Wheii.com > Be in the Know
Wheii.com is a knowledge portal dedicated to monitoring and understanding global trends, the market and emerging technologies.
- The Future depends on what we do in the Present.
- "Be the change you want to see in the world" Mahatma Gandhi
- "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" Edmund Burke
- Haiku from Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club:
Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The queen is their slave. - Everything we call "the past" is, literally, nothing but present memories. Likewise, everything we call "the future" is nothing but present memories inverted, or rearranged, to form a prediction or expectation.
- Millions of us complain about political decisions
without acknowledging that the way we live our lives supports them.
The combination of what we DO and what we don't DO affects the world.
Contributors
- Roberto Vitalini, Switzerland
MBA University of St.Gallen
- Peggy Tan, Singapore
MBA University of St.Gallen
About Roberto Vitalini
As a futurist Roberto is a member of the World Futures Studies Federation, the Foresight Network and the Club of Amsterdam. His work focuses on inventing, designing and marketing futuristic products or services. He is a Lateral Thinker by Nature (media artist) and Vertical Thinker by Education (MBA).
Disclaimer
- Neither I, Roberto Vitalini, nor any of my friends collaborating on Wheii.com,
makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal responsibility
or liability for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information,
apparatus, products, or process disclosed, or represents that the use of
such information, apparatus, products or process by any third party would
not infringe on any privately-held rights.
- Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not constitute or imply its endorsement or recommendation.
The View from Nowhere
- Oxford Univ Press, 1986:
As Thomas Nagel wrote in a famous paper, we can learn all about the brain mechanisms of a bat's sonar system without having the slightest idea of what it is like to have the sonar experiences of a bat. The human brain may be inadequate to fully understand the world and therefore itself. We can never be sure that our viewpoint is an objective viewpoint. We can only be sure that our viewpoint is definitely a very subjective viewpoint. At the same time, we should not limit ourselves to objective reality, as the subjectivity of consciousness is part of reality.
- Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. A book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
Brain Science, George Lakoff says, is overturning twenty-five centuries of Western Philosophy. The most basic philosophical ideas, ideas about truth and beauty, events and causes, mind and self, justice, morality, and what it means to be human, all are under siege today. Cognitive Science, according to Lakoff, is discovering that thought is mostly unconscious, abstract concepts mostly metaphorical, and that the mind is not just in the body, it is of the body; not separate from it, as in the old image of the ghost in the machine. What all this means to Berkeley's George Lakoff is that Plato, Descartes, and Kant were fooling themselves into thinking that they had constructed Great Philosophical Theories with something like pure reason. Their ideas, says Lakoff, are no more than elaborations of metaphors deeply rooted in our humanity that are probably oversold as universal truth.
Quotes from The Matrix
- Morpheus:
If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
- Agent Smith:
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.
