Regime Change — Technology Style — Peter Radford

Must-read. Peter Radford is onto something.

Economics is looking in the wrong direction by emphasizing capital-labor as the variables in production and supply and demand in distribution through markets and rationing scarce goods based on price. This post sets the stage for a more holistic approach to the world system in terms of key fundamentals. The more significant factors are energy and information.

In my view, the foundational element is intelligence and its creative application, which Peter Radford does not mention. It is a hidden assumption. 

Intelligence is the source of reflexivity, learning and adaptation, creativity, innovation, and organization. Intelligence turns raw data into useful information through ordering (organization). 

The evolution of intelligence and its application begins with the emergence of life from bare physicality. Even before life order can be detected in crystalline structure. 

Indeed, physicality unfolds in an ordered way, that is, in ways that exhibit invariance. It is these levels of invariance that are discovered as "the laws of nature." 

In this sense, there is intelligent design, although that doesn't necessarily imply an intelligence designer separate from and prior to nature, although it doesn't contradict it either.

The order runs from consciousness to intelligence, to its application in history, to energy, to behavior in the physical world. 

Consciousness is in essence unbounded, and intelligence is potentially unlimited. "Progress" lies in rolling back the limitations individually and socially. 

This is set forth in perennial wisdom.

The conclusion is that understanding involves grasping the nature of the system as an integrated whole, both vertically — consciousness, intelligence, energy, and action in physicality — and also horizontally. Each of these planes of existence-knowledge is "horizontal" in the sense that the horizon is never reached.

Based on this analysis, consciousness is primary. What is consciousness? There is nothing that more immediate to us than consciousness as our experience. Meditation is the laboratory for investigating its nature and potential individually. 

Meditation enables one to go beyond ordinary experience to gain ordinary levels of experience and even pure consciousness devoid of differentiation of any sort. Pure consciousness is the unitary "field" from which diversity arises.

This experience and understanding is the direction in which humanity is heading its development according to perennial wisdom, although this process is cyclical rather than linear.

The Radford Free Press
Regime Change — Technology Style
Peter Radford