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Reality 101

February 10, 2021 //
3

Being an engineer, I’m gonna present you with a more straight-forward version than the philosophical one.

For something to be real, it has to have consequences.

‘But…?!?’

No buts!
The only thing which classifies something as being real or not is our consciousness.
Without it, without our consciousness, the something we’re talking about now – reality itself, would cease to be ‘real’.
Without us pondering about it, ‘reality’ would continue to exist, of course! Only it would no longer bear a name… Without us being concerned enough about it, it would ‘disappear’ from our ‘radar’.

‘Yes, but … you just said that something becomes real as soon as it has consequences!
We encounter ‘real’ things in each and every moment of our existence.
We need air to breathe, water to drink… food to eat. And a solid earth to walk on…’

True enough. Only for all these things to become ‘real’, we first need to notice them!

See how ironic things are?
In retrospect, electrons are real. Despite the fact that none of us can actually see them. Or otherwise ‘feel’ them. In any way, shape or form!
But until we had gathered enough evidence about their existence…

And now, that our discussion has reached this subject – evidence, I feel the need to mention the fact that Earth is not yet round ‘enough’. That there still are some people actually believing in the notion of the Flat Earth.

‘Are you implying that the Earth might be Flat?!?’

Excellent question, thank you very much!
(If I may say something like that myself. Please excuse my boastfulness!)

You see, we are dealing here with two things. Two very different things.

The roundness of the Earth. Which seems to be real.
The ‘Flat Earth’. Which is certainly real.

‘Now you’ve outdone yourself! For sure…’

I’m almost certain that you can hear me chuckle.

The roundness of the Earth belongs to the realm of science. Which is ‘wrong by definition‘. At least according to Popper… In the sense that the Earth will continue to remain round only till somebody will prove it to be different. Which had happened already… In ‘reality’, the Earth resembles a potato more than anything else!
On the famous ‘other side’, the ‘Flat Earth Theory’ belongs to the realm of belief. Which is also real. Not in the ‘direct’ sense – a concept which describes a real ‘reality’, only in the sense that it has certain consequences.

‘The Flat Earth has consequences?!? You admit that the concept – ‘the Flat Earth’, describes something which doesn’t exist yet you pretend that it has consequences?’

Yep!

Can you deny the reality of this whole thing? Six hundred and twenty million hits? In less than point 8 seconds?
Can you pretend these are not ‘real consequences’? Can you imagine, for instance, how much energy is spent only to preserve this amount of raw information in the ‘cloud’. How much ‘space’? How much bandwidth is used to transport this ‘fake-ness’ across the ‘globe’!

‘And where does this whole thing lead us?
What about the Flat Earth?
Is it still a fake?’

Yeah.
I’m actually tempted to say ‘obviously’!
On the other hand… it’s hard to deny how ‘real’ the whole thing is…

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

Thought experiment

February 9, 2021 //
0

Imagine an ‘outside observer’. From, say, Sirius.
Who had just arrived. Didn’t have enough time to become familiar with what’s going on here.

Thailand.
Ballots had been cast in November. A party had lost. And pretends, without proof, that the elections had been rigged.

“In his first public comments after the coup, Gen Hlaing sought to justify the takeover, saying the military was on the side of the people and would form a “true and disciplined democracy”.” GETTY IMAGES

When the parliament was about to be convened, and the electoral results formally confirmed, the backers of the loosing party – which had happened to be the army, declared martial law and annulled the electoral results. The leading general announced in public that the measure had been adopted in pursuit of a ‘real and disciplined democracy’.

The US.
Ballots had been cast in November. The looser pretended, without proof, that the elections had been rigged.

When the parliament was convened to certify the results, a mob had stormed the House of the Parliament, at the bidding of the loosing President. Order was finally restored and the dully elected President installed into office.

What would the ‘outside observer’ think about our planet? About us…

What if their job is to asses whether we should be allowed to roam the Galaxy?
To be entrusted with some very powerful technological ‘secrets’. Which would help us solve some of our very stringent problems. Feel free to name a few…

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Categories arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, democracy, effective communication, evolution, In English, Intent, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, teleology, The kind of world we live in, Trust

Cultural Dementia

February 7, 2021 //
0

Cultural Dementia by David Andress

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


One of those books which function as a magnifying mirror.
The older you get – and the more mistakes you’ve made, the less you like of what you see when facing it.



View all my reviews

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, politically correct, politics

Monkeywrench

February 4, 2021 //
0

Well… Money doesn’t get spoiled as easily as bananas do…

On further consideration, money can be understood as a tool with many uses.
Hoarding, for instance. Bananas, among other things …

And, as with all other tools, the responsibility for its use falls squarely on the user, not on on the tool itself.
Tinkering with the tool won’t change that, ever.

My point being that monkeys would also hoard bananas if bananas were hoard-able.
There’s nothing wrong with that. For as long as the hoard is meant to feed the hoarder till the next crop, of course.

Hoarding is bad only when done for its own sake.

And this is something for philosophers to study, not for scientists.
The teachings of the Chicago School of Economics had been very scientific yet following them was what brought us where we are now. Into a very uncomfortable cul-de-sac…

Blindly following them… mislead precisely because of their scientific nature!

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, effective communication, evolution, fail better, In English, Intent, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, Money as goal, Psychology, teleology

We and the planet

January 24, 2021 //
0
What next?

Crows are deemed to be the smartest birds around.

“Crows are the hominins of the bird kingdom,”
“Like our own ancestors, they evolved proportionally massive brains by increasing both their body size and brain size at the same time, with the brain size increase happening even more rapidly.”
Dr. Jeroen Smaers

Crows have also witnessed our evolution.

All life transforms its habitat.
Living things actually pass ‘segments’ of their habitat through their digestive systems. Digest them. Consume the useful components and discard the rest. And, finally, excrete whatever their metabolism had turned the useful components into. Urea and carbon dioxide, to name but a couple. For us, mammals. Other living creatures contribute something else to their environments.

The blue-green algae of yore are believed to have produced the oxygen we breathe now.
“Wolf Reintroduction Changes Ecosystem in Yellowstone“.
Humans alter their ‘nesting’ places in ways sometimes detrimental to their own well being.

So, basically, we – as a society, actually ‘digest’ our planet. Our home… Our only home!

Are we happy with the results?

Are you happy with what you’ve done to your home?
To OUR home?

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Categories awareness, biology, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, cooperation, Economy, effective communication, evolution, In English, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, Trust

The Urge

January 19, 2021 //
0

I don’t know anything.
I don’t know everything hence, logically, I cannot pretend to know anything.

Seems odd, since I obviously know something… to type, for instance!

Indeed, only the key word here is ‘logically’.
From a logical point of view, you either know something or you just don’t.

Not very reasonable… This line of thinking leads up, fast, into a dead end!

As soon as I realize I know ‘nothing’, I must stop!
I can no longer ‘do’ anything.
Because I cannot control – in an absolute manner, each and every consequence of any of my actions.
Further more, there is no justification for me to continue thinking.
Again, because I will never be able to achieve ‘knowledge’.

Yet so many things are being done around me…
From the sun rising in the morning to the ant helping its mates to dig a nest.
From the electron ‘flying’ around the nucleus of a Hydrogen atom to a man developing a computer application.
How can all these actions be performed when nobody, not even the ‘performers’ themselves, is able to determine the ultimate consequence of what’s going on?
How can so many thoughts be ‘spun’, and books published, when the ‘thinkers’ themselves – well… some of them, actually, are fully aware of their intellectual limits?

What drives this frenzy?

And, if I may allow myself a thought, why ‘logic’?
How can such a ‘paralyzing habit’ survive?

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Categories alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Choices that we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, teleology

Generations

January 18, 2021 //
0
“The most common name this group is given is Gen Z; I call them Generation K, after Katniss Everdeen, the determined heroine of the Hunger Games. Like Katniss, they feel the world they inhabit is one of perpetual struggle – dystopian, unequal and harsh.”

Each successive generation has to make do with the situation they had inherited from the old one.
And whatever it ‘builds’ on top of that will constitute the starting point for the next one.

We – those born between the early 50-ies and the middle 70-ies, and who constitute the vast majority of today’s significant decision makers, have had a ‘once in the entire history’ opportunity. The fall of the communist regimes almost all over the world had lifted many of the ‘practical’ hurdles left around from the previous generations. We had been freed from all limitations but those we’ve imposed – willingly and/or unwittingly, upon ourselves. So much so that Francis Fukuyama had described the situation as ‘the end of history’.

We’ve been, indeed, the first generation in modern history – or ‘contemporary’?!?, which didn’t start a ‘wholesale’ war… if we discard the ‘war on terror’! Or that ‘on drugs’…

The point being that we’ve failed. To use the huge opportunity presented to us.
By Lady Luck… our fathers had done nothing but continued the traditions imposed upon them by their fathers…

We, on our turn, don’t have that excuse.
We didn’t have had to continue anything… Conditions had been perfect for a fresh start!
Yet we had ‘preferred’ to ‘carry on’… As if we had learned nothing from what had just happened!

Fukuyama himself, after having been lionized by his peers and then contradicted by Clio, had ‘relapsed’.
After prophesying that ‘liberalism uber alles’ he had recently attempted to explain away his failure using ‘the need for recognition‘.

In fact, he wasn’t exactly wrong in 1989 – we did have a chance to move in that direction, nor is he totally off the mark now. ‘The need for recognition’ did play a role in our failure.
Fukuyama – along with the rest of us, had made the capital error of over-trusting his own intellect.
Of convincing himself that ‘the world’ can be understood.

Hence predicted.

And who has to make do in the present situation?
To deal with our failure?

As always, the next generation!
Our children…

For the first time in 100 years, Britons are dying earlier.
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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, In English, teleology, Trust

Progress?!?

January 18, 2021 //
0

40 years ago, the car manual was about how to adjust the carburetor.
Nowadays it starts with a stark warning. “Don’t drink the cooling liquid!”
Then it teaches us how to use the infotainment system and how to adjust the electric seats…

In those times, most of us – regardless of what country we lived in, had nothing fancier than a washing machine. And a TV set capable of receiving no more than 12 channels. But we had a lot of time to spend with our friends and relatives.
Nowadays, our houses are choke full of appliances designed to make our lives easier… So we break our backs working to pay for this paraphernalia! And we get so tired in the process that when we finally get back home, late at night, we’re so exhausted that we cannot do anything else but watch one of the 200+ channels our cable feeds into the huge TV which dwarfs everything else in the living room.

Meaning that we wrap up most of our days watching yet another mind numbing news-bulletin… which informs us about how bad tomorrow will be… unless we follow whatever advice that channel is determined to ‘sell’ to us!

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, effective communication, evolution, fail better, Frames of mind, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, teleology, time

Coming from their future

January 7, 2021 //
0
“Trump summoned supporters to “wild” protest, and told them to fight. They did“

One of my high-school mates had emigrated to Canada. From Romania. He’s been living there for 25 years now. We keep in touch. A few years ago, he told me:

“We come from their future. I currently experience things which had already happened in Romania.”

His prophecy had been fulfilled, and then some, yesterday. The sixth of January, 2021.

1991, Romanian miners occupying the Romanian Parliament.

The differences between the two instances exist and they are not insignificant.

Both Trump and Iliescu – the Romanian president at that time, had been democratically elected. Both on populist platforms, even if the concept wasn’t as widely used in 1991 as it is now.

Only 1991 wasn’t the first time the miners had come to Bucharest.
In 1990 Ion Iliescu – the ‘cripto’ communist leader who had risen to power as a consequence of the 1989 uprising, had ‘thanked’ the miners for quelling a ‘festering’ anti neo-communist protest organized mainly by students.
In fact, this had been yet another precedent. ‘Occupy’ Piata Universitatii 1990 versus Occupy ‘Everything’ 2011.
In 1991, the miners had, again, ‘occupied’ Bucharest. Again, ‘supposedly’, under their own volition. The then prime minister, Petre Roman, had adopted some very stringent free market reforms. Which had fallen foul of both Iliescu and certain swaths of the population. Hence the miners had not been driven back to Valea Jiului until Petre Roman had been revoked from office.

And 1991 wasn’t the last time the miners had attempted to make themselves noticed…
As the old saying goes, it’s harder to quiet down a hornet’s nest than to stir it up!

We’ll see, as the blind man always says.

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Categories 1989, altruism, arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, democracy, effective communication, evolution, freedom, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, manipulation, Mutual Respect, politics, skin in the game, The kind of world we live in, time

Stepping stones

December 29, 2020 //
0

“How absurd to imagine that something we can make could actually deliver us from problems we could not free ourselves from!”
Dr. Allen Ross, Dead Idols or the Living God

According to Abraham Maslow, people’s lives are ‘staged’.
During the first four, each individual ‘must’ – ‘inside’ whatever circumstances Mother Luck had granted them, provide for their ‘needs’.
Only after they had reached the fifth stage, individuals have the opportunity – but no ‘obligation’ other than that each of them impose upon themselves, to ‘reinvent’ their own personae. Maslow had used ‘self-actualization’ to describe the process.

In religious terms, the whole thing is known as ‘coming to peace with oneself’.

No more ‘absurdity’ here!
There’s so much each of us can do in order to move ‘forward’…

‘And where is this famous ‘forward’?!? How are we, individually and/or collectively, to determine which is the ‘good’ direction?!?’

Is our ‘imagination’ good enough to come up with a solution for the “problems we could not free ourselves from”?

The carpenter measures with a line

    and makes an outline with a marker;

he roughs it out with chisels

    and marks it with compasses.

He shapes it in human form,

    human form in all its glory,

    that it may dwell in a shrine.

He cut down cedars,

    or perhaps took a cypress or oak.

He let it grow among the trees of the forest,

    or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow.

 It is used as fuel for burning;

    some of it he takes and warms himself,

    he kindles a fire and bakes bread.

But he also fashions a god and worships it;

    he makes an idol and bows down to it.

Half of the wood he burns in the fire;

    over it he prepares his meal,

    he roasts his meat and eats his fill.

He also warms himself and says,

    “Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.”

From the rest he makes a god, his idol;

    he bows down to it and worships.

He prays to it and says,

    “Save me! You are my god!”

Is ‘induction’ a comprehensive enough solution?
Or ‘too much of a good thing’ will never fail to become ‘bad for you’?

Confused?

Let me put it another way.

‘One size fits all’.
How many times have you been really satisfied by such a ‘solution’?
Do you really think an ‘idol’ fashioned by a carpenter – by the most talented carpenter, even, will ever satisfy the needs of at least one blacksmith?

‘But how about the idols fashioned by Plato’s king-priests?’

To answer this question – this excellent question, if I may say so myself, we must turn back to Dr. Allen Ross’ Dead Idols. To the difference between the Dead Idols and the Living God, to be more precise.

‘Criterion for what?’

If you pay close enough attention to what’s written above, you’ll notice that not passing the falsifiability test doesn’t mean than an assertion is false! Far from it, actually!
Not passing the falsifiability test – ‘if a claim is compatible with all and any states of affairs’, only means that that claim is both ‘true’ and unscientific! Simultaneously true and not scientific!

‘And what has any of these to do with God?!? With the Living God or with any of the Dead Idols humankind has built for itself? And later discarded?’

I’m afraid you’ll have to come back for the answers.
Or, to put it differently, I’ll gladly welcome you back!

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Categories altruism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Chance, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, Trust
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