Dear Neil,
Your contribution intrigues me and it is a pleasure to come with some remarks.
I fully agree with you that our "morality" has to change deeply from egoistic short time economic thinking to a "sharing" all the goods and energy that we have (sunlight = energy).
Understanding the technique of our material body is in my opinion (like yours) not an end-goal and will not contribute to a change of mentality, only to a more materialistic understanding leading to more "physical laws" that will lead to a thousand more questions, so that we are more and more busy with "matter". It is my view that "matter does not matter" because it is only a layer of reality, that emerges from what I perceive as Total Simultaneity, where our non-causal consciousness is part of. As Sean Carroll already said "Everything is made of Fields" The Consciousness Field is the catalyst for the "Matter Field" so that the excitation that we remember as matter is created.
I fully agree also with your answer to Tomaso, the growing of humanity has to be controlled, it is as I also mention in my essay that in 50 years we will need another four or five "earth's" to nourish all these individuals, and politics will not be able to solve this problem.
People are not really "stupid" indeed, it is only that because of the great numbers the most stupid as well as the most "wise" are both increasing and it is the first class that when put together have the greatest influence, because the wise man is a silent one...
About your mirror image : each three-dimensional object for instance a cube has three sides you cannot see, however hold it in front of a mirror and you are able to become aware of the whole cube (all six sides) so the mirror image can be a help to have a full perception of three dimensional objects outside yourself. Indeed the left and right are interchanged, it is not a film that you are looking at, to have a good image you need to look into your camera on the computer...and look at the screen...first you are astonished because you are used to look in the mirror.
About your problem with "work", Any "labor" takes time of your life, this time is only once , every minute is a "once in a lifetime" so in principle there is no reference for anybody else to give it a value. They say that people are happy when they work , but I have my doubts, the real problem is that people don't know how to fill their lifetime if they don't have to hunt for deer or labor on their land for vegetables...If mankind changes its mentality perhaps then....
About machines that would be able to think : It is my perception that any computer even how big it might be will never be able to create because the system is binair, it is only BLACK OR WHITE it can choose from, not the infinity number of grey-tones that are in-between, it is our quantum based brain that is able to realize "thinking" because very Planck time there are choices to be made, leading to catalyzing the matter Field, so Descartes could also have said "I think so I create" . I wrote an article that maybe published in COSMOLOGY (depending on review) where I wrote how a "quantum computer could help us to enlarge consciousness I quote it here:
QUOTE
Time-Travel Becomes "ETERNAL -NOW- MOMENT HOPPING"
The splitting in the original Many Worlds I interpretation goes only forward in time, not backwards. In our conception it IS possible that our consciousness "activates" Eternal Now Moments from other time/life-lines (or from parallel available universes) . Should this mean that time travel is possible ? Yes but...should we call this phenomenon time-travel ?
What we are understanding as time-travel in this causal time/life line always leads to the well-known paradoxes like killing your grand-father. (What a mentality !!!) These paradoxes however are no longer problematic when we apply the perception of Total Simultaneity. Then time-travel in the past and/or the future would become ENM-Hopping, and the so called "physical" time/life-line (in our memory) continues normally. Our consciousness is able not only to hop from one ENM to another but also line up these ENM's and in this way creating for itself the best possible past and future, Real Free Will resides in TS.
The extension of our Free Will lies in the extension of our consciousness and so in a closer contact with our NCC in order to realize more choices in the ENM availabilities. We think that the a future coupling of the quantum-computer and our brain will be an opening.
In the article "Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules..." 16 Prof. Nick E. Mavromatos, proposed that :
"For the first time there is concrete evidence for quantum entanglement over relatively large distances in living matter at ambient temperature, which suggests a rather non-trivial role of quantum physics in path optimization for energy and information transport" :
(http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/329/1/012026) (14) ,
It becomes clear that quantum entanglement and decoherence time, which are for the construction and the operational qualities of quantum computers the main issues, these qualities are are already available in our own brains inside the Cell Microtubules (MT).
(decoherence = The particles that make up a computer interact with surroundings, so that information is spreading out, which means: this effect is spoiling quantum computations, (to decohere = lose their quantum properties)).
Regarding the "macroscopic" aspect : Recent experiments on atoms in salt crystals have shown that an amount of 1020 atoms formed a hugely entangled state. Vlatko Vedral in "Living in a Quantum World" (Scientific American , June 2011) and "Progress Article Quantifying entanglement in Macroscopic Systems" (June 2008 Nature 453, 1004-1007 : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7198/full/nature07124.html .(21). Quantum Bit Storage is advancing not only in the macroscopic way but now also scientists have succeeded to retrieve coherent information for extended times (39 minutes) at room-temperature. See Kamyar Saeedi et al in "Room-Temperature Quantum Bit Storage Exceeding 39 Minutes Using Ionized Donors in Silicon-28" http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6160/830 (22)
Our brains are RWA (Ready Willing and Able) to perform quantum states that when brought in coherence with a quantum computer. This will enable us to realize "ENM-Hopping".
UNQUOTE
So you see this one of the possibilities (I hope)
I also hope that you will find some time to read my essay : "STEERING THE FUTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS ?", because as you are also a broad interested man we sure have perceptions in common, so I wonder what your comment on my thread will be and maybe you will be able to rate my contribution in accordance to your appreciation.
(full article for Cosmology is attached I hope it works..)