01:070:111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Global Catastrophic Risk, Ecological Collapse, Eucatastrophe
27 Mar 2018
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Document Summary
Sporormiella is a more abundance near lake shores than the middle of lakes, a stratigraphic decrease in abundance could simply relate to an increase in lake level. Criticism- things that seem to be due to time may be due to lake depth. Human activity and climate acted together to push megafaunal species into extinction 10000 years ago. Existential risk- causing a drop in the expected value of human existence. An existential eucatastrophe is an event which causes there to be much more expected value after the event than before. This aspect of mythology - subcreation rather than either representation or symbolic interpretation of the beauties and terrors of the world--is, i think, too little considered. He argues that we can do something special. The human mind is capable of forming mental images of things that are not actually present. The faculty of conceiving images is (or was) naturally called imagination. Ecological collapse- failure of ecosystems, mass extinctions.
