i was just interested in the thoughts all of you might have about agriculture in our society today. also it is not a area that is very 'popular', presumably because many people can't see its benefits and so i thought it would be an interesting adn not-so-usual topic to bring up for discussion.
what i specifically wanted to talk about was how agriculture will be in the future, given the direction it is going in currently. in our world today, a lot of the foods, plants are modified, because monetarily, it is just more advantageous for the growers, suppliers adn etc. and although there are organic foods, the supply of organic foods is insufficient, adn the prices are too high to use such foods to effectively feed the world population.
and so some questions that are posed are
will genetically modified foods be the inevitable future?
if not, what alternatives are there?
what will the wide spread of genetically modified foods do to agriculture in the world?
and what impacts does the current trend/attitudes about agriculture have on developments in such an area?
P.S.
and also importantly,,,, do u know or have any thoughts about agro-terrorism or food-terrorism?
and what preventative/protective measure could you take to reduce the impacts of an attack
There is no easy way for me to produce the kind of self intro requested in the first post of this community. I arrived at an interest in augmenting intelligence through other tertiary areas of inquiry that would be involved explanations in themselves. I might try to summarize the trajectory I followed to get here as flowing from the observation that there is no qualitative control in natural biological systems and my preoccupation with precision and intelligent control.
I have always been a follower of contemporary realism in the arts, and while I have not set pencil to paper for this purpose in an unreasonably long time now, I have studied the work of the old masters closely and the sciences of projective geometry and optics that developed in association with their work. It was during this endeavor that I began to introspect about the origins of my fascination with opulent draughtsmanship. Followers of realism are often accused of banal sensibilities, and I was compelled to articulate where my admiration for the art was localized. Very early on, I realized that my admiration seemed localized at least as much (if not more) in the execution of the work as in the finished artwork, and the way in which I appreciated the work seemed to have more in common with the appreciation certain Japanese Connesseurs have for a masterfully executed work of calligraphy than it did with the ridiculous race/class/gender axis those of my acquaintance seemed too eager to deconstruct all human creativity through.
I have lately speculated that this model of masterful execution may be adequately summarized under victor schklovsky’s theories of the aesthetic forces of complexity and difficulty. Why, for instance, is our appreciation for an artwork or creative act frequently associated with the complexity of the act or it’s result? I had come to describe where my artistic aspirations resided with opulent draughtsmanship as being associated with the precision of execution. It was evident to me that I had uncovered something, because an analysis of other artworks I held in great admiration that fell outside the realm of contemporary realism were also “precision generated.” Tibetan sand painting and the work of Andy Goldsworthy are conspicuous examples.
This preoccupation with precision carried over into other domains of inquiry or endeavor. My region of interest in materials science for instance, has concentrated upon intelligent and active materials, and increasingly, upon biological materials, where the properties emerge from the design of the smallest units of composition and subjecting them to intelligent control.
As these themes of precision and active control permeated my efforts at my own draughtsmanship, I had reason to become extremely frustrated. Recreating an image from the world on a drawing surface became an act of awesome concentration, and I found that my mind often lacked the discipline to record and interpret features in the way it needed to. My acuity for detecting surface features became inconsistent, and the limits of my dexterity did not seem to allow for executing a single line with the precision that I sought. My frustration, ultimately was that I was beholden to human faculties and human equipment, which seemed unequipped for my purposes.
Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences model gave me a useful means of distinguishing various intellectual faculties which I had been seeking to identify, and I began to reflect upon how each of these faculties within myself, was deficient. I was not satisfied with the extent of my mathematical or spatial faculties. I was uncoordinated. The quality of my thinking seemed superficially poor. I wanted more. This developed into a personal dialogue from which two new inquiries emerged:
-To what extent are these weaknesses just my failure to exercise the full capacity of my faculties? Can they be augmented internally?
-To what extent are these weaknesses dictated by the limitations imposed by nature? If natural selection does not select traits for intellectual merit then is it possible for one to engineer the organism for those traits?
