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Which One?

January 7, 2026 //
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Some forty odd years ago, a co-worker asked me: ‘What do you think about the UFO-s?’.

Romania, while Ceausescu was still running the show.
People had time on their hands to consider subjects like that. Unidentified Flying Objects. No TV to watch. Only two hours each day. Most of it repeating what Ceausescu had just said. No vacation to plan. People didn’t have enough money. Nor were allowed to go abroad. No books worth reading. No new books worth to be read, anyway… So people spent their time discussing ‘safe’ subjects.

‘Well, I’m not sure they actually exist. I haven’t seen one myself.
But if they do… that might mean we’re under surveillance.
Not that different from what we do in the jungle. Study the chimpanzee. Without interfering in their evolution!’

?!?

‘Do you feel exploited?’

‘No…’

‘Well… We, humans have been exploiting those who were weaker than us. Remember what happened when the Spaniards had discovered America. Or when the English had managed to conquer India. Control China. When the Americans ‘opened up’ Japan…
Now let’s accept the UFO’s as being real.
They must be controlled by very powerful agents. The kind of people which could, if they so wished, very easily control the entire Earth. Transform it into a colony. Which didn’t happen.
Which means they’re not like us. Like we used to be, anyway.
And let me go further.
If they do exist, and do have a certain technological prowess, they may behave in two ways. Peacefully or aggressively.
We’ve already established that they seem to be peaceful. And probably have been so for quite a while.
Then they’re no longer able to fight. Ready to risk their lives in battle.
Hence they’ll be using their technological prowess to protect themselves. Against ‘fresh’, immature, civilizations. Whose members continue to believe it’s worthwhile to risk their lives if the reward is big enough. Who are still ‘ready to fight’.
According to this scenario, the UFO-s are here to make sure we don’t get out in the space until we learn to behave.

A couple of years ago, I stumbled upon Liu Cixin’s Trilogy. In which he exposes the ‘Dark Forrest Hypothesis’. A couple of weeks ago, I came across the final book of the trilogy, the Death’s End.
Reading it, I remembered the discussion I had with my co-worker.

So, which will it be?
And, even more importantly, will we learn from our own mistakes?

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

‘Why’ and ‘How’

December 26, 2025 //
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‘Nothing which is impossible may ever happen.’
Until it does…

Life happens. Because it is, after all, possible.
In certain conditions, true.

Life, individually speaking, is limited. Individual organisms live for a while. Then go away.
Species adapt themselves. Or disappear…
Evolution! That’s how we, conscious observers, call this process.
Life itself, the entire phenomenon, may happen – as I’ve already mentioned, I know – only ‘inside’ a certain ‘environmental bracket’. The kind of life we’re familiar with, anyway.

The ‘impossible’ I’ve started with is a very interesting thing.
First of all, it’s – again – us who have come up with the notion. Until we’ve started to observe, things happened. Or not… But there was nobody to tell whether something was possible. Or impossible…
Things which could happen, did – if the conditions were right for long enough, while things which could not – at least not in the then present circumstances – simply didn’t happen. Without anybody noticing any of those things.
Now, that we’ve started to observe – in a conscious, as in ‘what’s in it for us’, manner – we’ve become very much interested in whether something may happen or not. Whether something good might be ‘enticed’ to happen and whether something bad might be prevented from happening.

I need to go back to ‘life’ for a moment.
I’ve already mentioned that individual life is temporary. Finite. I’ve also mentioned that species have to adapt to changes in order to survive. And that life itself, as we know it, can happen only inside a certain environmental bracket.
The point being that individual organisms which happen to be less than perfect – less than perfectly attuned to their environment – may still survive. At least for a while.
Life, as a phenomenon and strictly inside that environmental bracket, has somehow stretched the very notion of possible/impossible. The limits of ‘impossible’ are no longer clear cut. Somehow hazy. As in ‘possible’ but not for very long…
‘In constant balance’.

And we’ve arrived to the next level.
Society. Conscious people in congress.
Just as life has stretched the limits of ‘possible/impossible’, society – us, individual people working in concert – has stretched those limits even further.

The most blatant example which crosses my mind being the academic who had decreed that ‘heavier than air flying machines are impossible’. Lord Kelvin, 1895.
So. What had happened in the short 8 years passed between Kelvin uttering his now infamous words and the Wright brothers taking off? Had physics changed? Had our understanding of physics changed?
None of the above. We, as in ‘we humans’, made it possible. Found ways.
Just as life found a way to transform inanimate matter into living organisms – on a temporary basis – people working in concert have found ways to accomplish feats which seemed impossible. To their contemporaries. And, sometimes, even to those who live in the distant future of those achievements. We still have not figured out, in detail, how the Egyptian pyramids had been built…

I’ve been speaking of ‘individual’ achievements.
Flying machines as well as pyramids are, in a sense, ‘individual’. Somebody had an idea and, based on previous human achievements and with the help of others, have put their ideas into practice.
‘Individual’ not strictly in the sense that they have been achieved by an individual but in the sense that they have been the result of a deliberately targeted effort.

Other achievements had been ‘natural’. Or social?
In the sense that they had come around without anybody coordinating the effort. As in the case of the individual ones.
Learning to speak. To write. Yes, we do know that Cyril and Methodius were the guys responsible for the Russian alphabet. And that Mesrop Mashtots had created the Armenian Script. Only these efforts had been based on previous knowledge. Humankind had already been writing for at least 3000 years. Using different manners of notation but the principle was already there. And the achievement was ‘folkloric’ in nature. No identifiable author. The feat belonged to the entire community.

Another social/natural achievement is morals. Our habit of doing ‘the right thing’.
Which is different from what is being known as ‘justice’. Formal law being upheld by the government. Which is, basically, a collection of individual achievements.
So, why do we – statistically speaking – behave in a moral manner?

Evolutionary speaking, simply because moral communities fare better than amoral ones. And even better than immoral ones.
Don’t believe me? You’re not convinced that immoral communities will, sooner rather than later, either change their ways or crumble under the weight of their undoings? You are still under the impression that immorality is here to stay? Based on what you witness on a daily basis?
Do you remember that “individual organisms which happen to be less than perfect – less than perfectly attuned to their environment – may still survive. At least for a while”? Same thing goes for communities/societies. Communism, amoral by definition and profoundly immoral in practice, did survive for quite a while.

Then why do we stray from the ‘straight and narrow’?
Why do so many of us succumb to temptation?
I’m going to save that for the next post. But I’ll add this here.
Each digression is individual in nature. The consequence of ‘a deliberately targeted effort’. An individual human being comes up with a new idea. Good or bad. Is followed, if at all, by a group. Which group will survive – and add the ‘new’ idea to what is called ‘tradition’ if, and only if, that ‘new’ idea is beneficial for its survival. If that new idea works in the particular set of circumstances where that group of people live. Only after that had happened, after the group had survived for long enough and the new idea had become traditional, that particular, individual, achievement becomes a social one. The original author of the idea is forgotten and the engendered habit becomes natural.

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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, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

To Whom?!?

November 18, 2025 //
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Things – every’thing’, actually – are/is relative.
Relative to the agent evaluating each of those things.
Accordin’ to Einstein, that is.
He was the one who taught us to use whatever reference frame suits our needs.

Do you reckon anybody wasted any time or energy thinking about freedom before the advent of slavery?
Me neither.
Forget about the fact that, in those times, people didn’t have much time left for abstract thinking. Finding food and enjoying it with friends kind of drains your energy when you have to do it yourself… The point being that, in those times, everybody was free. Hence ‘had’ nothing to compare freedom with… No lack of freedom, no reason to speak/think about it.
No reason to notice the thing and no reason to coin the concept…

Hunter-gatherers have no use for ‘property’. Personal objects are just that and everything else either belongs to Mother Nature or to the entire group. And this goes without saying. Or thinking about it. People share everything as a matter of fact and common sense discourages the others to use anybody’s personal objects unless in an emergency.
Agriculture – either herding animals or growing crops – changed everything. Property, both as a concept and as an everyday manner of dealing with ‘things’, was invented and introduced in daily use. Productivity increased dramatically. Which made it possible for people to have ‘spare time’. For thinking.
And for planning…

‘The neighbors have better crops. Let’s go take some for us. And while we’re at it, let’s take some of their women too’.
The first slave was probably the first person to long for freedom…

‘Cheap’ slave work coupled with the increased social productivity induced by a markedly improved technology for obtaining food meant that some individuals could afford the luxury of thinking.
The Ancient Athenians had both slaves and philosophers. The slaves did whatever was needed to be done while some of the ‘beneficiaries’ had enough time, and energy, to let their minds ‘free’. To roam free in search for meaning.
To coin the concept and to explore freedom…

Relative “To whom”? To us!
We’re responsible for freedom and freedom is relative to us.
We have invented it. We’re the ones using it. In the sense that we’re the ones who need to notice that freer communities fare a lot better than the less free.

So freedom is relative both to those thinking about it and to each particular community.
To each particular community which puts freedom into practice!

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, evolution, freedom, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, Trust

Deliverance

November 6, 2025 //
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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

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

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

Temperature

August 3, 2025 //
0

Where things take their places

In 1995, University of Colorado Boulder physicists observed BEC, a fifth state of matter that only exists within a sliver of absolute zero. At such a low temperature, individual atoms overlap so much that they collapse into a single quantum state where they collectively act as a single entity.

Positing that ‘space is where things happen’ is nothing short of stating the obvious.
It does have some merit, though.
It leads to the real subject of today’s post.

When no temperature is present – 0 degrees Kelvin – there’s no interaction between the things which happen to be there.

So whose temperature are we measuring?

The temperature of the space? Of the place harboring whatever happens there? Or not…
The temperature of the things happening to be there?
Or the amount of interaction between the things populating that place?

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Categories complementary ways of attending knowlege, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, re-definitions
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