GAP2008
From UpliftWiki
Workshop on the Good Ancestor Principle
Jonas Salk said, the most important question we must ask ourselves is, “Are we being good ancestors?” Given the rapidly changing discoveries and conditions of the times, this opens up a crucial conversation – just what will it take for our descendants to look back at our decisions today and judge us good ancestors? Just what would a Good Ancestor Principle look like? This is a rich topic for discussion, full of complexities of enormous magnitude. We are both creating our descendants and the environment in which they will grow. Until now, our evolution has been characterized as a “fitness landscape”, in which species evolve by climbing higher peaks. Current and future generations are rapidly moving to a position of reshaping the very landscape that controls our evolution.
Salk recognized that we were going through a unique inflection point in the evolution of life on earth, what he called conscious evolution. In the billions of years of years of evolution since the primordial soup, we are among the first generations of the first species to consciously understand the processes that shape our own evolutionary destiny. We are rapidly developing technology that allow us to control our own evolution, and choose our own evolutionary fitness function, giving new meaning to the term “fittest” in the maxim, “survival of the fittest.” Jonas Salk referred to this challenge as survival of the wisest.
Simultaneously, we are discovering that our behavior can have enormous long-term effects on the planet and life on earth, with activities today taking decades or centuries to play out. Our discovery of chaos theory in the middle of the last century pointed out how tiny influences can cascade to major proportions, far outside the orderly “clockwork universe” realm of the time of Newton. Our notions of time, order, and causality are in the midst of fundamental rethinking as science delves into ever-tinier components of the atom as well as the largest scale notions of the origins of the cosmos.
Humanity has not previously faced such rapid change of such enormous significance. The world is connecting itself economically, physically, and electronically in ways unimaginable just decades ago. At the same time, we are opening ourselves to the “bad apple syndrome” – giving an individual or small groups enormous potential to damage the rest of us. We have an increasing array of technologies and mechanisms which have the potential for catastrophic effects on life on earth. Within the next several generations, we will be faced with many decisions that have the potential of leading to a new era of abundance, peace, and harmony. Or we could be taking actions that will lead to the destruction of life on earth. The good ancestor principle, by assuming that we have even have descendants, seeks to ensure a positive outcome for our decisions today.
This approach defines an anticipatory model of uplift - being pulled by expectations of a better future, rather than being exclusively driven by solving the problems of the past. Our expectations and our intentions shape our future now more than ever.
Resilience
This year's theme will focus on the general topic of Resilience. The Year 2000 computer problem can be seen as an example of systemic brittleness. A problem that was well known in advance, for which there could have been a simple technical solution, ended up causing billions of repair work. Given this as a counter example to resilience, the question becomes, what can we do today to more easily adapt to the rapidly changing, uncertain future of tomorrow?
The Workshop
The workshop will be a small, conversational group of people with both a deep personal and professional interest in the complexities humanity faces in working through the decisions of the next few generations. It is a successor to the 2007 Good Ancestors Workshop. While recognizing the importance of a diversity of opinions and belief systems, the workshop will focus on how science can inform this topic. Participants are assumed to have a strong grounding in the strengths and weaknesses of our current model of science, but also be open to levels of eclectic and inter-disciplinary thought beyond what is typically experienced in departmental academic settings. Participation is by invitation only; participants are likely to have written books and scholarly articles, started organizations, or have developed significant reputations in a field relating to the topics discussed. The Uplift Academy, Donor's Trust, and The Philanthropic Enterprise are sponsoring the workshop.
Videos from 2007 Good Ancestor Workshop
- 2007 Good Ancestor Workshop Summary
- Tom Munnecke's opening presentation
- Heather Wood Ion's presentation on Jonas Salk's Good Ancestor's questions
- Judith Rosen's Presentation on Anticipatory Systems
- Frederick Turner's Closing Discussion
Travel arrangements
San Diego airport is the closest airport. The Moonlight Beach Motel, 233 2nd St., Encinitas, Ca. 92024, (760) 944-9827 has reasonably priced rooms near the beach ($75-$85/night) and is a short walk from the Coaster Train station in Encinitas. The workshop itself is at the home of Tom Munnecke, a 10 min drive from the motel; we will coordinate rental cars. Weather permitting, we may have a session on the beach near the motel.
Agenda
Monday, Feb 18
An optional pre-workshop dinner will held at 6 PM in the Encinitas area.
Tues, Feb 19
9:00 Continental Breakfast begins, registration, informal discussion
10:00 Opening Session Tom Munnecke
General Discussion
12:30 Lunch/Open time
2:00 Afternoon discussions - social and emotional models of resilience: Heather Wood Ion, discussion leader
5:00 Appetizers
7:00 Dinner at a local restaurant
Weds, Feb 20
9:00 Continental Breakfast
10:00 Networked models of resilence - Valdis Krebs,
12:30 Lunch/Open time
2:00 Planned Resilience: how other topics TBD
5:00 drinks, appetizers - Lunar Eclipse watching. (The moon will rise in a total lunar eclipse. We will be able to observe it from a telescope during the event.)
Thurs, Feb 21
For those interested, and weather permitting, we will be taking a sailing trip out of San Diego harbor, perhaps to do some whale watching. We will be on the water from 10 AM to 2 PM; the dock is just minutes from the airport, for those needing to catch flights.
Prior Workshops
- Santa Fe Institute, May 2002: Santa Fe co-hosted with Murray Gell-Mann
- New York City, Aug 2004 New York 2004,
- Washington, DC Jan, 2001 DC 2001,
- Washington, DC Nov, 2004 DC 2004,
- Wellesley, Ma. Aug, 2006 Wellesley
- Boston, MA. Nov, 2005 Boston 2005
- Paris, France, April 2006 Paris 2006
- Encinitas, Ca. Feb 2007 Encinitas 2007
Attendees
(attendees are listed according with their prior Uplift Academy workshop attendance)
David Brin (DC 2002, Santa Fe 2002, Encinitas, 2007)
David is a scientist, public speaker, and author. Several of his novels have been New York Times Bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on The Postman. His fifteen novels have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Brin's 1998 non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- deals with a wide range of threats and opportunities facing our wired society during the information age. His chief argument, that openness is more effective than secrecy at fostering freedom, sparked controversy and garnered the prestigious Freedom of Speech Prize from the American Library Association.
See also Horizons and Hope: The Future of Philanthropy, Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competitiveness for Society's Benefit, The value - and empowerment - of common citizens in an age of danger
"Ideological clichés only distract from the real struggle between two ways of perceiving time - romantic nostalgia vs. pragmatic modernity. To some, the future seems daunting, limited, and perilous, requiring steady leadership from above. Others see it as a frontier of opportunity where free citizens can thrive, both individually and together."
"It boils down to whether you believe children can and should be better than their parents."
David Brin's papers in scientific journals cover an eclectic range of topics from astronautics, astronomy, and optics to alternative dispute resolution and the role of neoteny in human evolution. His Ph.D in Space Physics from the University of California at San Diego followed a masters in optics and an undergraduate degree in astrophysics from Caltech.
David Ellerman (DC 2002, Santa Fe 2002, Boston 2005, Paris 2006, Encinitas 2007)
David is visiting scholar at UC Riverside, and author of Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance (Evolving Values for a Capitalist World) as well as Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life He works in the fields of economics and political economy, social theory and philosophy, and in mathematics. His undergraduate degree was in philosophy at M.I.T. ('65), and he has Masters degrees in Philosophy of Science ('67) and in Economics ('68), and a doctorate in Mathematics ('71) all from Boston University. He has been in and out of teaching in economics, mathematics, accounting, computer science, and operations research departments in various universities (1970-90), founded and managed a consulting firm in East Europe (1990-2), and worked in the World Bank from 1992 to 2003 where he was an economic advisor to the Chief Economist (Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern). Here is a video of his Apr 2006 presentation at the Paris Uplift Academy Workshop and his paper Autonomy-Respecting Assistance: Toward New Strategies for Development Assistance at the May 2002 Santa Fe Institute Workshop. Here is an audio of David's presentation “Helping People Help Themselves: Moving From Failed Methods of Economic Development to Alternative Strategies.” LA Future Salon 4 Mar 2007.
Dorion Sagan
Award-winning writer and sleight-of-hand artist Dorion
Sagan is sole or coauthor of twenty-one books
translated into eleven languages, including Notes from the Holocene: A Brief History of the Future, Dazzle Gradually (with Lynn Margulis),
and Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life (with Eric Schneider). His What is Life? (with Lynn
Margulis) was chosen (with works by Billie Holiday,
Shakespeare, and others) as one of fifty
“mind-altering masterpieces” by Utne Reader. He wrote
the foreword to the best-selling book on atheism,
Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to
Christian Fundamentalism, as well as Cooking with Jesus: From the Primal Brew to the Last Brunch, Acquiring Genomes: The Theory of the Origins of the Species (with Lynn Margulis), and Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (with Lynn Margulis).
His essays have been included in collections edited by Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson, and he has been anthologized with Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jorge Luis Borges in books merging science, philosophy, and art. Reviewing Microcosmos in The New York Times Book Review, Melvin Konner wrote that, “This admiring reader of Carl Sagan, Lewis Thomas, and Stephen Jay Gould has seldom, if ever, seen such a luminous prose style in a work of this kind.” His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Wired, Cosmos, The Skeptical Inquirer,Pabular, The Smithsonian, Umass, The Ecologist, The Environmentalist, Co-Evolution Quarterly, Whole Earth, The Times Higher Supplement, Omni, Natural History, The Sciences, Tricycle, After Dark, Black Box, Cabinet, New England Watershed, and Meat for Tea: The Northampton Review. He is currently co-director of the new Chelsea Green Publishing Company’s new Sciencewriters Books imprint, and is general partner of Sciencewriters an educational partnership devoted to advancing science through enchantment in the form of the finest possible books, videos, and other media.
Frank Mosca
Frank Mosca Ph.d. Is an experienced clinician, coach, consultant with a background as a professor in the humanities. His work and interests have included complexity theory and in the last five years a specialization in Positive Psychology and resilience. He has trained with Marty Seligman and the Positive Psychology Center at U Penn and was chosen by them to be a resident scholar for a related project this April in Australia.
Frederick Turner (Encinitas, 2007)
Fred is Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of Genesis, an Epic Poem He was born in Northamptonshire, England, in 1943. After spending several years in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W. and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, he was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (a terminal degree equivalent to the Ph.D.) in English Language and Literature.
See also his essays: Values as Strange Attractors, Unbearable Lightness of Cyberspace, Tat Tvam Asi: A feedback model of goodness and beauty
He has appeared on two PBS TV documentaries, "The Elephant on the Hill" and "The Web of Life", in the prizewinning Smithsonian World documentary series, and on the Discovery Channel's science documentary "Understanding Beauty". As a poet he is known especially for his use of the longer genres, the narrative, science fiction, and strict metrical forms. He is a founder of and spokesman for two recent and influential movements in contemporary American poetry, the New Formalism and the New Narrative (sometimes named together as Expansive Poetry). Another emphasis has been on the relationship between science and technology on one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. He has thus been involved in groundbreaking studies of the neurobiology of esthetics, the ritual and performative roots of the arts, and the humanistic implications of evolution, ecology, recombinant DNA technology, space travel, artificial intelligence, brain science, and chaos theory. His book The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit assesses the chances for a revival of our cultural energies at the turn of the millennium, based on the remarkable new developments in scientific cosmology and technology. E.O. Wilson reviewed this book: "it takes us past the wreckage of postmodernism to revive the dream of the unification of science and the humanities -- and hence of culture. Frederick Turner is an articulate spokesman for the small band of visionaries who know enough, and care enough, to make that dream realizable."
His contributions as an interdisciplinary scholar have been recognized, cited, or published in the fields of literary and critical theory, comparative literature, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociobiology, oral tradition studies, landscape architecture, planetary biology, space science, performance theory, education, the sociology of knowledge, ecological restoration, political philosophy, the physics of computation, theology, the history and philosophy of science and technology, translation theory, Medieval and Renaissance literature, media studies, architecture, and art history. He has been a consultant to NASA's long range planning group, and was invited to the Ames Space Center in California with Carl Sagan, Christopher McKay and other experts in 1991 for a workshop on Mars terraforming. He is a black belt (second degree) in the Shotokan school of Karate. Workshop Essay
This are Fred's Closing Remarks at the 2007 Good Ancestor Principle Workshop and A Roadtrip Interview on Time with Tom Munnecke
Heather Wood Ion (DC 2002, Santa Fe 2002, Ben Lommond 2003, Encinitas, 2007))
Heather is currently executive director of the Goldie Hawn Institute, author of Third Class Ticket, and co-author of Against Terrible Odds: Lessons in Resilience from Our Children. Jonas Salk gave her his meditation journals which contained many of his unpublished thoughts on evolution, "metabiology," and the issues facing our times. She will be opening the workshop with a review of Salk's philosophy of "ancestorhood." See Can What Counts Be Counted? and The Missing Link presented at the 2002 Santa Fe Institute workshop. Heather is a Founding Fellow in the Uplift Academy. This is a video of her Presentation at the 2007 Good Ancestors Principle workshop presentation
Lenore Ealy (Encinitas, 2007)
Lenore is director of the Philanthropic Enterprise, a sponsor of this and previous Uplift Academy workshops. The Philanthropic Enterprise is the public face of The Project for New Philanthropy Studies at Donors Trust, a 501(c)3 public charity whose mission is to help alleviate, through education, research, and private initiative, society's most pervasive and radical needs and to encourage philanthropy and individual giving and responsibility, as opposed to governmental involvement, as an answer to society's needs.
The Philanthropic Enterprise seeks to improve philanthropy in America, by examining more closely the complex ecosystem of voluntary associations, charities, and gift-making organizations and better understanding their appropriate relations to both commercial and governmental institutions. To this end, we engage scholars and practitioners working to better understand the role of voluntary action and philanthropy in enhancing the production of human excellence, prosperity, and social cooperation.
Lenore holds a Ph.D. in the history of moral and political thought from Johns Hopkins University and has taught at both the secondary and post-secondary levels. She earned an M.A.degree in history from the University of Alabama and a B.S. degree in education from Auburn University. She is the founding editor of Conversations on Philanthropy, a periodic journal that explores the role of philanthropy in a free society.
Lew Shuster
Lew Shuster has broad and
extensive experiences in the biotechnology industry. He is currently
President and CEO of Kemia, Inc. Before he joined Kemia, Inc., Mr.
Shuster served as the CFO for Pharmacopeia and Human Genome Sciences where he led successful IPOs for both companies. Mr. Shuster also held several executive management positions at Invitrogen Corporation, including COO. In addition to his position as CFO at Pharmacopeia, he also served as the COO of Pharmacopeia Labs. Mr. Shuster previously held executive positions at Human Genome Sciences and Microbiological Associates (now BioReliance). In earlier years, Mr. Shuster served for the Boston Consulting Group and United States Senate Budget Committee. He obtained an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of
Business and a BA in Economics from Swarthmore College. Lew is now looking at innovative models of network-based innovations in health care, post market drug surveillance, epigenetics, and the relationship between personalized medicine and the personal health record.
T. Clark Durant (Encinitas, 2007)
Clark is a post-doctoral fellow in the Economics Department at New York University. His research is in constitutional design, with a focus on experiments with alternative electoral systems that try to maintain impartial politics in otherwise divided societies and to frame the accumulation of wisdoms in otherwise static constitutional systems.
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Tom Munnecke
Tom is host and organizer of this workshop. He took an early retirement as vice president and chief scientist at a Fortune 500 company in order to look at the intersection of technology and better world activities. During this career, he was one of the lead software architects of two of the largest hospital information systems in the world, the Veterans Administration's VISTA system and the Department of Defense's CHCS system. He was one of the original "Hardhats" featured in Philip Longman's Best Care Anywhere: Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours. After seeing his software evolve to support about 12% of the US Health Care system, he began to have doubts about the role of technology and health care. He considers the current health care system to be a slow moving train wreck, and attempts to make it more "efficient" will serve to make it get worse faster. The current system can best be seen as a "Disease Industrial Complex"; significant change will not come until we make the "positive flip" towards a new vision of health. To that end, he was one of the first champions of the Personal Health Record. He contributed the opening chapter (with Rob Kolodner) to Person-Centered Health Records : Toward HealthePeople. He is currently active as an investor and consultant in a number of startup companies in the Personal Health Record space.
Starting an "encore career" in 2000, he founded GivingSpace, which changed its name to Uplift Academy in order to broaden its focus to forms of uplift beyond financial giving. He was a 2003 fellow at Stanford's Digital Visions program, and is a Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures. He was interviewed as part of the Pew Internet Visionaries Interviews at the 2005 Accelerating Change Conference. He is on the board or consults with of a number of non-profit organizations.
He has a deep interest in networks of self-organizing, self-propagating systems, which he is exploring in a series of Uplift Academy workshops on the topic of "Infectious Good." He is particularly interesting in exploring evolutionary "search/amplify" models of uplift in contrast to more traditional "plan/execute" models favored by centralized approaches. He is also interested in deeper understanding of the notion of scale, coining the term, "Very Large Scale Uplift" to describe a model of very large number of individuals engaging in smaller positive scale interactions. The Good Ancestor Principle as discussed in this workshop is a way of visualizing a positive future "attractor" which "pulls" us forward, in contrast to a past "push" model that is driven by the problems of the past. He blames our 500 year old accounting system (which presumes that we can break complex interactions down to predefined transactions categorized at an instant in time, and then aggregate them linearly to a meaningful "bottom line." The problem is not that we don't have enough bottom lines, but rather that we are using bottom line thinking in the first place. After a 500 year run, he thinks we need a replacement for our accounting system.
Since he seemed to be off-topic everywhere he went, he started organizing workshops around general topic of how we can translate good intentions into good actions. He named his organization Uplift Academy independently of David Brin's use of "Uplift" noting that the Academy has nothing to do with dolphins (yet).
This is a video of his presentation at the 2007 Good Ancestors Principle Workshop and This is a video of his presentation to the 2007 International Symposium for the Study of Tiime.
Shana Hormann
Shana Hormann, MSW, PhD Core Faculty,Organizational Psychology Program, Center for Creative Change, Antioch University Seattle. As a social worker of 30 years my perspective is strengths-based and positive psychology is one of the frameworks in the Antioch M.A. in Organizational Psychology program where I am a faculty member. Together with my colleague, Pat Vivian, I have been working with groups and researching organizational trauma, that is, trauma that is embedded in an organization or community's culture and has lasting psyche impact. This path took me to a study of resilience and the importance of building and strengthening resilience for individuals, organizations and communities for overall health and to mitigate against trauma. My dissertation work on leading during organizational trauma affirmed this perspective.
Valdis Krebs (Boston, 2005)
Valdis Krebs is the Founder, and Chief Scientist, at OrgNet. Valdis is a management consultant, researcher, trainer, author, and the developer of InFlow software for social and organizational network analysis [SNA/ONA]. InFlow maps and measures knowledge exchange, information flow, emergent communities, networks of alliances and other connections within and between organizations and communities. Since 1987, Valdis has participated in almost 500 SNA/ONA projects.
He is also active with NetworkWeaving
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