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Global and placeless brains:
A third culture perspective
Vahid V. Motlagh
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Contents
1
Third Culture Intellectual Movement
2
The Idea: Placeless People
3
Encouraging and Promoting Global Citizenship
The Third Culture
1
The Third Culture Intellectual Movement
Third Culture
 Started by C.P. Snow and now is encouraged and propagated by
Brockman and his fellows at Edge.org
 “The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the
empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are
taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the
deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.”
 “In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has
shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly
marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not
a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the
traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly
reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many
of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their
culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own
jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by
comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually
reaching the point where the real world gets lost.”
Myths Busted by Scientific Discoveries
 The centrality of our planet is incorrect
 The centrality of our species is incorrect
The Next Myth
There is yet another strong “sticky” myth in which the majority of
contemporary people still strongly and wrongly believe. This myth
encourages the centrality of certain nation-states, cultures, languages,
and in short the cherished mental model.
It is incorrect
Evolution
Evolution
Natural and Artificial
Genes
Memes
building blocks or
codes of life either
natural or artificial.
building blocks or
codes of the mental
model .
They shape the
physical aspects of
life
They shape the non
physical aspects of
life
Nontrivial Ideas
Natural
Evolution
Artificial
Natural Evolution
 Evolution has NOT stopped.
 Natural selection is operating NOW
 Scientists have found that natural selection is acting to cause slow,
gradual evolutionary change in specific traits with medical significance.
The descendants of the women in the Framingham Heart Study, a
project of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and Boston
University that began in 1948, “are predicted to be on average slightly
shorter and stouter, to have lower total cholesterol levels and systolic
blood pressure, to have their first child earlier, and to reach menopause
later than they would in the absence of evolution.”
 “Age at first birth and age at menopause appear to be changing so as to
lengthen the reproductive period. And fertility is the driving force
behind evolution in modern populations.”
Artificial Evolution
 But the future path of evolution is Artificial
 In 2003 in a conference at the Boston University's Pardee Center for the
Study of the Longer-Range Future scientists discussed the Future of
Human Nature and shared their thoughts on the Promises and
Challenges in Genomics and Computer Science
 It was pointed out during the conference that “natural selection no
longer determine the evolutionary process, artificial selection does.”
Artificial Evolution
 Achievements of the J. Craig Venter Institute after 15 years of R&D:
Synthetic Life
 Some viruses evolve too quickly. For instance: HIV
 The vaccines cannot keep up with these rapid evolutionary changes
 To make the flu vaccine, e.g. H1N1, with the usual technical tools, it
takes Weeks to Months
 But with Synthetic Genomics, it can take Less than 24 hours.
 They now can shorten the process of making vaccines
 We are understanding life at the most basic level
Natural Huge Time Frames
 Natural remarkable phenomena, either geological or biological, need a
huge time frame to occur: Millions of Years
 Tectonic plates on the Earth’s crust are moving, yet too slowly, at the
rate of a few centimeters per year
 For instance, San Andreas fault in California is sliding one inch per year
and a huge stress is building up there.
 Twenty Million Years ahead Los Angeles will move up enough to
become a suburb of San Francisco
Natural Huge Time Frames
 Mutations that affect the protein encoding parts of the DNA sequences
occur at a very slow rate also.
 Genes usually change at a much slower rate than DNA sequences that
do not encode proteins, because they often cause problems for an
organism, they may not survive to reproduce offspring.
 Only a small percentage of the human genome (less than 2 percent)
encodes proteins, and most mutations do not affect genes. The total
human sequence consists of approximately 3.2 billion base pairs.
 “Even though the human population is huge (about 6.7 billion in July
2008) and inhabits every corner of the globe, any two people differ from
each other only by about one in every thousand letters of the genetic
code (0.1 percent). That is five times less than the amount of variation
among chimpanzees, although current estimates place the world chimp
population at just 125,000, and they live in much more restricted
habitats.”
Brain Evolution
 Russ Hodge explains…
 “There are 214 genes known to play a role in the development and
function of the brain. Scientists looked at two types of primates
(humans and macaque monkeys) and two rodents (mice and rats). This
allowed them to compare the rates at which brain-related genes had
been evolving over the past 80 million years—the time at which the
common ancestor of all four species lived. The study showed that the
genes were evolving more quickly in both humans and macaques than
in rodents. In the line leading to humans it had accelerated even more.
Strong evolutionary pressure has been at work.”
 “Evolution had given the average modern human an unusually large
brain compared to other primates and species. Comparisons to chimps
and apes revealed that the brain of the last common ancestor was only
300 to 400 grams in size. The modern human brain generally ranges
from 1.2 to 1.8 kilograms, and studies of fossils have shown that most of
this growth has taken place in the past 2 million years, the era of
hominids.”
Brain Evolution
 Russ Hodge explains…
 Scientists believe that “a few genes have played a particularly important
role in increasing brain size.”
 Studies show that some genes, when mutated, “cause humans and
animals to develop unusually small brains. A rare genetic problem in
humans, for example, causes microcephaly—a condition in which
people are born with very small brains. They are often severely mentally
disabled. Other studies in humans and mice had revealed defects in
several molecules—including microcephalin and a gene called ASPM—
that play a role in microcephaly. Both of these molecules have evolved
unusually quickly since the split between humans and chimps.” Also
recent experiments with mice point to another gene, called Nde1. The
loss of this gene causes neurons to mature prematurely so the mice end
up with small brains.
Brain Evolution
 Fossil studies also show that “primates evolved from early mammals
that had small brains and little neocortex—the wrapping at the top and
front of the brain where a lot of the most dramatic growth has occurred.
As the neocortex increased in size and became more complex, it was
able to handle more types of sensory information and a greater volume
of it. As larger brains evolved in early apes and in our hominin
ancestors, the number of cortical areas increased to reach an estimated
200 or so in present day humans.”
Rapid Iteration, Slow Reproduction
 In the virtual sense, a Genetic Algorithm is used to model optimization
problems and find the solutions. They can be run in powerful
computers through software applications.
 The software too quickly evolves to solutions through ITERATIONS…
 The organism too slowly evolves to the next remarkable events through
REPRODUCTION…
Accelerated Development
The two What Ifs
Genes
Accelerated
Genetic
Development
Memes
Accelerated
Memetic
Development
Accelerated Genetic Development
 Can we run some truly rapid reproductions (including mutations) on
organisms in the real sense?
 Can we engage the remaining 98 percent of the human genome to
encode new useful proteins, and thus provide enhanced abilities, extra
senses, more sophisticated brains, etc?
 Will Millions of Years transform into Centuries, Decades, and why not
Months or Weeks?
 Can we squeeze the evolutionary time frames?
 Can we enormously shorten the process of making and creating?
 Recall the vaccines and viruses case
 “100,000 years is about the equivalent of 6,000 or 7,000 generations for
humans. The comparable ancestor of a fruit fly—grandfather to the
7,000th degree—lived only 230 years ago. If its rate of reproduction
remained the same, it would undergo 3 million generations in 100,000
years.”
Accelerated Genetic Development
 What if humans’ descendants will undergo 3 million generations in 100,000
years with the aid of artificial evolution and the current synthetic genomics?
 When Genetics will take off? The moment biotechnology business makes
life forms as Toys for Play (According to Freeman Dyson)
Accelerated Memetic Development
 The same question may be applied to the non-physical aspects of life.
 Will we become able to alter current worldviews, dominant mental
models, and the psyche of each and every individual?
 Richard A. Slaughter argues that the emergence of new ideas, the
expansion of horizons, and the creation of new possibilities holds out
real hope for innovation and change. And the best hopes lies where the
“unique interior world of each individual” is at work, where the
“accelerated psychic development” can and should happen
 He also argues that high converging technologies and their promising
spectacular innovations could be useful if and only if options for the
fusion of them with “advanced values” will be seriously explored.
Otherwise, “embedded in conventional taken-for-granted worldviews
with inadequate values” they will be definitely misused, and thus
aggravating the already aggravated situation.
Convergent Technologies
 Converging Technologies refers to the synergistic combination of four
major “NBIC” (nano-bio-info-cogno) provinces of science and
technology, each of which is currently progressing at a rapid rate
 BANG technologies: Bit (Information Technology), Atom
(Nanotechnology), Neuron (Cognitive), Gene (Biotechnology)
 The accelerating progress of machine-aided human intelligence and
enhanced consciousness has encouraged some futurists like Kurzweil
(2005), among a dozen of others, to believe that we are approaching
Singularity, beyond which the fabric of our civilization will be ruptured.
Machine intelligence is bound to take over the place of human
intelligence and continue to grow itself explosively afterward.
 Imagine an army of tiny nanobots swarming into the brain
The Critical Role of Mental Models
 Forrester (1961): Mental Models are the lenses through which we see
the world. Mental Models incorporate our biases, values, and beliefs
about how the world works.
 Senge (1990): Mental Models are deeply ingrained assumptions,
generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we
understand the world and how we take action. Very often, we are not
consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our
behavior.
 Weick (1993): Mental Models guide, shape, and provide the basis on
which individuals interpret and make sense of organizational life.
Symbolic Systems, Languages
 Boroditsky (2009) an expert on symbolic systems, points out that “even
what might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far
reaching effects on how we see the world” and on the way we think
about space, things, time, and events. She also highlights studies that
suggest treating nouns as masculine or feminine make people think of
them being more like men or women. In one of such studies the
researchers asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects
having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The
findings were intriguing. For German speakers a “bridge”( feminine
noun) is beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, slender, and pretty while
for Spanish speakers a “bridge” (masculine noun) is big, dangerous,
long, strong, and sturdy.
Language and Brain
 Russ Hodge reports…
 “In 2002 the laboratory of Wolfgang Enard at the Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found a gene that
may have played a key role in the evolution of human language. Several
facts made the molecule, called FOXP2, stand out. First, it seems to
help give humans precise control over their facial muscles, which is
important for speech. Secondly, the researchers compared the versions
of the gene found in humans, chimpanzees, and several other primates
and found two changes that are unique to humans. The mutations
seem to have happened at the same time as the first modern humans
appeared.”
 According to Christof Koch, “it is plausible that some species of
animals—mammals, in particular—possess some, but not necessarily
all, of the features of consciousness…these animals have feelings, have
subjective states. To believe otherwise is presumptuous and flies in the
face of all experimental evidence for the continuity of behaviors
between animals and humans.”
Global Brain
 Taking into account the accelerating and explosive growth of human
knowledge about the environment and genes it is probable that the
scientific findings will soon pave the way for the emergence of the
know-how of a reliable interface with fauna and flora. While the human
translation profession is on the verge of extinction with the presence of
useful machine translation applications like Google Translate one
should not be surprised that the next big thing will be that the fauna
translation profession will be on rise.
 Language barriers seem to be to none-barrier in the years to come. For
the sake of effective communication you soon can rely on the emerging
intelligent machines. I am now myself using this sort of global brain in
combination with the feedbacks I often receive from my private teacher
and fellow pen friends to improve my Italian. However, human or
machine translations may not result in sensing and learning about the
far reaching effects of languages on how we see the world. In other
words, through translation some valuable parts and “metaphors” of
mental models will be definitely lost.
 Remember to learn foreign languages (Hang this on your lips and ears)
The Idea: Placeless People
2
The Idea: Placeless People
Multiple Mental Models
 In our network society that is growing rapidly day by day it will be a
source of disgrace and embarrassment that people who want to explore
the new horizons are only connected to a closed circle of old friends
and colleagues who are, most likely, residents of the same region.
 My suggested rule that can be used as an indicator or measure of how
global you are:
 “You cannot become a global person unless have a good command of
at least four languages and when forty percent of your fellows are noncountry men and women.”
Limits of Human Cognition
 The are limits on human cognition
 "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our
Capacity for Processing Information" is one of the most highly cited
papers in psychology. It was published in 1956 by the cognitive
psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University's Department of
Psychology in Psychological Review. It supposedly argues that the
number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7
± 2.
 Miller concluded that memory span is not limited in terms of bits but
rather in terms of chunks. A chunk is the largest meaningful unit in the
presented material that the person recognizes - thus, it depends on the
knowledge of the person what counts as a chunk. For instance, a word
is a single chunk for a speaker of the language but breaks down into as
many chunks as the word has letters for someone who is totally
unfamiliar with the language.
 Chunking as grouping, mentally recoding them into a smaller number
of high-information-content items
 Chunking has also been used with models of language acquisition
Placelessness
 In the wake of a new kind of globalization in the modern era sometimes
it may appear rather silly to ask a total stranger a very typical question:
“Where are you from?” The point is that some people are “placeless” in
a sense that they do not belong to a specific country, culture, language,
and etc. Placelessness and not having clear and vivid roots may result
in potential gains and pains in the life of an individual to the extent
that, a related postmodern notion has become fashionable nowadays: to
have “multiple identities” (Giridharadas, 2010). Having multiple
identities is a growing problem for those people living in cultures other
than their own in different moments of their lives which leads to “a
variety of selves that are not integrated by any sense of culture” and
thus will highlight “the most important trend of the future: the rise of
cultures of schizophrenia, of madness” (Inayatullah, 1993).
Memetics Degrees of Freedom
 In mechanics, degrees of freedom (DOF) are the set of independent
displacements and/or rotations that specify completely the displaced or
deformed position and orientation of the body or system. This is a
fundamental concept relating to systems of moving bodies in
mechanical engineering, aeronautical engineering, robotics, structural
engineering, etc.
 In memetics, degrees of freedom indicate if and how you can easily and
comfortably accomadate and switch among diverse mental models or
sysems of memes or languages without stepping into the phase or age
of madness!
Global Citizenship
3
Encouraging and Promoting Global Citizenship
The future silly questions
Who are your parents?
What is your career?
Where do you belong to?
Where are you from?
Silly identification questions
1.
2.
3.
Where are you from? Which version do you want to hear: short,
medium, or the long story?
Where do you belong to? Technically and Practically Nowhere
Who are your parents? A combination of different genes taken from
humans plus animals or even totally designed by a computer program,
(J. Craig Venter Institute’s Synthetic Life which was designed by a
computer is a weak signal)
Identification in the future
 Is your genetic and memetic immune system robust enough to cope
with diverse threats and accommodate numerous opportunities?
 A huge amount of options and a huge amount of uncompressed time to
realize them
 Increased life span means increased chance for self-overcoming and
self-transcendence
 Placeless and Multiple
 Globalized, Multilingual, Travelling and Immigrating Worldwide
Through Open Borders
The New Unconscious
 Insights from the state-of–the-art Psychology
 Automatic behavior: Top scientists demonstrate through their
empirical findings that people perform quite a lot of higher mental
processes and behavior automatically, without their awareness and
conscious attention
 John A. Bargh (2005) reports:
 “Behavioral evidence from patients with frontal lobe lesions, behavior
and goal-priming studies in social psychology, the dissociated behavior
of deeply hypnotized subjects, findings from the study of human brain
evolution, cognitive neuroscience studies of the structure and function
of the frontal lobes as well as the separate actional and semantic visual
pathways, cognitive psychological research on the components of
working memory and on the degree of conscious access to motoric
behavior---all of these converge on the conclusion that complex
behavior and other higher mental processes can proceed independently
of the conscious will. Indeed, the brain evolution and
neuropsychological evidence suggests that the human brain is
designed for such independence.”
The New Unconscious
 Psychologists also show that the concept of self is quite distributed and
not crisp. The boundaries of self, significant others, and strangers,
sometimes really become blurry and we can measure these changes and
mis-perceptions by the normal empirical studies.
 Andersen, Reznik, and Glassman (2005) summarize an extensive
research program that documents how representations of significant
others unconsciously influence our responses to strangers. In this
research, participants describe significant others (SOs) in one session.
Then later, in an ostensibly unrelated session, they encounter a stranger
who has some of the features of one of their SOs. Results show that this
partial resemblance automatically activates the SO representation,
which affects impressions of and emotional reactions to the stranger, all
without the participants’ awareness. In addition, representations of the
self that are associated with the SO also become activated, including in
some cases self-regulatory processes that were developed in interaction
with threatening SOs. These demonstrations all suggest that “the self is
fundamentally interpersonal and relational, providing all people with a
repertoire of relational selves grounded in the web of their important
interpersonal relationships.” And these relational selves can and usually
do operate outside of awareness.
The New Unconscious
 Social Priming
 New York, 1996: University students take part in an experiment on the
effects of behavior-concept priming. As part of an ostensible language
test, participants are presented with many words. For some
participants, words synonymous with rudeness are included in this test;
for others, words synonymous with politeness are included instead.
After finishing this language test, all participants are sent down the
hall, where they encounter a staged situation in which it is possible to
act either rudely or politely. Although participants show no awareness
of the possible influence of the language test, their subsequent behavior
in the staged situation is a function of the type of words presented in
that test.
 Consciousness is not a literally private and purely individual issue. In
other words, we are actually part of some larger web of collective
consciousness and therefore most of our behavior and decisions are
built and carried out automatically, without our awareness or ultimate
control. Goals and motivations can be triggered by the environment,
without conscious choice or intention, then operate and run to
completion entirely nonconsciously (Bargh, 2005).
Future Technological Applications
 Artificial Evolution of Brain through Playing with Genes
 Nootropics are drugs, supplements, nutraceuticals, and functional
foods that are purported to improve mental functions such as cognition,
memory, intelligence, motivation, attention, and concentration
 Smart Pills, Brain Boosters, Cognitive Enhancers help us overcome the
Limits of Human Cognition
 New Cultural Chunks May Emerge: High-Information-Content Items,
Natural Born Multilingual Humans, Having Multiple Mental Models,
and Thus Multiple Identities
 Erasing true bad memories (for patients who suffer from post-traumatic
stress disorder) AND building false pleasant memories. Cognitive
(Male) Science and Marilyn Monroe Experiment: If and how to build
an artificial memory of sleeping with her.
Shifting Genes to Alter Memes
 Eastern and Western cultures nurture and reward, respectively,
interdependence and independence values. In Eastern Asia “the nail
that stands out gets pounded down” while in Western Europe “the
squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
 There are significant difference between Easterners and Westerners’
serotonin transporter gene (5 HTTLPR) three variants: short-short,
long-short, and long-long.
 “Whereas two thirds of East Asians have the short-short variant, only
one fifth of Americans and Western Europeans have it.” Also multiple
studies have demonstrated that the short- short variant individuals
“from non supportive families and/or those who lack social support”
have the greatest depression symptomology. According to Lieberman’s
conclusion, “the relative absence of this gene variant in the West would
lead to a neurochemistry predisposing people to create a culture that
values independence and individual achievement.”
Scenario Planning Exercise
 Step 1.0: Rip Van Winkle Technique
(Identification of Key Uncertainties)
 Step 2.0: STEEP Matrix
(Identification of Drivers and Barriers of Change)
 Step 3.0: List Weak Signal and Develop Wild Card Scenarios
(Identification of Future Surprises)
Scenario Planning Exercise
 Step I: Rip Van Winkle Technique
 You have been asleep for the last 30 years. You know nothing about the
world in which you awaken. Somewhat unfairly, you have been asked to
guess what global citizenship look like in 2040. To be somewhat more
fair, before answering you are allowed to ask 10 questions about the
world in 2040. You are told that those questions have yes or no answers
and should not be contingent on the answers to other questions.
 What are your 10 yes/no question?
Scenario Planning Exercise
 Step II: STEEP Matrix
Scan the local and global environments you are living in them and
write a list of drivers and barriers of global citizenship associated with
these categories:
1.
Social
2.
Technological
3.
Economical
4.
Environmental
5.
Political
Scenario Planning Exercise
 Step III: List Weak Signals and Develop Wild Card
Scenarios
 A Wild Card is a description of an outcome that is assumed to be
improbable but which would have large and immediate consequences
if it takes place (Mendonça et al., 2004)
 A Wild Card Scenario is a series of high impact – low probability events
 Weak Signals are "currently existing small and seemingly insignificant
issues and events that can tell us about the change in the future" and
can only be detected by some able environmental scanners who use
widened surveillance filters and pay more attention to the periphery
relative to the mainstream (Hiltunen, 2006)
Because things are the way they are, things
will not stay the way they are.
Bertolt Brecht
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