Prosocial Commons (Zoominar Cafe) !
ProSocial Commons !
(Zoominar Cafe, of: 26th March 02022)
...What is Prosocial Commons? For details, please see: Introducing The Prosocial Commons
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A blog-post
by
Velikovsky of Newcastle
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So, I've been a member of Prosocial World for a while...
& now, excitingly - there is:
& so, I attended this great webinar...
A brief excerpt below, from the PC's official webpage: Introducing the Prosocial Commons (on, TVoL)
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`What is Prosocial World (PW)? PW is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote positive change based on the most recent advances in evolutionary science. Our methods can help any group become more cooperative and adaptable at achieving its valued goals and entering into prosocial relations with other groups. We have trained over 650 group facilitators and are creating “field sites” for stewarding cultural evolution around the world. It is also part of our mission to increase knowledge and literacy in evolutionary science as an overarching worldview.
What is the Prosocial Commons (PC)? PC will provide a way for you to both support and become engaged with PW. Support includes financial support, although it can be anything within your means, and exemptions based on need are possible, so there will be no financial barrier to becoming involved. Engagement includes a broad range of co-created activities that support PW in ways that are fulfilling for you. What is your passion for changing the world in a positive direction? No matter how you answered this question (health, education, climate change, biodiversity, equity….) or your current capacity as a change agent (a teenager, a parent, a clergy member, a philanthropist, a professor, a director of a nonprofit, a corporate CEO, a spiritual seeker…) you can pursue your passion more effectively by seeing it as a process of evolution and working within the cultural ecosystem that we are helping to create. Activities can include:
Online cafés, discussion groups, and book clubs.Learning journeys, for deepening your knowledge about evolutionary science and its many implications.Action labs, for accomplishing concrete goals that the group has agreed upon.Volunteer teams that utilize your talents to develop PW as an organization.Importantly, your tax-deductible financial contributions will not only support PW in achieving its mission but will also be utilized to support projects co-created by PC members.
What will it be like to join the PC? The PC is designed to be a social experience, not just a digital experience. You will immediately begin meeting with current members, either individually or in small groups, for an introduction and exploration of common interests. You’ll also be encouraged to join existing initiatives or to explore the formation of new initiatives. Meetings can be both online and in-person, especially when place-based activities begin to take place (e.g., neighborhood groups or meet-ups in a given city).
For members who are newly encountering the modern evolutionary perspective, the PC will offer learning experiences such as advice on what to read, discussion groups, book clubs, and webinars. For professionals such as university professors and policy experts, there can be workshops resulting in academic publications, policy applications, and content reaching a wide audience on PW’s online magazine and podcast This View of Life. In all cases, learning experiences will be oriented toward action—actually doing things together that change the world in positive directions, facilitated by the infrastructure for cultural evolution that PW is helping to co-create with many other like-minded people and organizations around the world. In this fashion, the experience of joining the PC can be optimized for each member.'
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... [end of excerpt, & please see the official webpage, for more information]
For more, please see: Introducing the Prosocial Commons
...And am happy to say, I've already joined this group: (see below, where I have also Selected and Transmitted a post, from the Hylo page: https://www.hylo.com/all/post/48088)
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Ed GibneyyesterdayPROJECT#philosophy#evolution
`Towards a Circle of Evolutionary PhilosophersThe Vienna Circle began meeting in 1924, partially inspired by Einstein’s revolution in the field of physics. The group sought to create a similar revolution in philosophy, determined to ground truth in empirical findings using logical positivism. Their ultimate failure in this quest became an important historical example for the limitations of knowledge, but the Vienna Circle still serves as a shining example of the power of small groups acting with purpose towards a goal. (Other than the tragic murder of one of their founders!) (is.gd/Rg6xQ3)
Now, inspired by recent revolutions in evolutionary biology, the time is right for another group of philosophers to come together and focus on the implications for their field. Early philosophers after Darwin may have once poisoned the well for such endeavours with their abhorrent and tragic beliefs such as eugenics and Social Darwinism, but they were digging in the wrong place based on naïve and poorly understood versions of evolution. With the advent of the modern synthesis, the extended evolutionary synthesis, multilevel selection theory, and a host of other findings about the major transitions in the evolution of cooperation among living organisms, a much more mature evolutionary philosophy can now be developed.
This is already happening in isolated pockets around the world. Just a handful of prominent examples illustrate this clearly:• Dan Dennett has been writing about Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and the metaphysical implications for consciousness and free will for decades.
• Michael Ruse has written dozens of books on evolution and philosophy and edited The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics.
• The term evolutionary epistemology was first coined in 1974 by the psychologist Donald Campbell and has had notable developments from philosophers including Michael Bradie, Nathalie Gontier, and Andy Norman.
• David Livingston Smith edited a superb collection of essays in 2016 titled How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism.
• The philosopher Denis Dutton published numerous books and essays on aesthetics and his TED Talk “A Darwinian Theory of Beauty” has been viewed over 2.6 million times.
• During the 10 years he’s written Evolutionary Philosophy (evphil.com), Ed Gibney has published peer-reviewed papers on evolutionary ethics and evolutionary politics, which propose ways that evolutionary perspectives can help us bridge David Hume’s is-ought divide and rebuild the collapsed harm principle from John Stuart Mill which underlies theories of justice in liberal societies.
• Even the field of classical logic has been built on three laws of thought that only hold for static views of the universe, which, of course, have been completely undermined by Darwin.
From this brief list, we can see that all of the major branches of philosophy have been affected by evolutionary thinking. Dan Dennett’s “universal acid” has reached every one of them. Yet these exciting developments are seldom seen together by specialized philosophers or their students. This is because university departments necessarily contain diverse perspectives and are often still dominated by Continental or Analytic philosophers who sometimes ignore or are downright hostile to evolutionary and other scientific studies. (is.gd/113wNi)
This project contends that there is now a huge opportunity to bring all of these evolutionary perspectives on philosophy together. Such a collaboration could provide great benefits to the field of philosophy, to the intellectual underpinnings of the activities of Prosocial World, and to the study of the survival and flourishing of life in general.
Prosocial World (PW) is a nonprofit dedicated to “consciously evolving a world that works for all.” It was co-founded in 2020 by David Sloan Wilson as an amicable spinoff from his previous nonprofit, the Evolution Institute. With its online magazine This View of Life, over 15 full and part-time staff, and a new major grant from the John Templeton Foundation, PW is in an excellent position to serve as the online hub of a circle of evolutionary philosophers.
Elsewhere on PW, EvoS programs have demonstrated the benefit of bringing a cross-disciplinary group of scientists together from all backgrounds (both physical and social) in order to view their subjects through the lens of the latest findings of evolution. Movements are also sprouting to bring such evolutionary views to the study of topics in the humanities like art and religion.
What is to be done here? In the development of this circle of evolutionary philosophers, we can follow much of what the Vienna Circle did. Their group included academic and non-academic philosophers, as well as scientists and thinkers from a variety of other disciplines. They included teachers as well as students. They met regularly to discuss important papers and ideas. Some members wrote a manifesto for the group (which others vehemently disagreed with—a sign they weren’t using the prosocial process!). They organized conferences. They started a peer-reviewed journal. And numerous influential books were produced from this intellectual environment.
Now, with advances in technology, we can do all this and more, drawing from a worldwide audience of interested participants. Anyone eager to learn about and apply “this view of life” could join in. Altogether, this would eventually construct an independent and virtual philosophy department within the broader “Evolution University” of Prosocial World. If such a department did form, it would be unique in the world, and likely impossible to replicate in any existing universities.
The information above lays out a long-term vision for this circle of evolutionary philosophers. We can only get there through many iterations of projects and growth. And we must start from square one not knowing who will take part in this circle or how fast it will spread. As such, this particular initial project will embark upon a co-created “learning journey” to begin to explore this vast territory with practical applications in mind. The steps accomplished will very much depend on who is taking them, but a firmer plan for the future will be one of the main goals we seek.
This exploratory process will take place as part of the Prosocial Commons (PC), a new support-and-engagement group that has been formed within PW for implementing new initiatives such as this one. The initiatives will take place as part of a 12-week ‘generation’ of activity that will begin in April. The minimal commitment for becoming involved includes:
• Attend a single one-hour online meeting per week.
• One hour of preparation for each meeting.
• Notification if this commitment cannot be met on any given week.
This is a very modest commitment per capita that can result in a very large public good. Working in appropriately structured groups with meaningful objectives and a minimal commitment by each member is usually a highly rewarding experience.
Joining the Prosocial Commons requires making a financial donation to PW that can be anything within one’s means, with exemptions for those who truly can’t afford to pay anything. This creates a common pool of financial resources for the PC without imposing any financial barriers to entry. Members of the PC are free to join other initiatives or to nominate initiatives of their own. In general, we expect a high degree of synergy between initiatives, which will be in communication with each other during the 12-week cycles of activity.
To join in this exciting new collaboration, begin by taking just these two steps:
1) Go here (is.gd/vIqh3V) to make your donation to PW to become a member of the Prosocial Commons.
2) Go here (is.gd/rcHapn) to register for this project and provide some basic information about yourself and your interests.
Thank you for becoming part of this bold experiment in cultural evolution! We look forward to varying it, selecting it, and replicating it with you.
Ed Gibney
Evolutionary Philosopher
www.evphil.com
Andy Norman (is.gd/49O7XH)
Author of Mental Immunity
Executive Director, CIRCE (is.gd/kFIDtg)
David Sloan Wilson (is.gd/3ckKO5)
President, Prosocial World (is.gd/pG7yzz)SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus
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(...Once again, the above unit of culture, aka, unit of information [or fractal HOLON/parton, if you want to get all scientific about it] was Selected, Varied, and Transmitted, from the Hylo page: https://www.hylo.com/all/post/48088).
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And especially, see Ed Gibney's post. on:
Joining a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers
on Ed's great blog:
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As an aside,
...my review of Ed Gibney's (2012) great book Evolutionary Philosophy , here.
& my review of Andy Norman's (2021) great book Mental Immunity , here.
& my review of David Sloan Wilson's (2021) great novel, Atlas Hugged , here.
& my (2016) Evolutionary Culturology PhD Dissertation is (free)... here.
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Well, that's about all we have time for, folks.
You have been reading / viewing a blog-post by:
Dr J T Velikovsky Ph.D
Evolutionary Culturologist
and/or
(Velikovsky of Newcastle)
Information Scientist & Systems Scientist & AI Researcher & Enthusiast & Evolutionary Culturologist & Filmmaker & Writer & Artist & Actor & Muso & Rugged Frontiersman & Random Guy
(and, also The StoryAlity Guy)
aka
(or, The Artist formally known as Dr J T Velikovsky)
More stuff:
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