The New World of Lonnie Mandigo

It's an interesting question given humanity's propensity for shortsighted and self-destructive decision making.  Glibly, the answer is no.  It's not worth saving and should get exactly what it deserves.  It is not earning its way as a responsible contributor to the universe.   That, of course, begs the question of what does the universe want? Other than a few fantasies that we've crafted it's unclear. We have values as humans such as order, beauty, and joy.  Science is the objective pursuit of discovering order in the universe.  Beauty straddles a line between the objective and subjective.  Much of what is considered to be beautiful are objective observations with subjective assessments.  Joy is entirely subjective and tends to be generated by the orderly and beautiful. These are potential self-centered reasons for humans to continue to exist, but in an of themselves don't answer the question of what the universe wants. What does the universe...

Hubris is what will ultimiately destroy humanity.  The belief that you're "better than" rather than "a part of".  It's always good to ponder the metaphor, "What's the most important link in a chain?"  It turns out there isn't one. They each play an important and vital role.  Now if you ask, "What's the most impactful link in a chain?", that's easier.  It's the one that breaks. When chains break, it happens suddenly but often not without warning. We've had a lot of warning.  Clearly more than we deserve.

Either adapt to the current situation as you see it or die.  There really is no middle ground.

This is a book I need to read... Liberalism and Its Discontents , by Francis Fukuyama

I recommend the book ... Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment  by Francis Fukuyama In fact,  I'll even elevate it to the status of Lonnie's Core Educational Books that everyone should read.

One of the more entertaining aspects of the current conversations around AI is how much it challenges what we've believed, perhaps for centuries, about the nature of thinking. We've discovered that we don't currently possess objective and testable definitions for words like sentience and consciousness.  For reference, here are a couple of current definitions... Sentience - feeling or sensation as distinguished from perception and thought. ( Merriam-Webster ) Consciousness - the state of understanding and realizing something. ( Cambridge Dictionary ) Words like feeling, sensation, perception, thought, and realizing don't add a lot of value and tend to make definitions circular, but if you distill them you end up understanding as a component of each.  "Understanding" is a word worth exploring. Just for reference here are some of Merriam-Webster's definitions of the word " understand "... : to grasp the meaning of : to grasp the reasonableness of ...

 I just finished the Great Courses/Wondrium course Strategic Thinking Skills .  You can find it here... https://www.wondrium.com/strategic-thinking-skills This covers a huge number of areas that I've been a student of most of my life.  The benefit for me was how it tied so many things together. I would have loved to have this overview available to me when I was in my 20s.