Interdisciplinary Blogs
Problem: We can use this excerpt from Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” to illustrate negative actions: “Something there is that doesn’t...
Problem: We in contemporary technological societies remain tied to a Western strategy for problem solving that teaches us to say “I want” and not “I...
Problem: Plato’s allegory of prisoners in a cave is perhaps the most famous allegory in Western literature. It deserves that fame. Here are excerpts from...
Problem: Wiesel’s speech to President Clinton and the U.S. Congress in April, 1999, included these words: “We are on the threshold of a new century,...
Problem: Havel’s speech on taking office in 1989 as President of Czechoslavakia included these words: “We live in a contaminated moral environment....
Problem: Eliot, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature along with Camus, gave us powerful metaphors for both problems and solutions in his poetry and prose. As...
Problem: Camus, whose books include The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, A Happy Death and The First Man, was the second youngest winner...
Problem: The Ten Commandments includes ideas that conflict with contemporary humanistic ideas pointing in an evolutionary direction. Those Commandments are: (1)...
Problem: If indeed we are all conformists to a greater or lesser extent–as implied by the Milgram (blog 57) and Levin (blog 40) experiments–then learning...
Problem: Given the very slow development of the social sciences, the more rapid development of the biological sciences has resulted in the popularity of biological...
SEE RESPONSE TO BLOG 35 FOR INFORMATION ON A COURSE STARTING EARLY THIS SUMMER THAT WILL TEACH YOU HOW TO WRITE POWERFUL INTERDISCIPLINARY BLOGS AND ALSO EVOLVE PERSONALLY
Image of the future:
One day we will all learn to be poets, philosophers, and scientists (“head”).
One day we will all learn to change our negative emotions into positive emotions, moving from hate toward love, shame toward pride, guilt toward self-acceptance, fear toward confidence, despair toward hope, anxiety toward serenity, unhappiness toward happiness, boredom toward passion, disappointment toward satisfaction, and sorrow toward joy (“heart”).
There will be a future for our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, and their great grandchildren (“hand”).
We humans will make increasing progress on escalating problems by learning to use an interdisciplinary scientific method in our everyday lives, and we will thus move toward a next stage of personal and world evolution (“head,” “heart,” and “hand”).
The Academy for Individual Evolution, a nonprofit internet school, is ABSOLUTELY UNIQUE among all other schools at all levels of education, past or present. That UNIQUENESS is based on (1) half a century of research developing a truly interdisciplinary approach to knowledge, and (2) the above eleven books written in this century that build on that half-century and range over the social and biophysical sciences and the humanities, and (3) is illustrated by the interdisciplinary blogs on this site to the left. Visitors can test that UNIQUENESS for themselves by reading any one of those blogs on individual evolution, evolutionary coaching or teaching, and world problems, and discovering insights not to be found anywhere else. (SIGN UP ON RIGHT TO BE PLACED ON OUR MAILING LIST OR TO RECEIVE AN APPLICATION FORM FOR OUR 6-WEEK INTRODUCTORY COURSE).
The organization of the Academy is equally unique in its focus on teaching its students (1) how to write these three kinds of interdisciplinary blogs, (2) how to move into nothing less than a next stage of human evolution, (3) how to coach or teach others to do so, and (4) how to make progress on world problems. Granting that all of this must sound greatly exaggerated, these are nevertheless the Academy’s goals. They are based on making full use of the incredible and almost completely untapped potentials of language and the scientific method. Our past research has managed to break through the failures of the social sciences and humanities to yield a humanistic scientific method that we can all learn to use to address the problems that we confront throughout our everyday lives. That method follows the scientific ideal of opening up to the full range of forces relevant to whatever problem is addressed, by contrast with our present highly specialized and narrow disciplines, subdisciplines, and subsubdisciplines. The enormous complexity of human behavior requires such breadth.
As a result of learning to use a humanistic scientific method in one’s daily life in one scene after another, students will enter INNER SPACE , WHERE NO MAN OR WOMAN HAS GONE BEFORE.
Einstein stated in 1946 that “everything has changed, save the way we think,” and this is still true today. The 2003 book by Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Royal Astronomer, is titled Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s future in This Century. The Doomsday Clock of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has now moved from 6 to 5 minutes to midnight. Most recently, an airborne virus–produced by the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam–can kill many millions of us if it is ever released. Following Rees, it is only a matter of time before ever more deadly viruses will be produced and released by unbalanced individuals. Yet despite the depth and threatening nature of these and other problems, we are convinced that individual evolution can indeed succeed in confronting them with increasing effectiveness.
To the right are listed the Academy’s founding faculty. Presently we faculty are in the midst of a series of conferences over a thirteen-week period that will yield a series of 6-week courses, including the 6-week introductory course. The courses includes telephone conferences that will be recorded in case of missed participation. Textbooks for that course are included in the tuition and are provided at no further cost. See the drop-down category “Introductory Course” under “Courses” above for the introductory-course syllabus. All courses will be limited to 10 students to focus on student interaction with instructors and one another. Faculty will post office hours when students can call in. Completing each course, involving 12 hours of teleconference time, yields a certificate of completion. Our twelve-course program will yield a Certificate in Individual Evolution, Evolutionary Coaching, and World-Problem Analysis. Except foe the free initial intro course, the tuition for each course is $200, with 90 percent going to the instructor and 10 percent reserved for administrative costs (we are a nonprofit organization).
Write Bernie Phillips at bphillips@individualevolution.org or Andy Plotkin at aplotkin@individualevolution.org for any questions. They are the founders of the Academy, with Plotkin teaching the intro course. See descriptions of their backgrounds along with the backgrounds of the other founding faculty on the right side of this page.
