[ExI] [tt] instilling ambition

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg
...

>...Seriously, there is an interesting aspect of life design that doesn't
seem to be discussed much: how to handle slow maturation and goal
evolution...
--  Anders Sandberg,
_______________________________________________


I don't know if this is related to what Anders had in mind, but perhaps.

My son has taken an interest in native American cultures.  Today I took him
up to the Ohlone Museum near here.  They had a docent talk on basket
weaving, examples of knapped flint, a tule reed boat and such technologies
that were in use by the stone age people that inhabited the area until they
were mostly displaced.  Something I learned today was that their culture was
not swept away primarily by the missionaries, since there were not all that
many of them, but rather by the gold rush of 1949.  The missionaries took
square aim directly at the heathen culture and way of life, but scarcely
scratched it.  The '49ers had zero interest in the Ohlones, didn't care if
they lived or died, but just wanted at the gold.  The Ohlones themselves
recognized it was the '49ers that ended their traditional way of life.

What really got me to pondering was how the hell is it that a stone age
culture reaches an equilibrium, and why does it stay right there, doing the
same thing, using the same technologies for 100k years?  The modern Ohlones
had not one thing that they couldn't have had 100 millennia ago: they had no
metallurgy, they made homes and boats out of reeds, they made spear points
out of flint and used those to fish in San Francisco Bay.

Why didn't they ever want something else?  Why did the Europeans break out
and invent stuff, but the native Americans generally did not?  How does a
society reach equilibrium, or technological stagnation?  Can we even imagine
reaching some kind of equilibrium now, short of a singularity?

spike