“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).
Same person, inscribed simultaneously in a square and in a circle. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
What better metaphor? We belong to the real world. And, simultaneously, to a world of our own making.
A ‘virtual’ world. In the sense that our world is crafted according to our ‘virtue’. Defined by our virtue… Our collective virtue, of course. Nobody has ever managed to make an entire world for themselves… The world we live in, we inhabit as quests, is the consequence of our cultured efforts. A collective endeavor in both space and time.
OK, and where’s the link between redemption by divine grace and this schizophrenic world of yours?
The virtual world we’ve made, innocently until people have started to guess what God had in mind for us, can be measured across two dimensions. Freedom and faith.
You don’t make any sense…
Freedom of will is what allows us to choose. Faith is what keeps us together.
To make sense, freedom and faith need reality. There’s no such thing as absolute freedom and faith needs to be anchored in… you guessed right, hard core reality!
So here we have it. Individual human beings collaborating in good faith and making good use of the amount of liberty made possible by the reality present in each consecutive moment.
Or
Herded people driven by blind faith ignoring the very concept of liberty. (Can you even consider these people as being human?)
Since both the above situations are fictional extremes, the truth is – as usual – somewhere in the middle.
Individual human people trying to make a living in whatever circumstances they have happened to open their eyes. Since nothing is perfect in any given situation, people have to make do with whatever they have at their disposal. One of the tools they use to keep going, to remain true to themselves, is the famous fallacy.
OK, so it did happen in front of you. But this doesn’t mean you necessarily have to claim any credit for it. Not even if you were the only one to notice… Or to understand what was going on!
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is considered to be a fallacy. A logical fallacy based on a confusion. Correlation is not causation, right? Then why so many people continue to ‘indulge’ in this habit? Even after they’ve been ‘prompted’ about this…?
Evolutionary speaking, fallacies should not be able to survive, right?
But… but…?!?
OK, let me put it the other way around. Fallacies have already survived for long enough. For us to pay attention! Let me propose an explanation for their survival.
According to Gemini, the intelligence perusing the internet when we google something, fallacies survive simply because we’re comfortable using them.
‘We’re comfortable using them’?!? You’re not making much sense… ‘We’ consider them to be ‘wrong’ – as in “fallacious” – and you say “we’re comfortable using them”…
OK. Let me point your attention to the difference between we – as a collection of individuals happening to be in the same mess but fierce-fully guarding our individualitIES – and the collective WE. A group of people – a collective, a society or even the entire species – engaging in the same behavior. Knowingly, unknowingly and anywhere in between.
We’re made from the same ‘cloth’. Dust if you will… We ‘work’ according to the same ‘rules’. In the sense that we share 99.99% of our DNA. Or more… The fact that we’re so different, individually speaking, is the ‘strange’ thing. The marvelous thing! We shouldn’t be so cross when noticing how much we have in common…
The tendency to indulge in fallacies, even after understanding they are ‘wrong’. The tendency to appropriate credit when none is due to us…
You still expect me to keep my promise? An evolutionary explanation for why we keep indulging in fallacies? Come back tomorrow!
Gather information. Grind it into a modicum of knowledge. Make the call. Implement it. Wait for feed-back. Evaluate and reach a ‘final conclusion’.
Formal decision making in a nut-shell…
Philosophy bothers itself with what to think. What conclusions we should be reaching… Science bothers itself with the hows of the matter. How should we think in order to reach the right conclusions! ‘Right’ as in as close to reality as (humanly) possible.
But why?!? Why do we think at all?
I haven’t read everything Ernst Mayr had ever written but I’m sure he would have answered ‘because we can’! I’m no student of philosophy so I really don’t know whether a better answer has ever been offered. Or even if the question has been asked before…
So. What’s driving us to think?
Whoa! This is a different question, you know! ‘Why do we think’ is not at all similar to ‘What drives us to think’. But the second version is an easier one to answer…
As you’ve already noticed, I hope, this blog is about the ‘limited nature of our consciousness’. Which consciousness is defined/generated by our ability to think. Which has to be trained in order to be effective but I’ll save that for another post.
So, what drives us to think? Sheer necessity, survival instinct… I’ll come back. As the rest of us, I’m thinking as I go along. New paths open, left and right, but there is a place I want to reach today. The dimensional dimension of the whole process of thinking. I introduced the ‘driver’ to ‘open the space’. A driver needs a space to drive in…
According to the formal theory, thinking is a linear process. A narrative… According to the day to day practice, a thought is, indeed, a linear thing. A narrative. But the fact that a trail is linear doesn’t make driving into a linear something.
So, a thought is, indeed, a ‘linear narrative’ while thinking, like driving, is more like an exploratory process.
OK. Now that you’ve got my full attention, how about you get to the point? Cut the crap, already…
I’d really love to oblige but I need to make a small detour… I’m an engineer. As such, I do understand physics. Up to a point… Modern physics demand a lot of mathematics and that’s where I falter. As such, I’m aware that some specialists maintain that there are some 11 dimensions which measure the physical world… most of them being so tightly compacted that we don’t notice them in day to day life. Same thing when it comes to thinking… There are many dimensions which may come in handy but I’ll mention only three of them.
Goal. Individual prowess. Environment.
Polichinelle is my witness. Each and everyone of the above dimensions can, and will, be divided in sub-dimensions. Soon. Here.
Id, Ego, SuperEgo. Freud. Consciousness is the ulterior level of self-awareness. Added by humans through languaged interaction. Humberto Maturana. AI is a function. A human developed computer application. Built by cramming information available over the internet into computer circuits sophisticated enough to defy human understanding. Social Media
Some 70 000 years ago, people – human people, that is – have learned to articulate. To communicate in a symbolic manner. The next step up from coordinating their moves while hunting. Acting like a pack was inherited from their primate ancestors. Active communication, speaking with the intent to teach, was a human addition.
Not without consequences. They were already accomplished hunter-gatherers and skillful tool makers. Some researchers have unearthed evidence that they were also artists. They were painting on cave-walls some 20000 years before the modern humans, the Sapiens, had started to displace them. They were our uncles, the Neanderthals. But it was us, the Sapiens, who have survived. To tell the story…
Us being able to speak, to language our interactions, has had tremendous consequences. The most important one, even if rarely mentioned, is the ‘shape’ of our consciences. And the depth of our consciousness.
Some 10000 ago, people have invented agriculture. Planting crops and raising animals. Already conscious, they had figured out the ups of the whole thing. Unfortunately – their rationality was just as bounded as our still is – they didn’t knew what was coming… According to some researchers – and to my first hand observations – being able to grow your own food doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll live longer. Or better… But society, as a whole, was able to leap forward!
It took our homo ancestors some 2 and a half million years to evolve from primates to cave-painting humans. In another 50 000 years, our already speaking ancestors have invented agriculture. And built things like Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids.
You don’t need to speak in order to coordinate your actions while hunting. Wolfs do it ‘silently’. But you need a different kind of coordination, a deeper one, if you want to build things. ‘You’, in this case, is ‘you, the people’. When building things, the builders need coordinated thinking. Coordinated action is not enough. Hence religion. Reflexive self-awareness, developed in contrast to but in cooperation with the individuals comprising the community becomes a shared consciousness. A collection of cooperating individuals generate an entire space. Open-up a brand new ‘volume’. One full of human made opportunity and governed by culture. Nota bene, competition is nothing but yet another form of cooperation. Of a deeper nature!
Some 500 years ago, our fore-fathers have invented Science. While philosophy was a coordinated effort to make sense of things, science had been invented to coordinate knowledge with reality. While philosophy had sprouted naturally, as a consequence of how people used, and continue, to be, science had been born, intentionally, out of necessity. Philosophy and religion have happened naturally, depending heavily on the particulars of when and where they happened to appear. Science was invented as a consequence of where the people involved had ‘opened their eyes’. As a consequence of the circumstances produced by the previous efforts.
Nowadays, in the technologically built circumstances we have prepared for ourselves, we are currently cramming already gathered knowledge – too much of which being nothing more than mere crap – through computer circuits so complicated that we no longer understand. Hoping that the elusive AI we expect to be born as the result of our efforts will ….
Will what?!? Make more sense? Of what we call ‘reality’? Or makes us even richer? Well, make some of us even richer than they already are…
One caveat here. While humankind, as a whole, has leapt forward each time, individual humans have had a more nuanced experience. Depending more on the circumstances each of them had been born into rather than on their individual efforts. Yes, people who were able to grow their food had been able to build magnificent things. The Egyptian and the Mayan pyramids, for example. The Stonehenge and the Atlit Yam monuments. But if we look closer… only a small number of agricultural societies have been able to generate remarkable things. And only for a limited time… The rest of the agricultural societies had experienced nothing but hard work. Sometimes, too many times, wasted at the whim of authoritarian rulers. In fact, each and every such breakthroughs had been a blessing in disguise. To be experienced by others but those who had borne the brunt of them being introduced. Those toiling the fields had to work harder than the foragers before them. Those sweating in the factories had to work more hours, yearly speaking, than the peasants. Currently, people working remotely – connected to a computer – can hardly escape off-line.
History is full of peasant uprisings and various revolutions. None of which had accomplished anything. We’d better have a talk with our alter-ego. Or pray… We’re headed towards interesting times!
1939, September 1. The III-rd Reich invades Poland. 1939, September 3. France and Britain declares war against Germany. 1940, April 8, Germany invades Norway. 1940, May 10, Germany invades Belgium. 1940, June 14, German soldiers occupy Paris.
The British Army in France 1939 Army and French Air Force personnel outside a dugout named ’10 Downing Street’ on the edge of an airfield, 28 November 1939.
OK. War makes no sense. Starting one, that is. Unless you have to defend yourself, of course!
It was Hitler’s Germany which had started WWII. France and Britain declaring war on Germany was nothing but a formality. But what happened next…
Waiting for 8 months while your opponent was busy elsewhere makes even less sense. Than starting the war in the first place…
Counterfactual history is interesting. Imagining ‘what could have happened if’, we may learn how people think.
We know what happened. We’re not happy with much of it. It would have been a lot better if WWII was never fought. In the first place. For all of us. The next best thing would have been a lot shorter war. France and Britain invading Germany while Hitler and Stalin were dividing Poland among themselves.
I’m not going to enumerate arguments. Neither for nor against. I don’t actually know whether the war would have been shorter or not. Whether the end would have been significantly different. Or in which way different… But I would really like to understand what was going on in Chamberlain’s head! As well as in Daladier’s. The British and French prime-ministers at that time, respectively.
On the other hand… 1936. Hitler had ordered his army to enter the Rhineland region. In breach of the Versailles Treaty. 1938. Hitler had occupied Austria. 1939, March. Hitler invaded what was left of Czechoslovakia, breaching what he had promised in September 1938. During this time, France and Britain did nothing!
“Hey! sweet ghapama Whoever eats it is satiated Hey! dear, sweet ghapama Whoever doesn’t eat it, understands nothing!!” Harout Pamboukjian
Theory has it that if you know your goal and remain focused you’ll get there. ‘Meritocracy’. That’s the name of the pretense…
Practice demonstrates that in order to ‘get there’, one needs ‘opportunity’.
The reality of the matter is simple. Deceivingly simple and harsh as hail. Or hell… take your pick! If you stay focused on a sensibly chosen goal you will cover a considerable distance. BUT ONLY AS LONG AS the opportunity field you are toiling will not change much. Too much for you to cope with.
There are three sides involved in this. Or dimensions… Choosing the goal. Staying focused. Conservation of the playing field.
Staying focused is an individual thing. Something to be learned, for sure, but having more to do with the personal innards of each individual than with the community to which they belong. Choosing the goal is, say, 50%-50%. Each individual is torn between their personal preferences and the various fads piled on them by families/society. Conserving the playing field is the responsibility of the society. It’s the consequence of each individual doing their thing but the ultimate responsibility rests on the society as a whole.
What happened? Simple. Too many of us have stayed focused. On our individual goals. Set according to the prevailing fads circulating while we were young. We’ve been so focused on our goals, on our respective individuals goals, that we didn’t notice the change. The fact that we’ve been changing the world. The narrowness of our focus prevented us from seeing anything else… From understating that our goals were out of touch to start with. Not as important as they seemed at the beginning. And that pursuing them was detrimental. For us, for the society at large and for the environment. Understandably, we’ve become frustrated. Angry… In denial!
Some enterprising people have noticed the whole thing. And have figured out that anger can be weaponized. Used to herd us. To convince us to stop thinking about our fate. And to chase their goals instead…
One doesn’t need much to drive a herd. A lure to entice, a red rag works perfectly, and a scare to hurry the reluctant. Presently, globalization is the red rag of choice and the immigrant is the most efficient scare.
I’m of mixed extraction. Armenian and Romanian. During the last 25 years, some 4 million Romanians have left the country. Most of them are still citizens and some of them continue to vote. To cast votes when the Romanian state organizes elections. Lastly, a majority of the Romanian emigrants currently living in the Western Europe have voted for anti-globalist and anti-immigrant parties. AUR (gold, in Romanian) and SOS. And there are more Armenians living abroad – some 8 million, than the 3 million inhabiting Armenia proper.
Before wrapping up, I need to add that, as far as I know, the Armenian people have evolved in situ. Various foreign powers have sometimes controlled the territories inhabited by Armenian people but there were no known significant population influxes into the area. Until the Turkish speaking tribes up-rooted and overwhelmed the Armenians living in the flatter zones but that is another subject. So. We have an ancient people living in its original areal. And one of the most cherished dishes of that people is Ghapama. Roasted pumpkin stuffed with rice and spiced with cinnamon.
Pumpkin is currently cultivated in Armenia. But it was brought there from America… Rice and cinnamon don’t grow in Armenia! Never did…
Why are we so afraid of globalization? Why have we allowed the scaremongering social-entrepreneurs to lure us?!?
Only because we are frustrated? Angry enough to forget about ourselves?!?
Political prisoners and Death Camps can’t exist without “Gun Control”. Some Americans still feel “Gun Control” is a good ideea. To prevent a Schindler’s List in America, we must destroy “Gun Control”!!
“Say the words “gun registration” to many Americans—especially pro-gun Americans, including the 3.5 million plus members of the National Rifle Association—and you are likely to hear about Adolf Hitler, Nazi gun laws, gun confiscation, and the Holocaust. More specifically, you are likely to hear that one of the first things that Hitler did when he seized power was to impose strict gun registration requirements that enabled him to identify gun owners and then to confiscate all guns, effectively disarming his opponents and paving the way for the genocide of the Jewish population.“German firearm laws and hysteria created against Jewish firearm owners played a major role in laying the groundwork for the eradication of German Jewry in the Holocaust,” writes Stephen Halbrook, a pro-gun lawyer. “If the Nazi experience teaches anything,” Halbrook declares, “it teaches that totalitarian governments will attempt to disarm their subjects so as to extinguish any ability to resist crimes against humanity.””
“As the videos begin, Pretti can be seen filming as a federal agent pushes away one woman and shoves another woman to the ground. Pretti moves between the agent and the women, then raises his left arm to shield himself as the agent pepper sprays him. Several agents then take hold of Pretti – who struggles with them – and force him onto his hands and knees. As the agents pin down Pretti, someone shouts what sounds like a warning about the presence of a gun. Video footage then appears to show one of the agents removing a gun from Pretti and stepping away from the group with it. Moments later, an officer with a handgun pointed at Pretti’s back fires four shots at him in quick succession, footage shows. Several more shots can then be heard as another agent appears to fire at Pretti.”
What happened next? The Roaring 20s, Prohibition – and the advent of the Mob, the Great Depression, WWII. In the rest of the world? The Great Depression, Fascism, WWII.
Could America have made a difference? As an ‘insider’ rather than as a peeping Tom?
“The United States never joined the League. Most historians hold that the League operated much less effectively without U.S. participation than it would have otherwise. However, even while rejecting membership, the Republican Presidents of the period, and their foreign policy architects, agreed with many of its goals. To the extent that Congress allowed, the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations associated the United States with League efforts on several issues. Constant suspicion in Congress, however, that steady U.S. cooperation with the League would lead to de facto membership prevented a close relationship between Washington and Geneva. Additionally, growing disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles diminished support for the League in the United States and the international community. Wilson’s insistence that the Covenant be linked to the Treaty was a blunder; over time, the Treaty was discredited as unenforceable, short-sighted, or too extreme in its provisions, and the League’s failure either to enforce or revise it only reinforced U.S. congressional opposition to working with the League under any circumstances. However, the coming of World War II once again demonstrated the need for an effective international organization to mediate disputes, and the United States public and the Roosevelt administration supported and became founding members of the new United Nations.”
‘Intelligent design’ didn’t make much sense. For me. Until now!
Trying to make sense of what’s going on, I’ve suddenly understood how useful it is. The concept! How many things can be explained using the ‘intelligent design’ paradigm…
January 14, 2026. NASA is cutting short, for medical reasons, a scientific mission. And brings back 4 astronauts from the International Space Station. Meaning that NASA, a human ‘agency’, is able to fly people up and down into the sky. At will. And that it cares, for whatever reason, about the well being of those involved. Meanwhile, in both Bucharest and Kyiv people have to make do without enough heat. In the middle of winter. Why?
Can any of this be explained without making use of ‘intelligent design’?
But wait! It gets even better… OK, NASA was well designed in the first place. Operates in a civilized country and is manned by some of the most capable inhabitants of that country. People in Kyiv are suffering the consequences of a ‘well designed’ conflict. People in Bucharest experiment the consequences of their own short-sightedness. For 35 years the centralized heating system has been neglected. Underfunded and ineptly maintained. A patent lack of ‘intelligent design’, right?
All these three examples, as well as many others, fit perfectly. Things too complicated to happen without outside intervention. Things so different from what is considered to be ‘normal’ that a ‘deus in machina’ is needed as the only possible explanation.
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: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
“They’re extremely simple and accessible objects, which is not always the case with math research,” Schwartz said. “It’s the kind of thing that you could explain … to an eight-year-old.”
This doesn’t make much sense, does it? Driving ‘man’ “forth from the garden of Eden”, that is… The Mobius band, as stated above, is a simple thing!
After all, knowing good and evil is a natural thing. For humans… ‘Man’ doesn’t need to ‘raise a hand and eat some fruit’… Living among like-minded peers is enough. As long as they talk to each other, of course. As for ‘living for ever’… that’s impossible. Not only for ‘men’ but also for gods. So many of them are nothing more than memories… like ‘ordinary’ deceased people, right?
So. Somebody mentioned it in one of the most interesting books known to ‘man’. Not only interesting but also extremely consequential. Then it must mean something. Despite not making much sense, on the face of it…
What if we look at the whole thing as a metaphor? As the story of how ‘man’ has become a conscious human being? Instead of a mere historical rendition…
‘But I was under the impression that all cosmogonies were exactly that. Stories meant to impart sense to the Universe. To make it acceptable to the conscious ‘man’…’
Indeed. That’s exactly what cosmogonies do. Did… Only calling them cosmogonies shreds the magic. To use another metaphor, using the wrong name transforms a swan into a lame duck.
OK, the Bible is a cosmogony. One of many. But there are many ways to read it. From the inside, as a ‘bible’. And from the outside. As a cosmogony…
Which brings us to the point. Science – cold, rational observation performed by conscious agents – can be made only from the ‘outside’. Any personal involvement of the observing agent, any feelings towards the observed subject, will only add layers of bias on top of the ‘desired’ knowledge.
Ouch?!?
How can a ‘rational conscious agent’ observe the world they live in as if they were on the outside?!? Not only ‘banished outside’ but also made ‘to till the ground from whence he was taken’? …
No hard feelings allowed! No feelings at all, actually…
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nicichiarasa 