These are images from one of my recent “punditry” gigs. The client was BP.
Appropriately enough, a cartoonist took notes.
One of themes I talked about is the sense of a metaphorical “ramp of progress” that people often internalize to frame the past and future in technological and dynamic societies. I compared the technological ramp (which has fire and the wheel in the distant past and perhaps Star Trek and The Jetsons, or a singularity, in the future) with the moral ramp (which has the Ten Commandments in the Past and peace in the future), and then presented a third ramp, which concerns ever expanded means of interpersonal connection. This ramp has the inception of language in the distant past and perhaps something like shared, intentional, waking-state dreaming, what I sometimes call “post-symbolic communication”, in the future.
Cephalopods come up a lot in my talks.
Given the natural ability to animate and morph found in some cephalopod species, along with their wonderful intelligence, they might have come upon something like post-symbolic communication by now if only they had nurturing childhoods, and therefore a platform for the development of multi-generational culture.
