the path to a self

Imagination gives us an ability of seeing ourselves from the outside to realize how we come across to us. If this kind of amazing recursive perception is (possibly) unique to human being, that might be a critical point in evolution of humanoid. Imagine what was it to imagine yourself for the very first time! Now we could imagine ourselves in the past (remember) and then use the past-to present extrapolation to imagine ourselves in the future – first 2st-person (point of view) dreams.

To do that we had to get at the beginning some important abilities – to have first conscious predictions and ability to imagine alternative reality.

When we dream and extrapolate our imaginary future based on memories, our minds build the time-independent (or salable) sampled (in neural system) structure for subset of subjective realities. Essentially from this point we could build new alternative realities. At the very beginning it was only extrapolation of existing reality (to predict and get evolutional competitive advantage), but then the extended deviation in prediction caused outliers – imagination of something totally not related to reality. What was that first time? Maybe two-headed dangerous predator was giving a birth to a fear of imaginary? Maybe the will of getting a mate produced an image of some beautiful creature – first dreams of love ?

These days, the animals “actively recall themselves” and not just respond to a recorded past (“state machine”) as we know it happens in dreams, when they imagine themselves running, they are moving legs.

And so it begins – the path to a self.

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Recovery Waves

The concept of Recovery Waves is showing a probable scenario of ecosystem evolution for next hundreds of years. It is the kind of “rolling back” of annihilation waves that we have caused throughout human history.

First Annihilation Wave Catastrophe

About 50,000 years ago, there was the biggest and fastest nature annihilation disaster in a world history for 65 million years (since  dinosaurs were destroyed). The flaring expansion of homo-sapiens was the cause for this phenomena. Although back then they were hunters-gatherers only, the damage they have caused was the extermination of nearly half of terrestrial mammal species that lived prior to the migration.

Second Annihilation Wave Catastrophe

Agricultural evolution and enhanced migration of humans brought another disaster – the second annihilation wave. For thousands of years, humans went farther and farther to islands, to Australia and the Americas, spreading their settlements, burning forests to free up lands for agriculture, hunting and multiplying. The evidence we are gathering is not only archaeological as in the first wave, but since this wave was until recent times, we actually can follow up on the last migrations to distant islands such as Madagascar and New Zealand. Every time when homo sapiens went to any new area, the variability of the animal population in the area was immediately and dramatically decreased. In Madagascar until human arrival there were huge Elephant Birds, Giant Subfossil lemurs, and others that disappeared with our first appearance.

Size of Aepyornis Maximus (Elephant Bird) (center, in purple) compared to a human, an ostrich (second from right, in maroon), and some non-avian theropod dinosaurs. Each grid line is one meter in height (by Matt Martyniuk)

 This is the same picture we see over and over again all over the earth and throughout the whole human history.  

Life Trends of mankind

Is life of mankind improving? Do we become more optimistic? What is the rate of change? Are we depressed? Are we happy? Are we going to have more problems in the future then ever? The best way to know it is as usual just to look at the data.

Thanks to Google for exposure of this data. Our main tools are going to be Google Trends for short term analysis and Ngram Viewer for deeper and more general view into human behavior change.

Happiness:

Are we happy? Are we happier ever? Are we going to be happy tomorrow? Let’s check!

Human interface modeling for communication trends – Part Three (Model-driven applications: Motoric, Touch, Literacy, Content View and Sum)

Intro

This is a third and the last part of the article, that is about applications of last three human communication channels that I am talking about – Motoric, Touch and Literacy. To understand the model there would be a need to get through a first part and to get interesting insight into Audio and Visual human communication channels there is a second part of the article. Lots of important questions for entrepreneurs, Interaction designers, system architects and other fellows that care about people as part of their technology.

Human interface modeling for communication trends – Part Two (Model-driven applications: Audio and Visual)

This is a second part of the article I am working on that is providing actual applications of the model. You can find here examples of existing products and usages as well as some possible directions of communication evolution or get some inspiration.  To understand what the #$!% am I talking about, it is recommended to read a first part that describes the model. Enjoy!

Human interface modeling for communication trends – Part One (Model)

Intro

The article is about proposed modeling of human interface and communication channels that are describing lots of technological trends up until today. The model is giving a structuralized perception that might help to come with new technologies and would make our world a better place to be. I have spent on it several days. Hope you like it. Comments are much appreciated. The article includes two parts – Model Description and Model Application. Here comes a part one.

Post-communication era

…What would be a post-communication era after we’ve got close to ideal communication between all people? Then we would stop finally thinking about how we communicate and start thinking more about what we communicate. Only then, when we are optimally close, we would finally realize that the reason that we thought we are communicating Knowledge, Emotions and Will is orthogonal to the real one. Only then, when we know and feel in the deepest way all that we have to, we would understand that communication is not a support for other needs, but fundamental entity by itself. Only then we would understand that connections between us like between cells in the brain are the essence of our human being. With this new answer our children’s children are going to start working on communication content definition… from the beginning.

… A part of article I am writing about “Human Interface Modeling for communication trends” (doing for myself). A pretty cool one and helping to see the human communication in a new light. I am planning to finish it soon and start making it shorter (currently ten pages of text). Still considering to publish it in parts…