“An old Jewish Rabbi dies and goes to heaven. He stands in line for a while for his chance to meet God in person. His turn comes and he steps forward. God says “Welcome. Do you have any questions for me?” Rabbi: “No, I just want to tell you a joke about my time in that concentration camp.” God: “How can you joke about such a thing?” Rabbi: “I guess you had to be there.” “
‘A proposition needs more than ‘mere’ Logic in order to be True. It also needs to be epistemologically correct.’ Oscar Hoffman, 1930-2017
This morning (February 22, 2013, thanks FB) I had a very interesting discussion with my son.
Trying to ‘soften’ him up to my arguments I said: “I don’t understand how a person with such a command of logic as yourself is unwilling to accept that…”
I should have seen this coming: “If you have such an admiration for MY logic why don’t YOU accept that…” That very moment I recalled a lecture by Professor Oscar Hoffman: ‘A proposition needs more than ‘mere’ Logic…’
How do you translate that to a 13 years old?
“Look here. Being Logical is only the beginning. You cannot do anything without it but it isn’t enough just by itself. It’s only the formal side of Things”. And that was the very moment when inspiration hit me: “Let me give you an example. You have a lot of wooden pieces: spheres, cubes, pyramids, cylinders, cones..etc. and two boards with holes in them: circles, squares, triangles. Your task is to put each wooden piece through the corresponding hole but you must also follow a second rule: half the wooden pieces are made of red oak and they belong to the red board while the other half are made of birch and they belong to the blue board”.
“Let’s presume you have no idea about either geometry or kinds of wood. Using logic you might separate red oak from fir using the grain and then learn to thread various shapes each through the corresponding hole. But no amount of logic will ever enable you to associate the correct pile of wooden pieces to which colored board unless somebody tells you which pile is made of red oak and which pile is made of fir. Savvy?”
I’m proud to report that he got the point!
Present day edit. He remembers the discussion but neither of us can recall where it started!
Language is the tool we use to convey information. To speak our minds…
The consequences of tool use – messages, in this case – depend on the yielder. The consequences of shooting a gun depend mainly on the person aiming the gun. The consequences of using language … depend on those who are at the both ends of the ‘barrel’.
Messages – consequences of language being used to put together batches of information with the intent of transmitting them to an audience – are interpreted as soon as they reach their ‘target’. Meaning – what the receptor makes of a message, using the same languaging tools as those put to work by the emitter – depends mainly on the receptor. In fact, most of the times, there’s more information to be gleaned from a message than that intended to be conveyed by the person initiating the exchange.
If interested in who said what and what Orwell thought about the subject… just click on the link above. I’ll only add the reasons for which I know it to be a misleading affirmation.
The factual truth is that only dictators need to be guarded by rough men during their sleep. And during the rest of their lives… We, the rest of ‘the people’, go to sleep at night knowing there’s only a very slim chance to be targeted by thieves. Yes, we know that the police will likely come to investigate after the fact. After the fact… But we also know that we are less likely to fall prey to violence than those living in other countries because our societies work better than those which are more violent than ours.
Because our society works better, not because we employ more ‘rough men’ to guard us… On the contrary! The more violent a country, the more ‘popular’ the ‘rough men’ are. On both ‘sides of the isle’!
And the more violent a country, the less peacefully people sleep in that country…
There’s no other meaning but that attached by men to the stories they had spun themselves. For their own use.
Children are afraid of the dark. Not of ‘darkness’ but of ‘the dark’. Children, not babies! All babies let us know when they wake up. For the simple reason that they wake up to eat. Or to have their diapers changed. With small children – babies who had developed a certain level of self awareness – things are a little more complicated. They need more than simple sustenance. They need to learn. Their budding consciences needs to fit themselves into the world. Play being the first step. But play is impossible ‘in the dark’. Specially when previous experiences, hastened by ‘well meant warnings from well wishing adults’, suggest that ‘the dark’ is full of ‘hidden’ dangers.
In fact, it’s actually fascinating to observe how self awareness transforms darkness into the dark. Sheep – who are hunted during the night by various predators – don’t go into depression at sunset. OK, sheep are never alone and their senses – other than vision – are far sharper than ours. But I’m sure you understand what I’m driving at. While the rest of the animals do not have problems related to darkness, we – humans – are not comfortable in ‘the dark’. To the tune of developing various forms of phobia. From claustrophobia to agoraphobia. Simply because conscience – our ability to observe ourselves experiencing life – realizes it can observe/control less when in ‘the dark’. When its ability to see/influence what’s going on is reduced.
The point being that it’s our consciousness which makes the difference between darkness – lack of light – and ‘the dark’. That place/situation in which the conscious agents who cannot see/intervene experience their impotence. And call it for what it is. ‘The dark’.
Yes, you who have enough spare time to read things like these and are open minded enough to continue. Who don’t worry too much about what you’re going to eat tomorrow and who would like to figure out what life’s about. What’s the meaning of all this which is going on around you.
You who have just figured out you’re different from the rest of the animals. That you’re able to think. And that you’ll never make it alone.
That no matter how smart you are, you’ll never be able to pull it on your own. That no matter how strong you are, now, you’ll always need to be helped by your brethren.
Your previous actions that were done in error now have consequences. Karma.
My father has cancer. And an eye problem. The cancer is being treated in a public hospital while the eye problem is taken care of at a private facility. In the last couple of days we have visited them both.
Besides the obvious differences there’s a huge, and overpowering, ‘common ground’. The money problem.
No, not the money you have to fork out if you want to be treated in a private facility. The fact that money has been elevated to goal status.
Functionally speaking, health-care is a ‘social function’. By helping each member to remain healthy, the society – as a whole – preserves it’s overall health. It preserves it’s functionality. It’s ability to survive and to thrive. By helping my father with his medical conditions, the society makes it possible for me and my family to remain productive. Instead of taking care of him – which we can’t do properly – we can continue to do what we’re good at.
And no, the subject of this post is not ‘who should pay for health care’. There is no ‘free’ anything so everything has to be paid, one way or another. The problem is the fact that money becoming the main goal has consequences.
Instead of trying to maintain the well being of the population – in an economically sensible manner – the health industry is focused on making profit. Instead of trying to maintain the well being of the population – in an economically sensible manner – the public health system is focused on being ‘thrifty’. The consequences are similar. Overworked doctors, crowded waiting rooms, impatient personnel, long waiting hours, irritation… And no spare capacity to cover ‘mass emergencies’!
Unfortunately, things go way deeper than this.
Do you remember what else ‘surfaced’ in the winter of 2020?
Put two and two together and it becomes a lot easier to understand how and why a huge number of people ended up believing that COVID-19 was a scam. A scam concocted by Big Pharma to convince us to buy their products…
In retrospect, what happened doesn’t make much sense, does it? So many people who had died because so many of us didn’t have enough trust in masks and vaccines… So many of us were convinced that we were being played! For money…
Because it had already happened!
“These consumers were getting a raw deal. They were being exposed to Mylan’s price increases and excluded from the market forces that might cushion them. They were getting ripped off. And it’s no wonder they got angry.”
And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, toknow good and evil. Gen 3:22
Why are we doing all this?
?!?
You heard me. ‘Why are we doing all this?’ Everything that we do.
Is anything wrong with you?
No. Not anything that I know of. Only this question which has arisen on it own. Why don’t we just stop? Stop doing everything that we do…
But doing what we do is the reason for our existence… Otherwise we would not exist. At all! The world itself would have been different. Completely different!
So what?!? Do you really care about the world? What’s in it for you? For us… What benefit do we have from the world being as it is? Or at all…
I have to start by confessing that until yesterday evening I’ve never seriously considered this possibility. Why would anyone bother?
Then somebody – thank you, Jeffrey Mercer – introduced a whole new twist into this conundrum. ‘What if this whole (computer) simulation thing is nothing but yet another attempt to make sense of the Universe? To attribute sense to the Universe? Which whole thing, if anything, is the epitome of anthropomorphism…’ I took the liberty to rephrase Jeffrey Mercer’s words. To make them more ‘suitable’. To fit better my preexisting answer. Yet another ‘anthropomorphic’ thing….
My immediate answer was ‘our world is indeed a simulation. Or maybe not as much a simulation as an artifact.’
Before delving into the matter, I’m going to formulate two questions. Hence ‘the furcula’. If we live in a simulation, what kind of world does the simulator live in? Why would anyone bother? To study us responding to its simulating our senses/minds? Why doesn’t it study itself? Its own self/persona?
Coming back to my initial answer, I have to point out that the key word here is ‘our’. We’re speaking here about ‘our world’. The world we live in. Our reality!
We, the ones trying to make sense of this world/reality, have a few characteristics. We’re made of matter and we have, each of us, a conscience. Having a material nature introduces certain limitations and being conscious widens those limitations. Us being conscious widens those limitations, by introducing a ‘new dimension’, but this doesn’t mean those limitations disappear. A bucket is ‘wider’ than the circle at its base – the bucket has height, hence volume, while the circle is ‘flat’ – but the bucket itself continues to have limits.
Let’s examine the consequences of us being conscious agents of a material nature. Limited conscious agents of a material nature…
Us being conscious means us being aware of our material nature. Of our limits. Having a material nature means the most powerful instinct we have is our ‘need to survive’. Both as a biological organism – a.k.a. animal – and as a conscious agent.
Our consciences – I’m speaking about the individual ones here – are very crafty ‘devils’. They can accept our individual material fate – death – but have a problem accepting their own dependency on the ‘bodies/brains’ they need to inhabit. Hence ‘the soul’.
Which ‘soul’ has been invented – by our conscious selves – as the first step towards building a sense for this world. For the reality we inhabit. Which soul is the building block for all religion. For all religion known/built to/by man.
Are you still here? I have to make a pause here. And to mention the fact that I’ve already cut a few corners… A lot of corners… What I say is probably rather hard to follow. Mostly because I don’t have time/space to explain myself. Not now but certainly in due time.
And yes, what we call ‘religion’ is of our own doing. The Bible itself has been written by us, regardless of the origin of the ideas mentioned there. It doesn’t matter whether we have been the interface between (a) God and ‘the world’, we are the ones who have written the Bible. And all other sacred texts. We have written them, we have believed in them and we have shaped the reality we live in.
We have done all that according to how we have interpreted the teachings we have inherited from our forefathers. And we continue to. Even those of us who consider themselves to be ‘free of religion’. We might not believe but we continue to act as if. Believers and nonbelievers alike hold the same things as being valid. Don’t kill, don’t steal, respect the values which keep society together…
What about where we started from? What about the ‘original’ simulation?
One moment please, I haven’t yet finished with ‘God’. If (a) God made us who/what we are, then who made God?
If someone took the trouble to build the simulation we consider to be ‘home’, what about the ‘real’ world? What about the reality harboring the simulating agent?
There’s no need for an outside agent? The world we live in, our world, is the world we have built for ourselves? Using the things which were at our disposal and the information we have gleaned about how things work? Maybe not always fully aware of what we were doing?
You got it! That’s exactly what I was trying to say!
4,000 years ago. An alien probe examines the Earth and determines there are two ‘species of interest’ on the planet. ‘Interesting’ in the sense that both had already discovered ‘exploitation’. Ants farming aphids and humans farming sheep.
4.0 seconds ago. The same alien probe checks back and determines that both ants and humans continue their respective farming activities. The only difference between now and then being the scale of the respective operations. And the consequences to the environment…
The probe is a robot. Which robot has no feelings. Doesn’t care. Does what it has been instructed to do and that’s it. The data is being transmitted to those who had commissioned the robot.
‘The ants are practically the same. Individuals transported through time would fit perfectly in either situation. The humans have evolved in a certain manner. They live longer – on average. They have thoroughly transformed much of their environment. But they have maintained the ability to survive in either situation. To thrive, even, if the individuals are transported through time very soon after birth – and if they are well taken care off at the receiving end of the journey’.
The received data is deemed ‘baffling’ by the agents whose job is to make sense of it. To analyze it. To determine whether each planet checked by the probe was inhabited by a potentially autonomous species. In which case the planet was deemed ‘off limits’. Or not, hence open for colonization.
The procedure to determine the outcome is simple. Is there at least a species which evolves faster than the rest? Is there at least a species concerned with the well being of the environment it depends upon? If only the first condition is met, the planet is scheduled to be checked again later. If both conditions are met, the planet is considered off limits. If none are met, the planet is considered ‘open for business’.
The present situation is unprecedented. During their entire recorded history, this is the first time the analyzing agents have come across such an occurrence. An intelligent species who has achieved so much yet still remain driven by desire. By emotion.
A species perfectly capable of thinking yet still prone to judging. A species comprised of individuals who consider perfectly acceptable to rationalize their own wishes while entertaining a low opinion on others who do the very same thing. Find excuses for indulging.
This find generates an ontological storm among the analyzing agents. Being the first time when they no longer have a complete grasp on what’s going on, this whole thing compels them to reconsider.
nicichiarasa 