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Written by Bob Guyer
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A conscious species rapidly changing the earth's climate through its ordinary daily activity sounds like a science fiction scenario, but it's true, it's our species, and it's unprecedented in the history of life on Earth. Like it or not humankind has now entered the era of conscious responsibility for choices that effect the health of all life on the planet. This new situation is cause for a deep revisioning of human industrial activity that will require not only technical changes in how energy is produced and used, but significant changes in political, and economic systems. Our current systems reflect widely held assumptions about human identity and the need to change in response to knowledge of our effect on the life of our planet amount to a global identity crisis.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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It is imperative, now that high levels of extra-biological power are a persistent feature of human life, to move our social organization, and our systems that express our social organization, farther away from the primate (rigid, male centric, violence ordered, social hierarchy), and more toward the male/female pair bonding form of social organization created through our evolutionary split from the primate species. Our evolutionary split from our predecessor species resulted in creatures that walked on two feet, had larger brains, and a different form of social organization, compared to primates. These changes hold the secret of our ability to develop extra-biological power and the type of social structures that have directed the use of that power as it has developed. Our heads and brains became larger in proportion to our bodies than our primate forebears and the average size difference between males and females declined from 50% to 15%. This changed our form of social organization to a male female pair bonding form as opposed to a the typical primate model of a primary male hierarchy, with little interaction between male and female except to mate, and a separate female hierarchy that is subjugated to the male hierarchy.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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911 didn't change everything, that's just a political slogan, but human extra-biological force amplification really did. Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, concludes that rates of development of modern civilization depended on geographic differences in productivity of the soil, water, climate, plants, and animals. Building on this fundamental biological capacity, recent developments of science and the industrial revolution have resulted in escalating amounts of extra-biological force being available to human beings. This has changed how we live with each other and how we relate to the natural world. The biologically destructive aspects of our collectively increasing power are becoming ever more obvious and now require our full attention.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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As our collective and individual ability to generate and use extra-biological force has expanded far beyond our biological boundaries yet we still culturally conceive of the purpose of this boundary transcending force as serving primarily an exclusively private individual purpose. I propose that we must develop a purpose that matches our degree of extra-biological forcefulness, existence as part of the biological life of this planet, and the fact that we are conscious and that the boundaries forming our sense of individuality are semi-permeable. I propose a starting point for development of a human purpose as being to expand the scope of human consciousness and, to the degree that extra-biological force exceeds human biological bounds, apply that force for benefit of the entire body of life.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Using a biological entity model as a symbolic representation of the complex system of interrelationships that make up the total ecological system of life on our planet is a more accurate way of describing the relationship between human beings and nature than the previous models that portray nature relative to the needs and fears of human beings. This gives the earth entity status and places human beings within that entity as a part of it.
Each species and each individual entity within each species plays a role in the web of life that is part of the living entity of planet earth. The Autopoetic theory of life proposed by Maturana and Varella defines living systems as a “those systems which (a) maintain their defining organization throughout a history of environmental perturbation and structural change and (b) regenerate their components in the course of their operation. Autopoietic systems realized in the physical space are living systems.” Each individual entity within a species is a self-maintaining and producing process and as such has a degree of autonomy within the context that it arises. Each species is a collection of autonomous individuals that share similar characteristics.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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With the onset of freedom and power moral responsibility for the effects of choices arises.
Freedom, the awareness of alternatives, and power, the ability to choose among alternatives and act by consciously applying energy to the chosen course of action gives rise to moral responsibility. Another choice could have been made; a different amount of energy could have been applied to the choice taken. The effects of the action taken on the scope of consciousness of the acting individual and others affected by the individual’s action and the effect on the entire body of life, if extra-biological force is used, are the measure of how the action contributes or subtracts from the human purpose.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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All behavior can be judged relative to the purpose of expanding the scope of consciousness in the service of life. Imagine a scale that has a zero as a neutral point where an action is neither positive or negative in it's effect, negative 10 is the most negative point on the scale, positive 10 is the most positive point on the scale. Individual actions that effect single individuals would occupy the middle range of the scale from 0 to 3.3 in either a negative or positive direction, group action would range out to the 6.6 range of the scale, and systems would range all the way out to 10 on either side of the scale.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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With the advent and then the acceleration of extra-biological power availability to humans previous privacy dynamics should be revised. The dynamic of people, institutions, and systems being able to invade the privacy of others has been, and currently is, a feature of aggregation of social power. When extra-biological power is added to that social dynamic the inequities of the fact that the functional ability to achieve privacy, prevention of unwanted intrusion across a semi-permeable boundary from the outside of that boundary, has increased with the acquisition of power. Now that extra-biological power extends far beyond the scope of the individual privacy needs to be viewed as modifiable in inverse relationship to the possession of power. We should develop systems, political, legal, social, and economic, that implement this principal. Extra-biological power exceeds the biological boundaries of a person. As extra-biological power increases it becomes less private because it extends further beyond the biological boundary of the originating source.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Consciousness, extra-biological power, and inseparable biological existence are the primary facts of modern human life. Identity and human systems need to adapt to the fact of extra-biological force and develop systems to manage the effects of extra-biological power that exceed the bounds of our biological self. The following will describe the rational, and some principals, for the development of a new governmental system that takes these three primary facts into account. I will refer to this new system as Bio-democracy.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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If we keep the current formula for calculating representation for the U.S. Senate and Congress as presently conceived we have a starting point of 100 senators and 435 congressional representatives. To add bio-representation that covers the rest of the living community that human life is sustained by we need a means of calculating the number of seats that we would have to add to represent them. In the following table of representatives I have taken the biomass of the constituent parts of the food chain, based on Silver Springs Florida river ecosystem data collected by Howard T. Odum, and calculated the number of seats that would be necessary to provide equivalent biomass representation for these non-vioced constituencies.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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The planet and everything living on it needs humans to develop an economic system that is aligned with nature and a more complete view of humanity. Since we are fully separate individuals, and non-separate individuals as well, our economic system needs to accommodate both of these seeming opposite facts. Pure self interest versus pure commonality have battled for supremacy in our post industrial revolution economic systems and thinking. Make no mistake, both systems have a philosophical stance and reflect that stance through their design. Therefore establishing a new philosophical framework for a new economic system to inhere in must be part of the equation that creates a sustainable human future.
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Written by Bob Guyer
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Given all the problems we face environmentally and socially what do we want the future to look like? What is your vision of a positive future? Let yourself imagine what we could be and share that vision in the comments section below.
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