Requirements For Another Ideal World

In "Money and Responsibility" I mentioned my latest vision of an ideal world, whose focus is on preserving and proliferating life, especially ours, through commonly held values, understanding, and management of resources. It can be described, with some refinement, by a set of requirements that would apply wherever humans are (on Earth and in space):

• V: All of us agree to a common set of basic values and standards for developing them
  • The main value, which dominates all others, is the preservation and proliferation of life for as long as physically possible
• U: All of us agree to a common understanding of reality and standards for developing it
  • That understanding will be based on observation, logic, and verifiable predictions
• M: None of us can take, or render useless, the means of basic survival ("the commons") used by anyone else, including members of other species critical to maintaining those means, beyond the constraints of natural predator-prey relationships
• E: Everything not in the commons may be distributed among people in a socially acceptable way, such as in an economy
  • This includes rewards for risks incurred in expanding the commons, which may be kept for a fixed time (not to exceed one lifetime)
• R: We are all responsible for maintaining the commons

For convenience, I'll refer to these requirements by the acronym VUMER, and its implementation "VUMER World." The main value is the driver for all of the requirements; and an accurate and commonly-held understanding of reality is critical for taking appropriate and effective action in implementing values, especially those involving survival, and well as maintaining a cohesive society. Values "V" and understanding "U" therefore take precedence over the other requirements, which deal with implementation.

It is of course possible that an actual global agreement about values and understanding (which itself is pretty "ideal," and would involve everyone, rather than just officials of dominant political entities) would preclude my preferences for them and everything that follows from them. I wouldn't be surprised if such an outcome represents a compromise between VUMER World and the "Dead World" we are currently creating, which might delay our demise by a few more years, but at least we would all be invested in the outcome rather than, as many of us are, going along for the ride.

Quality of Understanding

The world is a complex place. Our ability to survive and thrive depends on our understanding of the parts of it we experience, as well as the power we have to change it, because our understanding determines how accurately we can predict the results of the actions we take. The better our understanding, the more likely our actions will have the desired results.

Understanding is an interpretation of observations that identifies what the parts of the world are, how those parts are related to each other, and how they and their relationships tend to change or stay the same. Its quality and usefulness is therefore highly dependent on the quality and amount of our observations, and our ability to correctly interpret those observations. Science is society's most successful means of building quality understanding, in large part because it uses strict rules of evidence which filter out observations that cannot be verified.

Technology has enabled a vast increase in the number and verifiability of observations, while logic and mathematics have enabled us to create and test interpretations of those observations that will have maximum accuracy and reliability. It has also, as a byproduct, enabled people to have more power, unfortunately without an associated requirement for understanding its full impact beyond its intended and very specific applications.

Alternative approaches to science for building understanding, such as religions, tend to depend heavily on hearsay, reported observations that cannot be independently verified; and their interpretations cannot be rigorously tested, if at all. That many people use the interpretations that result from them is evidence that the interpretations have enough quality to be useful in various situations, typically ones where success in surviving and thriving is not increased by having more quality.

Humanity is now at a point where our impacts on the world require a high quality of understanding to manage without extreme harm to us and other species. Those with the most influence (power) must either acquire that understanding, or reduce their power to a level they can manage safely. To do so voluntarily, they must also value the others they influence, and values are in large part a function of culture – especially religion. If our values do not motivate us to mitigate the harm we cause, and if we insist on holding onto power without adequately understanding the complex interrelationships and interactions that it can disrupt, then we will be entirely responsible for our doom as a species.

Math Block

Regular readers of my blogs and Web site have no doubt noticed that there is a fair amount of math underlying most of it. Although very little is beyond what I knew in high school, I've come to understand that its use may be behind the limited popularity of my writing. Even my novel (“Lights Out”), an adventure based on an early version of my population-consumption model, has been reported as almost too technical by some readers, though I went out my way to focus on the very human implications.

I've used math as a way to understand the world from the time I was eight years old, when I took an active interest in predicting the positions and motions of the stars and planets. My father, who loved to challenge my thinking, bought me a toy armillary sphere, which simulated how stars change their position in the sky as a result of the Earth's rotation and orbit. I've used the knowledge I gained from playing with that toy a lot since then, both for fun (as an amateur astronomer and geographer) and work (as a radar test engineer).

When my father experimented with reinventing math to help my brother, he enlisted my help to first test his ideas and then develop new ones. It became the core of the business we started together, which sought to show everyone how they could use basic observation and logic to “learn all the math they need to know.” No one was perhaps more frustrated than me with the way math was taught in school, especially as I was learning college calculus while developing a more natural way of understanding it with my father. We understood, along with our generous business partners and supporters, that math was simply abstraction built on reality, which had lost its roots in academia's rush toward teaching it as pure abstraction.

I openly admit that algebra was the hardest subject I took in high school, but now I use it as merely another language, shorthand for a simplified version of reality I see in my mind. Nearly twenty years after my last-gasp attempt to teach that reality to kids with my father and the dear, retired teacher worked with us, it's too easy to forget that most of today's adults and children still see math as language without substance that magically provides answers to questions they can barely comprehend.

When we were tutoring kids, calculators were already being used to bypass thinking, and today's computers have become far more successful at blunting our collective mental prowess. The “magic” has been harnessed with our electronic slaves, making us even more helpless than my father feared we would become when he (among other things) was teaching in the 1950s. I'm both frustrated and saddened that we have sacrificed so much wisdom for so much power that we are collectively like children playing with nuclear bombs, both figuratively and literally.

I refuse to give up hope that somehow we can relearn how to learn in time to avoid the catastrophe we seem headed for, as projected by my own limited research along with that of much smarter people than me. One of the signs that such hope is justified will be increased acceptance of the existence of human-induced climate change. Another will be an increase in intelligent public discourse that values evidence and reflects an understanding about how the world really works along with a willingness to develop more. Maybe, in my own little part of the world, there will be more of an interest in math.