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Living in a Bubble

September 2, 2024 //
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“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?

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 //
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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 //
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“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!

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

Terror Management System

August 20, 2024 //
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“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 //
0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning the Tables

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

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

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

And here’s the catch.

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

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

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

It’s not wrong. Only delusional.

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

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

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

Some of those philosophers have reached rather strange conclusions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re both ready to be taken over.

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

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

Make believe

August 4, 2024 //
0

Observe the abnormal.
The out of ordinary.
That’s how you might figure out the regular…
Psychology 101

We live on faith.

Without faith, one cannot even raise from their bed in the morning…
‘What’s the use?’

Animals start looking for food whenever hungry.
Human beings, for as long as they remain conscious, check whether there’s any chance of finding food before attempting to find it.

Faith in what?

Living organisms are made of matter.
Atoms and molecules stacked in a certain order and interacting according to certain rules. Rules being preserved, managed and passed over from generation to generation as ‘genes’.
Individual organisms have very little influence about the whole process, except for some ‘checks and balances’. Which checks and balances work according to some rules also contained in the genes.
Species, generations and generations of individual organisms, evolve. The genetic information passed over from generation to generation becomes slightly altered as evolution forces it to fit the changes in the environment.
According to Ernst Mayr, evolution is about the demise of the unfit. Individuals need to be able to survive in the environment where they happen to have been born. If the genetic information inherited from the parents is suitable for that environment, the individual has a fighting chance. To live and to pass over the genetic information which made survival possible.
The nature of life – the existence of successive generations and the mechanisms which pass genetic information from one generation to the next one – makes it so that genetic information may be slightly altered when copied into the new organism. The alterations appear haphazardly and ‘survive’ only if they don’t jeopardize the existence of the individual organism harboring them. If the organism survives for long enough, the alteration is passed over to the new generation. If the alteration happens to be beneficial for the organism in the context of circumstances where it needs to survive, that alteration has increased the chances of survival for the organism. And its own chances to be passed over to the next generation. Please note that no agency is involved in this process. Nobody and nothing but happenstance has anything to do with what’s going on here!

Conscious organisms are made of animals plus conscience.
You need a living organism in order to have a functional conscience.
Which conscience is nothing but a set of rules learned from the other members of the ‘species’ to which the individual belongs. In fact, conscience – individually speaking, is nothing but a set of ‘cultural’ genes.
Lumps of information passed on from generation to generation which allow us to actively interact amongst us, people, and between us and the environment where we happen to live.
Each individual conscience is like a ‘cultural’ organism riding on top of a biological one.

The difference between the cultural organism and the biological one being the fact that the cultural organism is aware of itself.
Of its mortal nature!

Being an organism, conscience has only one job. To survive for as long as it can and to pass over the information it has gathered to the next generation.
Just as a biological organism is driven by a ‘vital force’ – named ‘survival instinct’ by those trying to make sense of this whole thing – conscience is driven by hope.

Biological organisms have a symbiotic relationship with their environment. They ingest substances and excrete the consequences of their metabolism. They also notice information and react to it. Individually as well as collectively.
As a consequence, the world we currently live in is the ‘byproduct’ of 3 billion years of countless biological organisms having already lived on this planet. Without this teeming life we wouldn’t be here and the planet would be barren.

Cultural organisms have deepened and accelerated the process.
Not only they have physically transformed the planet but they have also built meaning.

As I mentioned before, consciences need hope in order to survive.
In order to have hope, you need meaning.
Things have to make sense.
Out of sheer necessity, we’ve built explanatory scenarios for what’s going on around us.

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

One God

August 2, 2024 //
0

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Doesn’t make much sense?
Mentioning ‘God’ on money is the first step towards the establishment of an officially sanctioned religion?

Well…

In my previous post I posited that property, the concept, is the stepping stone for social order.
I’ll add to that a simple observation. Whenever too much property gets hoarded by a too small number of people, the community which had allowed that to happen is in great danger.

Same thing here.
We have religion – a social phenomenon – and religions.

We have a certain understanding of the world, shared by the members of a community – which allows the community, as a whole, to behave in a coherent manner. Not that much different from what happens when people use a common language. They can communicate. Same thing happens with people partaking in a religion. They ‘see’ things in a coherent manner. Hence can coordinate their efforts.

And we have religions…
To reach the ‘certain understanding of the world’ I mentioned before, each community had traveled a road. A particular road through the particular circumstances in which each cultural community – currently known as ‘nation’ – had had to build their culture. Their identity.
Some communities had put together certain scenarios to accompany them along this road. To help them make sense of what was happening to them.
Some communities have used more than one scenario during that journey while others use more scenarios simultaneously.

Sociologically speaking, all that matters is social coherence.
All is well as long as the community conserves its ability to function. To survive.
As long as the individuals who compose that community continue to have a common enough understanding of the world in which they live.

For the simple reason that they, we, live in the same world!
And if we, individually or in small ‘gangs’, start behaving as if the world is different for each of us…

The Founding Fathers had a common understanding of the world. They belonged to the same (functional) religion despite belonging to different ‘denominations’. For them, the First Amendment was about reigning in the powers of the Government. They had realized that a Government able to impose a certain religion – a certain scenario – upon the entire community would eventually bring destitution.
The Founding Fathers could not foresee a situation in which a few of us would deny the practical daily realities of this world. Invoking their particular scenario as an argument… As the supreme argument for refusing to see the reality.

The reality as it is.
And as it is seen by a majority of us.

I mentioned earlier that some communities have changed their scenario along their history.
They did it when they have found new meanings. They have seen new things about the reality and they have integrated those new things into their newer scenario.
By changing the scenario they have actually built a new reality.
Societies which have clung to their scenario to the bitter end… are no longer with us.
Societies which have somehow found it in their collective minds to adapt their scenarios to the reality changed by their own efforts continue to survive. To thrive, even.

“Hoarded by a too small number of people” means controlled by a handful of people.
Sometimes coordinated.
As it happens in any dictatorial regime. It doesn’t matter who formally ‘owns’ something if the use of that something is tightly controlled by somebody else.
Furthermore, a certain ideology may end up having a lot of clout without being imposed by an authority. Nevertheless, the fact that an ideology dominates, for a while, makes it so that the community which allows this to happen to experience a dictatorial regime.
For whatever reason, some people were convinced that witches were real. And burned them at the stake.
For whatever reason, a lot of people continue to believe that communism might be a good thing.
For whatever reason, some people continue to believe that they are entitled to determine whether a woman may or may not abort a fetus.

What is the difference between an ideology and a scenario?
The manner in which people relate to it.

Having been told that they were the children of the same God made it possible for the believers to stick together. To act like brothers. To respect each-other. To invent and implement capitalism and democracy. Both relying on trust. On mutual trust and on the freedom of the market. Both the market where goods and services are traded and the public forum. Where ideas are traded…

Being told that only one particular understanding of a certain text/idea/concept is correct some people remove themselves from the ‘general population’. Which ‘general population’ becomes ‘the others’.

‘The others with whom we don’t have anything in common’.

Quite an untenable situation, given the fact that the world is becoming smaller and smaller.

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Categories authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, effective communication, evolution, freedom, In English
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