Archives for category: Choices we make
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Freedom

November 5, 2024 //
0

Abstract:

While there has been a plethora of analysis on diverse subjects within Holocaust studies,
there remains some reluctance to engage with women’s unique experiences,
which were largely subsumed under those of men in the decades following World War II.
This article examines how women’s specific experiences, both biological and social, are often denied
or suppressed in research and literature on the Holocaust, even in survivors’ own testimonies,
despite the fact that these are often clearly gendered experiences.
By revisiting key themes from the testimonies of female survivors,
such gendered analyses contribute to a fuller picture of the unprecedented
and relentless killing that the Final Solution’s anti-Semitism entailed.
Nicole Ephgrave
Journal of Women’s History Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 28, Number 2, Summer 2016 pp. 12-32
10.1353/jowh.2016.0014

Those who had ordered what had happened at Auschwitz and many of those who had actually perpetrated the crimes considered themselves to be free. They did it on their own will.
Their freedom was intact!
And they had chosen, freely, not only to diminish the liberty of other people but to actually defile them…

Individual freedom is something which depends, largely, on each of us. On how each of us ‘digests’ their previous experiences and chooses to operationalize what they have learned.
Social freedom, on the other hand, depends on how we, as a group/community, aggregate our individual choices.

In this sense, the latter one, freedom becomes a space.
A place – THE place, actually – where each of us can put in practice our own individually free choices.

Now, places have rules.
Each place being defined by the rules governing that place. Some of those rules are specific for each space while others come from the ‘previous’ spaces.
For example, we – humans – are both animals and something ‘higher’. As such, we ‘obey’ both the rules governing the biological realm and the laws of each of the countries we happen to live in.
One of the most fundamental rules evident to man is “no good deed goes unpunished”. Otherwise known as the law of the consequence. “Do not be deceived… A man reaps as he sows” Gal 6:7

Everything we do leaves a trace. Influences the future. Creates karma.
How we, each of us, chooses to exert their freedom creates the circumstances in which we, and our children, will have to exercise theirs. Their freedom!
The manner in which the ‘free nazi’ had chosen to exert their freedom – to kill other people – has shaped the future of Europe. And of much of that of the world!

The manner in which we choose to ‘digest’, to interpret, what had happened shapes our future.

Which brings us back to ‘dehumanization’.

Many of us consider that the victims have been dehumanized. Made less human.
Had their humanness obliterated!
By the abusers. By those who had abused both their freedom and their power!
By those who had transformed other humans into victims….

I beg you to reconsider this:
Who had undergone the process of dehumanization?
The victims or the bullies?!?

We, as free thinkers, have the ability to poke fun at whatever happens to us.
To relativize our experiences.
Hence ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. When the utmost importance of the subject begged for a way more formal wording…
Poking fun at things we cannot control is a survival gimmick. By doing this we can, individually, survive in dire circumstances. Specially in situations where our inner values are questioned. When we have to quell what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. When we are forced – by ‘external factors’ – to do something we would not have done in ‘normal’ circumstances.

In this sense we can better understand the process of dehumanization.
The defiler actually needs to dehumanize the victim. To consider the victim something else but a human being. Otherwise, the defiler would no longer be able to defile the victim.
But what happens when a human being does not recognize (some of) their fellow humans as being their peers?

Who ceases to be human?

Tags , , ,
Categories 1989, 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

Opportunity

October 22, 2024 //
0

“All governments suffer a recurring problem:
Power attracts pathological personalities.
It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse:Dune

“How can Orson Scott Card be so bigoted, but the Ender’s Game series is about empathy and acceptance of others?“

– “Circle of Empathy. If you’re inside the circle, you are worthy of empathy and it applies to you. If you’re outside the circle, you are not worthy of empathy and bigotry towards you doesn’t count because you don’t count. If you’re ever baffled by how one person can be forgiving and accepting towards one group and turn around and be rabid dogs towards another group it’s because in their emotional calculus the second group literally doesn’t count as “deserving”.
Does it make sense? No. Do humans make sense? No.“”

– Card was young when he wrote Ender’s Game and for what it’s worth I think it reflected his real views on the world at the time. He’s since spent decades of his life in a high control cult that has told him constantly that gay people are moral failures.
I think there’s a chance that Card is actually closeted from remarks he’s made on the subject and fear of discovery has made him feel he has to be even more dogmatic on the matter.
I grew up queer in fundamentalist churches. I’m always going to think of people like this as partial victims, even if it would be easier to just hate them. Brainwashing is real. It’s not just something you shrug off because you’re an adult.
I love his Ender series and think it’s beautiful. It doesn’t actually matter to me what he personally believes because his work is saying something else.“

Discussion found on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/14mmmu0how_can_orson_scott_card_be_so_bigotted_but_the/?rdt=42921

Alive in a living context.

Try to imagine a single living organism.
Forget about ‘where did it came from’. Forget about ‘what does it drink/eat/breathe’.
Now, does the existence of a single living organism mean that life is present? When attempting to answer this, pretend no observer is present…

‘Life’ is ‘wide’ word. It covers a lot.
From ‘life’ as a phenomenon. That thing studied by biology.
To ‘life’ as an ‘individual experience’. That thing cared for by medicine. Human, veterinary… By the way, how do you call a person who takes care of sick plants?

Am I making any sense here?

My point being that life is both a phenomenon and an experience.
As a phenomenon, life – as we know it – needs a certain environment. And a ‘push to start’.
According to what we presently know, life may appear, on it’s own, in certain conditions. We don’t know, yet, which are those exact conditions. Nor exactly how it happened. Only that it seems possible. And that’s enough for me.
If certain conditions are met, life – as a phenomenon – is possible.

Furthermore, if life as a phenomenon has established itself in a certain environment, life as an experience becomes certain. Each individual organism living in that environment experiences its own life. Regardless of whether a particular organism is aware of its being alive or not.

Shared Awareness

Life, as a phenomenon, is a ‘process’.

Individual organisms become alive. One way or another but always as a ‘continuation’.
Each generation of individual living organisms live by the same rules as the generation before it. Each ‘child’ generation follows in the footsteps of the ‘parent’ generation. A ‘blue print’, a genetic blue-print, is passed over from generation to generation. OK, let’s pretend we haven’t yet learned about genetic variation…
Each individual organism continues to be alive for as long as:
– It remains ‘functionally whole’. A human can continue to live, at least for a while, without any limbs. But not without its head or heart. Well, you understand what I mean.
– It continues to exchange substances with the environment in which it lives. Which means that the individual organism is the entity controlling which substances get inside and which substances are ejected from its interior. OK, we need to breathe so we inhale microorganisms and pollutants ‘on top’ of the air we need to survive – and some of them make it into our blood-stream – but it’s still our lungs which absorb oxygen, eliminate carbon dioxide from the blood and leave nitrogen alone. I’m sure you get my drift.

This ability of even the most basic/primitive individual organisms to interact with the environment – along the rules inscribed in their genetic inheritance – allows us, conscient observers of the phenomenon, to consider that individual organisms, while alive, display a certain degree of awareness. They behave as if being aware of the difference between oxygen and nitrogen. As being aware of the need to breathe. As being aware of the fact that too much carbon dioxide in your blood is something to be avoided… And so on.

Fast forward from bacteria – individual organisms which are able to extract specific nutrients from a broth to, say, chimpanzee. Who are very picky about food. When there is plenty enough to choose from…
There is a certain commonality between these two very different kind of organisms being able to feed themselves, right? And if we, humans, pretend to be aware of (some of) our our actions… how do we name this ability of our fellow living organisms? Their, our?!?, ability to choose?

Together?

“The greatest consequence of the arising of self-consciousness and self-awareness in the constitution of humanness, is that to the extent that we human beings are self-conscious beings we are aware of what we do, and of the possible consequences of what we do to ourselves and to other human and not human beings. Self-awareness and self-consciousness are manners of relational living that as they are lived constitute a relational grounding for all else that is being lived. The self-conscious person lives his or her living in a manner in which a question such as, “are you aware of what you are doing?” always makes sense. The self-conscious person lives his or her being in self-consciousness as if he or she were distinguishing him or herself as an independent entity, and operates comfortably in that way. Yet, if we seriously want to explain how is it that self-consciousness happens under the circumstances that we cannot distinguish in the experience between what we call perception and illusion, and, therefore, that we cannot make any reference to an independent reality, we cannot but Þnd out that it is not possible to do so if we do not accept that languaging is not a system of symbolic communications about entities assumed to exist independently of our distinguishing them, but it is a manner of living together in a recursive flow of co-ordinations of consensual co-ordinations of doings.”
Humberto Maturana, The origin and conservation of self-consciousness, 2005

According to Maturana, self-consciousness is somebody’s ability to observe themselves ‘in the act’. To observe themselves observing. Ability developed alongside other self-conscious ‘agents’ through the use of language.
“It is not possible to understand the nature of self-consciousness without understanding the operation of human beings as living systems that exist as emotional languaging living systems: self-consciousness is a manner of living.” Op. cit.

The way I see it, consciousness – self-awareness in Maturana’s terms – is life 2.0.

Just as there are life as a phenomenon and life as an individual experience, there are also human consciousness – a shared ability – and individual conscience.
Just as there’s no way in which a single living organism might appear ex nihilo – unless some ‘outside agent’ introduces it, there’s no way in which anybody might become aware of their own self by themself.
Life – the phenomenon, once established – opens up a huge field of opportunity. Mere chemicals, entangled, ‘cooperate’ towards maintaining the life of the individual organism inside which they happen to ‘cooperate’. Evolution, the process, makes it possible for new forms of life to appear as the environment is shaped by the formerly living organisms. Or by other naturally occurring phenomena.
Consciousness, our shared ability, opens up the next level of opportunity. The opportunity for each of us, individual self-aware agents, to show/prove our ‘true nature’.

Individually as well as collectively.

Tags , , , , ,
Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, cooperation, effective communication, In English, skin in the game

Next

October 14, 2024 //
0

“The World Health Organization explains QoL
as a subjective evaluation of one’s perception of their reality
relative to their goals as observed through the lens of their culture and value system.“

Until not so long ago, all people were busy surviving.
‘Waking alive to see another day’ wasn’t taken for granted.
Food was scarce, illness was plenty and war was a constant presence. And these were shared by all. From kings to their last subject. “Although (Queen) Anne (of Great Britain and Ireland, 1702-1714) was pregnant 18 times between 1683 and 1700, only five children were born alive, and, of these, only one, a son, survived infancy.”

And this need to survive didn’t stop at death.
Since most people were convinced that, one way or another, there was life after death, they were also concerned about redemption. It doesn’t matter what you believe in, if your belief includes any kind of an after life … you need to prepare yourself for it. Either to avoid reincarnation or to ascend to heaven/escape going to hell.

This commonality insured that all people had something to share. A common ground.
Which made it possible for them to see eye to eye regarding at least something.
Which common understanding of one thing made it possible for them to live in a (sort of) community. Together!

Nowadays…
Too many of us continue to have a hard time foraging for the essentials. Continue to survive.
While others have it differently.

Haven’t experienced hunger. Nor need. And their most dangerous experience is speeding on the highway. Dangerous in the sense that they may pay a fine if caught ….
Surviving has been replaced by searching for a better quality of life!

Which is fine!
One should make the most of the opportunities present, right?

But do we really know what we’re doing?
The consequences of our actions?
Specially since surviving was a team effort while ‘quality of life’ is a solitary quest… With nobody in attendance – except for the occasional life coach – to warn us when we ‘jump the shark’.

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

Consequences

October 7, 2024 //
0

“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…

Tags , , ,
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’?

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

Why it matters:

September 16, 2024 //
0

Our children have to make do
with the consequences of what we’ve cooked up.

The happier amongst us live in states run as liberal democracies.
Most countries on this planet define themselves, constitutionally speaking, as being democratic.
And except for a very few, all the others behave in an apparently capitalistic manner. Some under a free(ish) market and the rest under a ‘mixed’ regime.

Since we’re speaking about the ‘current’ socioeconomic arrangement, which is in flux, we still don’t have a name for it.
We do have a name, though, for the previous one. Feudalism.
And for the one before that. Slavery.
Or, to use a modern term, all the previous regimes might be bundled together as ‘authoritarian-isms’. Regimes where authority flows from top to bottom and where feed back comes only in the form of revolution. Coup d’etat. Dynastic change… and other euphemisms.

History suggests, and those wise enough to notice implement this lesson where ever possible, that all authoritarian regimes crumble under their own weight.
While liberal democracies tend to survive for as long as they maintain their liberal nature. Their freedom!

What’s the difference between liberal and ‘illiberal’ democracies?

“It’s not who votes that counts
but who counts the votes”
Josef Stalin

Now, speaking seriously – as Stalin style ‘popular democracies’ have crumbled more than 30 years ago, following all other ’empires’ which no longer exist, there is a difference between liberal, a.k.a. functional, and make-belief democracy.
People maintaining a liberally democratic regime take their job seriously.
They speak up their minds. Hence the problems become known.
They listen what the others have to say. Hence the people are not only aware of problems as they arise but people also have the opportunity to understand the nature of those problems.
They respect each-other. Hence they treat all problems, affecting all the people, in a fair manner. Thus maintaining the natural stability of the social arrangement.

It goes without saying that in a liberal democracy everybody can vote and each vote is counted…

An illiberal democracy, on the other hand, is where things are more complicated.
The most illiberal situation is that where it doesn’t matter whether people vote or not. The results have been counted beforehand. The latest example being Venezuela 2024.
A more ‘subtle’ picture is offered by, for example, Hungary. As a matter of fact, it was Viktor Orban, the Hungarian “dictator“, the one who had coined the very notion of “illiberal democracy“. A revamped Constitutional Court, some Constitutional Amends, “emaciated checks and balances“, tight controls imposed over the media…

What about the ‘capitalist’ part of the current arrangement?
I’m afraid we waddle in confusion here.
We no longer make any distinction between ‘capitalism’ seen as ‘hoarding money as a sport’, and ‘using accumulated fiscal deposits as resources for building something new’. New and useful, of course…

‘Fiscal deposits’ – hoarded fiduciary money – have been around since coins have been minted. And IOU notes have been written. But capitalism, as Adam Smith understood it, wasn’t born yet at that time.

Under authoritarian regimes, having a lot of money does offer some leverage. But no immunity!
Consider what had happened to the Templar Monks when France’s Philip the IV-th coveted their money. Or the fate of the richest Chinese, after he had been perceived as being too cocky by the communist regime…
Whenever ‘capitalism’ takes place in liberally democratic settings, the market can be described as being ‘free’. Each economic agent – buyer or seller – decides in an autonomous manner. Takes their own advice and has to obey nobody’s orders. Has to obey the law but doesn’t have to abide to any whims.

Putting two and two together, for a society to remain functional in the longer run, the most importing thing is the ‘free market’.
The key word here being ‘free’. The meaning attached to the word and the understanding people have about the concept.
There is ‘free’ as in ‘free for all’ and free as in ‘freedom under the law’.
‘Free for all’, also known as ‘the law of the jungle’, inevitably ends up as a ‘dog eat dog’ situation while freedom under the law remains functional for as long as The People bring the law up to speed whenever needed.
The ‘market’ part is a lot simpler.
A ‘place’, an ‘open’ space, where both ideas and wares are exposed and exchanged. Amongst those who come to the market, to the agora, to solve their problems. To fulfill their needs.

As long as that ‘space’ remains free – as in ‘open’ for all – most people are able to make ends meet. The situation remains stable. For everybody to enjoy.
As soon as one ‘operator’ starts to ‘corner the market’ – using any of the already known ‘technologies’, the most popular being the old fashioned lie – the situation becomes potentially dangerous.

Whenever ‘The People’ have a sound understanding of what freedom really means, the bullies are ejected from the system. The ‘antitrust’ legislation is put to work and the budding ‘monopolies’ are dismantled before real harm was done.
If not… If von Papen hadn’t helped Hitler to rise into power and if Chamberlain hadn’t led the free world into submission…
Had we not threaded so lightly when Putin snatched Crimea back in 2014….

https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2017/03/revisiting-the-2014-annexation-of-crimea?lang=en

“he said abortion bans early in pregnancy went too far,
suggesting Republican candidates needed to be moderate enough on the issue
to “win elections”.”

The point I’m trying to make here being that what candidates say matters.
That we really need to see through their words.
Whether they are interested in solving issues – and which of them – or they simply want to accede to power.

Doesn’t matter? As long as they keep their promises?

Do you really expect a lying bully to keep up with their words? To fulfill their promises?
Are you comfortable with ‘hiring’ a lying bully to mind the future of your children?

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

Living in a Bubble

September 2, 2024 //
0

“The act of redistribution requires confiscation of the fruits of labor.
Marxism is a fantasy…..
a classless society with no private ownership of the means of production.
The mere suggestion invites revolution.
Instead, today’s neo Marxist will allow for private ownership
with a high tax rate and a strangling bureaucracy.”

Life, a natural phenomenon, fine-tunes the environment where it happens to take place.
Living organisms, according to our current understanding of how life works, need to eat. Also to drink and to breathe. And they need to excrete the ‘consequences’ of their ‘imperfect’ metabolism.
By ingesting, digesting and excreting portions of their environment, living organisms slowly transform the space where they ‘do their thing’.

Humans do all of the above. Some of it ‘on purpose’!
Human societies ingest huge amounts of raw materials and ‘excrete’ merchandise and waste.
Human societies ingest huge amounts of information and ‘excrete’ knowledge. As in ‘meaning’ and ‘ideology’.

Living organisms, humans included, evolve in the environment they have inherited from their ancestors. Regardless of the species each of them belongs to.
Human societies have to make do in the environment they have inherited. To do that, to ‘survive’, they need to make sense of the situation they find themselves in. In order to go ‘forward’, they need to identify a ‘meaning’. Which meaning is actually built according to the prevalent ideologies, at each given moment in time.

Living organisms do their thing according to species specific information they have inherited from the previous generation. Individual organisms do have some ‘lee-way’/autonomy but only a very small number of animals are able to actually learn something from their parents. And none, but humans, have the ability to teach.
Humans are under a double determination. As animals, they are still functioning according to their DNA. As cultural beings, they are also heavily influenced by the culture in which each of them had happened to be raised. By the culture to which each of them has the opportunity to contribute.

The practical manifestation of culture, civilization, makes it possible for individual humans to enjoy a far deeper autonomy than the rest of the animals. Not only that humans have a lot more to learn from their ancestors/brethren but they are also capable to ad, in real time, new information/meaning to the very culture to which they belong. And to ‘rebuild’/refine the civilization itself.

Darwinian evolution is a multidimensional thing. The individuals/species endowed with genetic information which no longer fits with the prevalent environmental conditions disappear. Only those capable to survive, those endowed with useful enough genetic information, manage to transmit their genetic information to the next generation.

Human evolution, a process which takes place on top of the Darwinian level, is a three dimensional thing.
We build culture and civilization. While searching for ‘meaning’.
We gather information and use it to build the world we live in. The freshly built civilization, our new ‘environment’, constitutes a new ‘playing ground’ where we gather some more information. Which we quickly use to ‘improve’ our ‘homes’.

Humans, like all other living organisms, are limited. By their material nature. By our making.
We live in a three dimensional space but we only perceive two and a half dimensions. Up/down and left/right are very clear. Depth, on the other hand… is a little bit trickier…

Same thing with the evolutionary dimensions.
At first, when transitioning from animals to conscious human beings, we were mainly concerned about ‘meaning’. Gathering food was ‘natural’ – we did it like our ape-like ancestors used to – and we didn’t need much protection against the elements. But our budding conscience was screaming for meaning.

What’s gonna happen to me? What is this whole thing? Who’s responsible for all this?

That was why our ancestors had invented totems, territorial gods and, eventually, religions.
As an answer to the three questions I’ve just formulated.

What we currently call culture and civilization have been built, by us, to ‘beef up’ ‘meaning’. As a manner of confirming, to us, that our already formulated conclusion was right.
Stonehenge was erected to prove that, year after year, the Sun was rising when it was supposed to.
And so on…

After reaching a certain level of material and psychological comfort – Abraham Maslow’s fourth level, self-esteem – we no longer need ‘confirmation’. We’re comfortable enough with what we have so we no longer need fresh meaning.
As a matter of fact, when Maslow was speaking about ‘self-actualization’ he was absolutely clear.
In this stage, the individual is free to chose.
Nota Bene, self actualization is only an opportunity. Not a ‘sentence’.
An open door to a vast space. Where each of us can do almost anything. Anything of what is possible…

Until the bubble bursts!

I grew up under communist rule.
None of us had any hope that our society could ‘revert’ to being ‘normal’.
The fall of the regime was a surprise for everybody.

I understand now, after 35 years of freedom, that the communist rule was doomed to failure.
Because of the ‘strangling bureaucracy’ which was preoccupied with their own survival.
And which blissfully ignored the hard reality.
Living in the bubble they have built for themselves, the strangling bureaucrats were unaware of the mistakes built one on top of the other as a consequence of the bureaucrats deciding according to their own ideology and without proper feed back from the real reality.
Looking farther down in human history, it is easy to see that this has been the fate of all ‘imperial arrangements’. From ‘political’ empires to ‘economic’ monopolies.

Alexander the Great, Genghis-Han, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler, Lenin-Stalin-Brezhnev…
East India Company, AT&T and now Boeing & Intel.

“Meanwhile, as we reported in a post earlier this week, Lip-Bu Tan, a high-profile board member of Intel, has now resigned, citing the board’s unwillingness to listen to his ideas to make Intel’s contract manufacturing business more customer-centric and to remove the inertia-inducing layers of bureaucracy, including an army of middle managers who thwart innovation at the company’s desktop and server divisions.”

And what about gambling?
“Using datasets showing deposits and withdrawals into and out of online sports betting platforms like FanDuel and DraftKings, as well as to and from equity brokerage accounts like Charles Schwab, E-Trade, Vanguard and Fidelity, Baker and his co-authors found that legalization has led to higher credit card balances, lower access to credit, a reduction in longer-term and higher-yield investments, as well as an increase in lottery play — with the effects particularly pronounced among financially constrained households.“
“Financially constrained” people have a tendency to see their future through a glass ceiling. They know it’s there but they have no idea how to reach it.

The “strangling bureaucracy” are busy – but without a real understanding of what they’re doing – casting layer upon layer of fresh glass-ceiling.

And we continue to live in our respective bubbles… built by us, according to our ideological specifications…

Tags , , ,
Categories 1989, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Miehkrud

August 30, 2024 //
0

Classic sociologist Emile Durkheim theorizes that crime exists
in all societies because it reaffirms moral boundaries and at times
facilitates needed social changes,
while former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan believes that
Durkheim’s views omit the possibility of too much crime, especially violent crime,
so that deviance as a serious social problem is not addressed.

“Normlessness and deregulation are poor translations of dereglement for several reasons. They did not enter into common English usage until the 1960s and certainly didn’t exist in Durkheim’s time. Dereglement is difficult to render in English. It carries with it in French the connotations of immorality and suffering, but is perhaps best translated as derangement. Anomie as dereglement implies a condition of madness or something akin to sin. This concides with the observation that over 20 words denoting sin were translated as anomia when the Bible was translated by St. Jerome and others.”

Durkheim was right after all.
‘Crime’ does fulfill a social function.
Some deviance, when well ‘managed’, can be useful. The US have somehow managed to transform a rather high level of deviance into ‘speed’. 250 years ago, the 13 American colonies were almost insignificant.
Today, the US is the most powerful/wealthy nation on Earth. While the Union continues to be the most ‘deviant’ among the civilized nations. On all conceivable metrics.

The key words here being, of course, “well managed”!
Maybe the time has come for the likes of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to go back to class. And to finish reading what Durkheim had to say about things.

The problem with the current political class, not only in America, being the fact that too many politicians ‘outsource’ responsibility!
It’s not history’s job to maintain accountability!

The politicians themselves need to provide enough reasonable alternatives for the ‘people’ to chose from!

Durkheim, read from both ends, told us that much.
We are the ones who need to maintain the balance.
For it’s us who will bear the consequences!

No matter who was the culprit, we’ll have to clear up the mess.
So we’d better stop the fan from spreading the mess around!

After all, shit happens. It’s a natural occurrence.
We have to eat so we need to relieve ourselves.
But how about doing this in a civilized manner?
And not rewarding those bragging about ‘inappropriate behavior‘….

Tags , , , ,
Categories 1989, awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, In English, Mutual Respect, Rule of Law, skin in the game

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?

Tags , , ,
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.

Tags , , ,
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
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »