique to their history and environs rather than a monotonous, prefabricated replicability.6 The architects also had some ideas about the kinds of features that would encourage the neighborliness and civic-mindedness to which they aspired. Homes, they thought, should be fronted by porches instead of garages. The houses should be close enough to the streets to invite conversations with passersby. Streets should be narrow enough to discourage drivers from speeding. In

GATHERING AND INTERPRETING INFORMATION Practice: Gathering Relevant Data The quality of a decision is directly influenced by the quality of the data gathered. That faulty data leads to less effective decisions is a truism whether or not the decision is made within a context of discernment. Just because we are discerning, we can’t presume that God will magically make up for not doing this essential step. But what sets discernment apart from other decision making is that we do assume that the very process of data gathering can be set within the context of prayer—and that is the goal of this practice. 1. Pause as you begin this reflection and each time you work on the task of gathering data. Ask for God’s gracious presence and help to seek out what is relevant to your discernment. 2. Ponder various kinds of information that will bear on your decision: —Information about yourself, your personality, history, life experience, spirituality. —Information about your relationships with family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and enemies that will affect or be affected by the decision you are contemplating. —Information about the groups, agencies, and entities that you belong to or interact with or that will be operative in the decision you are contemplating. —Information about the human-made and natural environment, that is, the wide external context in which the decision is set. —Other information that will help you make an informed decision in this particular case; including, for example, background leading up to the situation you are now discerning, knowledge of the players and their relationships, projected possible out-comes—that is, anything that could impact the decision or its outcome. 3. Imagine how you can gather this relevant information. Make a plan about what information you need to gather, and outline the information-gathering process in your journal. 4. Begin gathering necessary information. As you do so, keep a record of what you find out, assembling the relevant information in a form and in an appropriate place where it will be accessible to your continuing discernment. (This process of data gathering may continue throughout your discernment.) 5. Offer this reflection and the sometimes tedious homework of data gathering back to God. Record in your discernment journal how the growing amount of data affects your discernment. Speak to God about what it reveals: about the situation, about you, and about your relationships, especially with God.