Why is it that the discussion of post-industrial society is what it is?

This was the hardest of your questions to get a grip on. :-) You mention disaster fiction, Star Trek, 1984, and Brave New World, and you categorize the first two as post-industrial and the second two as bad-industrial perpetuated. If I look for the intent behind your question... the idea seems to be that visions of the future are limited to destruction, salvation from outside, and dystopia.

Missing from your list of future scenarios is the anodyne dystopia of boredom, which doesn't show up in literature about the future because it's what people are already living in the present, and that's not what they look for in futurology, unless they are perverse enough to want true realism even in their escapism, and experienced enough to know that real life is mostly about boredom and disappointment. The TV series "The Office" comes to mind as a representation of what I'm talking about, though I've never seen it; I just know it's a sitcom about people doing very mundane things every day (like every other sitcom) - and that is reality.

If you're worried that reality might somehow just not contain elements that transcend human routine, don't worry, they are there, they pervade even the everyday world, and human routine is something that must end one day. Human society is an anthill, and anthills are finite entities, they are built, they last, they are eventually destroyed. But an anthill can outlive an individual ant, and in that sense the ant's reality can be nothing but the routine of the anthill.

Humans are more complex than ants and their relation to routine is more complex. The human anthill requires division of labor, and humans prepared to devote themselves to the diverse functional roles implied, in order to exist at all. So the experience of young humans is typically that they first encounter the boredom of human routine as this thing that they never wanted, that existed before them, and which it will be demanded that they accept. They may have their own ideas about how to spend the time of their life, or they may just want to be idle, but either way they will find themselves at odds with the social order to which they have been born. There are places in the social ecosystem where it works differently, but this is how it turns out for many or even most people.

So my thesis is really that boredom is the essence of human life, human society, human history, and human experience. Note well: the essence of human reality, not of reality as a whole, which is bigger than human beings. I will also say that boredom was the essence of preindustrial life as well as of industrial life, and also of any postindustrial life so long as it is still all about human beings. Some people get not to live boring lives, and wonder and terror can also just force themselves upon humanity in a certain time and place; and finally, I should add that people can live amid the boredom and not be bored, if they are absorbed in something. Our Internet society is full of distractions and so the typical Internet citizen is not just flatly bored all the time, they will be in a succession of hyper moods as they engage with one thing after another. But most of it is trivia that has no meaning in the long run and that is why it's reasonable to say that it adds up to boredom.

All these non-boring stories about the future are partly expressive of reality, but they are also just distractions from the boredom for the people who consume them. Apocalypse doesn't solve the problem of giving me a happy free life, but it does solve the problem of boredom! Salvation by aliens is an instance of something exciting and non-boring coming from outside and forcing itself upon us. Huxley and Orwell's worlds actually are boring when they're not oppressive or dissipative, so in that sense they resemble reality.

Some people in some times aren't born to boredom. What this really means is that there's some form of instability. Either it's the instability of novelty, that eventually settles down and becomes a new boredom, or it's the instability of something truly dreadful. Our favorite instability on this site is artificial intelligence, which is a plausible candidate for the thing that really will end "human reality" and inaugurate a whole new Something. There may be a cosmic boredom that eventually sets in on the other side of the singularity, but for now, dealing with everything implied by the rise of AI is already more than anyone can handle. (There may be people out there who are thinking, I can think about the possibilities of AI with equanimity, so I can handle this. But no-one's in charge, the situation is completely out of any sort of consensual control, and in that practical sense the human race isn't "handling" the situation.) There are many other ways to avoid boredom, for example the study of the universe. The main challenge then is just convincing the human race to allow you to spend all your time doing this.

But the original question was about the culture's own image of the future. My thesis is that adults generally know in their bones that their lives are boring, and that fact is itself so familiar as to be boring, so there's no market for stories which say the future itself will also be boring. You're finding the available non-boring narratives unsatisfactory - they're either dystopian or involve wishful thinking. But the problem here is whether there's a viable collective solution to boredom, or whether every such solution will be just another type of Watchtower-like unrealism (I mean the little magazine circulated worldwide by Jehovah's Witnesses, in which future life is an agrarian paradise with the sort of nonstop happiness you only see in TV commercials). I should emphasize that the narratives which dominate the part of the culture that is concerned with the practicalities of the future, such as politics, do not try to solve the boredom problem, that's not remotely on the agenda and it would be considered insanely unrealistic. Realistic politics is about ensuring that the social machine, the division of labor, continues to function, and about dealing with crises when they show up. So it might be regarded as depressing rather than boring.

I can't say that the problem of collective boredom concerns me very much. Like other singularity fans, I have my hands full preparing for that future event, which probably is the end of the boredom as we know it. The task for you may just be to come to grips with your own difference from everyone else, accept that most people will end up in some boring but functionally necessary niche, and then try to make sure that you don't end up like most people.

physical view of the universe as fundamentally alive rather than dead ... stars are living and thus self-directing

Since life is considered a solved problem by science, any remaining problem of "aliveness" is treated as just a perspective on or metaphor for the problem of consciousness. But talking about aliveness has one virtue; it militates against the tendency among intellectuals to identify consciousness with intellectualizing, as if all that is to be explained in consciousness is "thinking" and passive "experiencing".

The usual corrective to this is to talk about "embodiment". And it's certainly a good corrective; being reminded of the body reintroduces the holism of experience, as well as activity, the will, and the nonverbal as elements of experience. Still, I wouldn't want to say that talking about bodies as well as about consciousness is enough to make up for the move from aliveness to consciousness as the discursively central concept. There's an inner "life" which is also obscured by the easily available ways of talking about "states of mind"; and at the other extreme, being alive is also suggestive of the world that you're alive in, the greater reality which is the context to all the acting and willing and living. This "world" is also a part of cognition and phenomenology that is easily overlooked if one sticks to the conventional tropes of consciousness.

So when we talk about a living universe, we might want to keep all of that in mind, as well as more strictly biological or psychological ideas, such as whether it's like something to be a star, or whether the states and actions of stars are expressive of a stellar intentionality, or whether the stars are intelligences that plan, process information, make choices, and control their physical environment.

People do exist who have explored these ways of thought, but they tend to be found in marginal places like science fiction, crackpot science, and weird speculation. Then, beyond a specific idea like living stars, there are whole genres of what might be called philosophical animism and spiritual animism.

I think pondering whether the stars are intelligences isn't a bad hobby to have, it's the sort of obscure reaching for the unknown which over time can turn into something real and totally new. But know and study your predecessors, especially their mistakes. If you're going to be a crackpot, try at least to be a new type of crackpot, so that humanity can learn from your example. :-)

Alright, let's start at the easy part concerning those questions:

Considering the psychological model of five senses we are taught since grade school is there a categorical difference in our ability to logically perceive that 2+2=4 vs perceiving the temperature is decreasing?

Yes. In a large set of possible categorical distinctions, they are in different categories. The true, most accurate answer is that they are not exactly the same. This was obvious to you before you even formulated the question, I suspect. They are at slightly different points in the large space of possible neural patterns. Whether they are "in the same category" or not depends on the purposes of the category.

This question needs to be reduced, and can be reduced in hundreds of ways from what I see, depending on whether you want to know about the source of the information, the source of our cognitive identification of the information/stimuli, etc.

The deeper question being is the realness of logic (and possibly other mental faculties not being considered here) the same as the realness of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch?

"Sight" is a large mental paintbrush handle for a large process of input and data transfer that gets turned into stimuli that gets interpreted that gets perceived and identified by other parts of the brain and so on. It is a true, real physical process of quarks moving about in certain identifiable (though difficultly so) patterns in response to an interaction of light with (some stuff, "magic", I don't know enough about eye microbiology to say how exactly this works). Each step of the process has material reality.

If you are referring to the "experience"-ness, that magical something of the sense that cannot possibly exist in machines which grants color-ness to colors and image-ness to vision and cold-ness and so forth, you are asking a question about qualia, and that question is very different and very hard to answer, if it does really need an answer at all.

By contrast, it is experimentally verifiable - there is an external referent within reality - that two "objects" put with two "objects" will have the same spacetime configuration as four "objects". There is a true, real physical process by which light reflected on something your mind counts as "four objects" is the exact same light that would be reflected if your mind counted the same objects as "two objects" plus "two other objects". "2 + 2 = 4" is also a grand mental paintbrush in a different language using different words - mathematics - to represent and point to the external referent of what you observe when two and two are four.

At this point, I no longer see any mysterious "realness" in either concept. One is a reliable, predictable pattern of interactions between various particles, the other is a reliable, predictable pattern of interactions between various particles. At the same time, on a higher level of abstraction, one is seen some way to identify expected "number" (another giant mental paintbrush handle) of things, while another is some way in which our minds obtain information about the outside world and gather evidence that we are convinced is entangled with large patterns of other particles through causality.

If I'm going too fast on some things or if you dislike my potentially-very-condescending tone of writing, my apologies and please mention it so that I can adjust my behavior / writing appropriately.

The other questions afterwards become progressively much harder to work on without a solid grounding in reductionism and other techniques, and in particular for the first interrogation on a "fundamentally alive" universe, is very much at the edge of my current comfort-zone in terms of ability to reduce, decompose, dissolve and resolve questions.

Unfortunately, there are also a great many things that might get in the way of resolving these questions - for an absurd example, if you hold a strong, unshakable belief that there is a huge scientific conspiracy hiding the "fact" that outer space does not exist and everything above the sky is a hologram while earth is actually one giant flat room (rather than a round ball) that warps around in spacetime to make us believe that it's round, then I'm afraid I would likely find myself very much at a loss as to how to proceed in the discussion.

Edit: As for the stream-of-consciousness matter, it's not about the widespread coverage of subject(s), but more a comment on the writing style / continuity. Basically, more organized writing and words with clearer delimitation, continuation, and links between topics / sub-topics that don't have a continuous progression are indicators of a more in-depth analysis of one's own words and thoughts, while the stream-of-consciousness style is more difficult for the readers when engaging in conversations that seek to attain a higher degree of truth.

I'm not sure what you mean by "self-directing". As I see it, "life" is yet another physical process, like "combustion" or "crystallization" or "nuclear fusion". Life is probably a more complex process than these other ones, but it's not categorically different from them. An amoeba's motion is directed, to be sure, but so is the motion of a falling rock.

Hiya!

I don't think there's a difference between the human sense of logic and the other senses, I agree with you there. Just as it's impossible to tell whether or not you're a brain in a vat, it's also impossible to tell whether or not you're insane. Every argument you use to disprove the statement will depend on the idea that your observations or thought processes are valid, which is exactly what you're trying to prove, and circular arguments are flawed. This doesn't mean that logic isn't real, it just means that we can't interpret the world in any terms except logical ones. The logical ones might still be right, it's just that we can never know that. You might enjoy reading David Hume, he writes about similar sorts of puzzles.

It doesn't matter whether or not logic works, or whether reality is really "real". Regardless of whether I'm a brain in a vat, a computer simulation, or just another one of Chuang Tzu's dreams, I am what I am. Why should anyone worry about abstract sophistries, when they have an actual life to live? There are things in the world that are enjoyable, I think, and the world seems to work in certain ways that correspond to logic, I think, and that's perfectly acceptable to me. The "truth" of existence, external to the truth of my everyday life, is not something that I'm interested in at all. The people I love and the experiences I've had matter to me, regardless of what's going on in the realm of metaphysics.

I don't quite understand what you're saying about vitalism. I don't know what the word "life" means if it starts to refer to everything, which makes the idea of a universe where everything is alive seem silly. There's not really any test we could do to tell whether or not the universe is alive, a dead universe and an alive one would look and act exactly the same, so there's no reason to think about it. Using metaphors to explain the universe is nice for simplifying new concepts, but we shouldn't confuse the metaphor for the universe itself.

I'm not really in the mood for discussing literature or trying my hand at amateur psychoanalysis, I'll leave that last question for someone else to try their hand at, if they decide they want to.

I think the sequences will help you out. I recommend that you start with the sequence on words and language, and then tackle metaethics. It could be a lot of work, but they make an interesting read and are very amusing at times. Regardless, we're glad you're here!

Hello! Welcome to LessWrong!

This post reads very much like a stream-of-consciousness dump (the act of writing everything that crosses your mind as soon as you become aware that you're thinking it, and then just writing more and more as more and more thoughts come up), which I've noticed is sometimes one of those non-rules that some members of the community look upon unfavorably.

Regarding your questions, it seems like many of them are the wrong question or simply come from a lack of understanding in the relevant established science. There may also be some confusion regarding words that have no clear referent, like your usage of "realness". Have you tried replacing "realness" with some concrete description of what you mean, in your own mind, before formulating that question? If you haven't, then maybe it's only a mysterious word that feels like it probably means something, but turns out to be just a word that can confuse you into thinking of separate things as if they were the same, and make it appear as if there is a paradox or a grand mysterious scientific question to answer.

Overall, it seems to me like you would greatly benefit from learning the cognitive science taught/discussed in the Core Sequences, particularly the Reductionism and Mysteriousness ones, and the extremely useful Human's Guide to Words (see this post for a hybrid summary / table of contents). Using the techniques taught in Reductionism and the Guide to Words is often considered essential to formulating good articles on LessWrong, and unfortunately some users will disregard comments from users that don't appear to have read those sequences.

I'd be happy to help you a bit with those questions, but I won't try to do so immediately in case you'd prefer to find the solutions on your own (be it answers or simply dissolving the questions into smaller parts, or even noticing that the question simply goes away once the word problems are taken away).

It took me a few hours to find this thread like a kid rummaging through a closet not knowing what he is looking for.

As my handle indicates, I am Lloyd. Not much I think is worth saying about myself but I would like to ask a few questions to see what interests readers here, if anyone reads this, and present a sample of where my thinking may come from.

Considering the psychological model of five senses we are taught since grade school is there a categorical difference in our ability to logically perceive that 2+2=4 vs perceiving the temperature is decreasing? The deeper question being is the realness of logic (and possibly other mental faculties not being considered here) the same as the realness of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch? There are questions which unfold from considering logic as a 'sense', but I wish to clarify this question first.

I have not found any proponent of a physical view of the universe as fundamentally alive rather than dead. Is there someone who has proposed, for example, that the stars are living and thus self-directing and the observations of galaxies may be that stars are purposefully forming these structures under their own will much like we form cities? Or maybe the idea that stars induce gravity and feed off of a source of energy from the subatomic regime? Or that different star systems may be fundamentally different on a quantum level like blood types? I mean the language is filled with terms like birth, death, and life, but it sounds like they are disconnected from their biologically meaning altogether.

Does anyone ever discuss the post-industrial society, no, not right question. Why is it that the discussion of post-industrial society is what it is? For example, in mainstream storytelling post-industrial=post-apocalyptic for much of what I have seen. There is Gene Roddenberry who cast post-industrial society as being rescued by aliens. There are Orwell and Huxley who left the world to be forever locked in an industrial nightmare. Zombies. Am I to understand that the culture's mind has settled on imaging the industrial society as its death?

To really impact the level of altruism in our culture you would do what you could to steer people away from the school system.

Would you predict that students raised outside of the school system are, as a group, more altruistic than those raised within it?

I think there should be some use of the "moral sphere" model in understanding the dilemma presented. The moral sphere is conceptually easy to understand - each person extends moral consideration varying from the center, oneself, outward into society(or world in whole) until a boundary of moral exclusion is reached, and beyond this boundary exist 'them'. The model would thus have Buddha being an idealized moral example having no boundary of exclusion and no decrease in moral consideration from self to the rest of the world.

The next consideration is that of culture, here in America, where we have schooled everyone to be...well....pitiful bitches. Seriously, the schooling process both breaks down community -even sense of community and neighborliness - and creates drones waiting for instruction from authority. (school is designed to do this see John Taylor Gatto and Ivan Illich for history and arguments). The studies you cite (and the fact you used deTocequville who witnessed the US pre-compulsory schooling) indict the culture created by our adoption of a school system meant to create a compliant, mindless, consumer society. To really impact the level of altruism in our culture you would do what you could to steer people away from the school system.

As for immediate intimate remedies look at how your "community" is structured - is it a really community(holistic relationships) or just a network(conditional, purposed relationships), or worse a hierarchical structure (relationships at work)? A final consideration is that if you are conditioning yourself to be more responsive in helping and more considerate of others you are going to find yourself developing skills in asserting authority, taking charge, and trying to solve dilemmas where you are being compelled to sacrifice from your own 'good will', or whatever tune your heartstrings get played to - this is undoing what schooling trains into everyone in various degrees.

The basis for honesty are arguments for development of a an egalatarian relationship. If the relationship is not based on equality then dishonesty is an inevitable result in resolving moral dilemmas. In the example case there is no reason to consider whether or not deception in words should mirror the deception of hiding filthy Jews. To split hairs further the ability to convey the truth is absolutely impossible in language. The allusion of of the 1st quote is towards this understanding: anything contained in language is only an approximation of the truth. So how honest can we really be?