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Artwork

March 14, 2023 //
0

Yesterday you’ve been babbling about painting an elephant. One which was already present in the room. Doesn’t make that much sense, does it?

In my childhood there was a certain emperor. Who had been duped by a couple of crooks to wear a suit of clothes so special that they were in fact invisible. Hence the emperor walked around naked, convinced he was wearing the coolest set of rags available on this Earth. Pun intended, of course. I forgot to mention the price. Not only hefty but also recurrent. Each set of clothes, of in-existent clothes, could be worn only once. They were too fragile for ‘second helpings’. The courtiers kept congratulating the emperor for his beautiful attire so the scam went on for quite a while. Until he took to the streets of his capital city to show off his clothes to the ordinary people. And a child exclaimed: “Look. the emperor is naked”. And those present started to laugh.

Same thing here. Everybody senses that something’s amiss. Except for those who should know better. Who, for various reasons – I’ll get there, soon enough, don’t believe what they see. Or, more exactly, refuse to ‘go to the bottom of it’.

Back in the ‘good old days’, emperors had jesters. Courtiers who were allowed to speak the uncomfortable truth. Cloaked under a thick layer of funny words, true, but well worth saying.
This is what I mean when I ‘babble’ about ‘painting the elephant’.

I’ve already mentioned the story about the naked emperor. Now it’s time for that about the four blind men being led to learn about the elephant. One got to feel the hind legs, one the huge belly, the third got acquainted with the ears and the last with the tip of the elephant’s trunk. When later asked to share what they had learned, the first said the elephant was a pair of tall columns, the second said the elephant was a huge barrel, the third contradicted the first two maintaining that the elephant was a leathery curtain of sorts while the last was convinced that the elephant was a thick snake ending with a finger.

As I said before, ‘same thing here’. For ideological reasons, we consider some things and disconsider others. Furthermore, for psychological reasons, we tend to coalesce into ‘bubbles’. Those who consider the same things tend to stick together. And to disconsider those who consider other things.

I’m afraid this is too hard for me to follow. You first want to paint an elephant, then come up with a naked emperor and end up with parts of an elephant. Is there any elephant at all? Or all we have is a collection of disparate impressions? Man made illusions, vaguely resembling parts of an elephant and involving nakedness?

Well, you got the gist of it but you’re afraid to say it out loud.
The elephant is indeed of our own making.
An image. Not an illusion, mind you! Just an incomplete image of what’s going on around us.
Let me try to spell it differently.

The world was complicated to start with. Both wide and deep. Too wide and too deep for any of us to be able to comprehend it in earnest. But for most of our history, we didn’t have to. We used to live ‘locally’. Both geographically and ‘spiritually’. Each of us, individual human beings, belonged to a place. To a village and to a tradition. When one of us happened to move to another village, they, more or less naturally, translated their ‘spirit’ into the local tradition.
Nowadays, the world has become even more complicated. We made it even more complicated than it was at the beginning. We uncovered many of the previously unknown nooks and crannies. Building the illusion of knowledge in the process. Then we assumed tradition. Called it culture and made it our own. Took it with us where ever we went. Shared it with others and, sometimes, even imposed it – or parts of it, upon others.

The world itself is no longer straightforward. For us…
Our ancestors didn’t make any distinction between the physical world and the tradition which made sense of it. The world – ‘Cosmos’, as they used to call it, was whole. ‘Reality’ was made of ‘objects’, the names of those objects and the rules between them. The point being that our ancestors did not make any difference between an object, its name and its place in the order of things. Between the physical reality and tradition. Between the objects per se and the meaning – name and connecting ties, we’ve attached to each object.
Only after the Ancient Greeks had come up with the concept of “phusis” things were separated into natural and man-made. Into real and illusory…

That being the moment when the elephant had been born.
When we have started to steer our fate. Not to determine it – we’ll probably never be able to do this in a comprehensive manner, but to influence it.
Which influence has two dimensions. Size and … there’s no words for what I have to say right now. ‘Awareness of what’s going on’?!? Our ancestors did what they used to do because they had to do it and they did it as things were done at that time. We, on the other hand, get to choose among the many things which should be done and the manner in which we see fit to do it. Meanwhile, we entertain the illusion of doing all these things in a fully conscious manner.

A part of the elephant I have in mind consists of the fact that our consciousness is limited. But our illusion about our consciousness is bigger than the reality of the matter.
Another part of the elephant consists of the fact that more and more of us no longer consider advice. From those who entertain different opinions (illusions?!?) than us.

And why should I accept advice from somebody who promotes illusions?

I didn’t say you should accept advice from a peddler of illusions. From a con artist or from a snake-oil distributor.
What I said was ‘be careful, your own convictions are nothing but, ultimately, illusions. Man made illusions. Some of them, maybe, closer to reality than those entertained by other people. Meanwhile, others of your illusory convictions – most of them, probably, are more distanced from reality than those entertained by those who ‘control’/master each particular realm of ‘knowledge’.
This being the reason for which we go first to the doctor instead of raiding a pharmacy when our child gets sick.

I didn’t say you should accept advice from any peddler of illusions.
All I said was that we should pay more attention to what other people have to say. More considerate attention to what other people say, bearing in mind that our own convictions – about anything, are nothing but ultimately illusory.

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

THE reason

April 13, 2022 //
0

What if there’s no reason, per se?

What if there are only individual reasons for each of the experiences each of us passes through?

Many of those reasons belonging to the ‘experimenters’ themselves and all reasons – even if the individuals who provide the actual causes are not aware of all the consequences, belong to us. To us, humans.

I have no way of determining whether there is any ‘supreme being’ but what I understand of this world has led me to the conclusion that this ‘aspect’ is irrelevant. For us. For those of us who are currently alive.

That supreme being, if it exists, has done nothing more than to provide a set of opportunities.
The world in which our ancestors – some 1500 generations ago, have become conscious human beings. The rest is of our own doing.

Influenced a lot by the specific circumstances in which each culture has been developed – by those having to make do in those specific circumstances, but still ultimately ours.

This ‘conclusion’ is the sole solution I had been able to come up with to the conundrum which opposes the notions of ‘free will’ and karma/fate/you name it.

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

Marriage

January 6, 2022 //
0

Getting out of a relationship before entering the next one makes sense, right?
But why would anyone marry his/her own self in the first place?

To send a signal? ‘I have removed myself from the (singles) market’?
As a publicity stunt? Proving – unintentionally, that marriage continues to be an important institution, at least at the symbolical level….

On the other hand, why bother? At all…
Specially now, after the advent of the ‘prenuptial arrangement‘….

So, marriage is, in reality, only about ‘property’? Who gets what after the couple separates? ‘Naturally’ or otherwise?
But, again, why make it a special thing? Property had been formally ‘coded’ about the same time as marriage was… why introduce another set of regulations, on top of those pertaining to the ‘mere’ individual property?

There must be something else…

And that something must be in our heads!
‘Property’ has more or less the same meaning all over the world.

Culturally, there are many forms of property ‘out there’ but the most ‘advanced’ cultures ‘use’ the same three main types of property, each in it’s own ‘mix’. Private property, state property, communal property…

Meanwhile, each culture/civilization has it’s own type of marriage. Or used to have, until very recently. Which types of marriage differ widely and in many ways.
From who can enter a marriage – number of people, ethnicity, religion, caste, etc., to how a marriage ends.
From the conditions which must be met before the marriage to the consequences of the act. And to the consequences of the marriage being ended ‘before time’, if possible.
Not to mention the wide gamut of rights and duties each member of a marriage might have, according to local rules and (by)laws.

If you think of it, ‘property’ is almost ‘natural’. It makes a lot of sense, ‘functionally’ speaking, to be precise about which is which. And about which is whose.
Life is a lot simpler when each member of a community knows what/how much can be had/used/eaten without anybody else having any say about the matter, what must be left alone and whose ‘permission’ you must ‘acquire’ before ‘trespassing’.

Meanwhile, ‘marriage’ is a lot more artificial than ‘property’. Leave alone the fact that the rules are far more complicated – and far more diverse.
In practice, marriage has been really important only for the ‘top’ members of any given society…
And the ‘fun’ fact is that the higher the rank of the individuals concerned, the more ‘leeway’ they used to have…

Henry the VIII had ‘invented’ a ‘new religion’ in his attempt to bend ‘the rules’ according to his wishes, the French monarchs had been famous for their mistresses… and a ‘modern’ financier had been recently convicted for ‘lending’ underage members of his ‘harem’ to some of his buddies…

That ‘something’ is, definitely, in our heads!

NB!
I’m not implying that that ‘something’ is good or bad!
We are the ones who attach ‘values’ to things/concepts.
We are the ones who ‘notice’ things and relationships, use them – properly, for a while, and then experiment in ‘abusing’ them.

A (beautiful) woman marrying – and divorcing, her own self is perceived as being a ‘fun thing to read about’ while gay couples becoming able to establish a formal family is perceived, by so many, as being ‘a threat’.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, evolution, In English, Intent, man as a measure for all things, Psychology

Torn between musts and don’ts

September 1, 2021 //
0

There are some things each of us must do.

Breathe, drink, eat, take cover.

There are some things each of us should do in moderation.

Drink, eat, ‘rest’…

There are some things each of us should never do.

Lie, steal, kill.

The things we must do ‘depend’ upon our DNA.
Unless we do what our DNA tells us to do, we die.

The things we shouldn’t do have been determined culturally.
Our fore-fathers have noticed that not doing ‘those things’ helped a lot.
That communities who taught their members to not do those things survived a lot easier and fared a lot better than those communities who had been ‘lax’ about ‘things’.
Teaching what to do and what to not do across generations transformed learned information into culture.

In time, culture has fulfilled the same function as DNA.

DNA had made it possible for life to exist. For species to survive. And to evolve when needed. When the environment had changed.

Culture had made it possible for communities to survive.
Individuals belonging to each generation didn’t had to reinvent fire each time they were cold. Or afraid. Or hungry.
They just remembered what their ancestors had taught them and put it into practice.

But there’s also a huge difference between DNA and culture.
Both consist of information passed over generations and both are instrumental in the survival of those who depend on that information being put to use.
The difference consists in the fact that DNA actually demands a certain behavior while culture only recommends certain ‘answers’.

There’s more.

DNA is a ‘language’. It has ‘letters’, ‘syntactic’ rules and even means to correct errors.
Culture uses languages as a vehicle.

Both code information using ‘letters’ and ‘words’ but they differ in how that information is passed to the next generation.
DNA passes that information in a way more ‘rigid’ manner than culture does.

While it is true that slight differences occur whenever genetic information is passed from one generation to another – that’s how evolution works, those ‘directly interested’ in the process have nothing to say about this whole thing. The differences occur accidentally and survive only if they don’t harm the organisms where they appear.

With cultural information things happen in the exact opposite manner.
Differences occur only when enough individuals notice that it would be beneficial for them to change that particular habit in that particular manner.

And now we have reached the moment to contemplate another similarity.

As the DNA has become more elaborate, the ‘superior’ organisms had enjoyed more individual ‘freedom’. Or ‘lee-way’.
Insects have more lee-way than worms, fish have more lee-way than star-fish, dogs have more lee-way than frogs and humans have more freedom than the rest of the apes have lee-way.
Similarly, people belonging to the hunter-gatherer culture had accrued a lot more freedom when they had learned – and taught it to their children, how to make fire. And so on.
Those who had learned how to grow their own food – and passed the information to the next generations, had far less chances of dying of hunger. And a lot more lee-way to conduct war…
Those who had learned how to make metal tools were a lot freer than those who shaped their tools out of stone. And very soon the stone-shapers had been ‘subdued’ by those yielding bronze weapons.

And so on to the present day.
Those who have become adept users of mass-media are seeding ‘change’ into the minds of the naive.

I only hope that they will eventually find out what Ernst Mayr had to say about this process.

‘Evolution is in no way about ‘the survival of the fittest’.
It is only about the demise of the unfit.‘

The problem with the ‘lee-way’ generated by culture being that whenever it becomes too wide the whole system becomes fragile.

Whenever people get high enough on freedom they forget that in order to survive we need to remain inside the ‘straight and narrow’ mandated by DNA and endorsed by culture.

Otherwise put, being torn between musts and don’ts is far better than being stuck. In a grave.

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

Adam Smith to Ayn Rand

August 23, 2021 //
0

Basically, Adam Smith and Ayn Rand had the same thing in their minds.

How society works and how individuals meet their needs in a social context.

And both of them had reached the same solution.
That capitalism was good.

Unfortunately – for Ayn Rand’s fans, any similitude between them stops here.

Adam Smith had described a reality.
Something which had evolved, naturally, in the cultural milieu to which he had happened to belong.

Ayn Rand was trying to push a social model.

The fact that what Rand was trying to push was very close to what Smith had described is, indeed, important.
But the difference between something which had evolved naturally and the very same something which had been imposed, by force, is also important.

Let me give you an example.

Christianity.
Much of what we have today – from ‘human rights’ to the very concept of ‘science’, has it’s roots down in the principles exposed in the Bible.
South America is, now, a Christian territory. Populated by people who had immigrated as Christians and by people – just as Christian as the first category, who had been born to parents having other beliefs. Parents who had been forcefully ‘conversed’ to Christianity.

It’s easy to notice that people in South America don’t fare as well as those in Europe, North America or Australia.
Why? They are Christians, South America uses the same capitalism and the same democracy as the rest of the ‘civilized’ world… why are the results so different?

Don’t bring ethnicity into discussion!
The explanation is simple and has nothing to do with ethnicity.

While in Europe, North America and Australia Christianity and capitalism had evolved naturally – in the sense that they had occurred in Europe and had been translated by the European immigrants to North America and Australia, in South America – and in other places, Christianity and capitalism had been forcefully imposed by the immigrants upon the much larger local populations.

Just as Communism had been forcefully imposed by the Lenin led Bolsheviks upon the Russian People.

Forget about the fact that communism had failed, no matter how hard some people have tried to make it work, while capitalism works for real – when used properly.
My point is that whenever somebody tries to force something upon somebody else, the results will never rise to the expected level. No matter how good that ‘something’ might be.

Are you familiar with ‘you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink’?
Leading it to water is enough.
Whenever somebody becomes ‘enthusiastic’ enough to try to force a horse to drink, the results …. no matter how skillful the ‘enthusiast’ might be…

And there’s another ‘small’ thing which makes a hell of a difference.
Adam Smith’s main point was that the whole society benefits from the functioning of the free market. Where each ‘agent’ competes with the others towards meeting his own goal. Which competition – as long as it remains free, results in everybody – well, almost, having a better life.
Ayn Rand’s point being that the free market is there only for the benefit of the ‘strongest’. Which is in line with Lenin’s view on the matter… ‘The Bolsheviks merit to lead the revolution because they are the strongest…’

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Categories 1989, altruism, arrogance, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, Economy, effective communication, evolution, In English, Intent, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, teleology

The ‘biological’ history of mankind

July 28, 2020 //
0

Culture is to human communities what DNA is to biological species.

It transports vital information from one generation to the other. Hence providing a venue for survival.
Furthermore, both culture and DNA can change in time. Hence providing a venue for evolution.

The difference between culture and DNA being, of course, the fact that culture is way more fluid than DNA.
DNA changes only once for each generation – what you get at birth is what you’re taking to the grave, while culture is in constant flux.
No individual organism has anything to say about their genetic information but almost every human is capable of learning almost anything.

Now for the historical part.

Stage one.

Veneration of the elders. The elders were the depositories of the common knowledge. Hence everybody took good care of the ‘data bases’.

Stage two.

Somebody learned to write.
Elders were no longer indispensable. More and more information could be ‘warehoused’ in alternative ways.
A structure was needed to manage the new ways of dealing with the vital information.

Stage three.

The state is born.
At first the structures which insured that culture was passed from one generation to another had been rather empiric: kingdoms, monasteries, etc.
Soon after the Enlightenment things had become more rational. Cultured people became nations and the academic scholars gave us the state. As the structure charged to make sure that culture and people stay together. Hence providing for the nation’s survival.

States who had been in constant contact – read rivalry, kept each-other fit. Or else.
States ‘removed’ from reality – geographically, by becoming too powerful to care or both, had experienced a natural decay. The people at the top of the food chain had forgotten about those at the bottom and those at the bottom had lost faith in their leadership.

States too weak to survive – for various reasons, have succumbed while those too powerful for their own sake have eventually imploded.

Psychology to the rescue.

Culture is more fluid than DNA for a reason.
DNA follows exclusively the laws of nature while culture is heavily influenced by us.
We, men, are the measure of all things.
All life heavily transforms the place it inhabits.
So do we, humans. Only we do it willingly. On purpose, that is.

Now, that we have amassed so much information – about life in general and about how we relate, as agents, to the entire process, we have reached a reckoning moment. What next?

Are we going to choose the path of the cuckoo or that shown to us by Hokule-a?

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Categories 1989, arrogance, authoritarianism, awareness, biology, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, complementary ways of attending knowlege, cooperation, effective communication, fail better, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

Why older people have such a hard time changing their minds

March 7, 2020 //
0

And the more important the subject – or closer to their hearts, the harder for them to reconsider their position.

I’m very close to 60 myself and I haven’t yet made peace with my dad.
We’re very good business partners, he lives in the same house with me – my mom passed away almost 25 years ago, and yet not a single day passes without us locking horns.

This morning, it finally downed on me.
He cannot accept my version of things because that would mean he had been wrong – on certain issues, during his entire life.

And what makes me so sure that my version of things is the right one?!?

Simply because his position is:
‘You should be the wiser one. You told me such and such for so long and I haven’t budged. Maybe you should have grown accustomed to the situation long ago and accepted it’.

I actually can accept that, after a certain age, human brain looses some of its flexibility. That is one of the saddest facts of life.
Only we had this very same discussion, on and of, for the last 40 or so years. Both of us were in our prime. He still is…

To make things clearer, before we get to the important part, the differences between us are of a cultural nature.
He is a born and bred Armenian while I’m a mixed breed. He grew up in a consistent cultural environment while I had to adapt to carrying a funny name and to uncountable social changes. He has a clear understanding of the world – which had served him well, while I’m full of questions. And still looking for answers.

And finally, I found one of them.

The funny thing being that I was already aware of the concept for at least 10 years now.

“Cognitive dissonance, the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information. The unease or tension that the conflict arouses in people is relieved by one of several defensive maneuvers: they reject, explain away, or avoid the new information; persuade themselves that no conflict really exists; reconcile the differences; or resort to any other defensive means of preserving stability or order in their conceptions of the world and of themselves. The concept was developed in the 1950s by American psychologist Leon Festinger and became a major point of discussion and research.”

Can you imagine an Eastern Mediterranean patriarch – something all men seeped in that culture attempt to become when growing older, caving in to contrarian opinions expressed by his totally unconventional son?

Can you imagine a successful ‘old timer’ accepting that the methods he had used to get to the top might actually be the causes for what we experience now?

“The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”

Imagine now what would have happened if the world would have been ruled by people who had made up their minds some 200 years ago.
Then imagine what would have happened if we would have forgotten what had happened 200 years ago…

Cherish your old ones – cause they made you possible, but don’t take them too seriously. It hurts.

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children, Trust

The bureaucratic mind.

October 28, 2019 //
0

“Asking a bureaucrat for help is like asking an acquaintance to help you move. They don’t feel obliged to help you—but they might, regardless, if you’re sufficiently charming, and they’ve got nothing else they’d rather do.”

John Faithful Hamer

Now, bureaucrats are individual human beings. Seeped/raised in the very same culture/weltanschauung as the rest of us.
If we’re not sure our own acquaintances would help us move, why do we expect a complete stranger to help us? Only because he happens to be a bureaucrat?
On the other hand, if what we need him to do is to fulfill his job – not ‘help us’, simply ‘perform his duty’, then it’s our fault. Our collective fault. Because we’ve allowed the wrong kind of people to climb the bureaucratic ladder.

And because we’ve allowed the wrong kind of weltanschauung to creep upon all of us. Laymen and bureaucrats alike.

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Categories altruism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Psychology, The kind of world we are building for our children

Traveling

September 21, 2019 //
0

Theory has it that visiting foreign people might make us wiser.
By seeing how each of them cope in their own environment we might learn the beauty of each culture.
By taking in all the differences between us we might learn how ultimately alike we all are.

Or not.
The key word here being ‘might’.
Whenever subjected to a learning experience we only might become wiser.
Being confronted by new information is only an opportunity. Not a all a fatality.
Integrating that new information into our personal library of ideas has to be preceded by a ‘digestion process’. We need to understand and accept each of them first.
Depending on various factors, some of us might remain indifferent to at least a part of what is going on around us.
Depending on various factors, some of us might reach a different conclusion starting from the same set of raw data.

The fact that each of us has a determinant contribution to the learning process explains the differences between our perceptions.

Whenever visiting a foreign country, each of us comes home with a different opinion about those places.
The fact that none of us remains indifferent represents our shared humanity while the differences illustrate the individual nature of the human species.

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Categories awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, Mutual Respect

Parazite to symbiont

August 27, 2019 //
0

If you think of it, life – yet another word for ‘survival’, is about growing up from being a ‘parazite’ to pulling your own weight.

And this is valid at both individual and ‘collective’ levels.

All individual organisms – from viruses to bacteria to human, are born as helpless ‘parasites’ and survive for only as long as they don’t go ‘against the grain’.
Similarity, new species appear completely by chance and survive for only as long as they do not create enough disturbance for the rest of those who live in the neihborhood to take ‘punitive actions’.

Higher up the ‘evolution tree, ‘cultures’ – ‘wisdom’ accrued while surviving specific sets of circumstances, continue to help those who observe them for only as long as the observants don’t try to impose ‘theirs’ where they do not fit.

Furthermore, rulers continue to rule for only as long as their presence is an asset for the system.
Otherwise, the whole system goes south but the responsibility belongs to the ruler, not to the entire system. Which, nevertheless, bears the brunt of the consequences.

In some circles, the process is also known as ‘becoming a responsible adult’.

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Categories awareness, Chance, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, evolution, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, The kind of world we are building for our children
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