Neo Leo

Prepared in the style of LEONARDO 5/2008; 3700 words: Leonardo is an international journal for artists and others interested in work that crosses the artificial boundaries separating contemporary arts and sciences. Featuring illustrated articles written by artists about their own work as well as articles by historians, theoreticians, philosophers and other researchers, the journal is particularly concerned with issues related to the interaction of the arts, sciences and technology. Leonardo focuses on the visual arts and also addresses music, video, performance, language, environmental and conceptual arts---especially as they relate to the visual arts or make use of the tools, materials and ideas of contemporary science and technology. New concepts, materials and techniques and other subjects of general artistic interest are covered, as are legal, economic and political aspects of art. http://www.leonardo.info/isast/journal/editorial/edguides.html

3660 words

GLOCALIZATION & HUMAN SURVIVAL TECHNOLOGY
A Fractal Logic for Our Negentropic Futures

Paul Wildman, Ph.D. (AU), Iona Miller (USA), Professor Robert Pope (AU)

Science-Art Guild, Int'l, 5.20.2008

"The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet" –William Gibson

‘We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).

ABSTRACT: Glocalization proposes both theory and practice for bridging global/local scales in an alternative equitable international system, using a mosaic of committed key actors in the physical and electronic environment. McLuhan called the environment a programmed teaching machine. COHERENCE: The meaning of globally accessible information becomes organized in its local context. Intense local and extensive global interaction is a dynamic that operates in fractally embedded spatial and cultural dimensions to mobilize social and economic interaction at the local, national and transnational levels, responding to our responsibility to future generations.

A potential movement, a peace-building activity combining realism and idealism, glocalization is a bottom-up view of the complex process of harmonizing local and global needs for sustainable futures. It brings globalization issues down to the human scale, linking commited local and global social actors. The immediate goal of glocalization's scale-relativity is practical development of pilot projects and best practice exemplars and policies that can be applied in many if not all areas. It includes proposals and concrete initiatives that promote balance of local and global dimensions via information sharing on a global or transregional basis.

By adhering to a mechanistic worldview, Western civilization is on a path to extinction, says Science-Art philosopher Robert Pope. The ancient knowledge passed on by the Greeks upheld a survival science, a “Savior science” that was misinterpreted by Leonardo da Vinci but was privately understood by Isaac Newton. Da Vinci was an “Unbalanced genius” according to Professor Pope, and by “inadvertently” obscuring the “principle of creation” he helped bring into existence a mechanistic mindset that is now accelerating a global crisis of destruction. He made the ultimate mistake by suggesting that all of the universe could be made visible to human perception, and yet the Greeks, and other ancients before them, identified with a universal reality in which harmonious, invisible atomic movement generated divine wisdom.

Introduction:

Futuring includes six synergetic aspects: 1) mapping acceleration, 2) anticipating, 3) timing and 4) deepening the future, 5) creating alternatives to the present and 6) transformation. Roadmaps help us visualize strategies and collaborative foresight. Paradigms are the assumed truths of our logic. Acceleration is built into the physics of the universe.

We propose a negentropic paradigm for the valuecosm and governing principle of ecological development. ‘Edge’ artists as strange attractors are a source of negentropy in society, catalysts of contemporary life. We can draw from the organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory to illuminate the state of the arts.

Artists magnetically draw the attention of others to their creations, to their vision, into the imagination, into the collective future. We might think of them as the ‘indicator species’ of the social ecology, the evolving cultural landscape. Orbiting far from the norm, they provide a negentropic counter-balance, an evolutionary burst, social innovation -- to conservative forms and institutions, which tend to ossify leading to stasis and decay.

Art changes the way people perceive reality, how they see life and their place in it. These negentropic innovations become embedded in social structure. Realizations, insight, empathy are implicit. They show us windows of prescient emotions and impulses, their unframed works rending the veil of the human unconscious.

Physics describes the interrelationship of chaos and order as field relationships, while chaos theory describes nature's own methods of creation and self-assembly. Entropy is the tendency for any closed part of the universe to expand at the expense of order. It is a measure of randomness and disorder -- chaos.

Negentropy is the generative force of the universe. Negentropy (emergent order from chaos) is a nonlinear higher order system, a dynamically creative ordering information. Thinking, science, and art are therefore negentropic. Negentropy, like art, is ‘in-form-ative.' It is related to mutual information exchange. Information is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols, which compress the informational content of the whole.

Creativity is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors, which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow. If you can't see how to use continually less matter, energy, space, or time (physical resources) in your scheme to improve human performance, then you aren't operating at the "leading edge" of the tidal wave—somewhere else on the planet things are flowing much faster and more efficiently, and will soon change your game. How can we give people a choice as to which values they want to maximize first, so that different cultures can take different paths toward an inevitably faster future?

Dynamic Socioeconomic Transformation:

Can we formulate tailored local responses to growth imperatives from the inevitable forces of globalization? A combination of 'Globalization' and 'Localization,' Glocalization was first used by transnational corporations to mean a global marketing adaptation strategy. This corporate "buzzword," a top-down view is NOT what this view is about.

Friedman defines glocalization as "the ability of a culture, when it encounters other strong cultures, to absorb influences that naturally fit into and can enrich that culture, to resist those things that are truly alien and to compartmentalize those things that, while different, can nevertheless be enjoyed and celebrated as different." A structural shift in information flow, Web 2.0 is about glocalization, it is about making global information available to local social contexts and giving people the flexibility to find, organize, share and create information in a locally meaningful fashion that is globally accessible.

Definition:

Diverse, over-lapping fields of global-local linkages -- pan-locality, a merging of global opportunities and local interests, aiming to create a more socio-economically balanced world, reconceptualized in non-geographical terms. Comprehensive connectedness.

Conceptually Local: Combining globalization and localization, the coined-term Glocalization proposes both theory and practice for bridging scales in an alternative equitable international system, using a mosaic of committed key actors, including a full range of local, national, international, public, private, and nonprofit entities. The meaning of globally accessible information becomes organized in its local context.

Networked Individualism: Intense local and extensive global interaction. This dynamic operates in fractally embedded spatial and cultural dimensions to mobilize social and economic interaction at the local, national and transnational levels, responding to our responsibility to future generations. Deterritorialized active learning processes rooted in mutual understanding of needs, problems and solutions.
Decentralized globalization, prioritizing strategic peacebuilding.

Placeless Power & Interconnectivity: A conscious development strategy, empowering non-subjugated localities to develop direct economic and cultural relationships to the global system through information technologies, bypassing and subverting traditional power hierarchies like national governments and markets. The identity-affirming senses of place, neighborhood, town, locale, ethnicity, etc. survive (if just barely) against the global onslaught of global capitalism, media, and network identities. Systematic integration of social and economic issues.

Vision:

Glocalization is a potential movement, a peace-building activity combining realism and idealism. It is a bottom-up view of the complex process of harmonizing local and global needs for sustainable futures. It brings globalization issues down to the human scale.

Social Synergy: Glocalization links committed local and global actors, including virtual personalities, individuals, local, national and international business, governmental and nonprofit entities, coupling and decoupling for positive sum solutions. We can harness the benefits of multinational globalization, ethical economics and repurposing open-source information for local realities by extensive local and long-distance interactions.

Negentropic Paradigm:

The basis of our technology is moving from a mechanistic to a negentropic paradigm. The most important thing happening today is a metamorphosis of human life: hyperchange, the cybernetic revolution, the biotech revolution. Business as usual is nonsustainable and cannot continue unchecked. We need a Plan B for human survival. Negentropy is arguably our greatest hope for a sustainable future rooted in HUMAN SURVIVAL TECHNOLOGIES, which doesn't mean that "technology will save us". It both creates and solves problems.

Unique physics governs matter at the nanoscale. Soon "reality chips" will put themselves and us together and culture will be revolutionized. Bioart, tweeking genetics and physical structure, is the medium of the 21st century -- 3-dimensional designing and engineering of new bodies and environments. Probably more than a million people living today were conceived in petri dishes.

Bioart is an aesthetic response to biotechnology (meta-biology). We are in a transhuman transition era we call the Information Age. Direct Brain Interface is coming soon. Quantum dots can already merge with nerves. Information is more fundamental than matter, controlling and patterning randomness; it makes matter matter.

We are heading toward an Age of Wonder, including synthetic or virtual worlds which will supercede the real world in many ways. Synthetic reality will compete for our attention. Supertrends shape the future: technological progress, economic growth, improving health, increasing mobility, environmental decline and global warming, and increasing culture shock.

Physics has jumped its classical boundaries, making a quantum leap from the domain of matter/energy to the more fundamental scale of the vacuum potential underlying field phenomena. We now consider our fundamental nature not only through biochemistry but through our energy body, living our wave-nature as well as particle-nature. The biophysical role of underlying EM fields can be demonstrated in energy medicine, quantum mechanics and field theory.

The energy body is our fundamental nature. Our consciousness has jumped out of our meatbody through technological extension; we've gone global. An analogous creative current informs ART that jumps the canvas into digital multimedia, including webart. Healing has jumped the consulting room into nonlocality and virtuality as global distance becomes a less and less meaningful barrier.

Social Cradle:

Fundamental Principles, the developed plan should:

· Express resolve to establish procedural and educational planning strategies – to gain public commitment to a set of fundamental principles – including ethical responsibilities to be adopted by all – to guide future urban and rural planning
· Present ethical arguments capable of winning public commitment to the principles of long term sustainability and responsibility for future generations:
· Call for public acceptance of a planning horizon that extends beyond 2026 to at least 2100, and preferably 2200.
· Argue for public acceptance of the imperative to plan for a post-carbon era.
· Argue for public commitment to plan for and live within eco-regional carrying capacity limits.
Planning Procedure, the developed plan should:
· Call for public submissions on alternative structure plan concepts for greenfield sites.
· Outline plans for submitting alternative structure plans to post-carbon era sustainability tests and comparative analyses in order to inform public choice.
· Outline strategies to engage public in democratic deliberation to (1) determine consent for the basic principles needed to guide evaluation and choice of alternative structure plans (2) decide on structure plans
· Outline plans to advance social methodologies for participation and technical methodologies for calculating eco-regional carrying capacity, and holonic footprinting (see explanation herewith) in order to inform decision making on structure plans. Outline plans to engage local/global partnerships and collaborations to undertake the research, and indicate the timeline for research completion.
· Outline action goals to engage educators in all sectors – schools, universities, communities, NGO’s, government agencies and corporations – to facilitate collaboratively the social learning and deliberation on the scale required (so that key players can anticipate the role they will need to play.
Greenfield Structure Plans should:
· Convey the known alternative conceptual options for guiding development of the structure plans and provide links to websites that provide developing analyses and discussion forums around each of the options.
· Outline plans to engage authorities and academic institutions to undertake suitability mapping and start-up siting for the development and demonstration of alternative planning models that offer promising long term sustainability prospects. (Wildman, 2008)

Negentropic Futuring:

"It was Plato who introduced 'the division between those who know and do not act and those who act and do not know,'" Paul Wildman explained in his article in the Journal of Futures Studies. "After Plato in the West we have doggedly followed a staunchly mechanist view, identified with Newton, that 'The Universe was a mechanical one whose order was maintained by a distant God'. Newton in fact wrote more on alchemy than mathematics: he saw the universe enlivened by emotion and love. These works remain unpublished. The results of this split are readily seen today in terms of the specialisation of skills, separation of academia from actual social change projects, separation of producing from consuming e.g. we are moving rapidly away from being 'prosumers' - having our own gardens, making our own clothes and other bush mechanic type activities. Arendt (1963) claims this is the challenge for modernity: to re-braid thinking and doing.

In today's complex and turbulent world it is vital to have futurists who can collaborate on collective projects, focus on action codified in exemplar projects and validate actions towards a better world. Unfortunately, current 'education' systems focus almost exclusively on the individual learner and have separated the learner from the praxis of the lived life. Furthermore, classrooms separate the learner from design, production and integration of learning into community life. Overcoming this separation of thinking and doing is one of the key challenges for modernity in future, in particular.

We may be able to meet this challenge as innovative individuals who look forward wisely and solve collective problems today through applying ingenuity with what is available, thus integrating thinking, doing and being in what in ancient times was called poiesis.Human knowledge of neg-entropic processes is urgently needed to avoid extinction. Sir Isaac Newton referred to the basic universal physics as a profound living philosophy to balance the mechanical description of the universe. This has become known as ethical physics and is known today through the logic of life viz. fractal logic the logic of neg-entropy. The holographic universe that such an approach begets and in turn begets it, is infinite, open, evolutionary and ethical – the new logic. This new logic needs to become the model for our social sciences such as economics. (Paul Wildman, Ph.D.)

Virtual Personalities:

Interacting & Teaching in Social Networks; Gender Reunion; Makers, Producers and Servers, Communicative Action, Learning in Action; Action Research; Social Negentropy. An integrated politics of partnership no longer splits off the "private sphere" from the "public sphere" or "women's rights" and "children's rights" from "human rights." The personal is political.

Some characteristics of social neg-entropy are:

Giving (in that giving from the heart without necessary expectation of return generates good will – an esoteric form of neg-entropy)
· Empathy (care and concern for others health and well being as well as yourself)
· Net energy creation (as contrasted to an energy sink)
· Organologic (such as diversity encouraging, fractal geometry, spectral-reserve, self-organisation, recursiveness)
· Diversity harmonising; Conformity centralisation
· Informal/outside the box (in that all the formal economic structures are now seriously entropic and generally shrink wrap any within house initiative); not one best way; the whole is more than the sum of the parts, neg-waste (another word for entropy)
· Trans rational from either or to either and ie. towards the theory of the included middle where something can be both a and b rather than only a or b – with no middle overlap
· Replacing black with green letter law – this means being rewarded for what we will do right tomorrow and not punished for what we did wrong today. Wildman (2003).

Bridging & Bonding:

Wider and Deeper Global Networking; Learning Circles; Emotional and Action Learning. Value is viable and thus valuable neg-entropic complexity and evolution may be seen as the increasing of diversity within this viable complexity through self-organisation and fractal logic. This will then lead to the emergence of something valuable and potentially viable which can be found by such self-organising fluctuations among the neighbouring possibilities.

Ethical Economics:

Physical Economy and Monetary Economy; Fractally Embedded Self-Reliant Economic and Political Systems; Creative Partnership Futures

Cultural Reclamation:

Positive Sum Situations; Intentional Community; Anticipating Emerging Issues; Deliberative Democracy
Tocqueville 1825 identified a form of oppression as 'mild despotism', which he saw as erosion of liberty far more serious than violent form of despotism characteristic of feudal societies. Corporate feudalism rolls back the world clock by imposing propagandized groupthink of the lowest common denominator:

'it covers society's surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules though which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd: it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it really forces one to act, and constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannise, it hinders, compromises enervates (deprives, weakens), extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each person to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals (robots?) of which the government is the shepherd.' Young, T. (2001). How to Loose Friends and Alienate People. London: Abacus. Pg 38

Cultural Dynamics:

Self-Organizing Chaos, Order and Negentropy. We may be able to organize boundary conditions under which evolution on earth can continue. These boundary conditions are therefore no longer purely biological they have evolved to be culturological. The spreading of this logical insight about the primacy of mental and cultural evolution is the key task, which, we have to fulfill in a hurry, and globally. We need a Socio-Cultural Neg-Entropic Innovation Process and we only have a generation to do it.

Such a Neg-Entropic Social Innovation Process (NESIP) needs to focus on:
· Global Governance
· Global responsiveness to socio-cultural events and acts of terrorism
· Zones of Social Innovation – resorced e.g. through private philanthropy or the UN
· Strong commitment to improve the health and well being of all people and peoples
· The Physics Of Love ennobles relationships between living entities and enriches our planet leading to a deeper respect for all life and what supports it. This way of being is called 'relatio' where relationships, as a way of knowing, become neg-entropic. Wildman (1996)

Deep Futures:
Evergreen Revolution; Metafuture; Compassionate Community; Collective Responsibility. Futuring means bringing proactive concrete responses to future issues into present-day operation. Rebraiding thinking and doing, this approach is suitable to present day challenges derived from global issues. This ancient approach to futuring demonstrates a better tomorrow today, cutting the lag time from innovation to diffusion.

· Mapping the Present and the Future through methods and tools such as the futures triangle and the futures landscape
· Anticipating the Future through methods such as emerging issues analysis and the futures wheel
· Timing the Future, understanding the grand patterns of change, macrohistory and macrofutures.
· Deepening the Future through methods such as causal layered analysis and four quadrant mapping
· Creating Alternatives to the Present through methods such as scenarios and nuts and bolts
· Transforming the Present and Creating the Future through visioning, backcasting, action learning and the transcend conflict resolution method. (Sohail Inayatullah; www.metafuture.org/ )

A roadmap is the outcome of a collaborative foresight process that considers a broad set of factors and strategies important to reaching a future goal. Roadmaps can include vision statements, forecasts, scenarios, strategy and plans, but go beyond such tools in three ways:
1. They emerge in a collaboration network of multidisciplinary and competing experts,
2. They emphasize uncertainties and challenges as much as probable and preferred futures, and
3. They have long-term time horizons (five to fifteen years is common) by comparison to traditional forecasts and plans. (www.metaverseroadmap.org/roadmap.html)

Fractal Logic:

Scientists throughout the world working at the cutting edge of human survival technology are now seeking a multidisciplinary solution to the social, economic and environmental crises threatening us all. There is a desire in Western culture to try, in some way, to enhance human values. Clearly, waste-based Western technology and over-consumption is now systematically causing the destruction of human values and the degradation of the global environment. More holistic worldviews of science and technology (Poetry Science; Science-Art; Freestyle Multimedia; Know-Brow Art) can lead toward viable visions of an optimistic future.

Art connected to Source and the zeitgeist of its times has a living taproot in the matrix of evolution. Our works "work" when they work themselves through our culture, based on that culture's underlying psychological need. They become meaningful if perceived as carrying revelatory weight that somehow illuminates our collective lives. They may not be "true", but good things come of this generative vision, reaffirming and celebrating our humanity.

Recent major scientific discoveries have been made which demonstrate that the living process is indeed associated with a very complex infinite universal energy system. New understanding of complexity and self-organization in nature, nature's own means of self-assembly, reveals its geometrical basis. This new paradigm, rooted in Chaos Theory, Complexity and Holographic Theory, also identifies the geometrical logic base that retrieves the lost ethical and humane physics value system.

We can use this scientific knowledge to construct a global human survival technology of unimaginable wealth, resources and human opportunity. The catalytic properties of art have been identified as the essential ingredient needed to provide the opportunity for this human survival technology to be developed. Artists actively demonstrate the environments of the future and create new valuecosms. Biotech and cosmotech are less likely than infotech to be disruptive over the next 30 years.

Evo-Devo

Human survival cannot be rooted in entropic theories of destructive physics logic from which technology and global economic rationalism is derived. We need a holistic, negentropic paradigm to support an optimistic vision of the future and radically new adaptive survival technologies. To understand the future, we must consider the essential nature of both evolution and development. “Evolutionary Development” combines the processes of unpredictable evolution with optimized predictable change of development.

For millions of years, to evolve has meant to adapt to the environment. Now the hidden electronic environment drives us.We need to build better environments not "better" humans. The emergence of the valuecosm has reemphasized the value of human teachers who can help us to become independent thinkers, and of education systms that help us to make decisions for ourselves in ways we never did before, and to understand the benefits and limitations of the advice we get from others, whether human or computer.

In an era of unprecedented accelerating change, there are individual, social, economic, ideological and physical menaces to long-term sustainability. Human society is not yet technologically powerful enough, economically rich enough nor politically united enough to afford a worst case attitude. But we can imagine a paradigm based in fractal logic for accelerating universal change.

Human survival technology must link life to an aspect of infinite universal reality. The culture shock associated with collapse of the entropic paradigm is enormous. The issue embraces fundamental human ethical values, and sooner or later it must enter the international legal system on behalf of global human survival. Already the United Nations University Millennium Project, South Pacific Node, American Council, has fully endorsed the concept of using Creative Physics fractal logic for the cause of global world peace and such an awareness is growing via the internet.

In 1999 Science-Art Research Centre of Australia published a paper entitled THE ENGINEERING OF GLOBAL DEMOCRACY, written by its engineer and prefaced by a former Professor of Life Sciences at NASA. The thrust of the paper was about using a fractal logic filter to obtain a human survival technology from information overload. A copy of this publication was sent to 100 famous engineers and scientists throughout the world. The replies to the Centre's publication revealed that enough scientists are working at the cutting edge of Creative Physics Science-Art research to implement the human survival technology. In particular, we were amazed that the chief scientist to Britain had been warning for several years that any country or government which did not realize how to use fractal logic to obtain new technology from information overload would become losers in the 21st Century. (Pope 2003).


REFERENCES

Miller, Iona (2004), Edge-Artists as Strange Attractors: A Source of Negentropy in Society. www.subcutaneous.org/edge.html

Pope, Robert (2004), Blueprint for Survival: How to Avoid Extinction, Science-Art Research Centre.

Pope, Robert (2001), Science-Art and Global Human Survival Technology, Science-Art Research Centre. www.science-art.com.au/china_lecture.htm

Smart, John (2005), Human Performance Enhancement in 2032: A Scenaio for Military Planners. accelerating.org/articles/...army.html]

Wildman, P. (2003). Economics for a Wriggling Universe: Economics and the Science For Ethical Ends. Human Science Technology - Harnessing Negentropy for Human Survival, Uki, NSW, Prosperity Press. 30pgs

Wildman, P., Socio-Economic Guidance from an Infinite Universe, in Human Science Technology. 2004: Prosperity Press, Brisbane. p. 35