after oil

http://www.dawn.com/2007/03/08/op.htm#5

q>But since oil is cheap and easy to use it will be incredibly hard to give up, especially since the biggest benefit of new fuels — lower carbon emissions — will be shared with future generations. Past changes in energy technology have made life easier for the people who use it; this switch might make things harder and more expensive.
apers

well, there is one way to reorg life to make it easier: simply move people together.  People who want to be close to each other will simply move into the same house/apartment.  Then life really will be easier, instead of driving a 2ton truck to go see each other, they will just walk across the hall.  We will simply have to adjust our mindsets to take advantage of this revolution: the harvesting of our cities and infrastructure.

This will not take any new morality or leaps of emotion.  Just start taking advantage of what is there in the cities, and do it cheap.  Same old self-interest applies.

Planning for this would involve only tearing down restrictions on creative use of existing property.  e.g. building shacks in backyards for 2nd families.  

The reptilian brain could still function in this economy, since it is well understood and there are no surprises there.  It will not even need any r&d, just artistic talent to make temporary living space seem livable.

economic entropy

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1429429

If the economy suddenly doubled in size, and the number of jobs increased by 2, then what would happen?

half the employees would leave their jobs, and some of the companies would fail. the resulting surplus of companies would then also fail etc.
 like the expansion of a gas, irreversibly.

even if you guyaranteed jobs, then companiees would fail, and vice versa.  there is atradeoff between safety of capital (companies) and safety of workers.  this should not be.  tightly interlinked capital and workers would prevent this.

 

Triune brain

http://www.ezls.fb12.uni-siegen.de/mkroedel/paul_maclean.html

The emotional life is dependent on some protection from around it to allow us to behave properly. The reptillian brain and cortex surrounds it. Similarly, we need to know how to counter the reptilian behaviour of other people around us, in order for us to live our own rich and emotional lives.

the cortex provides a ceiling to our emotions, delineating the limits of our emotions.

Conciousness is nothing more than a phase transition, a place where there is a critical mass of interconnected thoughts thatw e can say that we are self aware. Then maybe the brain releases a chemical that makes them all connected in some automatic way, without having to actually think the thoughts. If we lower the amount of thinking that we do, the chemical ensures that even small thoughts will propagate throughout the network, thus ensuring the structure established by conciousness performs its function even with simple stimuli. If the chemical level drops to a low level, then the whole thing "dies" and becomes a useless mass of tissue.

test

first post.