This guy used to own, and ‘operate’, an ‘university’…
Archives for category: Choices we make
Epigenetics refers to how your behaviors and environment can cause changes
that affect the way your genes work.
Unlike genetic changes (mutations),
epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change the sequence of DNA bases,
but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.
CDC.gov, 31 Jan 2025
So.
XII-th century alchemy was OK. And, eventually, had given birth to science.
All the while, starting with the XV-th century, practicing witchcraft was punished by burning the culprit at the stake.
In the same cultural space! Christian Europe…
Both alchemists and inquisitors read the same Bible. Followed the same precepts.
Both alchemists and witches were involved in the same business. Performed, or tried to, the same kind of feats. Alchemists tried to out-rightly transform the reality, according to their particular wishes, while the witches were accused of achieving ‘unnatural goals’. Saving someone’s life – or that of some animal – who should have ‘normally’ died. Who would have ‘otherwise’ died…
The interesting aspect of this whole thing is this:
Alchemy was considered to be OK. Alchemists believed – and the general public obliged – that everything which existed came to be by design. Was wished into being by God. As a consequence of this belief, the alchemists – and the general public – were convinced that by studying nature they would, eventually, learn something about the will of God. And achieve some results along the way…
Simultaneously, since the feats accomplished by the witches were ‘against the nature’, they must had been performed with the help of the devil. Hence had to be punished.
What about the miracles performed by Jesus?!? And promised by Him to all those who followed his teachings? In earnest…
“Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” Matthew, 17:20
What drove the XV-th century witch-hunters to the conclusion that miracles could be performed only with the help of the Devil?
That God was no longer willing to assist?
‘Reality’ – as in ‘whatever happened on the face of the Earth’ – was considered to be the actualization of the Will of God, remember?
Such a tragedy, “perhaps 50% of Europe’s 14th century population” disappearing in such horrible way, was bound to be interpreted as a punishment. Applied by God to a sinful population.
And since God was perceived to be in a vengeful disposition, any ‘help’ could have come only from the ‘competition’. From the ‘sneaky’ one.
Farfetched? Believers don’t think like that? Don’t blame God for the bad things happening to Man?
Some do not, indeed.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks after visiting Auschwitz:
“And suddenly I knew that when God speaks and human beings refuse to listen, even God is helpless in that situation. He knew that Cain was about to kill Abel, but He didn’t stop him. He knew Pharaoh was about to kill Israelite children. He didn’t stop it. God gives us freedom and never takes it back. But He tells us how to use that freedom. And when human beings refuse to listen, even God is powerless.“
Yet another interpretation?
Of the same cultural tradition?
Indeed, this my very point.
Just as individual living organisms somehow ‘tweak’ the information written in their DNA to increase their chances of survival in the specific conditions present in their environment, we – conscious human beings – have the opportunity, read ‘liberty’, to interpret the cultural traditions passed on to us by our ancestors.
We do that ‘under influence’. Pressured by everything going on around us.
Are we truly free when doing this?
Does our conscience work as intended in such conditions?
When in ‘dire straits’?
Only the future can tell.
We are terrified of the unknown.
We don’t know what that is, so it may be dangerous.
We are also afraid of the incomprehensible. Of things which challenge our already held convictions. Which challenge the things we currently believe to be ‘true’.
We turn our backs to the unknown and ignore, if we can, the incomprehensible.
If what we don’t understand seems ‘far enough’, without much direct impact on us, it’s simple. We just ignore it and that’s it. Especially if it doesn’t carry any emotional charge.
But if it affects us, directly or emotionally, we perceive the unknown as being abnormal. And declare it as such. An abomination…
By being familiar, the things which surround us make us feel safe. We’re familiar with them, we entertain the notion that we understand them, so we know what to expect of them. We end up feeling ‘good’ in their presence.
Things that come into flagrant conflict with the familiar, which challenge the order we consider to be natural, are also considered to be aberrations! So we don’t pay attention to them. They are not part of our familiar, they are considered rare. Rare, aberrant and, consequently, not worth taking into account.
But after we find out… Or after we’re no longer able to ignore what’s going on…
A mafia-like gang sexually exploiting underage girls.
One of them – at least one – commits suicide. The public assumes that if there had been others, the press would have brought it forward.
For some people, sexual abuse is part of the things that happen. Which is not OK, not ‘good’, but still part of everyday life. Like earthquakes. For these people, the suicide of the victim is an aberration. Something that should not have happened! If the rest of the girls survived… it means that there was something ‘more’ involved. It was she who was not strong enough. Her support system was not adequate. Or something else might have pushed her in the wrong direction… After all, it doesn’t matter! An ‘aberration’… One of those things which are not worth much of our attention…
For other people, sexual abuse is something caused by aberrant individuals!
An aberration from one end to the other! Earthquakes are normal, sexual abuse is not!
For this kind of people, sexual abuse cannot be normalized! Under any circumstances.
This is where the interesting part starts.
Even those who think that sexual abuse is part of life don’t feel good when they learn about specific cases. When the victims ‘get names’. They know that it ‘happens’ but they don’t think about this phenomenon all the time. They have nothing to do with it, it doesn’t affect them… Until they can’t pretend anymore. Until it affects them. Not necessarily in a direct manner… Until the reality of the fact can no longer be ignored!
To escape the psychological discomfort they experience very suddenly, these people need to do something. Quick!
‘Aberration’ to the rescue!
Epstein becomes an aberration.
Andrew becomes an aberration.
Even the victim who committed suicide becomes an aberration!
In reality, ‘the aberration’ is that these things happened at all! That they happened before our own eyes!
This aberration could unfold, for so long, only because too many of us are ‘resigned to the fact’ that sexual abuse is ‘a part of life’. A ‘normal thing’. ‘Normal’ at least as long as it doesn’t affect us….
This aberration – industrial-scale sexual abuse, practiced by apparently ‘respectable’ people revealing their true nature under Epstein’s ‘direction’ – has been made possible precisely by too many of us having chosen to ignore the information ‘sloshing’ around our feet!
‘Silently’ shouted by the victims we have chosen to ignore. Until it was too late…
Trust, but verify!
Russian proverb,
“adopted as a signature phrase”
by Ronald Reagan
I posited yesterday that “languaging is how things work in the living world”.
That a constant flow of information is piece and parcel of any living organism.
I will add today that the information flow mediating the life of those organisms has to be reliable.
To be true. To its stated purpose.
That an organism needs a dependable flow of information in order to remain alive. In order to be able to perform the feats which differentiate a living organism from a clump of inanimate matter. Maintaining its structural integrity and a controlled exchange of specific substances between the inside of the organism and its environment.
Well, the same principle ‘animates’ the meta-organisms we call ‘human communities’.
With a single, but very important, difference!
We lie!
On purpose…
There are many living species which use deceit in their quest to make a living.
Carnivorous plants which trap their prey.
Animals which use camouflage to pretend various things.
Even birds which emit false signals in order to fool other animals.
Yet we, humans, are mastering this on the rim of disaster!
We have not only invented the concept of lying but also mastered it to perfection.
How much sense does it make and how wise is it to harness the power of AI to a chariot full of deceit?
And when are we going to cut the crap?
To adapt our languaging to the new reality?
“It will take more than this, however, to restore our faith in the photographic image.“
‘Faith in the photographic image’… really?!?
OK, human language cannot be as precise as the kind of information flowing to keep our organisms alive.
Human language has to be more flexible than that. For evolutionary reasons to be mentioned at a later date.
But let’s be reasonable. And keep it from ‘jumping the shark’.
By transforming artifacts into objects of faith we actually let the ‘makers’ walk scot-free. Allow deceivers to shed all shrouds of responsibility…
What happened to ‘do not make idols’?
OK, I don’t believe in ‘God’ either but it would be wrong for us to discard time sanctioned wisdom in the process of setting ourselves free from organized religion.
‘Faith’ should be reserved for people, not for objects.
Faith, the word, stretches only as far as we pull it.
It’s up to us to do that sparingly!
Human language is far laxer than the ‘natural’ one. Which makes it less reliable.
It’s up to us to keep it dependable.
Or else…
“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.
Faith in themselves…
Until the shit hits the fan!
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.
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!
Not so drole anymore, eh…
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.””
Bernard E. Harcourt, On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler… 2001 The University of Chicago
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.”
And you call this ‘a complex reality’…
Make
America
Lonely
Again
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.”
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1914-1920/league
Was the World a better place after WWII? Was America happier? Inside rather than outside?
‘Adapt to survive’.
‘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.
Yet, as I already promised, things go even ‘deeper’.
As you might already know, there are some people who dislike the European Union. And who claim that nothing good comes from ‘Brussels’. That the Europeans would be far happier ‘on their own’, without the ‘obtrusive interventions’ coming from the ‘Commission’.
In this context, it is worth mentioning the fact that, for example, “80% of the apartments situated in Sectorul 3 (one of the 6 boroughs of Bucharest) have been thermally rehabilitated, most of the funds being grants from the EU”
Intelligent design, eh… Convincing people they will fare better outside the EU, when the EU had paid to make their lives more bearable….
nicichiarasa 