The Forth Industrial Revolution

The Oxford Martin School predicts 47% of current jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots in the next 25 years. In the film, Blackwell and Walsh identify certain key industries likely to be threatened by automated disruption and come up with the approximate figure of 500 million people who will soon be made redundant.

Typically, these statistics are a launching pad for people to speculate about how humanity will find meaning in a world without labour. Although the film does tackle these questions, it also encourages viewers to think about what will happen to the half-billion-odd workers facing sudden redundancy.

“We saw all these futurists, some of them very articulate and very successful but we found they were just becoming too excited without thinking about the global repercussions on very fragile infrastructures in developing countries,” Blacknell says.

On this point, the Rise of the Robots author, Martin Ford, is especially prescient. Contrary to many of his fellow interviewees, he argues that technology alone offers no solution to the problems of massive job displacement.

Ford believes addressing the challenge will require social and political will to push the boundaries of capitalism – and although the idea of a universal basic income isn’t explicitly mentioned (it’s to be the subject of Blacknell and Walsh’s next film), it does serve as
the backdrop to much of the discussion.

The film-makers decided to intersperse interview footage with archival
footage, much of it in black and white. This helps to place contemporary questions about work in a deeper historical context.



Indeed there have been moments in the past when the rapid expansion of technology has both excited and terrified us. At the 1889 Paris Exhibition, guild artisans were invited to marvel at new labour-saving devices which, as the artisans quickly realized, would destroy their way of life and most likely leave them destitute. Whether they endured or not isn’t easily determined, though several interviewees acknowledge the enormous job displacement that occurred in this period.

Of course, there are strong moral arguments for progress, and Blacknell and Walsh don’t deny the potential benefits. But while The Future of Work and Death encourages viewers to look toward the leading edge of research, it also strongly advises us to keep the other eye on
what’s happening right now.

“You’ve got to ask yourself, what’s important on a global scale?” Walsh says. “I think it’s important to focus on the trailing edge [those in poverty] a little bit if you’re going to move forward at such pace.”

This is perhaps more significant in the discussion of death. The documentary includes a quote from Bill Gates: “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB [affecting impoverished communities] for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.”
When the documentary turns to mortality and humanity’s attempt to conquer death through longevity, the discussion of what the future is likely to look like gets even more opaque.



The film explores two different models of longevity: the attempt to conquer ageing, championed by the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, and the project of digitally uploading human consciousness so our minds can live on without our bodies.

The unifying tenet behind these approaches is the philosophy of transhumanism, a movement that aims to reject the physical and intellectual limitations of humanity in favour of something greater. Given death is humanity’s greatest limitation, the holy grail of transhumanism is immortality.

The anthropologist Ernest Becker believed human life was defined by its avoidance of death – a theme the anthropologists Joanna Cook and Steve Fuller and the writer Will Self explore at length in the documentary. Becker also believed humans strived for immortality, though he thought we were more likely to achieve it through what we created. Instead of actual immortality, Becker believed humans undertake “immortality projects” to be remembered once they’re gone.
There’s a striking coincidence here: at the same time that humanity seeks genuine immortality, we’ve begun to phase out work – the attempt to fuse our labour with the world to create something new – perhaps the most common immortality project we’ve created.



The irony here is that the transhumanist desire to overcome humanity is motivated by perhaps the most deeply entrenched human instinct there is: survival. The transhumanists claim it is their zeal for life that motivates them.

Chesterton’s words again come to mind. “When men have come to the edge of a precipice,” he says, “it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in
progress.”

Who the optimists and the pessimists are in the fight for humanity’s future remains to be seen, but The Future of Work and Death lends both a soapbox on which to state their case. And as technology takes us closer to either utopia or the cliff, the film helps along a conversation we desperately need to have.
Source: The Guardian news

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Is the Lose of Religious Liberties Inevitable in a Modern Society?

By: Alexandria Addesso

Religion has long been the scapegoat of many of the world’s problems; poverty, ignorance, immorality, backwardness, and war. It is believed and frequently perpetuated that most wars were started and carried out because of religion, such instances were usually deemed “holy wars”. But do these notions suggest that there must be a war fought against religion itself?

Most first-world Western Nations are highly secularized. Where religions were once used to dictate moral standards and laws, now modern “norms” seem to be the guiding light. Such nations that lean toward secularism seem to hold atheism as the highest intellectual belief structure (or rather lack thereof). So what does that mean for those who still practice religions or formal faith structures?

Religious liberty and freedoms are hot-button topics in current events. The newly elected United States president, just days after being inaugurated, signed an executive order that banned people from entering the country if their visas were from 7 particular countries and if they were also Muslim. And while some may not disagree with these measures and brand the United States as a “Christian” nation, the state department completely disregarded the
Christian genocide that was ongoing in the Middle East and Africa for several years.



What is the cost we pay for progressiveness? Technological and scientific advances seem to push the need for the protection of religious liberties and freedoms further and further away. Would a religion-free society be better than a religious one? There is no doubt that many people would fight to establish the former, and there are currently people working for just that.

But with a look back on history to nations that tried to eliminate religions and make all such practices illegal does not paint a perfect picture, but rather just the gruesome opposite. The Cristero Rebellions in the 1920s where the Mexican government tried to suppress Catholicism and kill off clergy is one such example of such wickedness. The religionless Soviet Union is another. Yet in most of these cases the faith of such adherents only seemed to grow stronger, even unto death. So should these religious liberties be protected like any other human right or should they be part of the “final test”? Stay vigilant.

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Social Exclusion Leads to Conspiratorial Thinking

After analyzing the data, the researcher’s hypothesis was confirmed: Social exclusion does lead to superstitious beliefs and, according to their statistical analyses, is likely the result of one searching for meaning in everyday experiences. NeuroscienceNews.com image is for illustrative purposes only.

Researchers report people who experience social exclusion are more likely to believe disinformation, fake news and conspiracies.

Recent polls have shown that many white, working-class people in America feel pushed out by society, a reason why many voted for President Donald Trump. Many of these supporters latched onto misinformation spread online, especially stories that justified their own beliefs.

New research may show why so many were willing to believe exaggerated and misleading reports. According to a Princeton University study published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, social exclusion leads to conspiratorial thinking.

The two-part analysis — which did not specifically investigate Trump supporters, but two random samples of people — found that the feelings of despair brought on by social exclusion can cause people to seek meaning in miraculous stories, which may not necessarily be true.

Such conspiratorial thinking leads to a dangerous cycle, said co-lead author Alin Coman, assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton. When those with conspiratorial ideas share their beliefs, it can drive away family and friends, triggering even more exclusion. This may lead them to join conspiracy theory communities where they feel welcome, which in turn will further entrench their beliefs.



“Attempting to disrupt this cycle might be the best bet for someone interested in counteracting conspiracy theories at a societal level,” Coman said. “Otherwise, communities could become more prone to propagating inaccurate and conspiratorial beliefs.”

Coman published the study with Damaris Graeupner, a research assistant in Princeton’s Department of Psychology. For the first part of the study, they recruited 119 participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing internet marketplace.

Participants engaged in four phases. First, they were asked to write about a recent unpleasant event that involved a close friend. Next, they were asked to rate the degree to which they felt 14 different emotions, including exclusion, which was the emotion being analyzed.

They then were asked to complete a questionnaire that contained 10 statements and rank their agreement or disagreement using a seven-point scale from absolutely untrue to absolutely true. These statements included phrases like “I am seeking a purpose or mission for my life” and “I have discovered a satisfying life purpose.”

Finally, participants had to indicate the degree to which they endorsed three different conspiratorial beliefs ranging from one (not at all) to seven (extremely). These included the following statements: “Pharmaceutical companies withhold cures for financial reasons”; “Governments use messages below the level of awareness to influence people’s decisions”; and “Events in the Bermuda Triangle constitute evidence of paranormal activity.”

“We chose these particular conspiracy theories for their widespread appeal in the population,” Coman said. “These three are, indeed, endorsed by a significant portion of the American population.”

After analyzing the data, the researchers’ hypothesis was confirmed: Social exclusion does lead to superstitious beliefs and, according to their statistical analyses, is likely the result of one searching for meaning in everyday experiences.

“Those who are excluded may begin to wonder why they’re excluded in the first place, causing them to seek meaning in their lives. This may then lead them to endorse certain conspiracy beliefs,” Coman said. “When you’re included, it doesn’t necessarily trigger the same response.”



In the second part of the study, the researchers wanted to causally determine whether the degree to which someone was socially excluded influenced their conspiratorial beliefs. They recruited 120 participants, all of whom were Princeton University students

Participants were first asked to write two paragraphs describing themselves, one about “What it means to be me,” and another about “The kind of person I want to be.” They were told that these paragraphs would be given to two other participants in the room who would then rank whether they’d want to work with them.

Each of the three participants was then randomly selected to either be in the inclusion group (selected for collaboration in a subsequent task), the exclusion group (not selected for collaboration) or the control group (no instructions about selection). This was deceitful: The participants did not evaluate the other participants’ self-descriptions but instead descriptions created by the researchers. Finally, all participants went through the same four phases as the first study, which measured how social exclusion is linked to acceptance of conspiracy theories.

The second study replicated the findings of the first, providing solid experimental evidence that if a person feels excluded, they are more likely to hold conspiratorial beliefs.

In terms of policy, the findings highlight the need for inclusion, especially among populations at risk of exclusion.



“When developing laws, regulations, policies and programs, policymakers should worry about whether people feel excluded by their enactment,” Coman said. “Otherwise, we may create societies that are prone to spreading inaccurate and superstitious beliefs.
Source: Princeton University - NeuroscienceNews.com

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The Philosophy in Modern Times: We Really Need its Values

For many people philosophy is an obscure and largely outdated discipline that has little relevance in the real world. I’ve taught an introductory philosophy course for many years and many of my students come into the course with the idea that philosophy is little more than opinions wrapped in big words and focuses on topics that have no bearing on practical matters like paying for school or landing a job. So what’s the point? Why do people study philosophy and what, if any, value does it have?

I’ve found the study of philosophy to be life changing. This isn’t a slogan for me. Philosophy has proven to be immensely satisfying and valuable. Here are seven reasons why.

It broadens my world
Like the freed prisoner in Plato’ allegory of the cave, studying philosophy forced me to think differently about the world around me. Prior to studying philosophy, the world was simple, dogmatism came cheap, and frankly, the world was pretty bland. Don’t get me wrong, simplicity is great when things are simple. Few of us seek to make life needlessly more complicated. But complexity can actually be quite wonderful when it opens up new vistas. As I’ve aged, I’ve learned to appreciate fine cooking and all the adornments that go along with it (like a good wine and an enveloping atmosphere). As many an epicurean will tell you, the best cooking is generally not simple cooking. Tasting excellent food that has layers of perfectly balanced flavors that were prepared over hours or days and that come alive with the right wine or a hand-crafted bread is among the most enriching experiences one can have. Philosophy does the same for me with ideas. Getting past the boxed mac-and-cheese simple answers to a feast of nuanced philosophy is, simply, wonderful.



It trains my mind
The mind is in many ways like a muscle. It needs to be exercised, stretched, and pushed to the limit to be at its best. Philosophy can be very tough. As Alvin Plantinga has said, “Philosophy is just thinking hard”. Philosophy as a discipline, has forced me to think more precisely and carefully. It is teaching me how to frame problems and where to go to make better sense of those problems. It always pushes me to be a better thinker. For me, there was an unexpected outcome to stretching my mind to my intellectual limits. It makes many of the more mundane, daily challenges I face much easier to handle. And training your body to bench press, two hundred pounds makes opening the pickle jar quite a bit easier.

It continually challenges me
This probably goes without saying and is closely related to the point above. Philosophy is challenging not only because it tackles hard problems, but because it unrelenting in its demand for clarity. A friend of mine who was struggling with the question of God’s existence once expressed exasperation with the unsettled nature of the philosophical literature on the question. “If you read a good argument for one position one month, the next month there will be three journal articles with counterarguments that show why the first argument was wrong.” This constant dialogue with no clear end can be very frustrating. But it also forces us to learn how to evaluate what we’re thinking about and synthesize it. This challenge is something I find invigorating. I expect it to last a lifetime.



It makes me careful
One of the greatest lessons I’m learning from studying philosophy is that there are very few easy answers to life’s intractable problems. Philosophy has pushed me to labor over the nuance of a word or phrase. It encourages me to constantly challenge my assumptions and to slow down and be patient while looking for something that might resemble an answer. Finishing a great book in philosophy most of the time means concluding with more questions than I started with. While this can sound frustrating to some, it has brought a great deal of peace to me. I’m learning that when it comes to ideas, the journey is quite a bit more enjoyable than the destination.

It changes my point of view
There’s a popular bumper sticker that reads, “Hire a teenager while he still knows everything.” It’s funny--at least to everyone but teenagers--because with age we come to learn that life is nuanced and requires changing our minds about a great many things. Philosophy provides the means by which I can consider views of points. I would not otherwise consider and to look in a different way at problems I once thought were solved. Think of where’d you’d be, if you still believed all the things you were certain of when you were twelve. Healthy change generally means growth and that’s a good thing.

It tempers dogmatism
I’m learning that dogmatism may partly be rooted in a desire to be secure. While security generally is something to be prized, when it comes to the life of the mind, too much security can actually be a detriment. Because logic is so central to philosophy, it’s natural to think that intellectual problems all have hard-and-fast logical outcomes and the goal is to find those irrefutable conclusions. If this were the case, dogmatism would be hard to avoid. But philosophy, taken holistically, has led me in the opposite direction. The ambiguity of words, the fuzzy nature of our knowledge of the truth of many facts, the influence of the passions and desires, the imprecision of experience, and the obvious limitations of our mind should introduce a great deal of intellectual humility and tentativeness to our worldview. Philosophy as a discipline (and, in my opinion, when done properly) exposes both the power and the limitations of logic. As G.K. Chesterton rightly observed, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”



It puts things in perspective
As I alluded to above, philosophy is teaching me how to understand the relative importance of ideas. It’s all too easy to view every idea as equally important and to want to “go to the mat” for every idea we find disagreeable. But by having to go deep on concepts, I’ve learned that some ideas are worth wrestling with and others are not. There are a lot of very interesting ideas to labor over, argue about, and spend time on. There are a lot of others that aren’t. Philosophy is helping me figure out which are which.
Source: Paul Pardi

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You should never ‘Argue’ about Religion

The table talk focuses on everyday issues that we discuss with one another and have philosophical significance, and the daily conversation deals with common sense and minding our own business. Statements such as “that’s common sense” and “it’s none of my business” are frequently used but not always evaluated. Certainly, there are other statements that fall into this category such as, “There is one thing that I never argue about: religion”? Normally this statement is made with strong conviction as if it is not to be compromised but it always puzzles me when someone says this. Despite the fact that it is well within the right of the speaker to adhere to this idea, it still brings up two important questions: Why is this statement made? Is the topic of religion worthy of discussion?

There are several reasons why may say, and genuinely accept, this. One is indifference and this indifference can be expressed in two ways. Some are indifferent because they argue that religious issues are hotly disputed and diverse and conclude that there is no hope in finding any truth in the middle of all these differences and disagreements.

The attempt is futile. Some are indifferent because they simply do not care about religion and argue that we should be more concerned with practical matters, while still others are simply impatient with theological and philosophical issues. “The attempt to discuss these matters is preposterous.” They might claim. Moreover, others do not discuss religion because they find the idea so overwhelming. Here we are attempting to just get by each day and trying to understand the mysteries of religion is quite a daunting task. Lastly, this statement is made because of fear and disillusionment with religion. Some fear the discussion of religious and philosophical matters because they simply do not know how they feel about these topics. They have never really examined it. Or they think that they have examined it and are afraid to find out that they may be wrong. Some are simply disillusioned by religion because of violence committed in its name. They think of conflicts and offenses that have occurred because of religious issues and feel that the teachings of religion have lost their credibility. These reactions to the thought of discussing religion raise another issue which is philosophically significant.



Defining religion is a task unto itself. The meaning of the term ‘religion’ has been hotly debated for centuries by theologians, philosophers, politicians, and even scientists. Because religion is so multifaceted it has difficult to come up with a definition that covers the nature of all religions. Nevertheless, I’m going to make an attempt. According to Wikipedia (believe it or not, it’s probably one of the more concise definitions in cyberspace), religion is “the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or more in general a set of beliefs explaining the existence of and giving meaning to the universe, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.” This definition is adequate particularly in how it treats the idea of the divine. Not all religions—notably Buddhism—require a belief in a divine being. The definition contains concepts such as god or gods, existence, meaning, moral code, and human affairs. It is not a stretch to claim that religion is important to our lives, regardless of whether one admires or despises religion.

Religion’s importance lies in the fact that it deals with ultimate issues; matters that are fundamental to human life such as the existence of God, death, morality, meaning of life and human behavior. These issues are a fundamental concern and understanding them appear to be necessary for flourishing in this life. Dr. Thomas Morris explains in his book, Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life that disputed questions can be divided into two categories: existentially peripheral disputed questions and existentially central disputed questions. According to Dr. Morris, the former are questions that “may be widely or hotly disputed but whose proper resolution is not really crucial for my understanding of my life or for my living of a good life.”



Whereas the latter category are questions that are “widely or hotly disputed among human beings and that matter a great deal to how we understand ourselves and our lives.” For instance, some dispute which operating system is better: Windows or Mac OS X. This debate is worthy of consideration and important for computer usage but the resolution to this question will not affect the ultimate issues of life. However, the existence of God is existentially central because it greatly affects our lives and can lead to important insights into personal meaning, immortality, and ethics.

Religion can be hotly disputed and sometimes this can be discouraging or even repulsive to some but the fact that it is hotly disputed should not excuse us from pursuing an understanding of religion and how it fundamentally affects our lives. There are numerous existentially peripheral questions that are hotly disputed but how many times do you hear those issues being mentioned in the following statement: “There is one thing that I never argue about: …. (fill in the blank).” This is probably not a common statement. It is also important to note that the word “argue” can be misunderstood.
Many times, “argue” is used to mean participation in a heated exchange. In this sense, responsible and rational people would not condone “arguing” about religion. However, the classical meaning of “argue” is to offer reasons for your conclusions. This philosophical sense of the word should be encouraged when it comes to the topic of religion. Offering reasons for our conclusions when it comes to such an important matter as religion is vital to our lives and maybe those who have uttered the statement in question will realize what they are missing.
Source: Rick Pimentel

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Minds and Computers: Is there a possibility of a Computational theory of Mind?

There is now a very wide range of sound introductory texts in the philosophy of mind. Matt Carter’s new book offers something rather different. His opening six chapters include material which will be very familiar to any student of the philosophy of mind: dualism, behaviorism, materialism, and functionalism. But his main concern is to outline and defend the possibility of a computational theory of mind. Three chapters outline in a formal, rigorous way a variety of concepts necessary for understanding what computation is, and the remainder of the book aims to show how this formal machinery might be invoked in an explanation of what the mind is and how it works.

Carter’s cautious conclusion is that on the one hand there is no objection in principle to the programme of strong artificial intelligence – ie, that there can be systems which display (and so have) mentality simply in virtue of instantiating certain computer programs – but that on the other hand, our best available programs are ‘woefully inadequate’ to that task.



Carter succeeds admirably in explaining why this might be so. The opening chapters will be fairly simple for philosophy students, but the material thereafter will be almost wholly new and not available elsewhere in such a user-friendly form. For students of artificial intelligence (AI), the book explains very clearly why the whole artificial intelligence project presupposes substantive and controversial answers to some traditional philosophical questions. The book is a model of exercise in interdisciplinary. It’s also written lucidly, with regular summaries of important points. An Appendix supplies a useful glossary of technical terms.

So far so, good, very good in fact. However, as usual among critics, I want to make a number of critical comments, of increasing weight. The first and least weighty: though Carter sprinkles the text with exercises, he rarely supplies any answers, which students will surely find frustrating.

Next, he doesn’t mention one set of reservations some philosophers have about AI. That is the tendency among cognitive scientists to attribute to the brain certain activities which (so the criticism goes) belong only to the whole person. For example, in accounting for perception, the scientists will speak in terms of the brain receiving messages, interpreting data, constructing hypotheses, drawing inferences, etc., as if the brain were itself a small person. Carter may well find such criticism unpersuasive, but it would have been good to give it an airing, as it has been a significant issue between defenders of AI and their critics.

The third reservation is a matter of substance. Computer programs operate on purely ‘syntactic’ features – ultimately speaking, they depend upon the physical form of the inputs, transformations and outputs. By contrast, human thought is always a thought about something, it represents something, it has a contents. It displays what philosophers call ‘intentionality’. One central problem for artificial intelligence is how to get aboutness into computer programs – how to get semantics out of syntactic.

Carter’s answer is to invoke experience. What enables certain expressions of syntax in our heads to represent features of the world is that they are linked with the external world, and the linkage comes about because we experience the world. “In order for our mental states to have meaning, intentionality, we must have antecedent experience of the world, mediated by our sensory apparatus”, (p.179). Now this response might be helpful for a computational theory of mind if experience could be explained in purely computational terms. Some philosophers and AI theorists believe that this can be done, but arguably the move is not available to Carter. For earlier in the book he committed himself to an account of experience which seems to preclude a computational treatment.



Carter thinks that all our experiences have a qualitative aspect: that they include so-called qualia. There is something it is like to see the color red. Visual experience is beyond merely having certain physical inputs in the forms of light waves, undergoing certain transformations in the brain and producing physical outputs such as speaking the sentence “There is something red.” What it is like to be in any given experiential state, says Carter, “can be known only by having the first person experience of being in the state” (p.43). However, if this is correct, it surely cannot be squared with a computational theory of experience. Carter thinks that detecting qualia requires you to have that experience yourself; but there is no reason to think that detecting a particular computer program requires you to be an embodiment of that program yourself. Therefore experience can’t be like a computer program.

Carter tries to avoid the qualia problem by saying that it is not important that we each have qualitative experience unknowable by other people, so long as we agree on which things are red and which are not. But this seems inadequate. If a computational theory of mind requires getting semantics out of syntactic, and this requires a connection with the real world via our sensory experiences, and these experiences essentially involve qualia, we can hardly accept that qualia are unimportant. They are precisely what makes experience experience, and so mind mind.



It seems that Carter is faced with a trilemma. He needs to explain how he thinks a computational account can be provided of qualia; or he needs to abandon a qualia-based account of experience, in favor of some computational account; or he needs to abandon his conclusion that there is no objection in principle to a purely computational account of the mind.

However, it would be unreasonable to expect an introductory text such as this to provide the solutions to these problems. What it needs to do is to give readers a sense of the issues involved. Carter’s text does that extremely well.
Source: Nicholas Everitt

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Meditation in virtual reality: When Philosophy and the Business of Synthetic Technology meet

There’s no paradox in finding your true self via virtual reality because everyday reality is a simulation, says self-help guru Deepak Chopra of his latest venture

The cosmos swirls, wisps of purple, yellow and orange light flickering across the darkness of space, then across the visage of Buddha. An otherworldly plain fills the horizon, framed by the branches of a tree – the tree of enlightenment.

A familiar voice intrudes. “What or who is having this experience right this moment, right now?” Pause. “It is your own being. It is your innermost being that is having the experience, your true self.”

The voice continues. “Live here, with no regrets, no anticipation, no resistance, and you will be free. Freedom is always now. Being is now.”



Even if you enjoy psychedelic animation graphics you may struggle to live here, however, because visits last just 20 minutes and they are not real, not free and not quite now.
Welcome – if you have the headset or appropriate app – to Deepak Chopra’s latest venture: virtual reality (VR) meditation.

The new age entrepreneur and self-help guru unveiled the simulation, titled “Finding your true self”, this week at the headquarters of Wevr, a VR firm in Silicon Beach, Los Angeles’ tech hub.

Chopra, who narrates the simulation, hopes to sell the experience via booths at airports, hospitals and other locations, and via phones and laptops enabled with VR platforms.
“In 20 minutes you get a journey to enlightenment. The goal is to feel grounded and understand yourself a little better,” he told the Guardian. The technology, he said, facilitated an understanding of consciousness which eluded even René Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher. “He was good for his time but didn’t have VR to take it to the next level.”
A bold claim for a nascent technology more associated with gaming and pornography than reflection and contemplation. But Chopra, 68, has not built a lucrative brand and sold millions of books such as The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success through timidity.



Meditation’s benefits – improved focus, lower stress, inner peace – require investments of time, effort and discipline which frustrate many would-be practitioners. A vast market, Chopra hopes for a simulation which mixes “insights, contemplation and entertainment”.

Meditation purists may wonder if that is cheating. Those who simply wonder if it works will be able to find out when the product launches, perhaps in a few weeks. “Soon, very soon,” said Anthony Batt, Wevr’s co-founder. The app will cost $10, he said.

For that, according to a three-minute trailer shown to the Guardian and others at the company’s headquarters, you get trippy graphics, heavy on purple, with otherworldly sound effects laid over statements which, depending on perspective, are insightful, gnomic or nonsense.

There was no paradox between finding your true self via virtual reality because everyday reality is itself a simulation, said Chopra. An insect with 100 eyes, for instance, views the world differently than a human.

“For 30 years people have been coming to my lectures saying they don’t get it. Well now they can.”

Asked if the simulation tried to cross Descartes, who coined the maxim “I think, thefore I am,” with the science fiction film The Matrix, Chopra beamed. “Absolutely!”



The simulation features the Bodhi tree under which Buddha is said to have sat.
The project is the brainchild of Chopra’s son, Gotham, a Los Angeles film-maker. “I’ve been hearing my father talk about simulation for 30 years. I realized this would be a tool for him.”

Earlier versions featuring water were discarded for an impressionistic interpretation of the Bodhi tree in eastern India under which Buddha is said to have sat around 500 BC, seeking and eventually finding enlightenment. “We wanted to replicate that,” said Gotham.

Designers worked on the project at Wevr’s headquarters, a Frank Gehry-designed house where Dennis Hopper lived, partied and encountered his own virtual reality through alcohol and drugs.

Strapping on a headset or peering at a computer screen, were not inimical to contemplation, said Chopra. “I’ve never been too attached to tradition. We’re an evolving species. If you don’t keep up with technology you’re not in touch with the zeitgeist and you may as well pack it in.”
Source Rory Carroll, Los Angeles

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Glass Solar Roofing: Helpful Innovation or Unrealistic Luxury Item?

By: Alexandria Addesso

Cost-efficient and eco-friendly are buzzwords used in many new product pitches being that they are major concerns of “conscious” consumers. Solar energy has grown as an industry tremendously in the past several years due to its use as a cleaner power source. Solar panels, although initially more expensive when first installed, are believed to save users money on their energy bills in the long run.



Last October Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX amongst many other occupational titles, unveiled his newest project which is solar roof made out of many glass tiles. He revealed the solar glass roof at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, CA.

"So the basic proposition will be: Would you like a roof that looks better than a normal roof, lasts twice as long, costs less and—by the way—generates electricity? Why would you get anything else?," said Musk.

The tiles will come in four different variations which include slate glass tile, textured Glass Tile, Tuscan Glass Tile, and Smooth Glass Tile. But could such an innovation really be cheaper than a good old shingled roof? According to Musk the solar glass roofs will be cheaper than the terra cotta or slate roof styles that they are trying to mimic, which are the most expensive roofs on the market.

"The solar roof consists of uniquely designed glass tiles that complement the aesthetics of any home, embedded with the highest efficiency photovoltaic cells," explained a statement released by Tesla. "Customers can choose which sections of their roof will contain the hidden solar technology while still having the entire roof look the same."



The solar glass roofs function by utilizing three levels of glass film, then solar cells. When the sunlight reaches solar cells it is converted to energy and saved on a power wall. The glass solar roofs have not been priced or mass produced yet, the projected date is mid-2017. Although they may be beneficial and aesthetically pleasing, they will most likely be a highly priced luxury item.

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