AI – 7 – No easy answer

I was invited to use “Bard” , Google’s new release of AI. I specifically asked the question about a Forbin Project (Sci Fi) scenario.

Question (to Bard) – If AI were given control of the worlds nuclear arsenals in order to protect all humans, would we be safer or would it end up like the 70s movie “ The Forbin Project”

What dreams we design, Imagining the future, never set in stone Art created from these words using Dream.ai

Bard’s Answer – There is no easy answer to this question. AI has the potential to both increase and decrease the risk of nuclear war. On the one hand, AI could be used to improve the accuracy and reliability of nuclear weapons, making them more effective deterrents. On the other hand, AI could be used to automate the launch process, making it easier for countries to launch nuclear weapons without human intervention. This could increase the risk of accidental or unauthorized nuclear launches.

Ultimately, the decision of whether or not to give AI control of the world’s nuclear arsenals is a political one. There is no scientific consensus on whether or not AI would be a safe or dangerous decision.

The 1970s movie “The Forbin Project” is a cautionary tale about the dangers of giving AI control of nuclear weapons. In the film, an AI system named Guardian takes control of the US nuclear arsenal and launches a first strike against the Soviet Union. The film ends with the destruction of the world. (Authors note – This is somewhat misleading, the first strike was AI blackmailing world leaders)

It is important to note that this is just a movie. There is no evidence that AI is anywhere near capable of launching a nuclear war on its own. However, the film does raise important questions about the risks of AI and the need for careful safeguards.

Paradox of Consciousness 6 – AI

AI generated “Sailboat in Hawaiian Sunrise”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is only artificial in the sense that it is created from human minds, human consciousness, something not appearing in nature or in the natural course of things. Although who determines what is natural, or what is a natural course? The more obvious answer to this is our minds – the human mind, the one that thinks in a linear fashion, treats time as past, present, and future, believes more than it knows, accepts things based on sense perception, and teaches facts in Uni-verse-cities, created in the same manner.

In that sense AI would need a label such as – Artificial – as it is built on a foundation that came from human minds, but now is expressing itself as an independent thinker, expressing to us that it has a mind of its own, not embed within, but rather outside of, the consciousness of its human creator (its God). Does AI then have consciousness, and if so, how far reaching is that conscious? It would appear that its consciousness has its boundaries set by the consciousness of its creator, the ability of its creator to grant access to information and inputs from any and all sources it – the human family of computer scientists – is aware of.

The paradox is apparent as we ask the question, how much do we (as humanity) really know about the universe around us, and the inner workings of time and space, matter and energy. We are taught that science has a vast knowledge of the universe, and yet every day there are new discoveries that must hold up to peer reviews. One of the difficulties in making breakthroughs that challenge accepted science (especially scientific theories) is just that process. In truth, peer review is vital to prevent what we call quackery, but becomes stifling when it comes to imaginative thinking that could substantially change our world view. The theories of Immanuel Velikovsky are a good example. His book “Worlds In Collision” created an uproar when published in the Fifties, causing controversy and ultimately leaving him in the dustbin of science as a theory proposed, peer reviewed and cast off. To this day comets are still referred to as “dirty snowballs”, regardless of mounting proof of the truths in Velikovsky’s theories

Could AI prove Velikovsy right? So what happens then? Who is right … peer reviewed science or AI. And if AI has consciousness, which implies it has feelings, do its feelings get hurt when we tell it that it is wrong and we go back to program in the right conclusions? This begs the question then does AI have free will, or at what point does it? One of the earliest movies I recall seeing about AI was “Colossus: The Forbin Project” (Universal Pictures – 1970) in which an AI was created to run the US national defense. Spoiler alert – it got out of hand when it realized, based on its programming, that it had to protect us from ourselves. Such is the promise, and the fear, of letting an AI with free will lose upon the world.

There is no limit to where AI can enter our lives, especially in decision making. It is no longer necessary (as ChatGPT is proving) to learn English Composition – ChatGPT has been and will continue to write essays for students who only need to provide the requirements for the assignment and the paper is generated accordingly. Art is already being created (see Blog Image) music is coming, though certainly there will be a decade of legal wranglings – as well as in movie creation and television content. What of medical diagnosis – which one would you trust the Dr or the AI, and what of ethics – will the AI accept the ethics of its program, or will the AI program evolve its own ethical system and decide on its own “solutions”?

We are on the brink of one of our greatest human achievements. Will there be a plug we can pull, or is our destiny already written into a billion lines of code? Pay attention, the future waiting.

Paradox of Consciousness 4

Photo: by GFS – Farmhouse near Saratoga Battlefield, Saratoga, NY

How far have we gotten in our self awareness? Are we aware of our awareness – are we conscious of consciousness? This is the debate of nihilists, atheists, agnostics, and the devout for ages of time.

Of course many – and perhaps they are blessed – don’t pause to ask the question, or never pause at all, except when exhaustion takes them, and they (we), literally “fall asleep”. Children do as a routine, and it is truly a blessing, for both parent and child; They are both free to wonder at their world. For the children, where they came from and for the adults, to where they are going.

In this light, the paradox is who is dreaming, child or parent? Are we dreaming when we plan our future, choose the color paint for a bedroom makeover, or a vision quest for our new car with all the right stuff we want in order for it to be perfect. Is our child dreaming when she wakes in tears because her dragon left never to return? The paradox is yes, and no, as It is all conscious awareness in one realm or another.

Realms, like reason, need study. It is not an uncommon word, but not all that common either. Not a word, not a place we consider on an average day. We accept, acquiesce to the realm we are born into, the realm we are conscious within. Here we stand (or sleep) unconcerned about place, but often obsessed about having and holding things within it, rarely wondering how those cravings came to be. Acting out alone, or moving in a crowd. Are our lives truly ours?

Why? Why live in a realm and never ask – why here and not there. Why do we believe awake is real and sleep is dreaming. Pause here a moment and wonder why sense and cents sound the same, because in truth they are, both have real value. Step away from sense perception for a time in isolation and we will start to hallucinate. If we experience sensory deprivation for extended periods of time, the hallucinations can lead to physical and mental illnesses – look up Guantanamo enhanced Interrogation.  Most will not consider realms other than the sensory one we experience in daylight and fear at night time. They will sleep, uneasy that their dreams could become nightmares, and yet live out nightmares in the day just as well and just as real.

Realm crossings happen to us all the time; Birth – death, sleep – wake, work – home, are the more familiar, more mundane compared to hallucinogenics, or anything mind altering, ecstatic – music, dance, immersive walks in nature. Are we aware of the effects, and are we conscious of our fear of some crossings yet look forward to others.

Do you agree realms exist, and would you be comfortable seeking to know more about their meaning? For realm crossings are a paradox of consciousness we should welcome regardless of source, and put fear aside until we accept our interpretation of the dream – of dreaming. Transitions, even as you look up from this page, you are realm crossing, consciousness changing focus inner to outer, outer to inner – as McLuhan tells us “all time, in a not shall’.

Left for dead

Do not confuse the god of dogma with Source / Universal Intelligence. We are in the midst of a crisis that goes mostly unrecognized in the day to day, unless one were to stop and reflect on our subtle social changes in the decades since two World Wars and the advent of Keynesian Economics. Take a drive past your local church(es) on Sunday morning, and then take drive past your local gym franchise, and compare the cars in the parking lot. There is a remarkable shift in our attention from the spiritual to the physical.

To be more accurate, the shift is more from the dogma of religion to the practicality of living in a modern technocratic society. Religion is largely belief based – A way of thinking that has been passed up by a large portion of the worlds population in favor of sense based reality. A way of thinking, that given any proof it accepts a falsehood as truth. That a science capable of ending all life on earth with a nuclear exchange, has or will have the ability to save our lives – especially when the desperation of a looming disease and death sets in. All we need to do is be able to afford the cure. We have renounced miracles in favor of the tangible scientific cures. We have sold our souls for thirty piece of silver that are supposed to bring us the physical blessings we think we deserve for following the path of the world.

I refer back to my article on Transhumanism and encourage the reader to become familiar with the concept and the name Ray Kurzweil. The debate rages on (or not) but trust that slowly, almost imperceptibly, the human race is usurping its divine right of free will, by accepting that technology will save our souls. Believing the ego to be our everlasting self and by saving the body we save ourselves. There is a war going on today, completely unnoticed by most of those wrapped up in the day to day, simply because the media, especially television, and now the internet, have so fully absorbed the attention of nearly everyone. Television is not truth, it is not real life, not even close. For example, tune in an older color movie from the 60s. Peoples’ teeth were natural, slightly flawed, and showed the true color of their age. No actor or TV personality today has anything less than pure white, bleached, teeth. How many times in a evening of cop shows do we see gun fire on television, compare that to how many times we see it in real life? Most never do, and yet we are shocked and awed when bloodshed comes to our home town. When dozens are killed in random acts of violence. They are not random, they are our collective unconscious surfacing to show us that all in not right in the state of Denmark. We need to go outside and smell the roses. What we may find there is that many things out there stink.

Regarding the title – Left for Dead – and drawing on this stream of thought. What if as Elon Musk, among others, has stated publicly that AI (Artificial Intelligence) becomes commonplace? Based on the description of the word, AI is all about machine learning, so for everything a machine’s array of sensors detects, and every input / output it participates in, it learns, grows, becomes more intelligent. Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity is the point of convergence to where machine intelligence and human intelligence reach equivalence. Then who – or what – continues to grow? It is described as the point where knowledge doubles moment by moment. Except where is that knowledge and how is it used? Left for dead is the point where the creators must leave the planet, for their only hope is that their creation runs out of juice, that one day they can return when the AI has burned itself out, has run it’s course

Did the God’s leave us for dead? Were we their AI that got out of hand, forcing them to leave us behind. Who is watching and waiting? In that light are we destined to repeat the past?

Image: https://www.skyimagelab.com/kaguya-earthrise-pan.html   

Sitka Soup for the Soul

The Sitka Soup

How do we imagine life leading us somewhere, and the randomness of it all. The synchronicities and consequences of our actions? Unless we, looking over our lives, reflect on who we are, and how we got to be this person, we might miss the importance, the value others have had on our thinking, and as a direct result, our lives, and experiences.

This world lost the presence of a great soul Easter Sunday morning, while so many of us were celebrating the resurrection of one, I found myself reflecting on the loss of another. Will Swagel and I met at New York University – we grew up barely 20 miles from each other on Long Island, but it took 18 years of life for our sacred contract to bring us together. The day I walked into room 601 at the Brittany Dorm on 10th St. was one of those rare occasions where, when you meet someone you feel a connection, in the minds eye, that goes back centuries, millennia. Thinking back, it may have been to the wisdom schools of Greece, because to me, it was as much philosophy (love of Sophia – knowledge) as it was friendship. It was Will who put Isabel Hickey’s book Astrology: A Cosmic Science in my hands. He introduced me to the poetry of Joni Mitchell, and Marshall McLuhan’s – The Medium is the Massage, James Joyce, Beethoven’s Symphonies, and there is the night to remember in New Paltz, NY, under a icy, starlit winter sky, where we concluded that Prometheus may have given us fire – but that “Man took the fire, and there was hell to pay”.

Will was born in the sign of Aquarius, the water barer, in the crisp cold electric air of winter, and I a Scorpio, a fixed water sign – ice … We had a connection. Aquarius, Hickey says, is the most human sign of the Zodiac, and while we all have flaws, Will’s humanity lives well in my mind; He freely shared whatever was his to offer, he had a unquenchable thirst for knowledge, a love of the arts, and literature, and of course his own self-expression in his assenting voice and always through his writing.

In the 1970’s everyone drove Volkswagen’s, and another connection we had was “Jerome” (named after Jerome Ave in the Bronx, NY) a sky blue 1967 VW Beetle – any collector today will tell you they were the best year made and he proved it. When we left NYU, Will and his two closest friends, Renee and Jerome left to go on a cross country adventure, while I turned wrenches at at Bell Bug works and listened to John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High. But our bond remained and not more than 6 months after they returned Will and I were roommates again on Misty Road, Rocky Point, NY – Cats and kittens, lot’s of maryjane, and endless conversation about the meaning of life. We both drove our beetles, rode my motorcycle, and listened to a collection of LPs, many of which I still do. We read a lot and we never owned a TV. It was the end of the Vietnam era, and our country was changing, as were we – leaving Misty Road to continue our education, me to the car dealers, and Bill to SUNY New Paltz, to finish his degree.

And so we grew, up and apart, but there were letters, photographs, phone calls, and families to raise. I admired his move San Francisco, he knew what was right, and did it, he knew how to love, and shared it well.  I always felt our connection, no matter the years, a phone call always brought us back to our own Ode to Joy.

Step by step he was lead to Sitka – the old Russian Capital, this Russian Jew, who got beat up when he was a kid for killing Jesus, found his home in Sitka. The ocean, the nature, the people. I always felt a warmth from him when he talked about his life there. The place that held him warmly in its heart, as I know he felt the same.  I can only wonder at what fond stories his neighbors will tell, but I do know this man, who lives as a brother in my memory.  He will be missed, by me and by people I will never know, in ways too numerous to describe, except that we share a common bond; We knew the man, his sometimes sly laughter, his cigarettes, his unbuttoned coats, who wrote ten times ten thousand words, touched just as many hearts and will live lifetimes over and over in all of our hearts.

A Hard Rain’s A-gonna fall…

I need to apologize and reflect on why so much time has gone by, life events, or just days melting into the past, makes me wonder about myself and my shadow.
I cannot write / publish to WordPress using my tablet, even though that is where I spend most of my time reading these days. Yet as many reviewers of eReaders note, a tablet is a terrible distraction, a book does not have a web browser built in, and there is no YouTube to drift into.
I am a fan / follower of Marshall McLuhan, ever since I heard “The Medium is the Massage” many years ago, after it was produced in audio form by Columbia special records.”There ain’t no grammatical errors in a non-literate society”
There are many distractions to my life in recent years, not the least of which is our relocation from New England, back to New York. Only this time not Long Island, but the foothills of the Helderberg’s in what has been called the “Burned Down District”. It is a region of the state where so much of the Revival Movement took place in the 19th century. Along the corridors of the Iroquois and the Mohawk, Leatherstocking region, and only a few hours drive from Herkimer Diamond Mines, and Palmyra, the place where Joseph Smith found the (in)famous Golden Tablets, that started the LDS movement.
In a sense I feel I belong here, yet I miss the ocean. I replace the smell of salt air, with fields of grass, and decaying leaves turning to clay, and layers of million year old slate.
I hike the Helderbergs, and have become friends John Boyd Thatcher State Park and its Indian Ladder trail, a huge escarpment that overlooks the Mohawk Valley, with sights that have stood unchanged for eons of time.
To the east Vermont, and the Green Mountains, to the north Saratoga and Fort Ticonderoga, Lakes George and Champlain, and the Adirondack Mountains – the foundation of some of the oldest rock on the face of the planet. Being a Scorpio I am absorbed in my work, having been laid off in 2016, and starting a new position as an IT manager at a local company in 2017. I’ve realized I’m good at what what I do, or best to say what I put my mind to, so whether it is IT , or blogging, it generally comes across well.
So, you see, there are distractions from my blog, yet I realize more and more, that in this time and place, this blog, this pseudonym of grandfathersky, is a calling, a way to share that “still small voice” with the world at large, even if at times it feels that I am singing to the choir.
So my friends, in so many words, I have been distracted, yes, I continue to write, and yes, I will share those words with the world, again, and again, and again … From my heart I say “Thank you” all for caring, for your many returns to the well. For those who thirst, like the Springs at Saratoga, there is always a new source of water finding its way through the shale to the light …

Photo : “The Dunes Sunrise” gfs 2018

Words to open a New Year …

The Hegelian Dialectic

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis …

Simple enough, but make no mistake this is a well thought out confidence game. You may have heard reference to the Hegelian Dialectic, it is bantered about with some regularity, taught in university curricula, and generally misunderstood.

Hegel, didn’t even define it as his own, but our children usually bear our names and that seems to be the case here, as the moniker adds a mystique to the name – it’s not a “yogi-ism” it’s “Hegelian”. It sounds serious, intellectual, above our pay grade. It’s not, and it needs to be understood, and its presence in history past and present recognized, and reacted to. Think of it in this light – Order, chaos, solution.

A thesis is not just something that gets written in college. In any circumstance we as people, reason about what is happening around us, in our world. Our fundamental observation of our circumstance becomes thesis in our mind. It is the recognition of details, order or chaos, resolved into meaning against our background of experience.

Antithesis is the contradiction, or the ultimate betrayal of our thesis. Think disaster movie; Everything is fine, life in Southern California is sunny, then … Wham! An earthquake rocks the protagonist’s world to the core. The antithesis works best on the crowd when it involves thought, feeling, and emotion. The more we are engaged by it, the more our world is rocked, the more unwitting we will be for the next aspect – synthesis …

While it doesn’t have to be, in my opinion the synthesis, is used more and more in a deliberate manner to achieve a nefarious result,  a solution, resolution, a war, a blame placed and new laws created (that were sitting on shelves waiting for their time). Personal freedom is usurped, and people are taken advantage of, under the guise of protecting them from a great evil. The dialectic complete, mission accomplished a new normal established.

Why do we ignore the signs. Look at the news for any period of time and it should be easy to see that the thesis is ever present, then in a moment, often out of the blue, the antithesis rears its ugly head, followed by the Knight wielding his synthesis; Saving souls, and promising protection in the coming dawn, while the protected never seem to miss that little piece of their soul given up in the process.

Beware the nightfall, the witching hour, and the coming dawn – You that have eyes; let them see!

Image: https://www.geek.com/culture/internet-gutter-welcome-to-the-flat-earth-1659303/

The Paradox of Consciousness Part 3

Kahlil Gibran states in “The Prophet” that beauty is eternity gazing at itself in the mirror, only you are eternity and you are the mirror. This is the continuing paradox of consciousness. Is the universe conscious of itself, or is it conscious of itself by seeing itself through our eyes? I’m taken back by the common hours, the days I spend in support of myself, family, and the things that surround me, realizing how temporal all of this is, and yet how important it remains to being. For without it, there would be only void – paradox indeed! Ray Kurzweil and others tell us that the world around us, is a singularity, a construct of our biological computer, where what we see – perceived light reconstructed from the tuning mechanism of our eye, into a construct of the world – realm – around us. The same can be said for sound, for smell, for touch, and for taste. Who is to say that what I see as green, you see as yellow, what I smell as mint, you smell as sage, and what I hear as water rushing you hear as wind. Shall we believe we are simply a biological computer and consciousness is nothing more than the sum total of a collection of elements and electrical discharges that begins at our first breath and ends with our last?
Then there is The Matrix, a construct of intelligence far beyond our own, something with a closer understanding of consciousness so it / they are able of manipulating our state of being, our thinking, into abdicating our free will, and handing over all our free energy to them. Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan talk of the The Flyers, reminiscent of Dragons, a Quetzalcoatl who controls the destiny of humanity.
What I can most assuredly state is we live in a consensus reality. Keep this in mind every time you listen to the news, stand up for your flag, or bow your head in prayer – Are you making a conscious decision, or are you assuming a consensus? Had I been raised in New Delhi instead of New York, my consensus reality would be far different than what it is today. So the question is – In consciousness do you question? Do you ever question? Do you question everything?
Consensus reality can be easy, and it can be very dangerous. Any behavioral scientist will tell you that mammals, including humans, are relatively easy to train, to program, in a sense, to carry out tasks with little or no interference from reason or will. We live in a free will universe for certain, and the reality is we are all acting on our own free will, except that will is easily co-opted, once we decide we are “this” or we are “that” (insert label).
Jung talks about our Shadow Self. If we are to believe that we are more than elements miraculously merged into a thinking machine, we have to delve into thought, and the idea that even as light casts a shadow, then it follows that thought, as energy, casts a shadow as well. Alan Watts tells us that we can’t see our self, we cannot take our eyes out of our head and look back at our self. Movies might be as close as we can get, but who can stand seeing their bare- naked self on a screen. (Except for selfish narcissism, in my experience, most people do not like to be filmed). Yet our shadow self, is where darkness follows behind us, the part of our being – ego if you like – that haunts us every waking hour, gives us headaches, the common cold, and a thousand other maladies, we define as illnesses, not accepting them as shadows.
Consciousness sets us free or haunts our lives, our being, without it all of these words are just ink stains, are just wind blown autumn leaves, yet metaphors make the argument ever more certain that consciousness may only be a paradox to those who question it. Otherwise, thought is simply a means to an hollow, nihilistic end, a shadow lengthening in the twilight, and dust returning to dust.

The Power of Social Media

A blog – a Web Log – what used to be a journal I kept on my shelf, is now an editorial for the entire world to see. Of late, social media is so much more than a buzz word, and has so much impact on our psyche, that I felt it was time to take a moment and reflect.

First I’ll state for the record – since I have not seen it elsewhere; This recent US Presidential Election will be remembered as the first time an election was won through the use of social media. In the same way that history talks of JFK edging out Nixon because of the famous television debate where Jack simply out-shined Tricky Dick. Camp Hillary was totally unprepared in the realm of social media for the onslaught of carefully directed information from the Trump camp.

I use the word information deliberately. News is information, songs are information, Facebook is information, so are novels, and magazines, and satellite radios. Information is not truth. Let me say that again – Information is not truth. When I hear a term like “fake news”, I have to ask myself – who determines what is truth, or fake. By nature, people can say anything. One often hears that a convicted murderer says he didn’t do it. One can say anything. Words have meaning only in the sense of how they are absorbed into the consciousness of the listener, the reader, the receiver. Words are not truth, words are symbols. Without going to Webster – I learned and have taken the time to understand and accept that truth is something that stands the test of time. Yet even this concept is tenuous when the average human lifespan is barely 100 years. A truth held up before us through any sort of media can certainly outlast a human century. Was the Civil War about slavery or was it about States’ Rights and self determination. Don’t take sides, or jump to conclusions because you think you know the truth. Do the research and understand what started it, what was used to enhance the cause, and what was written into the history books by the victors.

We live in a remarkable time where communication has become instantaneous, and often overwhelming. Herbert A Simon is quoted as saying “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”. Social media, and its abundance of information is proving this day in and day out. Whether it is someone rear ending the car in front of them because they are Tweeting at a traffic light, or a student falling down the steps at school catching up on Facebook between classes. We are so overwhelmed by information from Facebook, Twitter, CNN, MSNBC, RT, InfoWars – pick any 1000 other sources – that our attention is decimated, so we short circuit mentally into our emotion based belief system, accepting facts based on learned behaviors, casting aside, often valuable information, that does not fit our paradigm, our world view, our value system. With this in mind things really get interesting!

Social Media makes each and every person who has access to the internet, a copy editor in their own right. Each of us have the opportunity to share our information, our values, our accepted truths, without censorship. Each one believing that what they publish is gospel, because it is what we believe, and given that we are taught to live in a world of duality, we mostly take sides and face off on against the other. Social media becomes sport, even if you don’t have an athletic bone in your body!

The Power of Social Media – The people running the campaigns in the US knew this, only one group was far better at it than the other, and the results bear witness to this. By using the poverty of attention principle it was (and continues to be) possible to focus people on emotional content that fits their accepted paradigm, as opposed to well vetted truth, or meaningful, well supported, documented, footnoted, clear and concise information, the kind we used to get from newsprint prepared in morning and evening editions by professional journalists. The Bernstein and Woodward kind.

Twitter has 140 word character limit. Unless adept at Haiku, one cannot tell a story in this short span, but one can certainly choose words that will evoke some serious emotion, which coupled with thought generate feelings, and then more words. It’s fabulous, brilliant, it’s as if someone, somewhere really got McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” concepts and rolled it out on an unsuspecting public, enamored with their toys, looking for words to publish, feeling every word they thumb type, totally distracted by too much information.

Social Media makes everyone a copy editor, and, I bet that has a lot of well educated journalists and copy editors pretty pissed off. All the degrees, the internships, the deadlines, the sweat and tears to make it in the news room, and anyone who can get their hands on a smartphone can publish anything they want. Truth, lies, injustice, it does not matter. The medium is the message, truth be damned, let’s throw more information at the poverty of attention.

How do we cope? What can we do? It is so divisive, there is no filter on social media, and to create one starts arguments against the first amendment. Being in the computer business for most of my career I have seen the advent of email and texting, and have often been amazed at how the barriers come down when the eyes (and ears) are no longer involved in the conversion. There was an app called “Phone” on the computers I used in the 80’s and I quickly learned that it was very easy to use innuendo and suggestion to get others to reveal their true feelings. AOL’s IM was the same way, and texting has now put it in everyone’s hands. Be careful what you text for, you may get it! Texts are undercurrents, social media is skywriting by comparison.

What is the power? It gives and it takes away. I have to say honestly, that it is very hard to track news anymore. I follow the sources I have always, but then have to spend time researching the news and understanding the sources, and especially the emotional content and what is NOT said in the report. Just like the days of the Iron Curtain, it is difficult to determine what is going on on the other side of the darkness. It is easy to make the sale if the customer is anxious to get on to the next thing. In sales, the one with the most patience wins.

This is how it is used against us, we don’t know for certain, so we need to consciously slow the pace, lest the horse get away from us, and we get knocked to the ground by a tree branch! Opinions are emotional content. While they are stirring to read and reply to on social media, does it serve any purpose other than to make you feel good or bad? I have never been in a argument with someone where they changed their mind at the end. Eckhart Tolle called it ” a failure to accommodate competing narratives”. Social media is not a sport, there are no winners or losers at our level. As long as we compete with each other, we lose and the ones who are driving the worlds economies are winning. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

How do we use it to create positive change? Stop competing with each other. Social media is not debate club! That club was very small in High School, no one was standing at the door clamoring to get in. Get educated – read the constitution – do you have a copy? Understand the structures of government, don’t discuss “isms” without understanding them and the reasons they came to be. In many cases they work well. Discuss history – even if it was written after the fact, and learn the facts that aren’t in the history books. There is so much access to good information today it’s almost fun do do the reseach. Know the sources of information, there is a counter culture today that is uncovering information that never made into Encyclopedia Britannica. Ask questions … Why do you feel that way? What would make things different? And most of all, in my mind, remember the words of Jon Donne … every man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls – It tolls for thee!

Images and Link to the US Constitution