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Relative to Absolute

March 8, 2024 //
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If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed;
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John, 8:32

Bruno, Giordano Bruno, was speaking the truth.
Something we consider to be true…
Yet he ended his career as a definitely unfree person! At the hands of people who considered themselves to be disciples of Christ…

Something doesn’t add up!
Either at least some of the truth mentioned here isn’t actually true… or we’re dealing with altogether different truths!

The way I see it, Giordano Bruno had died because he was defending an absolute truth while his killers had never realized that the truth pronounced by Christ was relative.

Let me elaborate.

An absolute truth – there are many – is a piece of truth of the kind which will eventually trips over you.

‘Reckless driving will kill you’.
‘High water will knock down the levy’.
‘A red hot iron will brand a cow’.

Relative truth, which has many faces but is essentially one, depends on us.
According to Christ, those who follow his word – who remain his disciples – will know the truth. And will become free.

According to Christ, it is not possible for an individual to know the truth – nor become free – in an individual manner. To accomplish the feat, WE have to follow his word.

We have to ‘love’ each-other. To respect each-other!
To turn the other cheek…

For us to be able to get near the truth – near the many absolute truths that are there – we need to share whatever knowledge we have.
Keeping anything hidden from our brethren – not turning the other cheek for ‘inspection’ – means disrespect. Means distrust. Lack of love. Inability to be in communion with the rest. Incapacity – or unwillingness – to partake in the same piece of reality. To partake in the same piece of absolute truth.

This is why Christ, who was right, has been killed. By those who didn’t want to share freedom. Who wanted to keep freedom for their own use. Who wanted to restrict the freedom of others.
This is why Bruno, who was right, has been killed. By people who behaved exactly – and for the same reasons – like those who have killed Christ. Despite declaring themselves to be the disciples of Christ…

Truth and freedom are human concepts. Words.
Both need us, human action, to become reality.
Both need us, working in communion, to become practice!

Individual absolute truths are relative to us. Are relative to us noticing, formulating, sharing and validating each of them.
‘Relative truth’, the ‘only one’, is absolute. In the sense that the only absolute – and definitive – truth is the fact that we can learn, and become free, only in concert. Respectfully helping each-other.

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Categories 1989, awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, religion, skin in the game, Trust

The Covenant

February 26, 2024 //
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Question: Where was God at Auschwitz?
Answer: Where was Man at Auschwitz?

What do Jews think about God not intervening in the Holocaust to save His chosen people?

“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.” “

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Black Lives Matter, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game

In Memoriam

February 22, 2024 //
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‘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!

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, Psychology, skin in the game, Trust

Lost in ‘translation’…

February 18, 2024 //
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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.

The text attributed to Orwell is too simplistic and too misleading to had been penned by Orwell.
Hence Google…
“There is no substantive evidence that George Orwell who died in 1950 made this remark. The earliest known matching statement appeared in a column in the Washington Times newspaper written by the film critic and essayist Richard Grenier in 1993“

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…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, re-definitions, Rule of Law, skin in the game, Trust

E Pluribus Unum

February 16, 2024 //
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We, the people

Imagine yourself living some 4000 years ago.

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.

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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, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, Trust

Two blades into the same scabbard…

February 5, 2024 //
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Unfortunately, it was a ‘deep critical thinker’ who had come up with this idea in the first place.
That ‘if you want to control, you need to isolate the intellectual’.

A ‘plain-clothes man’ doesn’t think in these therms!

Let me rephrase the whole thing.

I am rational.
Which means that all my conclusions are valid. Simply because I have reached them in a rational manner.
Hence all other conclusions are wrong. For the simple reason that they are different from mine.
Since they are wrong, they should not reach their audience.
For they might displace my conclusions from the public mind!
Which brings me to the conclusion that if I want to conserve my position – as the official thinker – I must make it so that all other intellectuals must be isolated from the public.
Only I need to dress up this conclusion as if it was about the greater public good.

And this is why Protagoras of Abdera and Socrates had been banished from the forum.
Why Plato maintained that before being allowed to rule the philosopher-kings had to be specially trained for the mission. Taught to keep an open mind towards alternatives!
Why Marxism, Fascism and all other authoritarian lines of thinking lead those who pursue them into the same dead-end. Into abject failure…

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology

Add the title of your choice

January 25, 2024 //
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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.”
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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, Psychology, skin in the game, Trust

Evidence is overrated…

January 22, 2024 //
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and, too often, disregarded!

Well, last time I checked, there were more than a dozen onions in my cellar.
And since my cellar is orbiting the Sun… along with the rest of the Earth…

As for who says what about who made what…

This morning I had to shovel some snow. I live near a kindergarten so the sidewalks should be clean.
Along with the snow, I also had to shovel some dog turds.

Snow coming down from the sky and dogs dropping turds are natural occurrences.
People shoveling snow so that other people may walk on the sidewalks is de rigueur. Also de rigueur is to pick up the turds dropped by the pet you take out at least twice a day.

People have a clear idea about who is responsible for the dog turds on the side-walk.
Even if they were dropped by dogs, the responsibility lies with the owners.
It’s the owners who have raised the dogs, who take them out to poo and who ‘forget’ to pick up the droppings.

In the last couple of centuries, people – well, some of them – have also developed a rather clear understanding regarding the snow. Regarding the water coming down from the sky. About evaporation, clouds, condensation… etc.
God is no longer held responsible for these matters.

Which brings us to the real subject.

There is a guy, Richard Dawkins, who tries to demonstrate there is no God.

And here we go again… I have at least a large china teapot. And since my house, along with the rest of the planet, does follow an orbit in the solar system…

More about who made what, if you care about the subject, can be found here:

https://nicichiarasa.com/tag/god/

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Categories awareness, Choices we make, complementary ways of attending knowlege, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, religion, teleology, Trust

Furcula

January 15, 2024 //
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“Twelve-year-old Carly Nix of Lakeland
says breaking the wishbone from the turkey is a silly tradition,
but that won’t hold her back from testing her luck this year.”

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!

If you’re still interested:

Click to access simulation.pdf

Are you living in a computer simulation by Nick Bostrom

Confirmed! We live in a simulation. by Fouad Khan

Of course we live in a simulation by Jason Kehe

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Psychology, re-definitions, religion, skin in the game, teleology

Scapegoat

January 4, 2024 //
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“A small gap rests between the two fingers
as the most important moment in human history is about to happen
– God making contact with the first person.“

I’ve been struggling for a while to understand why God is still relevant for us.
Why so many of us continue to believe in him and why so many of us struggle to demonstrate he doesn’t exist.
Why so many of those convinced he doesn’t exist blame him for so many of our own follies…

Because we’re ‘escape artists’!

So many of us continue to smoke.
Since not everybody who smokes develops a cancer or dies of COPD – Chronic Obstrusive Pulmonary Disease, those addicted to nicotine find ways to rationalize their habit. For it’s simpler for them to hope they are among the lucky ones than to accept the fact that they’ve acted foolishly for so long. I know what I’m talking about, I’m one of these people.

Similarly, it’s a lot simpler to use God as a scapegoat than to accept full responsibility for your destiny.
The less control/resources you have, the simpler it is to ask for God’s help. To lay your fate in his hands.

‘He must have had his reasons.
The fact that I don’t know what they are doesn’t change anything.
He’s in charge, I can do nothing but accept my fate!’

Same thing for the disbelievers.
It’s simpler to blame (a) God, or (a) religion for aberrant/abhorrent behavior than to accept that human beings can be manipulated – in certain conditions – into such behavior. Into such inhuman behavior.

‘If they could have been manipulated in such a manner then I might be manipulated in the same manner.
This is not acceptable.
It’s their God/religion which is at fault. Something like this cannot happen to me.
I don’t belong to any religion – or to a different one, so I’m immune to all this.’

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Categories 1989, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, complementary ways of attending knowlege, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Trust
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