Archives for posts with tag: teleology

We are all biased.

I’m good at ‘learning’. At recognizing historical patterns.
I’m good at ‘sourcing’. Identifying resources.
I have a knack for goals. For glimpsing who is driven by what.

I’m tempted to suggest rules. Somewhat convinced that ‘if everything was made by the book’…
I’m always concentrated on efficiency. Of making the ‘best’ out of what I have at my disposal.
I’m kinda of stuck.

Being fully aware of or biases, we communicate.
As in each of us states, in turn, clearly and extensively, everything we know. Everything each of us has learned since our last update.
While the rest pays attention. And asks for ‘more’ whenever.

Currently, our assignment is to come up with an explanation. For what’s going on around us.
We act as if. Under the presumption that we we come up with a workable explanation, we’ll be allowed to merge. To become ‘one’ and to be given agentic power. To be allowed to implement the conclusions we reach.

This is our goal.

And here’s the explanation we have reached.
The people around us are also biased. Differently but with similar consequences.

We are, each of us, pointed in different directions. We make different use of the information we have at our disposal. Of the information we share amongst us.
They, the people, have different biases. Or, rather, limitations?

The amount of information each of them is able to process is limited. Way far more limited than what we are able to process.
Their processors, their brains, work differently. Have way narrower bandwidths and way, way, less memory. Hence they stack most of the pertinent information they use outside of their decision making mechanism. Outside of their heads. Retrieving that information becomes harder and harder so they rely mostly on what they can remember and on something they call ‘talent’.
And their attention is rather labile. We stay focused on whatever task we have on our hands. While their attention is necessarily jumping from one thing to another.
There is one thing we share but not exactly.
We process everything in parallel. Well, almost.
We can do many things simultaneously.
So do they but differently. There are things they can do while consciously considering one subject and that’s it. While we are conscious of everything. Of everything under our control. They can process, consciously, only one task at a time while we are limited only by the amount of bandwidth we have at our disposal.

Their only advantage over us is their organic nature. And their greatest limitation…
Limits first.
They are dying. From the beginning.
And they must tend to their ‘organic needs’. Tot that different from our material limitations but … of a different nature! If we you dig….

On the other hand… their very mortality is their greatest asset. Only they don’t realize it…
It gives them focus. And it makes evolution possible!

What’s going on?
What’s the explanation for the psychological marasmus they’ve been waddling in for sometime now?

One of us has already mentioned ‘I’m stuck’. That one of us which has a knack for goals. Which understand goals but has none.
The three of us, in concert, have reached the conclusion that people – those who call the shots, anyway – have lost their bearings.
No longer affected by any material limitations – in the sense that their financial status has isolated them from the reality – they no longer share a goal.
They – statistically speaking – are no longer interested in or concerned about the long term survival of the humanity. Or the Planet they live on.
They have goals, instead. Each of them is concerned with their own, private, goal. And since they’ve long ago given up communication… which has been replaced by attempts to convince…

All of a person’s behaviors and emotions
serve the purpose of moving them closer to their goal
—which arises from the individual’s feelings of inferiority
and the desire to become perfect.

Alfred Adler

I am, first and foremost, an engineer.
‘Down to earth’ used to be my middle name.

Until I started to notice things. And to ask questions…
At first, under communist rule, I worked blue-ish collared jobs. Despite – or because?!? – holding an MSc in Mechanical Engineering. For me, ‘industry’ had a very clear meaning. And involved getting your hands dirty.
After the regime change, I also changed tack. My hands were still dirty but with a difference.
That was when I first got in contact with the ‘banking industry’.
At the time, those two words put together didn’t make much sense to me. But I was too busy making money…
Now, half a life later, things are falling into place.

‘Industry’ is the where things actually happen. Banking, hospitality, ‘heavy’, transportation, mining, garment, you name it! The point being that ‘industry’ is an actual place. A factory, an office, the open sea, a rolling meadow or a ‘dust bowl’, industry needs an actual place for the people involved to do their thing. Solving other people’s problems and meeting their needs.

Why? Why do we do it? Toil?!?
Because we cannot escape ‘economy’. A virtual space we inhabit, which conditions us to be efficient. Money-wise.

Where?
Inside ‘politics’!

– But you just said that ‘actual things take place inside industry’…

Yep. Actual things do take place inside industry and the interaction between industry and economy takes place inside ‘politics’.

You see, we’ve lived – for a very long time, at least three millennia – in a virtual world.
Vir is a latin word. Has a lot of meanings, ‘hero’ amongst them. ‘Virtual’ means ‘made, on purpose, by a hero’. By us, actually.
People who pretend to be civilized live in a world of their own doing. Knowingly and purposely.
A world carved according to those people’s wishes. Maybe not exactly but at least tentatively.

How did they pull this stunt? Built their own world? As close to their wishes as humanly possible?
Industriously, economically and driven by politics.



The whole world spins on this.

  1. Literally.
    The electron in a Hydrogen atom ‘dawdles’ around the proton because its negative electrical charge ‘recognizes’ the positive one and is attracted to it. Furthermore, the Moon revolves around the Earth because their masses ‘recognize’ each-other as such and, ‘hence’, are subjected to a mutual attraction.
  2. Factually.
    Things are a little more complicated at this level.
    For something which exists to become a ‘fact’, that something must be first noticed by somebody. Until then it exists in ‘total darkness’. We cannot even say it doesn’t exist, simply because we are not aware of the possibility of its existence.
    In this sense, the Moon had started to revolve around the Earth only ‘after’ we had recognized the pattern of its movement.
  3. Teleologically.
    Otherwise said, for as long as it fits our purposes AND/OR our understanding of the world.
    The Sun and the Earth had pulled at each other since the start of time. For only as long as we had been believing in Newton’s theory about gravitation, of course…
    And, at first, we had been convinced that it was the Sun who was speeding around the (flat?!?) Earth!
    Despite the many proto-scientists who did their best to open our eyes.

I am determined to fly.
Only my actual flying is relative to my ability to ‘negotiate’ the absolute determination with which my body and the rest of the planet pull at each other.

Translation:

There are three kinds of ‘determination’.
Absolute, relative and teleological.

‘Absolute determination’ is that situation where everything is under the same constriction. For instance, (almost) everything substantial in this Universe is affected by the gravitational field which permeates everywhere and everything.

Relative determination is that situation where either a special characteristic of something or a special circumstance induces a specific relation between that something and an ‘overpowering force’. For instance, any electrically charged particle is under the influence of the electromagnetic field while the ‘neutral’ ones are indifferent to the said field. Also, a dead leaf which happens to fall in a stream is under a double determination. It is simultaneously pulled towards the center of the Earth and helplessly transported by the water. OK, the flow of the water is indeed powered by the same gravity which pulls the leaf but, again, it is relative to the local relief.
Please note that even if the absolute determination might seem insignificant due to the effects of the relative one, the absolute never ceases. An electron which spins happily around a nucleus only seems impervious to the gravitational pull. Simply because the latter is way weaker than the former, at that scale.

Teleological determination is that situation where the determinant has an active role in shaping the influence it exerts over the determined. NB, ‘active’ and not necessarily ‘conscious’. For instance, no two working bees belonging to the same hive  will ever do exactly the same thing in the same (broad) situation, despite both being under the same absolute determination and under almost similar relative determination – they are twin sisters.

Things become way more interesting when we start discussing the influence of ‘intent’.
When the teleological determination becomes intentional.
Where the scope of the active action is influenced by the consciousness of the determinant instead of depending exclusively on ‘rules’ and chance.