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Revelation

November 7, 2025 //
0

And the Truth shall set you free.

Heidegger, the philosopher, has an interesting take on this ‘truth’ thing.
Nobody does, and never will, know everything about anything. Lest of all about ‘everything’. Hence nobody has access to a ‘true’ piece of knowledge.
Furthermore, ‘truth’ is about communication. About a message. An expressed piece of knowledge. And since there is no language precise enough to allow a communicator to cram into a message all they want to express… nor precise enough to allow a ‘reader’ to figure out everything the communicator had attempted to express…
Which drives Heidegger to posit that truth depends on intent. On a communicator sharing honestly everything they know about a subject. On a communicator allowing the receiver of the message to reach their own conclusion.

I ended my previous post by mentioning the ‘fairy tales’ our ancestors have spun in order to ease their ‘passage into the great unknown’. Thus making their lives bearable. Enjoyable, even.
In those times, ‘the truth’ – the unconcealed truth, in Heidegger’s terms – was that nothing made sense. That life itself was a meaningless joke. As a Romanian saying goes, ‘life resembles a hair from the private parts of the body. Short and full of shit…’
I’m not going to make a historical inventory of the various fairy tales the humankind has used to lullaby itself into accepting life as it used to be. Enough to say that they, the fairy tales, did the trick. Helped us reach the present stage.

I’m going to make a break here.
And notice that any, or even all, of those fairy tales might, eventually, be proven as being true. No matter how improbable this might be. I’m not an atheist. I just don’t know whether a god, or more, do exist.
What I do know is that, by their own admission, all of those stories have been spun by people.
Each of those stories is about what the original ‘spinner’ saw fit to communicate on the subject.
And the better stories, those who made more sense in the particular circumstances where they had survived, made it up to the present.
Helped the respective believers to survive. Helped some of them to thrive, even.

Now, today, we need to make up our minds.
Accept that our consciences are works in progress.
That consciousness is a space caught up in an accelerating evolution. A cauldron of sorts.
That each of those ‘fairy tales’ was useful in its own time. That the need to mitigate our cognitive dissonances continues to exist.
That we’re responsible for our future. Nothing new here.
And that there’s no one to save us. Not now. Or after we will have fucked up everything.


The ‘Truth’ being that ‘Give me Liberty or give me Death’ was a very effective call at arms.
On the face of it, on the ‘logical front’, it doesn’t make much sense.
‘Death’ was, and continues to be, inexorable. Why, for the sake of ‘liberty’, jeopardize the few precious moments left to be experienced as a living creature? Specially when, according to the lore considered valid when Patrick Henry had uttered the words, a second life was going to open just ‘after’…
‘The Devil is in the details’!
The belief in the ‘after-world’ works both ways. It encourages the freedom-fighters to take risks – believing they will get their reward ‘afterwards’ – and encourages the prudent to endure. Believing that they will get also get their reward ‘afterwards’.

Now, that I’ve ‘spilled it out’, I must confess that I’ve successfully convinced myself.
I’ve rationalized, according to my standards, my belief that it’s our responsibility.
To understand and accept that we’re responsible for the consequences we’re leaving for those coming after us.
I don’t know what we should do. I’m no prophet.
But I do know what we shouldn’t.
You do too!

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, freedom, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, Trust

Deliverance

November 6, 2025 //
0

Give me Liberty or give me Death.
Patrick Henry

I argued in the previous two posts that we, humans, live in a three layered reality.
At the intersection of three spaces.

One driven by a ‘primeval’ set of rules and inhabited by Democritus’ atoms.
The living one. Inhabited by individual living organisms, ‘suffering’ the consequences of evolution and subject to laws pertaining to the biological realm.
And what we call ‘reality’. A space opened up by our self-awareness. Inhabited by our individual consciences and furnished with culture. I prefer to call that space ‘consciousness’.

These three spaces have a few things in common.
The actual, physical, place where they exist.
The primeval set of rules. Which is valid for all those inhabiting these/this mingled space(s). The chemistry going on inside a living organism is no different from that happening in the inanimate world and the body of a fully conscious human continues to be pulled by gravity. Despite the fact that conscious human beings have have been building, and flying, airplanes for quite a while now.
And a few ‘principles’ which ‘transgress’ from one space to another.

‘Inertia’.
A ‘body’ tends to continue as it was. To move, on a ‘straight’ trajectory, or to stay put. Until subjected to a ‘burst of energy’.
‘Survival instinct’.
A living organism tends to go on living. Until subjected to a ‘burst of energy’ or until it wears down.
‘Cognitive ‘Consonance”.
Conscious subjects need to maintain a certain congruence. To close/rationalize whatever cognitive dissonances which happen to challenge their ‘Weltanschauung’. The story which imparts sense to their existence.

‘Inertia’ keeps the physical world together, ‘survival instinct’ drives individual living organisms to keep struggling against all odds and ‘cognitive consonance’ pulls us back from the precipice Nietzsche warned us about. “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you”.

I’ve been speaking about three spaces. The older being the home and growing place for the newer one.
Each of them being different from the previous one. But still having a lot in common.

Here’s another thing shared by all three spaces.
‘Evolution’.
The concept – everything we speak about is a ‘concept’, first and foremost – has evolved out of our need to make sense of things. To make sense of what we noticed as going on in the world. Species disappearing and fresh ones springing up to make good use of new opportunities. All of these species having a lot in common and ‘evolving’ in order to survive changes in their environment.
Well, if we look closer, ‘evolution’ takes place in all of those three spaces I mentioned.

Hydrogen, the first ‘species’ of atoms, gets together with other of their own kind and engender Helium. The process which keeps our Sun both hot and from gravitationally collapsing into a white dwarf.
A gas, hydrogen, ‘coalesces’ gravitationally and evolves into a star. Hydrogen, the ‘basic’ chemical element, gets together with other members of their own species and evolves into the next chemical element. Through a nuclear reaction, but that’s another subject… And so on, until all the fuel is spent and the star either contracts into a white dwarf or explodes into a supernova. And then contracts into a black hole…

The main difference between the evolution of the living things and the evolution taking place in the inanimate realm residing in how ‘individual destinies’ end up in each realm.
‘Radioactive’ elements are unstable by definition. Bound to become simpler but not to ‘dissolve’ into their initial components, as individual living organisms do.
‘Stable’ elements are… well… stable. Expected to remain as such, unless they are sucked up into a star and transformed into something else. But to ‘die’, not even then …
Stars ‘become’, ‘live’ and then become something else. Never ‘die’ ‘properly’!

Living things, on the other hand, are ‘actually born’, live and then actually die. The former organism ‘releases’ the chemical components back into the nature. To be – sometimes, if ever – part of another organism.

Until consciousness – the space – has been opened, to harbor individual consciences, ‘death’ didn’t ‘exist’.
The process of dying happened unnoticed. Unnoticed and unnamed, of course. Not yet conceptualized, to use a fancy word.

Imagine now the complete bafflement which had engulfed the first conscious individuals who stared into the abyss. Who noticed and then attempted to understand death…
What kind of cognitive dissonance must have been experienced at that point? At that stage in the evolution of what we currently call ‘consciousness’?
Hence the various ‘cosmogonies’. Stories about how the world came to be.
‘Fairy tales’ meant to assuage fear rather than to explain anything. To ease the way out in order to make survival probable for as long as possible.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22322778-a-history-of-religious-ideas-3-vols

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/terror-management-theory

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

Trapping.

November 5, 2025 //
0

“WE ARE GOING TO CONTINUE TO FOCUS ON SOLVING PROBLEMS
FOR HARDWORKING AMERICAN TAXPAYERS”
“LEADER JEFFRIES“

(You might want to read my previous post before this one.
If you haven’t already done that, of course…)

Democrit’s atoms come with a clear cut set of rules. ‘Trapping’ them into a very predictable ‘future’. ‘If conditions are such and such, each of them atoms will do this and that’.
Furthermore, and as far as we know, that set of clear cut rules is valid everywhere. Was since the start of time and will remain valid for as long as the world will remain ‘as such’.
Our current understanding of the world – leaving aside various religiously motivated cosmogonies – actually depends on that set of clear cut rules being consistent over space and time.

At some point in time, and space, another set of rules had appeared. Even if we weren’t there to notice the event… Meaning that that appearance was a natural occurrence. We don’t yet know how that happened – not exactly, any-way – but we are satisfied that the first set of rules didn’t have to be broken in order for the second to appear. We consider that no miracle was necessary for life to happen. That happenstance and the first set of rules are a sufficient explanation.

This second set of rules is somewhat laxer than the first one.
It still traps those who have to obey it into a certain behavior but those respecting it enjoy a way wider ‘lee-way’ than Democrit’s atoms. The second set of rules makes it possible for evolution to happen.

While the individuals involved – atoms in the first case and individual living organisms in the second – don’t have any say in the matter, the first set of rules is consistent in space and time while the second one depends on the specifics of each region of the space and evolves in time.
Still trapped, but differently. The limitations pertaining to the first set of rules are drastic – life needs a very ‘narrow’ ‘window of opportunity’ in order to remain viable – yet the second set of rules ‘enshrines’ a certain amount of ‘individual freedom’. In the sense that individual living organisms do have a certain say when it comes to their own survival while the individual species have the ability to adapt to whatever changes happen where they have to survive.

Very recently – in the cosmological time-frame – yet another set of rules. Opening yet another space/place. Consciousness.
Not unlike a Matryoshka…, the first set of rules ‘opens’ the space where everything happens. Exists, but somehow ‘insulated’ when it comes to the passage of time.
The second set of rules opens a ‘narrower’ space. Narrower in the sense that life needs a very ‘narrow’ set of temperature, atmospheric pressure and the presence of certain substances. But a lot wider in the sense that the individuals involved have a certain autonomy and a certain sensitivity in the passage of time.
The third set of rules, the one opening up the space we call ‘consciousness’ is ‘written on the go’.

It does have a certain consistency.
For the simple reason that it is ‘written’ by statistically similar ‘authors’.
Take language, for example. One of the sub-sets belonging to the third set. It is shared solely by members of a single species, wielding more or less similar brains. OK, different languages have appeared in different geo-historical conditions but every human being who happens to be alive is potentially able to learn any of the languages ever spoken on Earth…
This third set of rules is usually referred to as ‘culture’. In the wider sense of the word. Information which is passed from one generation to the next one. Information which, shared among the members of the living generation, makes them conscious human beings.

I know, this is a startling manner of looking at things.
Please allow me to shed some light on the matter from another angle.
We have – we have noticed, more exactly – a ‘First Set of Rules’. FSR, let’s call it. Ingrained into the building blocks of the ‘real world’. Which rules will, hopefully, remain as they are for the entire foreseeable future… otherwise life, as we know it, will cease to exist in a jiffy.
We have also noticed, while attempting to understand ‘life’, a SSR. Second Set of Rules. Describing/making possible what we call life. Which life is, by nature/definition an evolving process. Hence the rules themselves not only allow a certain lee-way but also are bound to be rewritten whenever possible. Whenever the ‘altered version’ doesn’t jeopardize the survival of the individual harboring that version.
And whenever the accumulated alterations happen to be beneficial … a new rule is in place. Or a new species, according to the biologists.
The TSR is a work in process. A lot more so than the SSR. In the sense that each individual ‘rule’ – piece of information added to the corpus of work usually known as culture – has been put there teleologically. On purpose. Never fully aware of all the implications but always as the consequence of a conscious act.

This being the moment when I remind you that this blog is about “exploring the consequences of our limited conscience”.

https://books.google.ro/books/about/What_Evolution_Is.html?id=i8jx-ZyRRkkC&redir_esc=y

https://constructivist.info/1/3/091 regarding self awareness/consciousness

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

Trapped! In other people’s dreams…

November 4, 2025 //
1

“As a white family, [we were] being told we’re racist
and not given the same opportunities because of the colour of our skin,”
“My daughters growing up in this world — we just couldn’t have it.”
In a bid to expedite his family’s citizenship applications,
Mr Huffman joined Russia’s military.

As living organisms, we are defined by the genes inherited from our parents.
As socialized human beings, our thoughts are shaped by the particular culture seeping through our consciences.
As politically governed inhabitants of various countries, our destinies depend on the wisdom of those calling the shots. On more than one level…

We don’t have much to say when it comes to our genes.
We can always interpret the tenets of the above mentioned cultures.
As citizens, and very much depending on the particulars of each ‘polity’, we can always try to influence the decision making process.

We cannot do much about our genes for a very simple reason. They are part and parcel of our ‘inner-workings’. The immutable part of what we are.
We can interpret culture and attempt to influence others because of our consciousness. Our ability to develop a certain kind of awareness.

Consciousness, the ability, can be construed as a space. The place where our individual consciences exist, meet and interact.
Our individual consciences can be understood as atoms inhabiting the consciousness.
Like all other spaces. consciousness has dimensions. Hence regions. Each region ‘functioning’ according to certain sets of rules. Sets of rules otherwise known as ‘cultures’.
Culture, in general and each of the individual ones, is ‘alive’. Just as life itself is ‘alive’.

Unfortunately, life is only ‘aware’. Not yet aware of it’s own self. Not yet conscious. Only a certain species of individual living organisms has, as far, developed this ability.
‘Culture’ – a living thing because it is animated by individual living organisms, the conscious ones – is also ‘aware’. Just as life is ‘aware’. But, again like life, culture has not yet developed a full consciousness. And awareness of

Atoms, in the real world as well as the individual consciences inhabiting consciousness, ‘cooperate’.
Democrit’s atoms, in various combinations, constitute the ‘real’ world. Including here the individual living organisms harboring individual consciences.
Conscious ‘atoms’, the individual consciences harbored by the living organisms which have been able to develop one, are about to take over a portion of the above mentioned ‘real’ world.

Unless they destroy it first…



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

Opening up

November 1, 2025 //
0

“Weaver pointed out that the word “information”
in communication theory is not related to what you do say, but to what you could say.
That is, information is a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message”

Space is where ‘evolution’ happens.
Where interaction shapes whatever is.

For space to exist, something must be there. Space needs ‘limits’. Which define it.
‘There’s a gap between these two bricks’.
‘This pile of bricks blocks the way’

‘Space’ is, simultaneously, a place, a concept and a word.
We, writing and reading about it, exist. Somewhere. Somewhere in ‘space’…
We’ve realized that. That we exist. Hence we came up with the concept.
We needed to share that knowledge. To discuss it. We needed the word!

A wise man, using tools crafted by his predecessors, has calculated that whatever exists in space shapes its form. The heavier the object, the deeper the dent.
Which depth of the dent influences the flow of time…

Time… the metric we use to measure ‘evolution’. The order and speed of happening…
Time… Another ‘thing’ which exists, simultaneously, as a ‘reality’, a concept and a word.

Einstein, the wise man with the calculus, did his thing trying to understand. To put together an explanation for everything.
Reading his findings, the results of his calculating, we can push our imagination.
How about switching time for space?

How about considering ‘time’ as being the place where events exist? Interact, producing the ‘space’ needed for that process?
Where the ‘weight’ of events, their ‘importance’, shapes the form of time. Which form of time influences the space ‘becoming’ as a consequence of those events existing/interacting in the place called time…

My point being …
You see, Einstein’s predecessors had developed what we call ‘mathematics’.
Our predecessors, also called ‘ancestors’, had developed a thing called language. Used it to communicate.
Among themselves, as individuals, and among themselves – as a cultural species – and the surrounding reality.
Language as the tool we use to digest and reshape the reality… Before we ‘do’ anything, we think about it. Using language to parse pertinent information stored in memory. Using language to consult with others. Using language to coordinate with others…

One of the languages we’ve developed is mathematics.
Einstein, using this language, reached a ‘conclusion’. Wrote a story. Others call it a theory.
Convincing enough for interested people to try. To try to prove it, to try to disprove it. To attempt to implement it into practice…

We exist.
In space, using whatever resources we can identify and building time as a consequence of our actions. We do this using language. To explore, think and coordinate.
That’s how we’re calling things. Space is where things happen and time is the ‘conclusion’ of whatever we do. Mathematics suggest that time and space are interchangeable.

So what?!?

Have we already solved all our immediate problems?

After all, we’re the only adults in the room. In the limited space called planet Earth.
Or, at least and for all that it might matter, we’re the only adults in the room who care. Who should care about our own fate…
Time’s running out, faster on the route we’re currently using!

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

Metaphusis to Metaphysics

October 31, 2025 //
0

The Ancient Greeks made the difference between Nomos and Phusis.
Phusis was Nature and Nomos was what they made of it. And as long as the story ‘held water’… that was it.

By figuring out that they were the link between Phusis and Nomos, the Ancient Greeks were capable of integrating the miraculous into their daily lives. As long as they kept believing ‘the story’…
For as long as ‘faith’ was doing its magic, things were OK.
They, individually speaking, didn’t feel the need for much additional explanation. They kept figuring out what they could and accepted the rest. As belonging to the ‘other’ half of the realm they were inhabiting. People and gods sharing the same (cultural) space….

Phusis was what there was and Nomos was the words they used to describe what they saw.
The words they used to make sense of what they were living. The words they used to spin ‘the story’ which kept them at ease with everything they couldn’t figure out.

Phusis and Nomos, together, was what made us possible. What we call ‘the Western Way of life’.

At some point, we’ve started to study physics.
Newton figured out gravity. Not why things fell down, only the rate at which they did it. 9.81 m/second squared at sea level.
Using far more advanced mathematical gimmicks, Einstein was able to calculate a lot more. But we still don’t know why mass tends to pull together. But we stopped worrying about it… now that we’ve been able to measure G. “Big G”, the gravitational constant, different from the “small g” measured by… Galileo Galilei. Forget it.
The point being that we still don’t know why mass tends to pull together, to coagulate, as opposed to attempting to dissipate. As gases do… as long as there’s enough heat available!

To cut the long story short, we’ve cut out the miraculous from what we consider to be normal. Acceptabil in nominal terms.
We attempt to measure everything. And to calculate what we cannot measure.

After all this time, we haven’t yet been able to accept our limits.
Which is good.
We keep pushing them.

Only sometimes we push them too hard.
We keep pushing those limits where they have given up previously. And we don’t always notice what’s really going on.

Trying to understand physics, we’ve learned to fly. Hot air balloons, fixed wing air-crafts, rotary wing air-crafts, Lunar landing modules, nuclear-tipped cruise missiles…
Trying to understand chemistry, we’ve learned to transform matter. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the materials we use, prescription drugs, life-saving vaccines, poison gasses….
Trying to understand biology, we’ve learned to influence evolution. Cross-bred plants and animals, decoded – and then coded back – genetic information…
Trying to understand economics, we’ve built the world as we currently have it. And put together the Efficient Market Hypothesis which keeps failing us…
Trying to understand consciousness we’re messing up everything. Fake-news, post-truth, “artificial intelligence”…

And we still don’t know why mass tends to coagulate, how life came up to be, how consciousness grew up on top of everything…

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

Awareness 3.0

October 26, 2025 //
1

You’re handed a pot.
So heavy, you need to hold it with both hands.
So hot, you want to let go of it.
On your feet?!?

I’ve argued sometime ago that all living organisms act as if they were ‘aware’.
All of them are adept at keeping their insides in, most of the outside out and, most importantly, they are the ones deciding what from the outside goes in and what from their inside goes out. And when!
I call this awareness 1.0. Or life…

We congratulate ourselves over being the only creature wielding ‘self-awareness’. The ‘full fledged’ variety… according to our way of understanding it, of course. “Consciousness”, we call it.
How about ‘awareness 2.0’?

Some of us are involved, heavily, into ‘faking’ things. From building something called ‘artificial intelligence’ to using ‘technology’ to mess up other people’s minds.
They are ‘delving’ in the ‘next’ level. Knowingly but unwittingly playing god.

Life is driven by ‘natural selection’. Or ‘evolution’… as Darwin called them.
‘Happenstance’, if you look at it from another angle.
The process of life/natural selection/evolution depends on it taking place ‘individually’. While evolution is a matter regarding ‘species’ – as Darwin itself had put it – the whole process depends on the fact that each individual organism which belongs to each species is distinct/different from all other members of the same species.

‘Self-awareness’ depends on the existence of other self-aware individuals. Willing to cooperate with the ones developing it. Just as no living organism has been observed, yet, while putting itself together starting from innanimate matter, no individual has ever been observed developing self-awareness with no outside help.
Mind you, while the process involves ‘mature’ individuals helping ‘fledglings’ to ‘fly’, the process isn’t entirely ‘voluntary’. The outcome, the emerging individual consciousness, depends on the actions performed by those helping it but only inasmuch as the result of the natural evolution depends on the actions performed by the previous generation. Achieving ‘self-awareness’ is a ‘natural’ process, not a ‘deus ex machina’ machination!

Awareness 3.0, on the other hand… the ‘artificial’ kind…
In this context, I wish to remind you of what happened when we, willingly but unwittingly, have reduced the natural bio-diversity in certain areas. According to our needs and understandings…

“The Green Revolution’s success also brought serious costs: intensive farming drained groundwater, degraded soil and contaminated fields with pesticides, while wheat and rice monocultures eroded biodiversity and heightened climate vulnerability, especially in Punjab and Haryana.
Swaminathan acknowledged these risks and, in the 1990s, called for an “Evergreen Revolution” – high productivity without ecological harm. He warned that future progress would rely not on fertiliser, but on conserving water, soil, and seeds.
A rare public figure, he paired data with empathy – donating much of his 1971 Ramon Magsaysay Award amount to rural scholarships and later promoting gender equality and digital literacy for farmers long before “agri-tech” was a buzzword.
Reflecting on his impact, Naveen Patnaik, former chief minister of Odisha, says: “His legacy reminds us that freedom from hunger is the greatest freedom of all.”
In Swaminathan’s life, science and compassion combined to give millions that very freedom. He died in 2023, aged 98, leaving a lasting legacy in sustainable, farmer-focused agriculture.“

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7eln1pm4ro


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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, evolution, fail better, Frames of mind, In English, skin in the game

Depth

October 21, 2025 //
0

God blessed them and said to them:
“Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.
Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky
and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
Genesis 1:28

Engineers are trained to think first. And ‘shoot’ only after they have figured out what was going on. What was going to happen as a consequence of their enacted decision…
Handymen, the hard working people who actually prevent the ‘wheels’ from halting screechingly, are trained – self trained, mostly – to repeat what has worked in the past.

Both engineers and handymen are convinced that they know better. That each of their Weltanschauungs are more appropriate.
Both are right.
The distance between them can be construed as (one of) the depths we need to fathom. If we wish to understand ‘reality’…

An engineer myself, MSc level, I had my midlife crises rather early. Went back to school. BA in Sociology. Trying to understand ‘decision making’. Figure out what reality really is…
How to make a wise decision if you don’t know what’s going on?!?

Almost 20 years later – and a few entries in my blog – I found out that I was not alone. That more than a century ago, another guy – a former mathematician, had already broken the ‘glass-ceiling’.
While ‘process philosophy‘ is as old as philosophy itself – traceable back to Heraclitus, Panta Rhei – it was Alfred N. Whitehead who had introduced enough epistemological order into the matter to make it a ‘real’ issue.

What’s the meaning of all this?
Why haven’t we changed tack since Whitehead gave us such a powerful heads-up?
Why most of us continue as ‘handymen’?!?

Process philosophy, as I understand it – with my engineering mind, is mostly about responsibility.
Marx’s was about ‘taking charge’. Shoot first, ask questions later – if ever, was how communism had been translated into reality. Like all other dictatorial processes…
Whitehead’s – if I read him correctly – is about understanding responsibility. Not about ‘merely’ assuming it but about accepting it. About accepting the fact that it will be us – or our children – at the receiving end of the processes we initiate.

‘Uncomfortable position’ is a very lame expression for feeling alone. When trying to decide ‘what next’…
‘Maybe we should just proceed as we used to?’

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Tripping

October 17, 2025 //
0

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, following ideas put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt, posits that the kind of language used by various categories of people have a meaningful impact upon the ways each of those categories of people think. And see the world.
The last iteration of the above hypothesis being the advent of AI. We train it using various languages. Those trained using precise languages – chess, go, ‘mathematics’ – work more or less as intended – aka ‘perfectly’ – while those trained using everyday English end up hallucinating…

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43102168: Sapir-Whorf
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/ai-hallucinations
Moloch’s Bargain: Emergent Misalignment When LLMs Compete for Audiences:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06105

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

The ‘real’, the ‘virtual’ and the sometimes ugly.

September 11, 2025 //
0

We live in the world of our own making.
Literally!

This is a picture.
A man-made picture.
God is depicted, by Michelangelo, as being very intent while ‘man’ seems to be casual about the whole thing. Disinterested. Somewhat absent.
Let me remind you, in this context, that Michelangelo’s painting was named “The Creation of Adam”.

The world we live in, very much like Michelangelo’s painting, has been made by us.

Unlike his predecessors – those who had painted the walls of Lascaux – Michelangelo had adorned a man made structure. A ceiling.
Unlike his predecessors – who had, most likely, painted on their own volition – Michelangelo was hired, ‘commissioned’ is the PC word to be used in these circumstances, by the pope, to interpret the Genesis Creation Narrative.
Very much like his ancestors, Michelangelo was also made of flesh and bones. Had to breathe, eat, drink and painted using substances ‘borrowed’ from the ‘nature’.

The point I’m trying to make here is both simple. And very hard to swallow.

We live inside ‘something’.
We use ‘reality’, the word, to describe a portion of that ‘something’. The portion we ‘control’. We think we know about and are able to interact with.
Very few of us accept the fact that what we call ‘reality’ is ‘tainted’ by us. That we have a growing contribution in the process of ‘reality’ becoming what it is. And what it’s going to be. To become…

The ‘something’ we inhabit is far wider that what we call ‘reality’.
It’s full of everything we do not know about.
And choke full of everything we have invented and does not fit in what we call ‘reality’. Choke full of gods, spirits, ghosts, ideologies, theories, explanations, narratives and so on and so forth. ‘Metaphysics’, if you know what I mean.

‘Another atheist. I should have known better…’

“It’s full of everything we do not know about”….
I never said there is no God. It might very well be. Or not… All I have to say about this is that what we consider to be ‘our god’ exists nowhere but in our imagination. Beyond the ‘physical’ world.

‘According to what your saying, we’re involved not only in ‘reality’. We’ve also ‘constructed’ a sizeable portion of the ‘netherworld’…’

As a matter of fact, yes. We’ve not only ‘created’ what we call ‘reality’, we’ve also created the ‘netherworld’ itself. Both inside the ‘something’ which encompasses everything.

‘ “Created…” how did we ‘create’ anything?!? Least of all ‘reality’…’

Language is a very powerful tool. And naming is a very powerful feature of that tool!
By naming something, anything, we separate that something. From the rest. We actually establish a barrier, in our collective mind, between that something and the rest of whatever there might exist.
And I leave aside the fact that our language coordinated efforts have drastically altered our portion of ‘something’, our ‘reality’, since the days when Michelangelo’s ancestors, ours, used to paint the walls of the Lascaux cave.

‘Reality’ itself is a very interesting word/concept.
Until not so long ago, Gods were real. And still are, for some of us.
But even in those times, people felt the need to make the difference between the real, hands on, reality and the rest of the things they believed into existence. ‘Metaphysics‘, the word itself, was coined by Aristotle’s editor. A certain Andronicus of Rhodes, sometimes in the first century BC.
As a consequence, everything was real, in those times, but some portion of what was real existed only in people’s minds. “ta metá ta phusiká“…
1500 years later, when science was budding – again, in our Medieval forefathers minds, the ‘tables had been turned’. The scientific state of mind demands that only the factual/physical things can be deemed as belonging to ‘reality’ while all the rest, including the metaphysical realm, belongs someplace else…

Nowadays… things have become rather complicated.
Science tells us we don’t know everything. Worse still, that we’ll never know everything.
On the other hand, everyday life proves, beyond any doubt, that things which exist only in our heads/minds do shape, dramatically, our daily lives.
I’ll give you but two examples.

The church and the traffic light.

People go to the church because they believe. Most of them. Very few people visit churches, ordinary churches, out of touristic curiosity.
People ‘obey’ the traffic light because they actually believe life has been made simpler, and safer, since the traffic lights have been invented/installed. Like churches, we don’t ‘obey’ them because they are there! We install them because we’ve understood our lives have improved since their inception.

Virtual Reality
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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, skin in the game, Trust, Uncategorized
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