Quoted Text

No White House brain drain: Obama launches project to study human mind
By Cheryl K. Chumley
The Washington Times
Monday, February 18, 2013

Hollywood could have a field day with a new Big Brother conspiracy theory.

The White House has announced a 10-year study on the inner workings of the human brain, akin to the Human Genome Project’s research into genetics.

The research, called the Brain Activity Map project, will encompass studies of federal agencies, foundations and an unspecified number of neuroscientists and nanoscientists, the Boston Globe reports.

The mission?

To study the billions of neurons in humans’ brains and learn what exactly leads to certain perceptions, actions and even levels of consciousness, the report continues...................................>>>>...........................>>>>.................Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com.....tudy-/#ixzz2LM5Y264K
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

Quoted from Box A Rox

The project holds some promise to help cure the usually incurable disease of Conservativeism.

The human brain in it's normal healthy state produces a Liberal view... but when the brain suffers from certain
defects... it reverts to it's primitive Conservative Brain, a degenerative process that is to date, incurable.

Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121101105003.htm

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Growing Discontent

The fight over involuntary commitment during the 1980s was in some ways separate from the Reagan agenda. But it was fortuitous since it coincided with the administration's desire to dismantle the liberal era reforms. However to understand why groups made committment an issue in the 1980s, we have to take a step back and look at reforms that occurred during the 1960s.

During the early 1960s a series of initiatives designed to reform the mental health system were passed. At issue was the system of state run hospitals for the mentally ill, which were increasingly perceived as inhumane and, with the help of new medicat ions, rather unnecessary for large portions of the patient population. In 1961, the Joint Commission on Mental Illness released Action for Mental Health, calling for the integration of the mentally ill into the general public with the aid of Commun ity Mental Health Centers. In 1963, the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers instituted the centers, but due to the financial drain of the Vietnam War during the 1960s and the financial crisis of the 1970s, the program was not fully funded.1 The result was the release of patients into an environment lacking the Community Mental Health Centers to adequately treat them (Becker and Schulberg, 1976; DeLeonardis and Mauri, 1992; Hollingsworth, 1994; Rachlin, 1974; Rachlin et al, 1975; Saathoff et al, 1992; Shwed, 1978, 1980; Talbott, 1992; Worley and Lowery, 1988;).

By the start of the Carter administration in 1977, involuntary commitment had been restricted to those who were deemed as potentially dangerous to themselves or, perhaps more significantly, those around them.2 Typically, the commitment had to be sponsored by a family member and/or ordered by the court. A result of this policy was that the mentally ill patient who refused treatment typically did not receive any at all. If the patient had lost contact with family members, she or he would not be committed unless found to be a threat by the court. Often, those arrested ended up in jail rather than in treatment if they had not been found to be a threat but had committed a crime (Abramson, 1972; Conrad and Schneider, 1980). On e result was a high degree of stress and frustration experienced by the relatives of the patient. Throughout the 1970s, family members organized with the purpose of correcting a policy that they perceived was wrong.

Professional organizations also joined the backlash against the liberal era reforms of commitment regulations. One obvious reason for this is self-interest. When some mentally ill patients do not receive treatment, mental health professionals have lost (or never gained) a potential client. These professionals as a group have much to gain in terms of patients and income if the laws governing involuntary commitment are expanded to include those patients who refuse help but do not pose a serious threat to themselves or the people around them.

Perhaps more important than self-interest is the burden that deinstitutionalization put on mental health practitioners. Time spent in court took away time spent with patients. Moreover, the medical profession saw themselves as being second-guessed by o thers outside the medical community: lawyers, judges, policy makers, etc. The treatments that psychiatrists and psychologists viewed as necessary for the well being of the patient often could not be applied because of the legal rights of the patient. Invo luntary commitment would force those who needed care into the hospitals and force patients to keep appointments and take medication. Without commitment, these things were more difficult for the practitioners (La Fond and Durham, 1992, 112-13).

Critics of Community Mental Health charged that in the rush to shrink the state hospital population, many patients were released prematurely (Robitscher, 1976; Yarvis et al, 197. Some patients went off their medications after being released into the community. The criteria of "dangerousness" for civil commitment also meant that some patients who needed treatment but were not a danger could not be committed. As a result, patients whose behavior was considered odd by the community in which they lived were increasingly arrested for bothersome and minor infractions such as vagrancy. These individuals were thus detained in the criminal justice system rather than the mental health system (Abramson, 1972; Conrad and Schneider, 1980).

Groups representing mentally ill patients also organized, but generally did not have the success that groups representing their families and practitioners had. Organizations representing patients, such as the Mental Patients Liberation Front and the Na tional Alliance for the Mentally Ill, lacked the political clout of larger organizations and tended not to be as well funded as the other organizations. Phillip Armour (1989) summarized the situation in this way:

In sum, congressmen do not confront well-funded lobbyists for the mentally disordered in the halls of the Capitol, they typically do not receive large contributions from the residents of state and county mental hospitals or the clients of com munity service centers, and they do not have to calculate the electoral risks of offending a multimillion member association of former mental patients. (187-
Although many groups were interested in seeing reform, there was a general lack of coordination between them. In addition, the interests of each groups shaded in and out of congruence. No two groups saw the situation the same way. This essentially left the political arena open to corporate interests and other well funded organis ations interested in mental health and capable of lobbying the government (e.g., the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, etc.). Still, the discontent of the practitioners, families, and patients dealing with the mental health system led to new hearings on mental health care policy.

Shortly after taking office in 1977, President Carter appointed the President's Commission on Mental Health. This commission was charged with assessing the particulars of mental health services, and then making specific suggestions on how things should be changed. The commission collected data by holding regional hearings in order to hear testimony from professionals, relatives of the mentally ill, and other politicians. This technique has been utilized as a politically conspicuous means of proving tha t action is being taken, but often has little merit in terms of scientific methodology.3 The final reports from the commission and its task forces were characterized in this way by Levine (1981: 179):

The quality of the Task Panel reports vary widely; apparently its members understood their instructions very differently. The reports range from very brief ones, which look as if they had been written by someone on the plane on the way to the meeting, to well-thought out analytic reviews. Some consist of little more than a list of recommendations. No more than a third of the Task Panel reports would pass muster as scholarly documents. The preparation of the reports was sloppy. Many are poorly written. Citations made in the body of the report do not appear in the bibliographies. Citations for key points are often to unpublished sources. To be fair, it should be stated that some of the Task Panels did not expect their reports to be published.
The commission made special references to political interest groups throughout both the task panel reports as well as the final recommendations. After the reports were completed and the Congress attempted to codify these recommendations into law, the l obbying organizations continued to be a presence throughout the process. Some groups were by nature opposed to each other: the National Council of Community Mental Health Centers (NCCMHC) and the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directo rs (NASMHPD), for instance. The former of these groups represents the interests of community mental health centers that would benefit by expanding these services. The latter group represents the directors of state mental hospitals. They would benefit by i ncreases in the funding of such hospitals and reinstitutionalization (Armour, 1989, 185). On this point, the commission searched for a compromise.

The final report of the commission to President Carter contained the recommendations upon which the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 was based. Despite the methodological flaws of the earlier report, the act was considered a landmark in mental health care policy. The key to the proposals included an increase in funding for Community Mental Health Centers and continued federal government support for such programs. But this ran counter to the financial goals of the Reagan administration, these were of c ourse to reduce federal spending, reduce social programs, and transfer responsibility of many if not most government functions to the individual states. So, the law signed by President Carter was rescinded by Ronald Reagan on August 13, 1981. In accordance with the New Federalism and the demands of capital, mental health policy was now in the hands of individual states.

Settling for Smaller Reforms

In the aftermath of the non-implementation of the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, the power of the various interest groups had been further weakened. Clearly, the groups that represented the patients themselves were the weakest. Such groups, represe nting the targets of involuntary commitment, tended to be opposed to the easing of commitment requirements. But facing interest groups representing mental health professionals and patients' families, the patient's rights groups found themselves underfunde d and understaffed.

The interests of others fared somewhat better. Pressure from organizations (some of which represented the families of the mentally ill) lead to new legislation in several states that made it easier to commit a mentally ill patient involuntarily. As noted earlier, much of this pressure emerged because the current underfunded system was not providing adequate supports for patients or family. Families of the mentally ill were genuinely concerned about loved ones who they felt were not receiving adequate care. Also, families who were responsible for providing care for their mentally ill members could not support the burden which came from care provision without adequate institutional supports. From the position of the family member, deinstitutionalization appeared more like an attempt by the government to download responsibility. In this context a loosening of commitment standards would, it was thought, force patients to receive care and (hopefully) reduce the burden on the family.

Mental health professionals were also concerned that patients were not receiving adequate care. Estimates of the homeless population ranged from 250 to 500 thousand people (Dear and Wolch, 1987; Jencks, 1994; Rossi, 1989; Wright, 1989). Of these, appro ximately a third were mentally ill (Rossi, 1989). In many cases, such mentally ill patients were arrested for vagrancy and other minor infractions and were processed by the criminal justice system. Concerned that this population was receiving no treatment at all, mental health workers advocated involuntary commitment as a means of getting the mentally ill homeless into treatment.

With such activism, a coalition between the neoconservatives who opposed liberal reforms in general and the interest groups mentioned above was possible. In the absence of the comprehensive reforms planned in the Mental Health Systems Act, the interest groups who opposed specific outcomes of liberal era reforms, although not necessarily all the reforms, turned to the neoconservatives for narrowly focused reforms. The activism of the interest groups supplied the Reagan Campaign with a supportive constituency which could be used as a foil for reactionary reforms. However there was a deep irony here. The 1980 Reagan Campaign received support from a population which might have otherwise supported the liberal objectives of the previous era (had they been adequately funded, for example). The fact that these interest groups had become disillusioned with the implementation of liberal reforms (specifically deinstitutionalization which was largely viewed as a failure), meant that this population would support a change in policy even if it meant policy reforms that would otherwise be unpalatable.

The composition of this coalition was of course antithetical to the interests of the mentally ill themselves. But groups representing the patients themselves were relatively weak. Despite the fact that groups representing the patients stressed the need for better treatment, debate most often revolved around issues defined by other stakeholders in the system like the growing homelessness problem and the burden on the families. And of course, better treatement automatically translated, in an underfunded system, to more more funding - this argument ran counter to the neoconservative need to cut back the welfare state. So often patients concerns were simply ignored.

Cuts in funding for mental health services continued throughout the 1980s, with the emphasis being on the provision of services via the private sector. Overall, the number of beds available to the mentally ill in public and private hospitals dropped ov er forty percent between 1970 and 1984 (Reamer, 1989). Most of this decline was due to cuts in public hospitals. During the 1980s, the number of beds provided by general hospitals in psychiatric wards and in private hospitals for the mentally ill increase d. In 1970, there were 150 private psychiatric centers; in 1980, there were 184; by 1988, there were 450 in the United States. General hospitals offering psychiatric services increased from 1,259 in 1984 to over two thousand in 1988 (Reamer, 1989, 25; LaF ond and Durham, 1992, 115-16). With such growth in the private sector, there were substantial profits to be made in mental illness, assuming that the patient had adequate health insurance. Those without medical insurance frequently did not receive adequat e care.

A Supportive Public Climate

The intersection of interests noted above was an important factor in creating an environment within which reactionary reforms could take place. However other environmental factors also played an important role in creating conditions whereby the desires for progressive reform could be co-opted. For example, the goals of the Reagan Administration were well received in some quarters of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). In the 1980s, the NIMH started to come under the leadership of a different cohort of individuals. While the NIMH had originally been led by individuals who had come of age during the Great Depression, the leaders of the 1980s had come of age later. The result was that while the former cohort had been committed to innovations in government al social policy, the latter generation tended to be less interested in actual social policy and more supportive of measures to reduce the cost to the federal government (Armour, 1989, 187).

The Administrations goals of fiscal restraint also received support from the general public due to the perception of a federal government too prone to waste revenues and not address other basic concerns, such as crime prevention. Certain forms of social welfare spending, such as programs for the mentally ill, were perceiv ed as wasteful and thus easy targets for budget cuts (Gans, 1995; Katz, 1989). In contrast, other social programs, such as Social Security, were perceived as being "earned" by the recipients, and thus equitable. Despite the fact that the average Social Se curity recipient receives more in return than they pay into the system, programs such as this are perceived as being a pension for which the recipient has already paid. As such, they are less susceptible to cuts than categorical spending programs, such as community mental health treatment centers. Indeed, Social Security funding per beneficiary increased under the Reagan Administration (Levitan, 1990, 30). Mental health policy lacks the widespread public support that benefits Social Security (Armour, 1989 , 186). In light of this, it is not surprising that the Reagan Administration was able to cut these programs relatively easily (186-7).

The concerns of the general public were also mobilized in the context of fear over the possibility of a patient committing a violent or otherwise anti-social act. Media attention paid to the problems of the mental health system tended to concentrate in two areas: the growing homelessness problem of the early 1980s and the possibility of criminal acts committed by deinsitutionalized patients. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people concentrated in the inner cities. With the rise of gentrification during the 1980s, many of them became displaced from their relatively affordable housing and were unable to fin d new accommodations. Many of these patients had lost contact with family members and were unable to work, and many did not have health insurance. Thus, they were unable to receive mental health services in the private sector. Media coverage of the growin g homeless problem helped to pressure legislators in many states to rewrite commitment laws to extend the net and make the streets "safer."

This media attention played into, and supported, the growing perception of violent crime as a problem in the United States. The Reagan Administration answered this general alarm by calling for quick and severe punishment of offenders. For those offenders who were not mentally ill, prison was normally seen as the solution (Gans, 1995). For the mentally ill however, involuntary committment seemed the best answer. Either way, quick removal of individuals threatening the social order fit well with the administration's "law and order" stance (LaFond and Durham, 1992, 114).

The new laws, however, were not intended to make it easier to commit the dangerous mentally ill. Rather, the new laws had more general application and made it easier to commit those only considered a threat (Lafond & Durham, 1992, 11. In addition to this, many of the existing liberal justices began to rule on a "right of treatment" clause rather than a straight civil libertarian viewpoint. The result was that at both the state and federal level, the court became increasingly reluctant to strike down legislation that broadened the definition of who was eligible for involuntary commitment (119). Again, this more stringent approach meshed well with the "law and order" stance taken by the administration.

Discussion

The net result of federal abdication of responsibility, the push to state orientated programs (often underfunded), the dis-organization of groups, and the confluence of public interests (in crime prevention and fiscal restraint) with state goals, were reforms that only marginally addressed the real concerns of stakeholders and that ultimately benefitted capital by reducing the cost of social safety net. To be sure, the shift in policies dealing with involuntary commitment emerged from larger social issues. By the middle of the 1970s, groups representing the mentally ill, their families, and those who cared for them had reached a consensus on the need for reform. This culminated in the passage of the Mental Health Systems Act. This implementation, though not without its problems, was seen as a progressive step forward. However the costs of these reforms were unacceptable in the new neoconservative climate and ran counter to the interests of capital. Reagan, who never presumed to support social policy, promised to cut federal spending and ensure a "favorable business climate." So under Reagan the new law was rescinded. This signaled that for Reagan's administration, social policy was of lower priority than fiscal policy. After this act, the interest groups would need to settle for piecemeal reforms within the limitations of the administration's desire for low cost reform measures.

The "New Federalism" served as justification for relaxed federal "interference" in state issues, including mental health policy. The business community was facing a crisis of accumulation, and a shift in the political economy was perceived as necessary to guarantee adequate profit. With the abdication of the federal government, mental health policy was almost entirely in the province of the individual states.

A survey of initiatives shows that they came primarily from individual state legislatures, and thus varied according to state (Peters et al, 1987; LaFond and Durham, 1992). The procedures for commitment of the mentally ill accordingly vary by state. Ma ny states have adopted outpatient commitment as an alternative to inpatient care, and this policy has met with mixed results. 4 Many state hospitals have been closed, and many others are facing the possibility. Debate around mental health policy is still, to a large degree, concentrated around issues of deinstitutionalization and reinstitutionaliza tion and the relative merits of each.5 Sadly, professional groups with opposing interests have stalled the implementation of a comprehensive mental health policy in most states (Becker, 1993; Wilson, 1993).

Under the Reagan Administration, groups and individuals who had hoped for a change found that the federal government did very little to effect a change. The appointment of conservative justices for the federal court system was a part of the "law and or der" platform advocated by the administration and thus was never intended to have a direct effect on procedures regarding involuntary commitment or any other aspect of mental health policy.

Perhaps what is most interesting about the change in policies of involuntary commitment is the coalition that helped bring it about: a combination of "law and order" conservatives, economic conservatives, and liberal groups that sought reform in the pr ovision of mental health services. But the policy shift had hardly anything at all to do with the mentally ill or the practitioners who treated them. It was designed to lower taxes and shift responsibility away from the federal government. Ironically then , the need for reform perceived by those involved and concerned with the mentally ill (practitioners and families) was co-opted by the interests of capital.

Reagan's social policy is best seen as an abdication. Reagan's economic policy was to adjust government regulation so that it favored business once again, and social policy was merely an outgrowth of this larger issue. While family groups and professi onal groups and patient groups did clamor for respect, the real struggle was between the state and the business community. Reagan worked to lessen the tax load for the rich, and the social policies were meant to match this goal. Business needed a more fav orable corporate climate, and Reagan worked to that end. The coalitions that were necessary for election were either gratified (the elderly) or abandoned (the poor). As for the mentally ill, certain changes that their families and practitioners wanted wer e gained, and the administration pointed this out. Even though these changes came about primarily through state governments and the courts, the Administration would take credit. All in all, business interests were served. Families and doctors were appease d. Patients were forgotten.

Quoted Text

Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
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Key Facts
Important Quotations Explained

1.     So it was the hand that started it all . . . His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms . . . His hands were ravenous.
Explanation for Quotation 1 >>

2.     We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone made equal . . . A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind.
Explanation for Quotation 2 >>

3.     Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores.
Explanation for Quotation 3 >>

4.     It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. . . . It’s a mystery. . . . Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences . . . clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical.
Explanation for Quotation 4 >>

5.     The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time . . . Time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt!
Explanation for Quotation 5 >>

Quoted Text

TIMOTHY LEARY QUOTES

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.

TIMOTHY LEARY, How to Operate Your Brain

Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.

TIMOTHY LEARY, The Intelligence Agents

Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out," "turn on," and "tune in."

TIMOTHY LEARY, The Politics of Ecstasy

If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Your Brain is God

Drop Out--detach yourself from the external social drama which is as dehydrated and ersatz as TV. Turn On--find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high. Tune In--be reborn. Drop back in to express it. Start a new sequence of behavior that reflects your vision.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Turn on, Tune in, Drop out

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Change Your Brain

All suffering is caused by being in the wrong place. If you're unhappy where you are, MOVE.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Evolutionary Agents

Higher has always been the trajectory of intelligent evolution.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Your Brain is God

To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Change Your Brain

The genetic stage of a gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the local God. Jehovah of Genesis is a low-level barbarian macho punk God. He boastfully claims to have created the heaven and the stars and the world, but provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupations, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and hatred of women are primitive mammalian brain. His petty prides are primate.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Evolutionary Agents

I wanted to scientize myth and mythologize science.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Your Brain is God

Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not ready for urban feudal pleasures.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Evolutionary Agents

If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Changing My Mind, Among Others

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

TIMOTHY LEARY, attributed, Was It Good for You Too?

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

TIMOTHY LEARY, attributed, Still Casting Shadows

Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say "you are a sinner", and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Timothy Leary's Last Trip

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Rolling Stone, Twentieth Anniversary Issue (1987)

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

TIMOTHY LEARY, attributed, The Best Advice Ever for Teachers

Drugs Are the Religion of the People — The Only Hope is Dope.

TIMOTHY LEARY, The Politics of Ecstasy

The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.

TIMOTHY LEARY, "Leary calls LSD sacrament," The Tech, Nov. 8, 1966

The universe is an intelligence test.

TIMOTHY LEARY, attributed, Cosmic Trigger

Nobody ever understands what a pioneer is doing.

TIMOTHY LEARY, Far Gone interview

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH DOUG WOLENS, DIRECTOR OF “THE SINGULARITY”



“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

If you watch Doug Wolens’ latest documentary, “The Singularity,” the quote from Arthur C. Clarke is the first thing you see. It aptly prepares you for the 75 minutes that follow over which a truly impressive cast of scientists, futurists and philosophers discuss the uncertainty of what the future holds for humanity and, for some, argue why Ray Kurzweil and others have it all wrong.

If you don’t have time to read The Singularity Is Near but want a more in depth understanding of the singularity, this is the film for you. Like the phenomena it attempts to explore, it takes off at an accelerating pace. In its first moments we meet Mister Singularity himself, Ray Kurzweil, who summarizes, for the uninitiated, what the singularity is.

And then come the experts, over 20 in all. Wolens weaves the conversation back and forth between these men and women of rarified technological air, among them AI expert Peter Norvig, Foresight Co-Founder Christine Peterson, neuroscientist Christof Koch who collaborated with Francis Crick (of Watson and Crick DNA structure fame) on the nature of consciousness, longevity guru Aubrey de Grey and Richard Clarke who oversaw cyber security for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

The breadth of topics covered in the film is truly impressive: artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, transhumanism to name a few. And of course no discussion about the singularity is complete without considering the prospect of a day when machines become conscious – what does that even mean and, well, should we be worried about it?


AI expert Peter Norvig offers his thoughts on what it would take for machines to gain consciousness.

I spoke with Wolens recently about the film which is now available on iTunes. He started researching the singularity heavily in 2000, reading Kurzweil’s and other’s books, reading everything he could find online and conducting his first interviews. But 13 years ago, at the start of his enlightenment, like most back then (and many now) the singularity was something he knew nothing about. But a fortuitous moment while on a flight to New York to promote one of his films changed that. Flipping through an issue of Business 2.0 magazine Wolens encountered a quote from Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. Immediately fascinated, he got off the plane, made a beeline for St. Mark’s book store, picked up the book and proceeded to devour it over the next three days. “I thought this was the coolest thing,” says Wolens.

And so the digging began. “It was a tremendous amount to put together that is cohesive and engaging. It’s a story, it’s not just stuff thrown at you.”

The film is broken up into four major parts titled: Conscious Machines, Neuroscience, Techno-Utopia and Post-Humanism. It’s complex stuff. The Neuroscience segment, for example, discusses how the merging of biotechnology and nanotechnology move us toward transhumanism, or the joining of man and machine. But despite its complexity, Wolens does a great job of moving between speakers in a way that makes it feel like a conversation, like a meshing out of the topics that might go on in our own minds, albeit expressed much more expertly and eloquently. And he didn’t just want to put a textbook on the big screen. He wants the audience to go away feeling as though they know these people who ponder these thoughts. “It’s not just the things they say, it’s who’s saying what.”

Having explored so many ideas with these great minds, I wondered what Wolens might’ve found particularly interesting during the making of the film. He spoke about the essence of what makes us human, and what it would take to make machines humanlike.

“It’s funny, when I was talking to all the consciousness scientists and
philosophers they would say, the only thing I can tell you for sure is that I’m
conscious. I can’t tell you if you are. But they do go on to say that I will
assume your conscious because you look like me, because you have the same lineage
as I do. So there’s that connection that we have that makes us human. And there’s
something that gets lost when you talk to people who say that as soon as we get to
X number of computations per second then we’ll have computers that can mimic the
brain. That always bothered me. What is the definition of intelligence? What is
the definition of human, and what do we do as humans? One of the things we do is
we empathize with each other. And I think that gets lost so much in Singularity
circles. If we’re going to replicate the brain we have to replicate the things it
does not the things it can do.”


Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warns that, while technological development moves fast, policy guiding that development isn’t moving fast enough.

Wolens admitted that he is a little uneasy about the idea of a conscious – and possibly competitive – robot. But then he shrugged and quoted what environmentalist and author Bill McKibbon argued in the film: “It’s not that we should be concerned that something’s gonna go wrong, we should be concerned that something’s gonna go right.”

As many Singularity Hub readers are no doubt aware, not everyone is receptive of the idea of the singularity or compelled to explore the finer points of its approach trajectory. Wolens found this out the hard way. Despite a solid résumé – his short film “Happy Loving Couples” made the screen at the Sundance Film Festival and another film, “Butterfly,” about a woman who sat in a redwood tree for two years to prevent it from being cut down, was featured on PBS – investors were cool toward a documentary that delved into what they viewed was too speculative.

“They laughed at me. They said you can’t make a movie about the singularity. It’s science fiction.” Try as he might Wolens could not find funding for the film. But he was so committed to the film that, in the end, he paid to have it made himself.

And now that it’s completed, Wolens is using technology to distribute the film in a way that was impossible a couple decades ago – by himself. In addition to iTunes the DVD and Blue-ray discs are available at thesingularityfilm.com.

At the end of his travels, having met the people he met and explored the concepts he’d explored, I wondered how Wolens felt about the singularity. Was he excited about it or did it give him a sick feeling to his stomach? He answered the question by sharing a concern that many people share about, not just the technology of the future but today’s technology as well.

“I’m a humanist. That is the most important thing and I worry that as we become more and more entrenched in our technology, more and more connected to our technology we lose a sense of our humanity.”



The_Singularity_trailer from doug wolens on Vimeo.

This entry was posted in AI, Art, Cyborg, Gadgets, Genetics, Longevity And Health, Robots, Singularity and tagged Documentary, doug wolens, Film, futurist, peter norvig, ray kurzweil, Singularity.