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Consequences

October 7, 2024 //
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“And what’s in it for us, ordinary people?”
My 90 years old father, commenting the news just running on TV

Nothing but what we can make of it.

The Earth was circling the Sun since the very beginning. Way before Bruno ‘discovered’ the phenomenon. Again…
The egg was sending ‘chemical signals’ since … who knows when. We, all of us, have been born without any knowledge on this matter.

Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake.
He wasn’t the only one to face the consequences of his discovery. The lives of everybody else have been changed by his discovery. And the way we understand the world!
Sooner or later, somebody will find a way to use the information about ‘how the egg works’. To make some money out of it, to help people… or even to make an ‘ideological point’. “Yet another male dominated fantasy about the creation of life…”

So, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake as a consequence of his discovery?!?

Nope!
Bruno was burnt at the stake as a consequence of what we, the people, have made of his work.
Well, not exactly us but our ancestors. And not exactly we, the ordinary people, as the ‘bright minds of the day’. They had to be bright since ‘they’ were the ones running the show, right?!?

OK, so ‘those who know how to weave a story are those who order around those who know the facts’.
According to Yuval Noah Harari.
And, again, what’s in it for us?

Nothing but what we can make of it.

For as long as we’ll continue to chase power, ‘political power’, things will continue as they were.
As we’ve conditioned ourselves to expect them to be.

But, hopefully, when the next Giordano Bruno will tell us things can be spun the other way around, we’ll know better than to burn him at the stake. Alive. Again!

Power can be exercised in many ways!
The more sustainable of which being in favor of the general public.
‘For the long term benefit of the self aware social organism’ instead of ‘for how the public has been led to believe by the spin doctors’.

When will we be able to figure this out?
When those who know how things work will spill the beans out-front instead of choosing whose arse to lick.
After all, the egg encourages the most suitable sperm, not the most enchanting one…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology

‘Semantics’

September 30, 2024 //
0

“Complementarity is a principle that illuminates
an “honest anthropology”
based on “the nature of the subjects themselves who are performing the act””
John Paul II

The manner in which people chose to speak about the subjects they consider to be of great importance sheds a lot of light.
On the speakers!

The notion of “complementarity” was coined by John Paul II in 1979-1981. He was the reigning pope at that time.
I must remind you he was born Karol Wojtyla and his native language was Polish.

Well, nobody bothered to tell him that, in English, “complementary” has a rather limited ‘range’.
“Combining in such a way as to enhance or emphasize the qualities of each other or another. “they had different but complementary skills””

The notion was, and continues to be, used as the reason for which women cannot be made priests or deacons in the Catholic Church. And to deny marriage to the homosexual couples.

I find this whole thing rather baffling.

Man and Woman do not complement each-other. Not always, anyway.
Man and Woman survive together.

If you don’t understand the difference, don’t bother reading any further.

Now, if we need a certain ‘interaction’ between Man and Woman for the species to survive, then certainly we need to condemn homosexuality, right?

Wrong!

We have a series of facts here.

For the species to survive, Man and Woman are equally needed.
For the species to survive, it isn’t necessary for all men and women to bear children.
Homosexuality and gender dysphoria are realities. Regardless of what each of us thinks about each of them.

Humankind has survived. For now, at least.
The three facts I mentioned above have existed along the entire human evolution. We’re still here.

Back to square one.

I can ‘understand’, for the sake of the argument, the notion that homosexuality should not be ‘encouraged’. Homosexual couples are not naturally ‘productive’ so they shouldn’t be sanctioned by the church…
But if both Man and Woman are so indispensable, in their respective ‘natural roles’, for the survival of the humankind and “equal”, according to mainstream Catholic theology, then how can be explained the fact that Woman always comes second? And cannot be ordained?

Why do we allow a rather obscure thinker from the IV-th century B.C. to influence our decisions!?!

“The polarity position, first articulated by Aristotle
(384–322 b.c.), rejected fundamental equality while defending the
natural superiority of man over woman.”

Prudence Allen, RSM: Man-Woman Complementarity, The Catholic Inspiration

Buckminster Fuller prodded us to ‘convert our high technology’ into something really useful.

To do that, we need to perform a ‘self-actualization’ act.
Maslow considered self-actualization to be a need. An actual need, on par with the rest of them. Basic resources, safety, a place in society, esteem…
Maslow was right. Even if somewhat ‘incomplete’.

We need to crawl through the first four stages of Maslow’s pyramid in order to reach the fifth level. Where we have the opportunity to perform a self-actualization.
The result is up to us! There’s no rule nor any guaranteed outcome.

Eat and you’ll live another day. Feel safe and you’ll sleep well. Be loved and you’ll find your place. Feel good about yourself and you’ll be more ‘useful’. For yourself and for those around you.
To become a ‘better person’ you have first to find out what ‘better’ means.
And we really need self-actualization. In order to fulfill the first four needs, we’ve changed the ‘environment’. The place we call ‘home’.
We’ve built the technologies mentioned by Fuller! To make life easier…

To accept Woman as Man’s equal, as a full fledged equal, needs accepting that Man has been borne by Woman.
Some believe that Man has been made by God, ‘In His Image’. I can accept that but I must point out that God made only one Man. Adam.
All the rest have been given birth. By Woman. And raised by the extended family. By Men and Women, together.

After all, what’s keeping us from following Buckminster Fuller’s advice?!?
And is there any real difference between not allowing a woman to be ordained and not allowing her to speak ‘publicly’?

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, feminism, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

Survival

September 27, 2024 //
0

Survival of the fittest?!?
No, only the demise of the unfit!
Ernst Mayr, What Evolution Is?

An end in itself…

For whom? For the concerned individual?
For the philosopher pondering the concept?
For the ideologue promoting the idea?

And who determines ‘the interests of the state’?!?

“Plato suggests, and all later collectivists followed him in this point, that if you cannot sacrifice your self-interest for the sake of the whole, then you are a selfish person, and morally depraved.”

Since there’s no better judge for ‘sustainability’ than mere history, let’s ‘look back’.

Whenever the powerful of the day considered that everything belonged to them, and that the collective wasn’t worth any consideration, that ‘arrangement’ soon ended in chaos. From Alexander the Great to Saddam Hussein. Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu…
Whenever the meek had accepted everything which came from ‘above’, very soon the ‘arrangement’ also ended in chaos. The Khmer Rouge experiment, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, communism being instated in the Eastern Europe by the Soviets…

As a rule of thumb, individuals can exist only as members of a collective.
None of us can birth itself (?!?)
None of us can educate itself ON ITS OWN. OK, one might teach itself to read. And then devour a whole library. But for that to happen, somebody else must have invented the letters first!
None of us can develop into a conscious human being without living with other human beings.

Furthermore, the same rule of thumb states that collectives which value their individuals, all of them, fare a lot better than the highly ‘hierarchical’ ones.
In this sense, Popper was right. ‘Individualistic’ societies – the collectives which ‘see individuals as ends to themselves’ – fare better than the collectives which allow, for a while, their temporal leaders to lure them into obedience.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Culture, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Conscience. A history.

September 8, 2024 //
0

Do you really care about where your car was built?
No, but I am interested in how it works.
I need that in order to use it properly!

‘Ordinary matter’ is ‘lifeless’. Inanimate.
The rules which ‘shape’ the interactions between pieces/portions of the lifeless matter are the same ‘all over the place’. As far as we know, anyway.
The pieces/portions consisting of ordinary matter are more or less similar. There’s nothing to tell apart one proton from another. One rock from another one. One drop/bucket of water from the rest of the pond.

And there’s life.
‘Technically’, the living organisms are made from inanimate matter.
And, anyway, while ‘ordinariness’ is forever, life is temporary. Individual organisms have a limited lifespan, species evolve and life itself has appeared some time after the ordinary matter.
The rules which shape the interaction between the living organisms and their environment are species specific. Further more, individual sets of data set apart each individual belonging to each species. Which means that each species interacts in a specific manner with their environment while each individual organism does have its own particular ‘manner of doing things’. ‘Inside’ the species specific behavior but nevertheless particular.

Then there’s conscience.
Which conscience is nothing but a concept. Like everything else here.
Which concept, like all other concepts, has been coined by us. By us, conscient human beings.
The point being that we, conscient human beings, attempt to understand conscience by thinking about it.
Somewhat similar to looking inside an eye when attempting to understand sight. Or listening attempting to understand hearing.

Freud came up with the notion that studying what’s wrong, out of the ordinary, might help us to understand ‘normal’. But Freud was a psychologist…
Engineers prefer to ‘look from above’. To extricate themselves from the problem in order to see it ‘whole’. And I’m an engineer…

So, what is conscience?
An individual ability and a space/place.

There is life and there are individual living organisms.
Life goes on regardless of a number of individual organisms passing away. As long as one individual living organism continues to be alive, life itself will continue to exist.
Further more, regardless of how life might have appeared, presently it seems impossible to have life, the kind we have learned to appreciate, with only one species being alive. Let alone with only one living organism…

Same thing with conscience.
Humans become conscient through human interaction. Our ancestors had become conscient way before anybody was thinking about conscience. People who, in various circumstances, have had a limited interaction with other people struggle to develop a functional conscience. A full fledged one…

But humans are not exactly alone when it comes to being conscient.
Not exactly aware of their own selves, but still functionally ‘conscient’.

Being alive, individually speaking, means being able to:
Maintain the ‘structural identity of the organism’. As in keeping the inside in and the outside out.
Manage to breathe, eat, drink and excrete.
Life, as larger process, means successive generations of individual organisms transmitting the pertinent species specific genetic information to the next cohorts.
Maintaining the inside in, the outside out and managing to breathe, drink, eat and excrete means behaving in a conscious manner, albeit in a very limited sense.
This behavior being specific to ‘life’ and life being dependent on species specific information being passed from one generation to another means that human conscience – acceded by individual humans imbibing culturally specific information – is nothing but a particular example, maybe the most evolved one to date, of an otherwise widespread phenomenon. As a matter of fact, people who – for various reasons – are not ‘conscious’ – as in aware of themselves – continue to ‘breathe, eat, drink and excrete’. ‘Incompletely’ and only for a short while, if left unattended, but that’s another matter.

Furthermore, there is a ‘continuum of conscience’ starting from plants and culminating with the human awareness.
While plants and fungi manage to stay alive, animals display a widely nuanced repertoire of behavior. From the learning slime to our cousins, the apes.

A hamadryas baboon, Hagenbeck Tierpark, 2009

https://constructivist.info/1/3/091.maturana

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, Trust

Which? If any…

August 29, 2024 //
0

If you use your mind to study reality,
you won’t understand either your mind or reality.
If you study reality without using your mind,
you’ll understand both.
Bodhidharma

According to “William Stein, a technology analyst at Truist Securities“, as of 28th of August 2024, “Tesla self-driving vehicles not ready for big rollout“.

Self driving vehicles rely on AI to navigate. The streets. To relate to, and to avoid, the other ‘objects’ which happen to be/pass by in the vicinity during the feat.
In a sense, each of the self driving vehicles behave as if they are alive(ish).

They take matter/energy from their ‘outside’ and transform it into ‘action’.
They attempt to ‘survive’ by reacting to what’s going on around them. They gather information through sensors and decide according to already learned algorithms. Which algorithms do include a certain lee-way.

So far, self driving vehicles – or, more exactly, those who promote them – haven’t performed convincingly enough to be accepted by ‘the general public’.

The ‘problem’ – one of them, anyway – resides in the manner we, the ‘general public’, understand ‘artificial intelligence’.

Which ‘artificial intelligence’ is a huge misnomer!

‘Intelligence’, the word, means at least two things.
An ‘ability’ shared by most human beings. Unevenly, but this is another subject.
An individual ability, used by each of the individuals to pursue their individual purposes. Each behaving according to their individually ‘accrued’ manners.
In this sense, individual intelligence is already ‘artificial’. Individual intelligence is relative to each ‘individual endowment’. To each individual’s ‘brain power’. The manner in which each individual tends to use their intelligence has been shaped by education and life experience. And each individual is able to choose, inside the ‘parameters’ I’ve already mentioned, what purposes to fulfill. To which ends to use their individual intelligence. And how to behave while attempting to fulfill those goals…

If individual intelligence is already ‘artificial’ then what about AI?

Let’s discuss first the difference between artificial and synthetic textile fibers.
We have natural – cotton, wool, silk – and man made fibers. Tencel, cupro, etc – collectively known as rayon – and nylon, Lycra, acrylic. Tencel is made of wooden cellulose. Cupro – a stand in for silk, used mainly for stockings, around 1900 in Germany – was made from ‘cotton waste’. Meanwhile, nylon, Lycra, acrylic and others are made from oil.
So, basically, both artificial and synthetic fibers are made by man. The artificial ones by slightly adjusting the nature of the original material while the synthetic ones are ‘achieved’ after the raw material – oil – has suffered a series of drastic transformations.

Same thing with ‘intelligence’.

As such, intelligence is an ‘animal’ ‘thing’. It’s the animals who do ‘intelligent’ stuff. We haven’t, yet, identified any intelligent actions performed by plants. Or fungi…
Each animal species has it’s own kind of intelligence. And each individual animal belonging to each of those species has its own level of that specific intelligence. But seldom in the animal world, with a few exceptions and in a rather limited manner, individual animal intelligence is honed through interaction between individuals.
Maybe this is why we, humans, consider some animals to be superior to others? Those who are able to learn? As they live? From us, as well as from other animals?

Compare animal intelligence with it’s human counterpart.
We learn during our entire life. We deposit the consequences of our intelligence – accrued knowledge – for later retrieval. By successive generations of intelligent agents willing to learn from past experience.
In fact, our collective intelligence is the consequence of a collective effort and all of our individual intelligences have been shaped through human interaction. Hence human intelligence, the collective as well as each of the individual ones, is ‘man made’. Already ‘artificial’.

But there’s more.
Life shapes its environment. The place it inhabits. Builds its ‘habitat’.
Yeast dramatically changes the dough, grasses transform soil into meadows and wolves fine tune the ecosystem in the Yellowstone park.

“Back in 1968, said Smith, when the elk population was about a third what it is today, the willow stands along streams were in bad shape. Today, with three times as many elk, (wolves had been reintroduced in 1995) willow stands are robust. Why? Because the predatory pressure from wolves keeps elk on the move, so they don’t have time to intensely browse the willow.“

Life, in general, shapes its environment.
In a natural way. ‘Unassumingly’ and without any intent, the mere interaction between life itself and the environment where living takes place shapes that very environment.

Humans have changed the nature of the interaction between life and the environment.
By assuming to know what they are doing and by having precise intentions about what they want to achieve, humans have started to build on purpose.

And the first thing we’ve built was an ontology.
While the rest of the living takes place directly in what we call “reality”, we live in the image we’ve built, for ourselves, about ‘reality’. While the rest of the living takes place directly in the hard reality – our ancestors had started their evolution in the very same place – we’ve gradually moved out to an ‘alternative’ reality. One – two, actually – of our own making.
We have the hard, but artificial, reality we have built for ourselves. Cities, agricultural fields, means of communication, pollution, global warming… and the image we have about ‘the Universe’.
The ‘stone built’ reality we inhabit and the culturally accrued understanding we have been distilling, since becoming conscious human beings, from the hard realities around us, for our own use.
Nolens volens, our hard reality has to be anchored in the real/natural hard reality. For it was made from the same ‘raw material’. Furthermore, our ontology has to make sense. Otherwise it would be contradicted – as it so often was – by the implacable real reality.

We have currently reached a very interesting moment in our evolution.
Until now, technology – the manner in which we put into practice the understanding we have about the world – was mostly about ‘outsourcing’ physical labour. A tool to extend our ‘practical intelligence’. Then we have invented the computer. A tool used to extent our ‘brain power’. Yet another lever…
At first, the computer apps were used to ‘mechanically’ amplify our individual intelligence. You know what I mean. Even now, if you have enough individuals with pen, paper, adequate knowledge and powerful enough communication means, you can calculate almost everything a computer can calculate.

Machine learning has changed all that.
Not only that we can’t replicate what’s going on inside the machine, we no longer fully understand the process.
‘Machine learning’ actually means that a machine develops its own understanding of something. Its own understanding/image regarding a piece of ‘reality’. Given the fact that machines learn/try to understand starting with/from a data base provided by humans… I have to conclude that the understanding/image developed by an AI machine regards a piece of an already artificial reality. A piece of a man made reality.

Meaning that the intelligence appeared/grown as the consequence of this process is a fully synthetic intelligence. And that the machine generated ‘ontology’ is twice removed from the hard reality.
Twice removed from the hard reality we try to understand by ‘training’ our machines at it…

For this is what we’re trying to do. Willingly or unwittingly…
We attempt to outsource thinking.
By training what we call ‘Generative Artificial Intelligence’ we attempt to build machines which would elaborate an alternative understanding of the world. Alternative from ours…
Will any of those alternatives fit?

Into the hard, real, reality?

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Transparency

Read!

August 27, 2024 //
0

Redistribution of wealth is an anti-marxist technology.

Taxing the super-wealthy and redistributing the proceeds towards education, health care and infrastructure makes it possible for the middle class to survive.

Otherwise, the marxist prophecy will come true.

“No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.
The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.“

Read what Marx had to say about things if you want to avoid the marxist abomination.

Marx’s idea of revolutionary progress was based on the notion that property, hence wealth, must be abolished. Abolished, altogether, and not redistributed!

‘Redistribution of wealth’ means everybody pulling their own weight/contributing their fair share instead of ‘the the already rich taking the lion’s share’.

Redistribution of wealth means preserving the concept of property/wealth and maintaining the functionality of the capitalist free-market.

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crises, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, democracy, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

The Long and the Short of ‘IT’

August 25, 2024 //
0

‘Universe’ has no meaning. Other than what we assign to be its meaning…

‘Universe’ is a word we use to encompass everything around us. Whether we know of it or not. Whether we understand (of) it or not.

From ‘where’/’when’ we are in/attempt to perceive this huge environment, things look like ‘this’.
Depending of the wavelength of the light we use to ‘reinterpret’ the picture…
Nota bene, the colours were assigned by a computer app, starting from a series of ‘black&white’ images shot using filters which select short intervals of light-wavelength.

By sheer change, life appeared on Earth. And on who knows, if ever, how many other planets.
Evolution, an impersonal process, playing the odds in the current setting, had engendered the set of circumstances into which we happened to ‘burst’ into existence.

We, for better or for worse, have shaped the planet into what it has become.

Regardless of what each of us believes, religiously speaking, it doesn’t actually matter whether a god did or didn’t do anything. Since each and every religion currently biasing human thinking on Earth speaks about individual responsibility – hence freedom, for you can’t have individual responsibility without freedom – it actually doesn’t matter whether any of the teachings we refer speak about have been induced by an outside agent or have been produced ‘in house’.
Since each of us is individually responsible for our thoughts/actions – hence ‘free’ – then the meaning we assign to the object of our judgement, the ‘Universe’, belongs to us. To each and to all of us.

‘God save us!’

But since we’re ‘free’, we must save ourselves.

And since nobody can be free on their own – freedom has been defined by ‘us’ and put in practice collectively – saving ourselves will be a collective effort.
Or else.

Nota bene!
We are a ‘collection’/community of individual human beings.
We either ‘save’ ourselves maintaining what makes us human – our distinct individual individualities – or we become a hive. Of something else but ‘human’.
Of what we currently understand as being ‘human’…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Trust

Terror Management System

August 20, 2024 //
0

“According to their records, Hilda is 81,
but she says recently her family killed a pig to celebrate
her “100th birthday or something like that”.”
“Many Tsimanes never reach old age, though.
When the study began,
their average life expectancy was barely 45 years – now it’s risen to 50.
“But for Hilda, old age is not something to be taken too seriously.
“I’m not afraid of dying,” she tells us with a laugh,
“because they’re going to bury me and I’m going to stay there… very still.””

Big Bang 1.0 had been inconspicuous. There was nothing there to vibrate so sound could not travel. Also, there was no space so light had nowhere to travel to. On top of everything else, there was nobody there/then to notice.
What am I talking about? There even weren’t any ‘there’ nor ‘then’ at ‘that moment’…

Not for us, anyway!
Hence ‘Big Bang’ is a rather blatant misnomer.

Big Bang 2.0, the currently unfolding one, is an increasingly flashier event.
It began when we have started to talk. And developed conscience as a consequence. According to Humberto Maturana.

The first thing our ancestors had discovered was that they were heavily dependent.
On each other and on what we currently call ‘nature’.
Not having any of what we consider to be ‘scientific knowledge’ they didn’t know much about how things worked.
But they learned, slowly, to use fire.
How to make tools. And how to improve their dwellings.
All these things – fire, tools and protection from the elements – were auspicious circumstances for the first qualitative transformation of the genus. Not only our direct ancestors – Homo Sapiens – but also their cousins – Homo Neanderthalensis – had started to consider ‘the future’.

‘What is going to happen to me/us?’

This question, ‘am I going to eat this much/tasty again?’, demands three things.
A full belly, some time off and a (proto)conscience. At least some self awareness.
The fact that our ancestors, both the Sapiens and the Neanderthalensis, buried their dead and used tools to build/carve ‘jewelry’ strongly suggests that both of them did have a certain awareness/preoccupation about their own condition.

We don’t know whether they were ‘religious’ people.
What we do know is what people very close to what was going on then were doing until recently. And some continue to do. Populations which until have been ‘discovered’ were living like our ancestors used to do. They used to thank their totems for the food they hunted. And they erected ‘altars’ to celebrate the movements of the Sun.
Which strongly suggests that ‘what am I going to eat tomorrow?’ was far more important to them than ‘how much longer am I going to live?’.

The way I see it – following Maslow’s cue – people who live in rather ‘undeveloped’ communities don’t have enough ‘time’ to think about ‘death’.
They are accustomed to it – death is a lot more present in their life than it is in ours – and they still haven’t solved the ‘basic needs’. Not to the tune of reaching the ‘re-actualization’ stage.
They do think about tomorrow but they do it in far more practical terms than we do it.

They are not afraid of death as they are of dying of hunger. Painfully. Or both.

It was us, the ‘civilized’ people, who have become afraid of dying.
Concerned about ‘redemption’.
Thirsty for ‘meaning’.

Which ‘meaning’ brings me back to where this post has started.
One of the experiments which have convinced Rosenblatt et all to develop the ‘Terror Management Theory’ involved a number of municipal judges. Half were ‘primed’ by making them think about death while the others were left ‘unprimed’. The primed ones had imposed tougher bonding conditions to similar fictional suspects.
The experimenters posited that death was so important to them that thinking of it changed the conclusions they derived from the information available to them. Which is more or less correct.
Yet this experiment suggests something even more interesting. To me, at least.

Death is, besides a biological phenomenon, a cultural construct. An artifact.
And the fact that the judges had to be primed in order to be influenced by ‘death’ is a strong suggestion that they were rather influenced by the artifact than by the biological phenomenon.

We do know that we’re gonna die.
But we don’t constantly think about it. Our mere mortality isn’t a constant presence in our mind.
For it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t help any. A waste of brain power which brings no real benefit.

What we do think – those of us who have a full belly and enough spare time, only during some of that spare time – is ‘what’s all this fuss about?’

What’s the meaning of all this?
Of all this man-made terror which is creeping on more and more of us…

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, cooperation, corruption, effective communication, In English, Psychology, skin in the game

Two millennia. And counting…

August 12, 2024 //
0

“Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men
genuinely and adequately philosophize,
that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide…
cities will have no rest from evils…
there can be no happiness, either public or private, in any other city.”
Plato, circa 375 BC

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways.
The point, however, is to change it.“
Marx,1845

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?
Nieztsche, 1882

“The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits“
Milton Friedman, 1970

“Real life, says Heidegger, happens when beings become ‘unhidden’,
when we help bring things out of their hiding places
and step out of our own along with them, into the light of being itself.
It happens in rare moments when we see links between
‘beings themselves, the human world, the work of God.’
It can only occur, he says, when you’re disturbed by a sense that real life is elsewhere.”
Peter Holm Jensen, 2023

Wood is the raw material we use to make timber. And paper.
Steel is the raw material we fashion into tools. And weapons.
Words are the raw material we shape into ideas.

We use timber to build houses.
Paper to print poetry.
Tools to transform nature into civilization.
Ideas to make sense of the world we live in. And of ourselves.

When angry, we burn houses. Print lies. Transform tools into weapons and use them to destroy.
When angry, we no longer see eye to eye about meaning.

Almost two and a half millennia back, Plato told us us that “until political power and philosophy entirely coincide…“
We had chosen, while ‘angry’, to interpret Plato’s warning as being a ‘blue print’. A ‘boiler plate’ for ‘how to breed appropriate rulers’. https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosopher-king.

Karl Marx, while terribly angry – and not without reason, had chosen to put in practice, tentatively, the generally accepted version of Plato’s work.
“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.“.

Nietzsche confessed, publicly, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him“.
We have chosen to place the onus on him. As if it had been he who killed God. Alone…

Friedman – Milton Friedman the economist, not a word-smith nor a philosopher – had formalized the public opinion prevalent during his ‘tenure’. That corporations should stick to what they were good at – producing things in an efficient manner, hence being profitable – and leave social intervention to those concerned with solving that line of specific problems.
NB. I’m not suggesting Friedman was right. More about ‘being right’ in a short while. I’m only stating that both Friedman’s sycophants and detractors – including me – have been near-sighted.

Heidegger was the guy who brought back into discussion the notion of Aletheia. “the presocratic way to truth, as unconcealment.“
Truth as the the ‘politically’ sanctioned expression of reality. “until political power and philosophy entirely coincide…“

In a sense, we’ve spent the last two and a half millennia updating Plato’s to Heidegger’s wording of how to make sense of truth.
We haven’t been able to come up, yet, with a convincing version because we’ve chosen to ‘ignore’ Buddha’s “truth that misery originates within the craving for pleasure“. That ‘misery’ originates from our ‘rational’ desire for ‘being right‘.

That misery originates from us being angry, collectively, for not being able to reach ‘the truth’ individually.
That misery originates from each of us, individually, craving to be ‘right’. Each on our own…

“The Buddha taught that nothing is permanent and that everything is impermanent.
Therefore, people should avoid getting attached to things as eventually everything will change.
People suffer when they crave and when they get attached to people and objects.“

Being right, individually, is both incomplete – as Heidegger pointed out – and temporary. According to both Siddhartha Gautama and Karl Popper.
Being angry about not being right is not helpful. On the contrary…
It compels us to defend our version of truth and it blinds us towards all others. Regardless of how they complement ours.
Renders us incapable to politically sanction a comprehensive version of truth. Renders us incapable to build Aletheia.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Turning the Tables

August 7, 2024 //
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I also believe that people – well, some of them – are able to change their minds if presented with the right arguments at the right time, in the appropriate manner and in auspicious circumstances.

People are not robots. And, for certain, not rational!

We are rationalizers. We use rational arguments to fortify our already held conclusions. And the more we love those conclusions, the further we go in our quest to find the ‘right’ arguments in our favor.
But given enough time and if the arguments which contradict our convictions are presented in an un-injurious way, we might be persuaded.

And here’s the catch.

For quite a while now, some of those familiar with how rationalization works have used their knowledge about the innards of our minds to further their own goals.
Nothing wrong with that?

Are you familiar with ‘divide et impera’?
That’s the strategy used by every would be dictator to breed trouble in the population they planed to take over.
Divide and conquer. Make your followers despise everybody else. To the tune of transforming ‘the others’ into sub-humans.
Make your followers believe they are ‘special’ while the others, all of them, are nothing but vermin.

‘And what’s wrong with believing yourself to be rational?!?’

It’s not wrong. Only delusional.

Making your mind up only after carefully considering all of the available ‘arguments’ means having a scientific attitude.
You know? Science, the fad currently popular among many of us…

The problem with the scientific attitude being the fact that this attitude has been developed in the context of hard facts. The scientific attitude has been ‘minted’ by those studying physics, chemistry, biology… fields where every minute transgression becomes evident in real time! Where people could not ‘fall in love’ with their own conclusions. For the simple reason that those conclusions had to be changed along with the new facts continuously discovered in the process of learning.

The concept of rationality had been minted late in the development of human thought.
Sometimes during the XVIII-th and the XIX-th centuries. When philosophers had started to concern themselves with ‘how we think’ on top of ‘what we should be thinking’.
When philosophers – and lately psychologists – have started to understand how we reach/build meaning.

Some of those philosophers have reached rather strange conclusions.

Nietzsche posited that ‘God is dead’ while Marx rationally convinced himself, and others, that there was a way – and only one way, his – to make everybody happy.
Nietzsche opened the gate and Marx led us through.

And now, that we’re dwelling in no-God’s land, everything is up for grabs.

Including reason…
What is here to prevent us from using our knowledge of how mind works in order to further our own, personal, goals?

Goethe did warn us.
The Sorcerer Apprentice made the very same mistake. Overconfidence in his own ability to ‘play the rules’. To fidget with reality.
The difference between Goethe’s poem and what we’re currently doing is the fact that Goethe’s was a work of fiction while we’re playing with our own future.

I’ll wrap up highlighting the extreme perversity of the message.
‘I have a mental illness…’
Loosely translated, this means that everybody who doesn’t follow those arguments to the same conclusion where I have arrived myself must be (also) mentally ill.
And now, that we’ve reached the conclusion that at least one of us is ‘crazy’, it no longer matters who is on the ‘wrong’ side of the fence!

We both are!
We no longer see eye to eye. Each of us is convinced that the other is sick.
Unworthy!

We’re both ready to be taken over.

The only way out is to start listening, respectfully, to what the other has to say.
‘Respectfully’ means, first and fore-most, ‘don’t mess with GIGO‘!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, skin in the game
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