Lightning Talk

Tony SmithMelbourne Less Wrong

15 November 2015

Seeing time as a product of knowledge systems

Today’s presentation:obsoleting core framings

Preliminary explorationsMeaning oflife, mind &cyberspace

Consequences

Lightning start to a much bigger storm

• Any claim that “only humans …” is most likely wrong

• Technologies for knowledge sharing (ref. Bill Hall)

• Pre-literate base set included:• Uses, dangers and behaviours of plants and animals,

irrelevance of others noted to avoid revisiting• Places (songlines), calendar (astronomy)• Own kind, Law, genealogy (outbreeding)

• Maintained by ceremony, induction (secret business)

• Colonial incomprehension due to assumed religiosity

Old white male, white collar hegemony

• Our planet Earth is spherical, not flat, in orbit around ordinary star

• Microscopes reveal microstructure, living cells, bacteria, vaccines

• Elements, atoms, electro-magnetism, subatomic particles

• All life has common ancestry, genetics, DNA

• Buried fossils, deep geological time, plate tectonics

• Milky Way is ordinary galaxy, expanding universe, Big Bang

• Calculus, mass production, energy, transport, infotech, finance

Enlightenment?

• Trade in Trepang/sea cucumber with Macassan fishermen, pearls, Australian interior, crocodile skins

• Repulsed initial invasions by British pastoralists

• After mission imposed, became valued workers

• Post-colonial policy for government workers to learn Yolŋu Matha abandoned, subsequent ignorance

• Need own ‘secret’ language to grok academic English

• Yothu Yindi and the Garma Festival

• No time left to talk about elephants

Yolŋu nation of northeast Arnhem Land

Economy emerges in Society Economy supervenes Society

Society emerges in Environment Society supervenes EnvironmentEconomic processes run a million times faster than Environmental

Imagine reframing your worldview to accept that the only time that exists is the instantaneous now determining the next now which will succeed it.

Questions?

Related Reading Bill Hall: Application Holy Wars or a New Renaissance? Lynne Kelly: Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies Colin Hales: The Revolutions of Scientific Structure Richard Trudgen: Why Warriors Lie Down and Die John Bradley with Yanuwa families: Singing Saltwater Country Carl Safina: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel