I’m aware of some of the stuff you referenced, for example Arnold J Toynbee and the role of creativity as a culture builder when an old culture dies or gets too stiff/old/useless.

Also as a way to find a parallel with future needs, I looked at another one of those hunter gatherer stories – the idea that a mesolithic culture in the middle east reacted to a fast climate change event (where I think the world got warmer and their staple foods dried up) by creating agriculture.

And what at the time I thought of as another effect of this “leapfrog” past was the first incidence of organised war.

But I’ve since heard that at the very least, it’s just not that simple, and that whole causal relationship may even be wrong.

It may be very wrong therefore to say that climate change led to these things, and to say that when that volcano blew we went down to 2000 families and we invented language, and that the two events were connected.

So what background research, or proof can you give to something that happened so long ago, and how much does that affect the focus of your talks, and in this time, when we can safely predict the next few decades will be very hard, our predictions of the future? I’m not saying you are wrong with this assumption and you may have loads of proof, but it’s something we *want* to be true, so it’s very easy to just assume it is without checking.

I’m afraid that by intentionally “augmenting” our realities we may risk diminishing them at the same time. In the same way that working culture has made us “efficient” – in terms of working quickly to a deadline, it has made us inefficient or even blind to so many other things that we have come to ignore. There’s only so many things we can be aware of.

Ale