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Monday, January 2, 2012

Changing Social Norms & Technology


Do you feel overwhelmed by your connectivity to the online world? By all this technology that enhances communication? By all the social relationships we have the luxury & obligation to maintain now that the internet gives us that ability?

There are a million different directions we could take a discussion on technology and communication,… and we already have had some of these discussions in one way or another.

One route I have been interested in and hope that other bohemians may, is how social technology has changed social norms over such a short time.

For instance:

Do you think people interact differently with eachother now that there is this ‘technological buffer’ like e-mail, text messaging, and facebook?

Do you feel like being connected to the “social matrix” has a few less obvious advantages or disadvantages on a small personal scale?

How do these social networks work for or against certain personalities?

How detrimental do you think two-dimensional (written) communication is, with the loss of infliction, gestures, reactions, and body language altogether? Do you think there is some level of de-personalization? Less authencity?

What do you think of the online dating phenomena?

This is a very open ended and broad topic, and multiple “reloaded” discussions are encouraged if you’d like to have them. I’m looking forward to hearing a variety of perspectives on this topic, and hope that you are too!

Consciousness

How certain do you really feel about who/what you are?
What do you identify yourself as? Your experience, your social identity, your body, your brain, all of the above? Any preference?

Is your experience reducible to neurophysiology, or is it made of "qualia" which are irreducible, and/or require a new ontology?
In other words, does experience have its own discrete "atoms", like matter, or in the same sense that color can be reduced to primary colors, secondary colors, etc.?


What is the value of experience in relation to other things? Could you see value in a universe without experience? If you were convinced that experience was the product of a kind of machinery, how would that affect the value of experience, or your sense of authenticity, if at all?


How does experience relate to behavior and causality? Why did evolution select for it? Is our inner life necessary for our bodies to behave adaptively?


Why is the inner life always "now"? Are "now" and consciousness even separable? Many physicists, including Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Steven Hawking have said that our experience of time is an illusion, or that the past, present, and future exist simultaneously in a timeless reality. Can consciousness be explained purely by neurophysiology or psychophysics, or do we need to explain a particular conscious moment's relation to space and time to understand it?

Also, is the difference between the subjective and objective merely a matter of perspective? if so, where does this perspective come from?

Introductory reading:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html

http://www.kurzweilai.net/my-question-for-e...