Gaia

 A follow-up to our discussion of mind-uploading, meat-eating, etc.

LISTEN. It was great Zooming last night with the whole far-flung family, celebrating Older Daughter's 25th birthday. When she was a toddler she once flung coins in the fountain outside the old Davis-Kidd bookstore in Green Hills and wished "we would all be together." And there we were last night, together again though she's in LA and her sister's in the 'boro.

Then the 2020 MLB season ended. For the record, I called it: LA in 6. Was hoping for 7, though. One of their stars was pulled after testing positive for COVID, and then joined the celebration. Unmasked, partly.

Will there be a Spring Training? Hard to see past Nov.3, with the larger fate of the human game so uncertain. I'll still be counting the days 'til pitchers and catchers are supposed to report, starting now. 110...

How many days 'til we can report springtime for Gaia? In Environmental Ethics today we wonder: If the earth is a "living organism" is that metaphorical or literal? Does it matter? What part of the organism are humans?

The first time I taught the course in '06 we read The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock's second book exploring his controversial Gaia hypothesis that "Earth functions as a self-regulating system" and "living meta-organism." This view

conceives of the Earth, including the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere and upper layers of rock, as a single living super-organism, regulating its internal environment much as an animal regulates its body temperature and chemical balance. But now, says Lovelock, that organism is sick. It is running a fever born of the combination of a sun whose intensity is slowly growing over millions of years, and an atmosphere whose greenhouse gases have recently spiked due to human activity. Earth will adjust to these stresses, but on time scales measured in the hundreds of millennia. It is already too late, Lovelock says, to prevent the global climate from “flipping” into an entirely new equilibrium state that will leave the tropics uninhabitable, and force migration to the poles. The Revenge of Gaia explains the stress the planetary system is under and how humans are contributing to it, what the consequences will be, and what humanity must do to rescue itself. g'r

Yesterday in CoPhi we were talking about Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, and the ethical/ecological case for veganism. Lovelock: “I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.”

Lovelock turned 101 in July ('The biosphere and I are both in the last 1% of our lives') and celebrated with the paperback release of his new book, The Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. “The experience of watching your garden grow gives you some idea of how future AI systems will feel when observing human life.” Has he been talking to Ray Kurzweil? 

He argues that the anthropocene - the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies - is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age - the novacene - has already begun.

New beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems. They will think 10,000 times faster than we do and they will regard us as we now regard plants - as desperately slow acting and thinking creatures. But this will not be the cruel, violent machine takeover of the planet imagined by sci-fi writers and film-makers. These hyper-intelligent beings will be as dependent on the health of the planet as we are. They will need the planetary cooling system of Gaia to defend them from the increasing heat of the sun as much as we do. And Gaia depends on organic life. We will be partners in this project.

It is crucial, Lovelock argues, that the intelligence of Earth survives and prospers. He does not think there are intelligent aliens, so we are the only beings capable of understanding the cosmos. Maybe, he speculates, the novacene could even be the beginning of a process that will finally lead to intelligence suffusing the entire cosmos.

Hmm. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Lovelock is clearly a sort of Humean, reason as slave of the passions etc., but without so many skeptical scruples.

I don't know about the "novacene" and all that, but I do hope I'm still dreaming incredible dreams of the (more-or-less) human/post-human future when I'm in my last 1%. I hope we all are.

And I hope I'm a cheerful centenarian then, too.