The Evolution Of Future Consciousness

How do our unique conscious minds reflect and amplify nature’s vast evolutionary process? This book provides a scientifically informed, psychologically holistic approach to understanding and enhancing our future consciousness, serving as a guide for creating a realistic, constructive, and ethical future. Thomas Lombardo reveals how we can flourish in the flow of evolution and create a prosperous future for ourselves, human society and the planet.

Are there any unique qualities that humans possess that make us special within the world of nature? Since the beginnings of recorded history, we have pondered this question. What if many of humanitys highest qualities and unique achievements, such as technology, civilization, morals, self-consciousness, freedom of choice, religion, and science are all built upon a single distinctive human capacity? It may be that our highly evolved mental power to envision and think about the future is at the core of our greatest accomplishments and most unique human attributes. In The Evolution of Future Consciousness, psychologist and futurist Tom Lombardo examines the human ability to be conscious of the future, to create ideas, images, goals, and plans about the future, to think about these mental creations and use them in directing ones actions and ones life. In the opening chapter, he looks at the psychology of future consciousness and its values and benefits, as well as ways to enhance this human ability. Subsequent chapters describe the emergence of future consciousness in pre-historic times and how it was critical in the development of love and bonding, the family, tools, and human aggression and hunting; the central importance of the future and time in early myths, religions, and classical philosophy; and the rise of modern futurist thinking, covering the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Western Enlightenment, and the Romantic counter-reaction. The book concludes with Darwin and how the theory of evolution revolutionized humanitys conception of both the past and the future. In its companion volume, Contemporary Futurist Thought, Tom Lombardo completes his survey of the historical development of future consciousness, discussing significant ideas and approaches to the future in the last century, including science fiction, future studies, and an extensive array of recent theories and paradigms of the future.

Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future: Collected Essays Thomas Lombardo, Ph. D. Center for Future Consciousness Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future is a profound, deeply important, and timely book that concerned people and change agents everywhere will want to read. Copthorne Macdonald The Wisdom Page As a college professor and teacher of psychology, philosophy, and the future, Tom Lombardos mind has been drawn toward such questions as: How will the human mind evolve in the future? In fact, how should the human mind evolve and improve itself? What might be the standards and ideals that guide this evolution? And what role does ethical development (or evolution) play in this process? The twenty previously published articles collected together in Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future chronicle the development of Dr. Lombardos ideas on these related questions and topics, and together constitute a theoretical perspective on the nature of the human mind, on how to best educate and evolve the human mind in the future, and how to integrate into this vision the central importance of both future consciousness (as a key dimension of human consciousness) and ethical character virtues. True to its title, three key themes emerge in this collection: wisdom, consciousness, and the future, and all three concepts tie into the authors main contribution to the field of futures studies, future consciousness. Numerous essays (for example, Evolving Future Consciousness through the Pursuit of Virtue and The Evolution and Psychology of Future Consciousness) address the nature of future consciousness, a term Dr. Lombardo defines as the complex set of mental capacities all humans possess for imagining, conceptualizing, and approaching the future. Aside from describing the psychological make-up of future consciousness, which includes emotional, motivational, cognitive, and personal dimensions, the author also explains in numerous essays (such as Developing Constructive and Creative Attitudes about the Future) how to proactively enhance ones future consciousness. Other essays deal directly with consciousness and the human mind in the broadest sense (as in The Future Evolution of the Ecology of Mind) and connect this general area of inquiry with the futurist question of how consciousness and mind might evolve in the future. Dr. Lombardo proposes that the progressive emergence of cosmic consciousness is the central evolutionary trajectory of the human mind. Hence, this book contains essays on both consciousness of the future and consciousness in the future. While the discussion of consciousness and the future fascinates in its own right, Dr. Lombardo is a holistic and deep thinker who searches for connections among myriad philosophical topics. A number of essays address the question of ethics and virtue and how such concepts connect with both future consciousness and the evolution of consciousness in the future. He then expands on this theme to explore how virtue applies to the goals of higher education in essays such as Ethical Character Development and Personal and Academic Excellence. In thinking through the concept of virtue and how it applies to consciousness, education, and the future, Dr. Lombardo emphasizes the one key virtuewisdomthat provides the center of gravity around which all other character virtues revolve. Indeed, if any one concept unites the majority of essays in this collection, it is wisdom. In The Wisdom of Future Consciousness, the author argues that wisdom is the highest expression of future consciousness, and systematically describes the numerous connections between wisdom and heightened future consciousness. Further, according to the author, wisdom is the key ideal that we should model and teach within education, now and in the future. This argume

Why is there so much chaos and suffering in the world today? Are we sliding towards dystopia and perhaps extinction, or is there hope for a better future? What happened in the human lineage over the last three million years that made us into a near-geologic force capable of altering the face of our planet and threatening our own existence? In Emerging World, Roger Briggs explores the evolution of consciousness and shows that this is behind everything humans have done, are now doing, and are capable of in the future. By bringing together the best knowledge from paleoanthropology, cultural philosophy, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary theory, Briggs makes the case that humanity is now on the verge of a major transformation, a monumental turning point in our story. Foreseen by many sages and scholars, this anticipated leap promises a new era of history and culture, and a new civilization on Earth in which the needs of all people are met and we become stewards of our living planet. Yet this is by no means guaranteed. Emerging World offers a new understanding of our crisis today and points the way to a bright future for humanity and life on our planet.

An evolutionary and transformative journey through the history of science fiction from the innermost passions and dreams of the human spirit to the farthest reaches of the universe, human imagination, and beyond. '...a grand vision of the role of science fiction in the progress of human consciousness.' Dr. Karlheinz Steinmüller, Winner of the Kurd Lasswitz Award

The integral worldview represents the next crucial step in the development of our civilization. Through its enlarged understanding of the evolution of consciousness and culture, the emerging perspective known as integral consciousness provides realistic and pragmatic solutions to our growing global problems, both environmental and political. As McIntosh convincingly demonstrates, the integral worldview's transformational potential provides a way to literally become the change we want to see in the world. This is really two books in one: the first half serves as an accessible and highly readable introduction to the power of integral consciousness, with the second half making a variety of original contributions to the integral perspective and breaking new ground in the application of integral philosophy to politics and spirituality. Moreover, McIntosh provides a much-needed contextualization and critique of the integral worldview's leading author, Ken Wilber, which helps make integral philosophy relevant to a larger audience.

A collection of stimulating studies on the past, the present, and the future of consciousness, Consciousness Evolving contributes to understanding some of the most important conceptual problems of our time. The advent of the modern synthesis together with the human genome project affords a platform for considering what it is that makes humans distinctive. Beginning with an essay that accents the nature of the problem within a behavioristic framework and concluding with reflections on the prospects for a form of immortality through serial cloning, the chapters are divided into three sections, which concern how and why consciousness may have evolved, special capacities involving language, creativity, and mentality as candidates for evolved adaptations, and the prospects for artificial evolution though the design of robots with specific forms of consciousness and mind. This volume should appeal to every reader who wants to better understand the human species, including its distinctive properties and its place in nature. (Series A)

Based on his life's research, Robert Ornstein provides a look at the evolution of the mind. He explains that we are not rational but adaptive, and that it is Darwin, not Freud, who is the central scientist of the brain. Our minds have evolved to help us survive, not to reason. At the same time, our individual worlds have developed our minds and destroyed many of our natural abilities.