Perhaps the defining characteristic of advanced civilisation is what it throws out to keep its garden neat?

Primitive societies, ancient and modern, seem more in harmony with Nature than civilisation

Why only “seem”? What does it mean to be in harmony with nature? What is Nature? What are we?

See this older conversation:

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/07/22/is-humanity-unnatural/

I just feel that we need to get more in touch with human nature at its best, which is not fostered systematically within civilisation.

Some would argue I think that civilization IS human nature. Seriously though, what is civilization except the careful fostering and management of human nature into acceptable channels. Civilization may just be catching wind in windmills, if you catch my drift!

Without any proof, I tend to feel that civilisation robs those who live outside of civilisation.

I have a tentative analogy to share based on some gardening research I have been doing. They talk in certain books about how you need to bring in outside fertilizer, because your garden can’t realistically sustain itself. By that I think they specifically mean if you plant lots of crops and harvest them, you remove with the crops the nutrients they pulled from the soil. But they aren’t very clear on whether you couldnt feasibly strike a balance where you only remove some of the crops and leave or compost the rest. It cuts to the heart of whether or not value is always removed from the system regardless. It may just be a faulty understanding though

Tim I think you’ve got a chicken vs. egg thing going.

Well, of course! It’s called a conversation starter. I’m trying to reframe familiar concepts so that they introduce elements foreign to our thinking in order to allow us to see now possibilities and solutions.

We may find a way to a different homeostatic state where human culture is once again in balance with its environment,

GOOD! Thats the kind of attitude I want to hear!

but we’re not in it now.

Why not? What’s your evidence? How do we know that what we’re doing, what seems to us like chaos and turmoil isn’t part of nature’s plan? James Lovelock said that we are the nervous system of Gaia or something similar. Why can’t we trust Gaia to use us wisely? Not trusting ourselves is in essence not trusting the planet or the God which spawned us!

Given the fundamental inconsistency of eternal growth and finite resources, and that having a civilization without growth is a problem that appears to be insoluable,

What if we don’t accept that as a “given”? What if we accept that for what it is: a hypothesis which correlates to certain perceived patterns in the observable world. From these patterns many different intepretations are possible.

Given the fundamental inconsistency of eternal growth and finite resources, and that having a civilization without growth is a problem that appears to be insoluable, the collapse of civilization seems to be an inevitability. by postponing this collapse you only increase our population overshoot which means the correction will also overshoot by a greater amount.

But don’t you hear when you say it just how inhuman that kind of thinking is? Do you want your individual life to be judged by such a method of thinking?

I value life, I don’t care whether the universe does or not.

And now THAT is a human value! And that’s precisely the door I was wanting to wedge open with my arguments. We have to make a stand somewhere and it seems to me that it ought to be on human values. Which I realize is a tremendously broad statement, right?

The “saving of life” argument arises from civilisation’s distorted objectives. Technologists and scientists will always seek ways to justify their vocations. They do what they do because governments or capitalism finance them to do so. “Quality of life” arguments are a by-product of the distortions generated by science and technology.

But is it really better to “go native”? In certain ways we could argue that it is.

As I write this comment, my wife is watching a TV programme about a child born without and immune system who is being raised in a “bubble” so that he cannot get infections. Lots of pundits and people emotionally attached to this child argued one way or another. I made one brief comment when the programme started: “This is a rich people’s dilemma”. I meant that in any primitive society the child would die early and that would be that.

Without any proof, I tend to feel that civilisation robs those who live outside of civilisation. Of course I am within that boundary looking out. I don’t have a romantic idea of “going native” nor do I think that any primitive societies past or present provide complete role models worth imitating. I just feel that we need to get more in touch with human nature at its best, which is not fostered systematically within civilisation. there are a few pockets of exceptions. I just visited my grandchild whose parents are educating him at a Rudolf Steiner school. I was impressed by it.

Death (or nature, if you want) is responsible for death. Death is more natural than life - if only because quantitatively, there is more death than life. Death is also guaranteed for all things that are alive. Life, on the other hand, is not guaranteed for all things that are dead.

Tim I think you’ve got a chicken vs. egg thing going. Nothing which is dead could be so unless it was first alive. Life IS(was) guaranteed for the dead, being a preexisting requirement for death. Perhaps Life IS “more natural” since life replicates. Can death replicate? No. Score 1 for Life.

Both share common underlying pinnings of existence vs. non-existence. Does non-existence = death? Who knows (but I doubt it)? Perhaps Death has the upper hand since while death = absence of physical life, the reverse is not true. Death is present amid life. Score 1 for Death. Tie game…

But on to the crash of civilization … same thing. Does Civilization equate with polluting, industrialized corporate-run global destruction? Yes and no.

Would humans benefit from all the captains of capitalistic civilized industry suddenly going away? Perhaps the jihadist muslims would!

I figure, like death vs life, that civilized suffering vs. non-suffering is a wash. Does the individual benefit more by being a part of, or not part of, human culture/society/civilization?

I dont think there’s an answer. Unless it’s for sale…

Physics’ most basic law, the principle of conservation of energy, that says “~energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only be converted from one form into another,” doesn’t have to be violated in order to get free energy.

This isn’t the law that is violated by free energy. It’s the second law of thermodynamics. The issue isn’t creation/destruction of energy. It’s the creation of usable energy that’s the problem. Energy is only useful to a given end if it’s organized in some way. Disorganized energy is useless to us. It takes energy to organize energy.

We usually “use” energy in its mechanical form, obtained from electromagnetic energy. Mechanical energy is lost (i.e. converted to unusable heat) through friction. Most generators involve mechanical energy. I think the newer “free energy” ideas involve using generators that are almost purely electromagnetic (in a way that I don’t really understand) so that no energy is lost through friction.

By the way, just because something is moving doesn’t mean it has “energy”. Energy is defined as relative velocity (sort of). So energy is used or gained when you change the velocity of something.

On the issue of life: life is a boundary state between states that represent death. Life is homeostasis, an extremely fine balance between competing systems, any one of which would “kill” the body if allowed to dominate. In my view, civilization (in its current form) is a system that has come to dominate the larger “body” and now threatens to destabilize the homeostasis of the planet’s ecology. We may find a way to a different homeostatic state where human culture is once again in balance with its environment, but we’re not in it now.

I agree that if civilization crashed (at least right now) the ensuing chaos would engulf the world, spreading misery and destruction far and wide. So I’m not really looking forward to a civilization-destroying apocalypse. But the alternatives (fascist, genocidal “management” of the earth and its organisms) don’t look so great either. What to do?

Who cares how many people would live if civilization crashed? They’d all wish they were dead.

Yeah, just like all those who lived before civilisation. And every other living creature. They all wish they were dead. Like those poor wretched dolphins, with no economy to speak of, doing whatever they want. I don’t know why they keep breathing.

Quality of life is subjective.

The psychological glue of civilization is nothing more than Stockholm Syndrome.

On the other hand by acquiescing to the collapse we all but eliminate the possibility of the miracle solution.

As to the question of the value of life you seem to be attempting to find some objective platform from which to judge it and have chosen a characteristic of (imho) rather dubious relevance: their relative abundance. as I lean toward a more relativist perspective I would suggest that no such objective perspective exists but that life increases the chaos in the universe and that makes my life more interesting. I value life, I don’t care whether the universe does or not.

I’ve racked my mind on this one for some time, and the idea that I’ve arrived at is, a crash of civilization, depending on how it plays out, could very well be the absolute worst enactment, if one values life. If civilization crashed, wouldn’t that increase the odds that more destructive wars could break out, and dictators set up in order to “motivate” people back into erecting civilization again. Under this dictatorship, would we be using even more polluting energy, over-exploiting more resources, causing more denuded landscape, thus increasing the fragility of life?

However, equally true, if civilization continues, life, at least on this physical plane of existence, could be radically altered. Global climate change, of course, would probably be at the top of the list. However, stepping back even more, …even if civilization somehow manages to become a completely sustainable closed-loop manifestation, …there’s always the chance that the continuation of our species could lead to catastrophic collapses for the earth, or even the universe. What would happen if we’re in the lab monkeying around with the smallest bits of quantum matter itself, and we all of a sudden stumbled into a situation where we’ve created a self-replicating, nearly indestructible, material goo. Because, in fact, the human race is actually trying to create this, in case you didn’t know

IE: …biomimicry &/or nanotechnology leading to self-replicators converting all carbon matter into self-replicating goo; with the “intention” that the goo could be used to print matter itself as if physical reality was the ink… Which could be much much much worse than the crash of civilization ever could be, …that would have made that potential possible.

Self-replicating goo, in which keeps expanding & expanding, eventually blanketing the entire earth and continuing on into outer-space, where it rapidly begins to multiple itself until it fills up the entire observable universe… Or what if one of these times in the particle accelerators, we smash the wrong things together and create a black hole, which then wipes the planet out of material existence in a flash instant… or what if we build time machines, like Doctor Who; go back in time to monkeywrench a single event thus obliterating an entire history out of existence. I could go on listing more & more, but this should be enough for anyone to scare themselves: http://www.exitmundi.nl

However, if civilization collapsed, and dictators erected, and the fragility of life was enhanced with more denuded landscapes, propelled by the dictatorship itself; …how would free energy technologies, such as Steorn’s potential magnetic energy invention, flourish? Steorn placed an advertisement in The Economist (IE: Dead flattened trees) …. (IE: within civilization) …. (IE: could that’ve happened in a dictatorship?)

I’d postulate that it’s impossible to judge wether or not the immediate collapse of civilization would be beneficial to the long-term sustainability of life, because there are way too many factors at play. Anyone who says differently is either lying to themselves, or are actually psychics able to read the future. Though, psychic readings of the future may well be psychokinetics masquerading as future predictions (IE: the belief in a particular future could be feeding/propelling it into existence).

http://www.steorn.net
http://www.steornwatch.com
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8567528697573826342
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1858134,00.html

As for free-energy nay-sayers; as a philosopher, I never did understand the so-called limitations of “free energy.” Physics’ most basic law, the principle of conservation of energy, that says “~energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only be converted from one form into another,” doesn’t have to be violated in order to get free energy.

I can prove this with one extremely simple experiment… Jump up and down… where does the energy of the impact go? Yes, silly, but we need to consume food, in order to live, in order to jump up and down. However, there’s this stupid assumption that many physicists hold for some reason, that the earth has no freely available energy… Isn’t the earth awash in gravity as it spins ~65,000 mph, within a galaxy that’s spinning ~489,600 mph. Didn’t some of the earliest “free energy” systems that were developed use waterfalls (water which uses gravity, which hits an object to make it move). The energy isn’t being created from nothing, but it is creating “free energy,” by utilizing gravity that otherwise would not be utilized… So too can pressurized dynamo floors be used to capture unutilized energy from our footsteps hitting the ground, propelled by gravity, in busy cities; or anywhere… So too we can capture still more energy from various other energetic forces, like magnetics going about it’s magnetic day to day fluctuating interactions with it’s surroundings, while using gravity.

and just think, that’s not even getting into the undetectible energy that supposedly makes up over 80% of the universe that is wrapped up into one gigantically vague term, “Dark Matter,” which supposedly needs to be in existence in order for gravity to work at all… As a philosopher, if I were a physicist, I wouldn’t understand how I could be so sure of the theoretical idea that free energy is impossible, especially without having done any scientifically rigorous experiments to prove such a concept…