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Survival

September 27, 2024 //
0

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

An end in itself…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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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, skin in the game

Conscience. A history.

September 8, 2024 //
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hamadryas baboon, Hagenbeck Tierpark, 2009

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

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

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…

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

Which? If any…

August 29, 2024 //
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which ‘artificial intelligence’ is a huge misnomer!

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

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

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

Same thing with ‘intelligence’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into the hard, real, reality?

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

Read!

August 27, 2024 //
0

Redistribution of wealth is an anti-marxist technology.

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

Otherwise, the marxist prophecy will come true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking in ‘Tongues’

August 22, 2024 //
0

“It is said
that one man’s terrorist
is another man’s freedom fighter.”
Sami Zeidan, Desperately seeking definition…, 2003

‘Truth’, ‘freedom-fighter’ and ‘terrorist’ are words. On the side where we get in touch with them.
We see/hear them first before they penetrate our minds. If at all…
We think of them and only afterwards they get pronounced by our mouths or typed by our fingers.

On the other hand, ‘propaganda’ – another ‘word’ – is a ‘technology’. A particular manner in which some of us choose to spread out their ideas.
Same thing goes for ‘conspiracy’. A particular manner of doing things. ‘Cloaked’. Hidden from sight and involving a number of vetted participants.
Nota Bene! Those involved in ‘conspiracy theory’ are also vetted.
The ‘theorists’ vet their targeted audience by choosing the subjects of their discourse and by wording it in a certain manner. The members of the ‘public’ ‘vet’ the ‘influencers’ by following them. And themselves – they set themselves apart from the rest – by allowing themselves to be ‘entertained’ by the message they keep returning to.
‘Terror’ itself is also a ‘technology’. A sort of ‘propaganda’ 2.0.

While ‘propaganda’ is a manner of spreading ‘the word’ around – presenting the ‘message’ in an easier to ‘accept’/’digest’ form for the targeted audience – ‘terror’ is a ‘technology’ used to convince an entire population that there’s no alternative. No alternative other than that ‘proposed’ by the terrorist.
A technology used to break the will of those whom the terrorist wants to submit.

And what ‘happened to THE truth’?!?

The truth of the matter is that there is no ‘truth’.
No ‘one size fits all’ kind of truth!

A truth is something we agree upon. In this moment!
Something we agree to consider as being true for as long as nothing meaningful contradicts the generally accepted ‘true thing’.

But what if there’s no longer a ‘we’?
What if those who – for whatever reasons – want to separate us manage to do exactly that?
What if ‘we’ no longer see each other eye to eye regarding not so long ago widely accepted ‘subjects’?
What if ‘we’ – a sizeable portion of us – accept ‘alternative facts’ as being at least as valid as the ones previously accepted as being true?
What if we, too many of us for our own good, start to doubt as a matter of creed?

“Too many of us for our own good”?!?
What happened to ‘doubting as a matter of creed’ being the ‘stepping stone’ for science?!?

Words… so many words, no matter how beautiful…

‘Science’ is, first and foremost, a state of mind. The ‘open’ state of mind which conserves the willingness to change ‘the truth’ according to the newly acquired information, if this new information is convincing enough. If it comes from more than one sources AND if ‘the conclusion’ can be reached again and again. Independently!
Being in a scientific state of mind means keeping the door open for new information.
Questioning everything with the transparent intent to impose a single version of ‘the truth’ is more than propaganda.
It’s a form of terrorism!

Tags , , ,
Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Trust

Terror Management System

August 20, 2024 //
0

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

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

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

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

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

‘What is going to happen to me/us?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power

August 18, 2024 //
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An amount of interaction expressed in the considered amount of time.

Where ever there is power, there is also resistance.
Michel Foucault in the footsteps of Isaac Newton

Michel Foucault used to be a post-Marxist philosopher and sociologist.
As the rest of the Marxists, two of his main subjects were Power and the individual’s (philosopher) duty to put their own convictions into practice. To make a difference, preferably ‘against’ the establishment.

From a Darwinian point of view, Foucault’s insistence that we shouldn’t restrict ourselves to the ‘straight and narrow’ makes perfect sense. The ability to change along with the changes in the environment is paramount to survival. Furthermore, the ability to induce change is paramount to what we call ‘progress’.

On the other hand, life itself demands that we, successive generations of individuals belonging to different evolving species, need to retain a certain congruence.
Succeeding generations share the genetic information needed to preserve the nature of the species.
Species living together evolve in such a manner as to maintain the viability of ‘their’ ecosystem. Or else…

The ‘law of the jungle’ is nothing more than something we believe to have noticed. And then convinced ourselves that we were right when we have formulated our observation in the current form. “The law of the jungle…“

“Power” is but a word.
And words have the nasty habit of cloaking more than one meanings. Well, most of them…

“Power” means many.
From a ‘certain amount of work divided by the time in which that work had been performed’ to ‘the influence somebody has over the people happening to live in the vicinity.
And also something very pervasive yet seldom noticed.

Something which ‘permeates everything and “makes us what we are”‘.

Contradictory?
A tool, teleologically yielded by agents, or a fixture of the ‘environment’?
Both a the same time!
Imagine a group of people cavorting in a pool. Each of them using water to splash the others.
Or two ‘teams’ of angry men fighting near a river and using stones retrieved from the riverbed to crack each-others’ skulls.

‘A fixture of the environment’ identified as such and used by agents as a tool with which to further their goals.

Knowledge is power and power creates knowledge...
Both Bacon/Hobbes and Foucault have been right.
By identifying new and increasingly powerful instruments people have transformed knowledge into power while by putting power to work, the powerful have generated new meaning and driven things towards where they wanted them to be.

Having been able to draw from more accrued knowledge (a.k.a. culture) than Hobbes. Foucault is marginally ‘even more right’ than his predecessors.

“People know what they do;
frequently they know why they do what they do;
but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”

This being the explanation for all ‘social arrangements’ where power has been concentrated in a too small number of hands/heads having eventually failed.

A society where schools and prisons are hard to tell apart – or perceived as such by those who have to spend time in any of them – is sooner rather than later going to reconsider it’s ‘knowledge’ regarding ‘power’. Or else…

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Two millennia. And counting…

August 12, 2024 //
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“Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men
genuinely and adequately philosophize,
that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide…
cities will have no rest from evils…
there can be no happiness, either public or private, in any other city.”
Plato, circa 375 BC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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