What is the lesson here? That each tyrant believes they can outwit all other tyrants. That tyrants are convinced they can outwit democratic alliances. That, in the end, all authoritarian regimes fail. Abysmally. For the simple reason that inability to accept their own faillings makes all authoritarian leaders incapable of coping with change. Unable to adapt. Unable to evolve. Hence all authoritarian regimes are inherently fragile.
And who suffers the consequences? We do. All of us. “World Wide Wars”, remember?
“Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
First celebrated as a brilliant physicist, Einstein had later been recognized as an ‘all rounder’. So much so that he was found ‘guilty’ for other people’s words.
Rita Mae Brown?!? Why bother mention her? If you want ‘to back’ up such an important saying, you’d better come up with a really famous ‘promoter’. Preferably a dead one…
‘And your point is…?’
On January 27, the day when Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago, I shared this on FB:
Some people took exception. Interpreting this as an allusion to what’s currently going on in the US, they asked me to ‘be specific’.
“I don’t protest the protesters but their particular way of doing it. Without any consideration for the ‘collateral damage’ and turning a blind eye towards the already experienced facts.”
My point being that Hitler didn’t invent antisemitism. Germany wasn’t the first country where large scale pogroms were organized. Pogrom is a Russian word. “To wreak havoc, to demolish violently”. The way I see it, ‘pogrom’ is not only a tragedy – for both victims and perpetrators – but also a symptom. A symptom that something is amiss in the society which allows it to happen.
To protest something is fully justified. If unhappy about something, one is fully entitled to try to prevent that something from happening. Again… But it would be ‘unreasonably’ to ‘prevent’ it in a way that will be even costlier than the ‘feared development’. Particularly ‘unreasonably’ if the method had already been experimented!
Those supporting Hitler were ‘protesting’ the Versailles Treaty. Just as Lenin’s Bolsheviks were protesting what had happened during the czarist Russia. Hitler and Lenin protested by perpetrating crimes even more heinous than those they were protesting.
They should have known better. Those who supported them, of course… for it was the supporters who had ultimately experienced the consequences! After all, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that the simple fact that this time it is the others who are at the receiving end of what’s going on doesn’t make it right. In no way better than what we have experienced. And continue to… The misery experienced by the others does not annihilate ours!
And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of Us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.
“And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?“
Adam called back and we all what happened next.
The serpent was cursed for his role, Eve was cursed for tempting Adam and Adam was cursed for…. In the end, all those involved – including the serpent, for whatever reason – were banished from the heaven. “Lest he put forth his hand…”
What are we to understand from all this? That God, the omniscient and all powerful Father, was ‘evil’? He must have known what was going to happen… he was omniscient, wasn’t he?
There are people who believe the Bible to be an accurate rendering of the past. I happen to be one of them. Only I don’t interpret what I read in the literal sense… the narrative is true, those things did happen, only not in the ‘real’ world. The Bible is not the story of flesh but a story of mind.
It is the story of what has happened in our minds. In our collective mind!
Genesis is the story of how we’ve grown conscious! Starting from the sensations perceived during our interaction with the ‘real’ world – read ‘serpent’ – and using the evolutionary accrued ability to speak among ourselves – we’ve learned to identify ‘information’. We, like all other living things, were already able to make the difference between good and ‘bad’. All living things ‘know’ what’s good for them and what to avoid. Or, at least, act as if… We, like all other primates and along many other animals, were already adept at ‘reading minds’. Were already able to figure out intentions. As conscious ‘human beings’ we have started to attribute intent! “To know good and EVIL”!
So evil is of a conscious nature, right?
‘How about ‘God’? Is it real?’
Sorry, I don’t have a reasonable answer for this question. All I know is that the God so many of us believe in is nothing but a representation. A figment of our collective imagination. And since we cannot imagine things but starting from the real world, there is a strong possibility that there is something, somewhere, which fits, however loosely, our concept. Our concept of a God…
We use words to build narratives. Which, supposedly, help us in our quest for meaning. Yet everything does nothing more than alleviate our fear.
At some point in my life, some 6 years after Ceausescu had been chased from his presidential palace, I discovered the Stock Exchange. I had read about it, was under the impression that I knew how it worked but never had the opportunity to trade on in. Living in a communist country prevents you from trading on the free market, you know. To cut a long story short, I had a lot of beginner’s luck. And I wanted more. So I started to learn about it. Fundamental analysis, technical analysis, accounting… investor’s psychology, decision making theory…
But it wasn’t enough. So I went back to school. Sociology this time. I was no longer trying to beat the market, I only wanted to understand what was going on. Not only in the market but in our minds. By that time, I had already learned that investors were – and still are – torn apart by greed and fear.
Being able to ‘see the difference’ is what makes us able to considerate. The result of our considerations…
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to spot the difference between a spot and a curve. You don’t even need to be able to read…
Every adolescent steps out of the straight and narrow. Time and time again. And is told by his elders to toe the line. Until they learn that stepping back into the fold is easier than remaining an outlier for the rest of their natural life. Only the fold is no longer were it used to be… It has reached its current position because those who had the guts to explore have done that for the rest of us. Experimented being outliers. So that we, all of us, did not have to experience every possibility before choosing where to go next. They, the outliers, found out what was ‘out there’ and told us.
I’ve already made a few considerations about the two pictures above. About some of the differences between the top and the bottom ones. I’ve left the main one for today’s post.
We do have a certain bias towards conformity. We do, socially and statistically speaking, tend to follow the trend. Like all other social animals. After all, no society/herd can function – as a group, when all its members behave ‘outlierly’. So much outside the trend as to buck it. The difference between the top and the bottom ‘graph-s’ being the attitude towards the situation.
The top one comes with the ‘normal’ bias. Each normal individual does have a certain ‘something’ against the ‘outlier’ situation and a certain affinity for the comfort of being trendy. But we have learned to respect the outliers, for as long as they don’t hurt us. For as long as they don’t rock the boat so much as to get us seasick. The bottom graph states from the beginning that only the outlier opinion is valid. That no matter how many people continue to follow the trend, they are wrong. Even worse, they are insignificant. Hence disposable.
OK, there have been instances when the trend was leading in the wrong direction. Quite a few. Yet people have somehow managed to survive. They stuck together, realized the outliers who kept warning them were right and followed them out of the dire situation they found themselves in. But in each and every situation where an outlier had declared the rest of the ‘mob’ to be insignificant/disposable, and had enough traction to act upon their convictions, the situation had to become worse before people realized they had to change tack.
Before the people had realized they were following the wrong outlier!
Two things cannot exist simultaneously in the same place
Logic, ‘the correct way of thinking’, starts from the notion that no two things can exist, simultaneously, in the same ‘place’. Not even in our own head… Until they do, actually.
I’ll make a break here and tell you about Oscar Hoffman. A Romanian Teacher. Who kept telling us, those who had the privilege to hear him teaching, ‘It’s not enough for a proposition to be valid from the logical point of view. It also has to make sense. Epistemologically speaking.’
The bottom part of the picture describes a stance which does make some epistemological sense and is seriously deficient when examined logically. The top part is logically correct but also includes the meaning hidden in the bottom part. Let me elaborate.
“100% irrefutable study that is proof and absolutely statistically significant.” Absolute BS. No scientific study has ever proved anything. Other than the facts examined confirm, or contradict, the hypothesis being tested during that study. Hence the hypothesis is allowed to stand, temporarily, as a theory or declared to be wrong. A single study being claimed to be ‘absolutely statistically significant’ is so outrageous that it isn’t worth any comment. “100% paid studies with an agenda and of little to no value or significance whatsoever”… Nowadays 99.99% of the studies do involve money changing hands. Scientists have to eat and ‘money’ want to learn things. Hence ‘agendas’, on top of ‘money’. ‘Little to no value’ makes a lot less sense. If those studies yield results without any “value or significance whatsoever”, then why is any money involved and any time spent? To discuss about them, let alone to put them together…. To fit an agenda? The scientists involved – all of them?!?, “100%” – are frauds and all those paying the hefty sums of money are suckers? Then how can be explained the huge technological leap and the scientific breakthrough we currently witness?
‘Outlier’ versus ‘General trend’, is a far more ‘logically sound’. But also a lot more vague… The first proposition/picture, when examined with an open mind, does include everything claimed by the science deniers and the conspiracy speculationists. An outlier can be right, all change starts with one, and trends can be wrong. As all of them end up being…
So. What will it be? Are we going to let ourselves be divided into warring camps? Or understand ‘superposition’? Accept that having an agenda is not necessarily bad and that money is an excellent servant but a horrible master? Or continue the current trend? Until we will have killed each-other along the line of divide et impera while repeating at nauseam ‘greed is good’?
And it thus becomes obvious that Nietzsche has been falsely accused. It wasn’t he who had murdered God! He was simply the first who had the guts to write His death certificate…
My point being that what we call ‘God’ is a man made image. A concept. It doesn’t matter, for this analysis, whether there is an actual god or not. What we call God is nothing more than our image of one.
And it had been enough. For a while. For as long as we have followed the rules we ourselves had established to guide our own behavior – as in written them down – the God we’d imagined worked as intended. ‘Religion’ did what it was supposed to do. People had a ‘spiritual environment’ in which they behaved both coherently and cohesively. Coherently and cohesively enough to evolve from slaves – owned and/or owners – to equal rights owning/yielding citizens. Coherently and cohesively enough to evolve from horse driven war chariots to the M1A3 Abrams tank. Coherently and cohesively enough to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ to the tune of 8 billion. Give or take. Not all of them following ‘the rules’ but all of them benefiting from the results of those rules having been followed for a while.
Yet, when things were unfolding so smoothly, why have we given up following those rules?
Have we outgrown the need for a shepherdly Father? For a Ghost to frighten us unto doing the right thing? Or have we become so infatuated with our own ability to think, to reason, that we have turned it into an idol? Against all odds… Despite having been warned about it!
Pascal’s wager is about turning the tables on ‘God’. The image we made for ourselves about God, the ‘Holy Gost who frightened us unto staying on the straight and narrow’, convinced us to behave in a constructive manner. Benefiting the entire community. The argument made by Pascal was made to convince us, individually, that we – each of us – should believe in God for their own sake. For their own benefit! Effectively transforming each individual belief into an idol… ‘Graven’ by each individual, upon their own soul, in the likeness of things in heaven, for their individual use… Transforming the community creating God into an individual tool designed and believed to ‘give’ each of us ‘everything’. Individually. As opposed to making it possible for everybody to exist.
As Nietzsche observed, by making Pascal’s wager – by transforming faith into a rational thing – we have collectively killed God. The same God which has made us possible. Against everything we have been warned about, by our wise ancestors, we have replaced God with ourselves. So that we “gain all”. Individually. Each of those who had made the rational decision…
Theoretically, we do have a certain understanding regarding the thing we call ‘intelligence’. After all, there are some dictionary entries discussing the matter. But when it comes to measuring the said intelligence… nothing is straightforward anymore. So we still have a lot to learn about the thing. About our ability to understand, after all… About our ability to understand, period, including our own intelligence.
Click the picture above and read the article. It is interesting. The most interesting part being what it misses.
The first really intelligent computer application put together by man was the one who defeated Garry Kasparov. Has anyone been invited to play chess by an application? Is anybody aware of any chess or go application who had any initiative? Meaningful initiative? Other than making this or that move only AFTER a human had initiated the game?
What are we discussing here? The intelligence level of any of the many, present or future, artificial intelligence applications or their ability to become aware? Aware of anything…
Furthermore, when we discuss whether AI, ANI, AGI or even ASI would erase humankind from the face of the Earth… nobody has yet mentioned us. After all, we are the ones building the applications. The computers on which we run the applications… Instead of worrying whether any of the AI versions would do anything to us, we should worry about what some of us will do after they will have laid their hands on a really powerful AI application!
For a group of autonomous agents to coexist in a limited space, they need to behave in a coherent manner. For that coexistence to survive in the long run, those agents need to behave cohesively. To maintain their autonomy while bearing in mind the limited nature of the space in which they need to do their thing.
Riding bumper cars is great fun! But have you tried to get anywhere driving like that on a real road?
Apa caldă – pentru spălat – este o realitate 1,0. Simțită de noi. Nu atât ‘organoleptic’ cât în ceea ce privește evoluția noastră.
Având apă caldă pentru spălat, am reușit să ducem la maturitate un procentaj mult mai mare dintre copii noștri. Mult mai mulți dintre adulții spălați la fund au reușit să ajungă la senectute… Apa caldă pentru spălat a schimbat, profund, demografia.
Apa caldă o fi fost ‘imaginată’ de noi dar a fost, și a rămas, o realitate palpabilă.
Luxul, așa cum este el definit de marketeri și înțeles/acceptat de marele public, aduce beneficii doar celor care vând produse și servicii ‘de lux’.
Abia când cei care se ocupă cu ‘sensul vieții’ vor fi fost în stare să ne explice în ce lux ne scăldăm, atunci când ne spălăm cu apă caldă… abia atunci vom deveni capabili să înțelegem, cu toții, care este adevărata semnificație a acestui generos cuvânt!
nicichiarasa 