It is too late, too fast!

That's all folks. The end of civilization will come in our life time, without a doubt. The question is how SOON and how. It is sooner than I previously expected. I can hope that it is not more nasty than I envisaged. And I dare not to write what I envisaged.

Edwin's Proverb Chapter 1 Verse 1

We all live by dreams.
The anticipated joy of fulfilling our dreams makes all pain endurable, and even the most shameful compromises become dignified.
But let's not forget, realizing our dreams is really not as important as what we would become. Dreams are intangible and prosperities vulnerable.
All things considered, there is no "fixed" asset except our morals - if we let it drift away, you will realize some day that the dreamer is no longer there. Your dreams will simply become your worst nightmares.
If the is a way to measure our achievement, I believe there is, it will not be our wealth or fame. It will be our effort of bringing happiness to our loved ones.
We might not do very well, but there is no excuse for not trying hard.
Reward your loved ones and benefactors with the best of you every day, it is the first and only dream we must hold out till the end.

I don't think I will ever need to write a verse 2.

The eternal parable

On day, the Mayor drove his executive limo to town. Quite a crowd was attracted so he decided to get off and shake some hands. Words spreaded and more people gathered. Those who came late started to squeeze through from behind. The momentum of the crowd began to push the limo to move forward. The Mayor could not get back in his car because he was tightly surrounded and his voice could only be heard by a few nearby. Seeing that the limo was leaving, more people gathered with more pushing and squeezing because no one wanted to be left behind. The limo thus travelled town after town. The crowd is so hugh now that the limo could not longer been seen. The new comers joined no longer for the Mayor but for sheer curosity and peer attraction. Who is leading? Not the Mayor, not the limo. The momentum of the crowd decides. "There is a cliff ahead, stop!" A few people in the front are crying as loud as they possibly can, while the crowd moves on.

What's wrong with us?

Imagine a hiker who is led only by the source of food and burns everything behind him. Where will he end up? Somewhere there is no more food ahead, nor behind.

In my previous blogs, I have expressed my idea that we all live in and live by our future projections. Our projections determine our value and actions. All actions have consequences.

Our ecological and economical calamities are direct results our our projections. What do we expect? To be richer and ... nothing else. We are even willing to shorten our life span for wealth.

Our illness is "Everything for Money".

With the paradigm of "everything for money", civilization became a place where lack of money means unfit for survival. The clash between Capitalism and Socialism thus lies in the tolerance of poverty. It is a jigsaw that can never be balanced. On one hand, the government must maximize the national wealth by protecting the rich, but on the other hand, it must also protect the underdog to maintain long-term sustainability because all forms of social inequalities will result in class conflicts inevitably.

In a world where Communism is practically dead, regardless of their self-labeling, all governments shift between Capitalism and Socialism at different times. When they have more wealth to spend or at very dire times, they are "more" socialistic and vice versa.

There is another bigger picture we need to see. We, the whole world, are getting richer, at the expense of consuming our earthly resources. By getting richer and richer, modern societies all depend on a highly elevated standard of living. In a most modern city, the worst poverty still live like kings to many parts of the undeveloped world. The result is that it is getting more and more difficult to lead a "basic" life in such cities. And with the growing importance of cities to National economy, we became "addicted" to wealth. That's why "deflation" is the most scary word for economists and world leaders. To stop becoming "richer" is nothing short of a death penalty.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with being richer. The question is: where are we heading? Is there a limit to this path of wealth?

If our common goal is JUST to get richer and richer and richer and richer, we have got what we have asked for, with the price it carries.

Ancient Chinese wisdom has always warned that there are limits to everything. When such limits are exceeded, it will return to the opposite. Therefore, Chinese wisdom values balance more than anything. To reach this balance, we must know what the upper and lower limits are, or to know who we are in relation to everything higher and lower to us.

Chinese medicine is the best expression of such understanding. While Western medicine tries to "tame" illnesses, Chinese medicine seek to understand the balances between the forces that govern our physical health and to restore it. Illness is not external, it is a loss of internal balance. When the balance is restored, the body is capable of fighting external threats because the body too is a product of the greater balance of nature. In evolutionary terms. we survive because we are fit. Let's not forget, we have survived millions of years before the advent of medicine.

Whenever something tries to be something else, or exceeds its original limits, it simply will not last. That is our calamity. We do not understand our relationships with Nature and one other. We are using Nature to serve our ego, thinking we can somehow get over it. We even fool ourselves into the belief that we could actually move to Mars when Earth is toasted.

We ARE a product of Earth, we are doomed outside of it. To really remove our curses, we must respect the dominance of Nature over us. Nature does not punishes us for being richer. It is our blind lust for wealth that backfires on us.

We need a new projection. "Everything for money" must go. "Money for something" should be in.

What should that "something" be? That is THE question.

Even a child dreams to be a fireman or something. What about us? To be richer? For what? It is a question we need to ask ourselves, as an individual as well as a species.

Expect to die of obesity if taste becomes everything in eating.

WWF Living Planet Report 2008

PLEASE READ THE WWF's REPORT at http://www.panda.org

What do you call a business which never pays its suppliers? And their selling prices do not include raw material costs? Answer: Modern economy.

The root of over-consumption is not defined by how much we consume. It is the difference between our consumptions and our ecological contributions. We can consume like mad IF we can regenerate as much resources with zero pollution.

Oil prices are too high, aren't they? Not at all, If we consider the availability of known oil reserves, 100 times the current price is still a bargain! And, how much a nice wooden furniture would cost us? Or a piece of xerox paper? Without a doubt, whatever price we pay it is not enough to grow the same amount of wood. We paid for everything all right, well, except the raw material.

We must find a way to balance our credit-and-debit with Nature, NOW! "Garbage recycling" and "use less" programs are never sufficient to compensate our economical and population growths, short or long term.

Our economical growth is mainly powered by customization, cheaper prices and bigger consumption volumes. It is only making the situation worse because as more and more natural resources are being extracted, less and less profit margins are left available for the big change. Very few new inventions can really be eco-friendly as well as economical and they are constantly threatened by "even cheaper" prices.

With the wrong incentives, or the lack of right incentives, the majority of us have been trained day in day out to promote consumption through our occupations, on the other hand, we demand cheaper (and more) unnecessary merchandises to sustain a "higher" standard of living as a reward of our hard work, yeah, the hardwork of promoting more consumption！It is nothing but a big loop of self-propelled consumption.

In the grant scale, no consumer can resist the temptation of "better living" over "global ecology". Our occasional acts of self-constraint is not enough to change the bigger picture. After all, without real economical incentives, individual efforts are difficult to administrate or sustain. As least, it would be too slow to save us from an ecological meltdown.

Our worse enemy is therefore the structure of economy inself which engulfs every facets of our lifes.
We need the correct incentives embedded deep into the blood of our economy. i.e. eco is value, is money! It is the only way we can change FROM WITHIN.

Perhaps, we need something like this:
1. A new eco-currency, say #, instead of $, a real trading currency
2. A world eco-bank to manage this money
3. A global eco-committee to determine the eco-currency value for all controlled earthly resources, including water, oil, minerals, wood, forest, farmable lands and etc.
4. Any relevant extractions entails a payment to the eco-bankin terms of eco-currency, e.g. quota-based annual fees and deposits.
5. These eco-money will be redistributed to countries for maintaining and promoting ecology, evaluated by the eco-committee with specific appraisal schemes.
6. Bonus will be given to innovative breakthroughs, somewhat like the Nobel price.
Benefits:
1. Since it is real currency, all countries will strive to earn it as a source of national income. e.g., more farmable land and forest means more income; less extraction and more eco-efforts means surplus. And eco-friendly enterprises will become valued assets of the country and may receive tax-cut as an incentive. Of course, bad eco-management means eco-deficit.
2. Sanctions are relatively easy to adminstrate: any non-confoming countries will not receive national eco-income, and additional tariff will be added temporally or partially for targeted export trading. Other countries which import "illegally" will likewise be penalized.
2. Comparing to regulate individual enterprises, it is much easier to control because earthly resources are limited in terms of category. A tightened domestic licensing scheme can manage most relevant activities.
3. Since eco-costs have been paid for from the begining of all supply chain, there is no need for any further regulations in subsequent production and trading activities. Pollution is something each government needs to self-regulate, in order to earn its eco-income from the eco-bank.

"IT WILL NOT WORK, because..... " Yes, I know that.

Please tell me what can work! We need as much brains as we can use in this subject matter now, or reserve our "intelligence" to hunting animals for food in a not-too-distance future.

How to be happy?

Peace is the fundation of our happiness.

What is peace? It is a psychological state in which we are freed from all worries and frustrations in our pursuit of future projections, like a relaxing tune can help us fall asleep or work more efficiently. We will simply call it “peace” from here on.

With our projective intelligence, “reality” becomes highly hypothetical, even more dream-like than dreams. In dreams we fall back to general intelligence and behave like animals. We do not look too far ahead and have very limited past recollections. Our actions are mainly dictated by our skills, impulses and instincts. We experience our dreams moment by moment and our emotions fluctuate accordingly. In contrast, in our conscious lives we constantly carry numerous long term and short term projections and “momentary experiences” are being unproportionally stretched. So much so that our momentary experiences are preoccupied by the projective contents on our minds, the HERE and NOW becomes more projection-dependent than sensation-dependent. It is a common experience that the most pleasant stimulus would become an nuisance when we are upset. Yet, the lover with a rose under the pouring rain always carries a smile.

If we want to be happy NOW, we need to “project” beyond.

Our capacity for emotions is a product of millions of years of striving to stay alive, a self-rewarding mechanism that guides us to make favourable choices. As a result, we are all seekers of happiness. Whatever we do, we do it for happiness. Even the most self-sacrificing act is driven by personal gratifications.

There are basically two mode of happiness: peace and excitement, including physical and fanciful excitements. If the happiness is brief, it is an excitement and we simply move no to project more. There is no such thing as prolonged happiness. Happiness when prolonged will inevitably and swiftly fade out, and the presence of faith will determine what would remain. If we have faith that it will recur, it becomes a source of peace, e.g. friendships. If we have no faith in its recurrence, it will be a painful reminder of what is gone for good, e.g. divorce. However, if we can pacify our sense of loss, it can become a source of peace again, e.g. childhood. There is no prolonged happiness but unpacified psychological pain CAN last and WILL. A traumatic experience is an haunting torture which disturbs the foundation of the victim’s peace, e.g. loss of significant relationships. It is so painful because it makes it impossible for the victim to fantasize a happy future.

Nothing is more horrible than not being able to fantasize. Raising children is so gratifying because it extends the lifespan and scope of our fantasies. Not only that we can fantasize beyond our own deaths, we also gain a second chance to fantasize for our children the things we failed, or succeeded. To fantasize, we demand peace. Our need for peace is proportion to our craving for fantasies, like the depth of foundation to the height of a building. Peace is reservation in nature. Excess possession is a peace-seeking activity unique to humans because only we can project so much and so far beyond. We all strive to make more money than we spend, otherwise we would feel insecure, won’t we? It is a sad but common picture that we all had worked hard for our families when we were poorer, but found ourselves too busy to spend time with them when are richer. When we are too carry away by our fantasies, we will often neglect the sources of our peace and find ourselves in deep regret after they are gone- often suddenly. “Taking things for granted” is therefore a common (but not necessary) price we pay for our fantasies.

Happiness is as illusive as our hypothetical projections. It has a cloud-like property, that you can identify it from afar but does not notice it from within. This cloud-like nature is caused by the invasion of projections into our momentary experiences. We are so projection-dependent that projections themselves can be more rewarding than the actual outcome. The joy of shopping is a good example. We fantasize that our lives would be nicer if we had the merchandise in possession. This excitement will fade with the act of payment and many of these merchandises often end up not utilized. The craving for possession can be more delightful than the actual possession indeed. Likewise, courtship unleashes our most romantic fantasies which are very unlikely to come true. “Falling” in love is always much more gratifying than “fallen” in love. Nobody has done anything wrong when we found our passions gone with our steady relationships. Successful relationships are prolonged happiness and therefore can only be “peaceful” instead of “fanciful”.

What is human intelligence?

Human intelligence has outgrew our environmental challenges, like the tails of peacocks. Intelligence is common in Nature. It can be define as the behavioural tactics which aim at gaining survival advantages against the competition. As a rule of thumb, we can compare the intellectual level of a species by the probability of mutative behaviours (excluding genetic mutations) under the same matrix of stimulus. The more spontaneous behavioural deviations observed among individuals, the more intellectual the species is. Human intelligence is simply an extension of such intelligence marked by its outstanding capability of making hypothetical projections into the future which in turns enhances the diversity of our behavioural responses. We will call it projective intelligence, in contrast to general intelligence.

All forms of life including viruses acquired different levels of intelligence. Since we have no way of studying non-human consciousness yet, we will put aside the issue of whether these behaviours are conscious or not. Intelligence can be understood as a mechanism which takes in sensations and memories and yields behaviours and more memories. The resulting behaviours must distinguished from Reflexive behaviours which are instinctual, not intellectual. General intelligence inevitably involves a different degree of anticipation of the future. Fight or flight decision-making is a primitive intellectual behaviour which entails an assessment of the “potential” danger encountered. Linguistic abilities were evolved to communicate ,and even preserve, these projections within a community or a species. e.g. bees dance to communicate food source and primates cry to warn incoming threats. The level of linguistic complexity of a species is therefore a very good indicator of its level of intellectual and social sophistication.

For humans, the initial manifestation of intelligence was just a matter of better ambush strategies or better hunting tools, like what we can still find in other primates today. However, for some divine or natural reasons, our projective capacity has grown unproportionally and became so abstractly hypothetical that our intellect can process hypothetical projections in infinite loops, instead of depending on sensations and memories alone. The Game theory is the best example to demonstrate this amazing power of our projective capabilities – what would you do if you knew they knew what you knew that they knew….. Evidently, not other species on Earth could comprehend the complexity involved, let alone solving it with mathematical equations! It has been proven beyond any doubt that primates can manage to communicate symbolically, but it remains that they cannot project as far and abstract as we do. Linguistic capability is driven by the intellectual capacity, not vice versa. The difference between projective intelligence and general intelligence is sheer “intellectual”, not genetic or biological. It is a matter of “how”, not “what”; software instead of hardware. Just like there is no physical evidence to justify the differences between running Linux and Windows on the same PC, neither can we find any distinctive “human” genes in our DNA. Recent studies has found that the RNA is what makes the difference between similar branch of species. RNA is not the building blocks, it is the program to control how DNA data are used, like the same Lego bricks can build endless toys.

With the evolution of our projective intelligence, our linguistic capabilities also co-developed into a complex system of artificial symbols and concepts that allow us to envision a shared hypothetical future and to preserve technology more effectively within a community. The power of Einstein’s thought experiments is no independent act of genius. Instead, it is a fruitful harvest from millions of years of coping with hypothetical situations ever since our ancestors emerged. With this unique capability, we gradually became the supreme ruler on Earth.

Like in the game theory, something perplexing happened when we turn this projective intelligence inward. “I think therefore I am” is also “I think therefore I worry”. The more future-conscious we become, the more we worry. All animals share the instinctive fear for harm, but humans also fear for death and our own wildest intangible projections. Fear for harm is a defence mechanism which triggers a fight or flight decision. Worries are hypothetical and no tangible things can really pacify them. It takes faith. We will remain restless until we can find “peace” by faith. Manic-depressive patients are typical victims of their own unpacified projections. Peace is the worry-killer which enable us to project positively.

For those who care about human destiny on Earth

After we have successfully evolved to conquer all competitors and threats, Nature has became our next target of conquest. As what we have done to other survival threats before, the entire history of civilization can be summed up as our attempt to combat Nature. With the aid of modern technology, the mode of combat has elevated to the level of mass-destruction.

It is time for us to recognize that if there is a survival threat between Nature and us, it can only be us ourselves. It is obvious that our "achievement" has jeopardized our ecological balance and thus our own existence. It will be the saddest prank we can do to ourselves if we should give up on Earth and waste our meagre resources on colonizing an unfamiliar distant planet. We are not the first and certainly not the last human civilization on Earth. Like any other species, we either continue to evolve successfully or we will be gone. Before we fantasize our grand intergalactic expeditions, we must first learn how to transcend our aggressive nature, befriend with Nature and with one another. Without securing a sustainable existence HERE, there is no THERE to go.

Brother: I am going to the property agency tomorrow.
We had better move out of here.
Sister: Why?
Brother: The water pipes are clogged in this building,
and the electric cables must be replaced.
Sister: Other tenants aren't going to pay for that.
Brother: Exactly! Besides, a nasty fire just broke out on
the second floor and is spreading fast.
Sister: How terrible! Shall we start packing now?

I often imagine that Nature is an enterprise and we the employees. Whatever we take from Nature is our salary. We can spend it as we wish, but let’s not forget good employees must contribute to make themselves worthy. We must then ask, are we a worthy employee? If Nature could speak, the answer would no doubt be, “You are fired!”

The growth of economy is the sum of growths in possession and wealth of individuals. The funny thing is, it is not a zero sum game! In the global scale, we are all getting richer, isn't it nice? Have we ever wondered where does all that come from? For every merchandise we bought, certain natural resources are being consumed. Sadly, the money we paid is wholly devoured by the commercial parties on the supply chain. Nature is rarely on the list of beneficiaries, and even when it does, she is at most receiving a humble tip of grace with a “clean up the mess and leave us alone". The richer we are, the more poor Nature is. That is the constitution of our "growing" economy. Eversince the invention of engines, we have been wiping the credit card issued by the "Bank of Nature" like there is no tomorrow. It looks like the banker has finally decided it is time to collect the debt.

Our behaviours are products of millions of years of evolution. But the emergence of modern civilization has practically cut outselves off from the mechanism of natural selection. The sick and the weak are all being taken of equally and only the "uncivilized" are being rejected. So much so that civilization has become the prime factor of evolution and our fate rests in our own hands now. To be or not to be, that is "our" question. Nature does not give second chances to the unfit. Nature will sustain. She always has and always will. She will heal herself in no time after we have tipped the ecological balance and wiped ourselves out from the surface of the Earth, leaving only the plastic bags and nuclear wastes to tell our tragic story for eons to come.

There is no LED clock to show a countdown, but we all know too well that it is imminent by the signs. If we want to avoid a pre-mature undoing and prolong our existence as long as Nature permits, our arrogance and hostility against Nature must be replaced by the most solemn respect! Transcend or be extinct!

In subsequent blogs I will try to explore the distinctive nature of being human, especially our unique "projective" intelligence which enables us to construct a hypothetical reality on top of the "real" reality. This projective capacity is the root of our current predicament. By understanding our true nature, perhaps we will know better how to facilitate the changes needed for our self-salvation.

I have no intention at all to convince anyone about anything I believe and I dare not believe I am wiser than anyone in any way. My only wish is to reach out to people who share my concern and that they would allow my participation in making the change before it is too late - if it is not already too late.