It’s one thing to be able to see white from black. And a lot more complicated to see black and white…
Being reasonable means listening to what the world has to say about things. Being reasonable means being open minded.
Being rational means balancing your means with your wishes. Being rational means actively identifying resources which might help you attain your goals and the pitfalls you need to avoid.
Being reasonable means choosing goals which ‘do not disturb’. Being rational means transforming things into what they should be. Into what you think they should be…
Being reasonable means getting along. Being rational means going alone.
Being reasonable means trying to get all in. Being rational means being able to get to the bottom of it.
The point being that evolution is about the species, not about the individual. And this point can be made out but individually…
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?
Nope! Trickle down is an idiocy. It doesn’t work. Just like ‘taxing billionaires out of existence’. It has been experimented, you know… It was called communism by those promoting this brilliant idea. So brilliant that it burnt down every society which had tried it. I lived under communist rule. I know. There isn’t much difference between all money being controlled by the state/government and too much money being controlled by a handful of billionaires! Meaningful decisions are still being made by a too small number of people…
Yes, taxes are useful. Besides gathering money to be used, by the government, for the common good. My point being that taxes are an expression of how a society sees money.
That’s what’s needed. Decision makers who do not put money over everything else! Any attempt to ‘tax billionaires out of existence’ is already an abuse of power. Doing it before the society changes its understanding of the matter would be worse than a crime. It would be a horrible mistake.
High marginal taxes accomplish two things. If no loopholes are allowed. Balance the budget and change the minds of the decision makers. ‘CEO’s’ as well as shareholders. Convince them to reinvest a bigger share of the profit. Which makes it possible for the company to become more efficient. Which makes it possible for the company to increase wages. Balancing the budget with money brought in by taxing the high earners makes it possible for the politicians to lower the taxes paid by the Regular Joes. Which would improve their status, their self esteem and their buying power!
Blaming a section of the society for something which needs to be dealt with in concert, by all the members of a society, is counterproductive. To say the least. It does nothing to solve the real problems and it deepens the already existing rifts.
Blaming the billionaires for what’s going on – for everybody being obsessed with money – is in no way different from blaming the immigrants for most of the people being unsure about tomorrow.
Billionaires, as well as the immigrants, should be ‘exploited’ rather than driven into disappearance. Each of them are very good at what each of them are doing. The difference between them consists in the fact that the billionaires set their own wages.
Wages, all wages, are paid by us. By the consumers. Hence it is us who should determine how much each people should get. We, not some of those getting our hard earned money! How are we going to accomplish that? Making sure that the market remains free. Functionally free as opposed to controlled by a small number of people. No matter where they come from. The Government, as in communism, or a collection of monopolies. As in oligarchic capitalism.
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…
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!
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!
Total BS. ISS distance from Earth is 408 km. So, the Moon should be… I don’t know. You do the math. In this picture, it looks like ISS is orbiting the Moon, not the Earth.” Somebody on the Internet
“I don’t know. You do the math!” But you do have the right to express your opinion, right? Me
Oui maître, mais… ‘I will defend to the death your right to make a fool of yourself. To demonstrate your ignorance…’ OK, I get it. Only your attitude stems from your conviction that everybody who is able to read is also able to understand the meaning of what they read… Which is no longer valid!
What do we need to do? Educate? The readers… Censor? The aberrant? And who will ‘put the stamp’?!? Who will be the trusted arbiter playing God? Wait till the consequences of our laisez-faire will rattle their skulls against our crossed bones?
Or simply wake up? Remember that mutual respect is paramount for our collective survival. And that asking before sentencing is the smart thing to do….
OK, I can give you this. God may have done all this. But is He aware of His creation?
‘But He loves us! Otherwise why make us in the first place?!?’
What if it was us who had come up with this notion? The way I see it, we may very well be an unintended consequence of His activity. So unintended that He isn’t even aware of our existence…
‘But He knows everything…‘
That’s what we think… about Him. And about the relation between Him and His Creation. Take us for example. Do we know everything? About our body. About what’s going on inside us.
‘No, of course we don’t!’
Think again. For an outside observer – specially one that lives significantly less than we do – our bodies are ‘perfection in motion’. They work ‘perfectly’. As if minutely controlled by somebody who perfectly knows what they’re doing. Right? We know this isn’t the case… because we are the ones who ignore what’s going on inside our bodies… Well, ignore is too strong. Not fully aware, at least for as long as things go on in an acceptable manner, would be a more accurate description. Same might be happening with God. And this is a far more sensible explanation for what’s going on. We’re the ones responsible for our behavior, not an inscrutable God. Who, despite being our Creator, allows us to defile His Creation.
‘We killed God and we now have to face the consequences’. That’s what Nietzsche told us. And then died. Like everybody else. Is this consistent with the notion of an all-powerfull and omni-scient God? As suggested by the second image?
The only God we know is the one we talk about. Among ourselves. During the ‘Middle Ages’ some of our ancestors killed each-other over their particular interpretations of the Bible. But they all agreed about one thing. For them, there was only one God. And they killed a lot of unbelievers attempting to convince them. At some point, and Nietzsche witnessed that, people had stopped believing there was only one God. God was no longer seen as an unifying principle and had become a mere representation.
I don’t know whether there is a god. A ‘real’ one. But is has become obvious that the one we talk about has stopped playing its role. It no longer unites us. We’re no longer children of the same father.
We have splintered ourselves into clans. Each wielding their own representation of God. Each wielding their own ‘hand made’ idol.
nicichiarasa 