Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Computer Philosophy
It occurred to me yesterday that one of the reasons that it is so difficult to create a computer with artificial intelligence is that the people doing so believe there is some other kind. Once you realize that humans don't have "intelligence" that is connected in any way to the real world, you can rethink the concept of what it means to set up a model of the world and respond to the model, rather than the real thing. If the physical connections to the servos of the machine happen to go where the real universe works out for them, then you suddenly have the nearest thing to human intelligence that can be created: the illusion that your machine did something on purpose.
That damned 43%
A while back, there was a story about the distribution of wealth among people of the world. The gist of it is that 80% of the people survive on 7% of the wealth.
Mixing and matching statistics makes some interesting associations. When Mitt Romney talked about the 43% who aren't going to vote for him because they are gettin' some from the gubmint, the remaining majority (who weren't at all bothered by this, by the way...they just say "it was taken out of context" or "he could have said it better" or "well, it's the truth"), keep believing that he was talking to THEM.
He wasn't. He was talking to the 20% (and if you don't know you are in the 20%, then you aren't) who have access and control of the 93% of the world's wealth. The remaining (notwithstanding the actual set intersections for a minute) 37% who were not in the 43%, THINK that they are somehow on the way to BEING able to access that 93% of the wealth (If we just didn't have to pay those darned income taxes). They are not. They are actually just fighting with each other and the 43% of ill repute for that aforementioned 7% which the top tier is willing to write off as "necessary losses."
The problem with this contempt of the working classes is that there is really no way to quantify it properly to illustrate how far out of proportion it is to the natural world.
Imagine a big warehouse full of happy puppies, getting automatically fed just enough to keep them from yelping...day in and day out. Throw in a hungry tiger. No matter how many puppies it consumes, there are always more than it needs, and the tiger just chases the puppies around for entertainment (creates jobs for them) and when he gets bored, he shuts off the feeders and takes a nap, maybe he even takes some of the extra food (because he's been eating puppies) and uses it as a reward to get some of the bigger puppies to follow him around or chase the smaller puppies for him. We'll call them the "middle class". Put a collar on one and call it a priest, and you've pretty much got the Euro-Western idea of civilization in a nutshell. Just add marketing and noisy shiny crap to distract everyone.
Now, granted, the numbers don't accurately apply to the disparity between the West and the Third World, where the rich would take the tiger/puppy idea and actually implement it at some kind of gaming profit (financed by Harvard Investment banking...), or the massive flow of useless information filling the void between the Haves and the Have Nots in the West, who are convinced that they live in an 'advanced' society because they have running water and cars (at great expense to their own future selves). What needs to be considered in the natural world, however, is the usefulness of the actions of any species toward its own future, and the rate of change of the environment vs. the artificial stability of civilization. In other words, those whose lives are 'nasty, brutish, and short' know that their lives will continue to be so. Introducing modern ideas of "standards of living" always comes with a price: the potential loss of those artificial standards. Romney and his ilk believe that by virtue of their control over the vast majority of wealth, their lives are perfectly stabilized as far into the future as they can see with their "free market" goggles on. What they don't see is an end to economics and civilization caused by the instabilities introduced when they created their artificial world and "conquering" nature by isolating themselves from its feedback mechanisms.
Mixing and matching statistics makes some interesting associations. When Mitt Romney talked about the 43% who aren't going to vote for him because they are gettin' some from the gubmint, the remaining majority (who weren't at all bothered by this, by the way...they just say "it was taken out of context" or "he could have said it better" or "well, it's the truth"), keep believing that he was talking to THEM.
He wasn't. He was talking to the 20% (and if you don't know you are in the 20%, then you aren't) who have access and control of the 93% of the world's wealth. The remaining (notwithstanding the actual set intersections for a minute) 37% who were not in the 43%, THINK that they are somehow on the way to BEING able to access that 93% of the wealth (If we just didn't have to pay those darned income taxes). They are not. They are actually just fighting with each other and the 43% of ill repute for that aforementioned 7% which the top tier is willing to write off as "necessary losses."
The problem with this contempt of the working classes is that there is really no way to quantify it properly to illustrate how far out of proportion it is to the natural world.
Imagine a big warehouse full of happy puppies, getting automatically fed just enough to keep them from yelping...day in and day out. Throw in a hungry tiger. No matter how many puppies it consumes, there are always more than it needs, and the tiger just chases the puppies around for entertainment (creates jobs for them) and when he gets bored, he shuts off the feeders and takes a nap, maybe he even takes some of the extra food (because he's been eating puppies) and uses it as a reward to get some of the bigger puppies to follow him around or chase the smaller puppies for him. We'll call them the "middle class". Put a collar on one and call it a priest, and you've pretty much got the Euro-Western idea of civilization in a nutshell. Just add marketing and noisy shiny crap to distract everyone.
Now, granted, the numbers don't accurately apply to the disparity between the West and the Third World, where the rich would take the tiger/puppy idea and actually implement it at some kind of gaming profit (financed by Harvard Investment banking...), or the massive flow of useless information filling the void between the Haves and the Have Nots in the West, who are convinced that they live in an 'advanced' society because they have running water and cars (at great expense to their own future selves). What needs to be considered in the natural world, however, is the usefulness of the actions of any species toward its own future, and the rate of change of the environment vs. the artificial stability of civilization. In other words, those whose lives are 'nasty, brutish, and short' know that their lives will continue to be so. Introducing modern ideas of "standards of living" always comes with a price: the potential loss of those artificial standards. Romney and his ilk believe that by virtue of their control over the vast majority of wealth, their lives are perfectly stabilized as far into the future as they can see with their "free market" goggles on. What they don't see is an end to economics and civilization caused by the instabilities introduced when they created their artificial world and "conquering" nature by isolating themselves from its feedback mechanisms.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip we make it.
I bought a Grateful Dead CD the other day to see what I've been missing for some 40 years (other than "Truckin'" which has played endlessly).
I can only say I wasn't missing anything except maybe the dope smokin' hotties that thought they were deep and stimulating.
I'll take Metal ballads any day over that.
Anyway, that was a side-trip from the point of this post. It occurred to me that I hadn't posted anything, and my 2 followers might be wondering what's up.
The usual. Family, farm, fixing, futzing with the world's views on things.
Since my last posts, I have come up with as concise a definition of homo sapiens as I can muster.
Homo sapiens: mammalian life form whose growth phase is occupied with developing an imaginary model of the universe and storing that model in working memory. Upon physical maturity, the human id transfers itself into the model and spends the rest of its life avoiding the real universe at all costs.
This explains an awful lot about relationships and politics and civil wars. The reason people can't understand each other is because they all live in a different universe. Some people create Systems to make their children develop similar models (religion, education, culture, etc), but the lack of realization of the functionality of these methods leads to ill-formed ideas about why people in different systems cannot be part of the "Right" systems. In other words, we spend our lives isolating ourselves from reality and then calling our isolated world "reality", but we want everyone else to move into OUR reality, rather than acknowledging that they (right or wrong) have to deal with THEIR reality foremost.
Men don't have to be from Mars for Women to not understand them. They only have to be people (and vice versa).
We cannot force our children into our model, either. They have to build their own model. Perhaps the trick is to realize that that's what they are doing, and to not screw it up by cutting them off from actual reality too soon. Hopefully, we have something to show them as a good example (if not ourselves, then we try to find someone else).
Friday, October 22, 2010
Total Perspective Vortex
My friend James and I have an ongoing discourse about logic, belief, time, and meaning, as well as how the actual universe can be sensed, remembered, interpreted and lived in without being sold an Intentionality bill of goods. I decided to draw this instead of explaining it.
Put yourself in the stick figures and imagine what you see as you look back at history and forward to the future.
How does it fit your perspective?
(N.F.U. is "net future usefulness", and this is drawn as a linear diagram, but the second half is really an all space filling 360° of possible random events. The point is that we SEE our past as a linear progression from a point, even though there were infinite possible directions for the line to follow at any time, as there are going into the future.) You may notice two things: it was done in a hurry, and I am not an artist.
Put yourself in the stick figures and imagine what you see as you look back at history and forward to the future.
How does it fit your perspective?
(N.F.U. is "net future usefulness", and this is drawn as a linear diagram, but the second half is really an all space filling 360° of possible random events. The point is that we SEE our past as a linear progression from a point, even though there were infinite possible directions for the line to follow at any time, as there are going into the future.) You may notice two things: it was done in a hurry, and I am not an artist.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Anger of the Honest
I just want to put in a plug here for something that just came to my attention:
Charles Hugh Smith's The Rot Within: Our Culture of Financial Fraud and the Anger of the Honest
If there is anything at all that describes me lately, I think it is that last phrase, "The Anger of the Honest".
If you're not pissed off, you're not paying attention. If you are paying attention and you're not pissed off, you're not being honest with yourself or your gut (there isn't a 'feeling' to the heart, but there is a second, active brain in your gut).
Dealing with insurance companies and health care has GOT to be the best example of this. We get hurt or sick, and we try to get help. We try to pay for it the best way we can with what is available. It is not our fault that the corporations are busy trying to suck every last breath out of each person who needs some service. An honest system would be to simply provide health care to people, which doesn't mean building buildings of glass and steel to house germs to make them worse than when they came in. It means connecting doctors to people so that people live healthier lives, not isolating the knowledge and experience behind piles of paperwork, bills, and elevators to nowhere.
Charles Hugh Smith's The Rot Within: Our Culture of Financial Fraud and the Anger of the Honest
If there is anything at all that describes me lately, I think it is that last phrase, "The Anger of the Honest".
If you're not pissed off, you're not paying attention. If you are paying attention and you're not pissed off, you're not being honest with yourself or your gut (there isn't a 'feeling' to the heart, but there is a second, active brain in your gut).
Dealing with insurance companies and health care has GOT to be the best example of this. We get hurt or sick, and we try to get help. We try to pay for it the best way we can with what is available. It is not our fault that the corporations are busy trying to suck every last breath out of each person who needs some service. An honest system would be to simply provide health care to people, which doesn't mean building buildings of glass and steel to house germs to make them worse than when they came in. It means connecting doctors to people so that people live healthier lives, not isolating the knowledge and experience behind piles of paperwork, bills, and elevators to nowhere.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Addendum conversation on "Because We Can"
Tommy said, You SOB. I'm supposed to be studying Accounting. I read this 4 times, and am not going to pretend I got all of it....
Lots of questions, sorry.
I think you are trying to confuse yourself more than you need to (by reading something written by a lunatic..me).
>> "Particles may have certain properties which allow them to maintain existence >>(exclusion principles, quantum levels, spin, etc), and thus,
>> are useful to themselves as opposed to randomly decaying under the rule of >>entropy."
These particles are the essence of existence? Why would we perceive them? How does this relate to consciousness? Or, are these particles consciousness, and people are merely vessels that only perceive daily life on our dust collection planet w/in a tiny spectrum of light?
Start with this premise: Mathematical formulas cannot produce a random number.
Ergo, no amount of mathematics will tell us where anything came from that does not have some type of order.
The substance of the universe is not a vacuum, but a random quantum 'foam' of particles appearing and disappearing.
If one happens to pop into existence that is stable (i.e. useful to itself), then the existence of that bit of order will influence other bits of order to be stable also. From that order comes more order See Chaos Theory. Off the cuff, I would say these are the quarks, since they are least stable of fundamental particles, and mostly, they need other quarks to remain in existence.
It relates to consciousness almost not at all. That relationship is transferred all of the way up the chain of increasing order through evolved usefulness of living things, which comes after the evolved usefulness of matter itself. I think consciousness is an advanced state of useful memory tricks. It was useful to extend the physical senses by remembering that tigers hide in shadowy places, so remembering to walk around those places on the way to the water hole was an evolutionary advantage. The increasing complexity caused by DNA's affinity for glomming on more molecules led us to things like teaching children to avoid those places BEFORE they ever see a tiger, and then, Believing in the power of tigers to suddenly appear out of darkness, and then imagining the shape of a tiger in the patterns in the sky and following that shape to find other water holes. Communication glitches let people to believe that tigers created water holes, etc.
Existence cannot negate randomness, but it can harvest it and affect the overall randomness in a particular space, the harvesting of randomness to maintain matter creates a slight influx of energy/particles which I believe may be what is called "gravity". Outside of the local universe, the effect is minimal, and randomness is still random. Whether or not a Big Bang occurred and created a 'bubble' of some type would be a good question to ask, and whether there were multiple little bangs instead of one big one. The treatment of a purely random background as "ether" puts a different spin on the Hubble constant and whether the red shift of stars is from a Doppler effect or a slowing over distance and time due to an interaction with the ether.
Why would we build machines that can translate other spectra for us to see?
See answer below about space travel, but add a dose of curiosity.
Then, you said,
Isn't the TRANSITION of decay to existence the "net useful" part?In other words, isn't it at the tipping point of decay when all the action happens (destabilization, dessication, de-everything)?
>>("If the increasing complexity is greater than the action of random decay, the net >>result is a continued existence of a thing.")
Isn't our transition the useful part -- for individuals AND whole species w/in the bell curve?
The transition is where the usefulness is determined in the moment as living things convert either decay or randomness into living matter. That does not determine the total sum of net usefulness, however. Net usefulness (or net FUTURE usefulness) is the ratio between the total usefulness of the individual (including all offspring and influences over( let's say 6 sigma on the curve for fun)the period after death until their influence is lost in the noise...MINUS the total consumption that they caused. In other words, most species are 'measured' by their continued existence in a stable environment, and individuals long after they are dead. If the species is consuming their environment, they are net consumptive, and will eventually be extinct. Everything gets an equal chance to TRY to live, nothing is granted the RIGHT to live, except within the physically limited human concept of a society, where the rules are based on the social contract.
In this regard, were we sort of meant to find, extract, and burn all the carbon pockets, trash the planet, then act as interplanetary spores to provide the randomness effect on other dust collections?
Here's where the rubber meets the bottom of the prisoner's feet: There is no meaning to it. We simply came into existence as another living species, with the same opportunities to consume and exist (alongside many other hominid types at the time). The difference with homo sapiens lies in their illusion of everything having been caused by some intention, which is simply a projection of human beliefs onto the natural world. This is the parasitic part of Intention: it convinces us of two things: first, that the things we do were intended, and second, that things done not by us must have been intended also. Rarely is the first as true as we believe, and even more rare is the second. The more we think, the more we think we have intentions and the more 'meaning' we find in everything, which leads to our mistaken belief that the smarter we are, the less we can be fooled.
I have to separate the following into two questions:
If not, then why do humans have a persistent archetypal fantasy to fly -- that lead us all the way to outer space?
I think this is simply the desire to accumulate 'more'...a natural tendency of all animals. The difference is that humans managed to eliminate their predators and diseases, and also find much more energy than we could handle wisely.
-- wasn't this part of the motivator of internal combustion and not electric motors, knowing that carbon held more potential energy (rooted archetypically -- not so randomly)?
Tough part (answering with my typical Bullshit): yes and no. The major motivator to internal combustion was marketing and profit. People were more conservative by nature in those days, and the electrics were quiet, limited to the elite by expense, and more reliable. The hand crank starter kept women from the IC engine cars until the electric starter was invented. By then, Freudian marketing techniques were employed to make quick work of the "manliness" of noisy, smoky engines and the expanding population and cities demanded growth of manufacturing, jobs, and speed in general (time is money). Ford opened up the roads to the common folks who made enough money selling eggs to buy a car, and the next thing you know, there's a tractor in every pot field and a chicken in every Senate seat. Pollution wasn't even considered hazardous until gasoline leaking into sewers started blowing manhole covers over the tops of buildings. I don't have a good answer for this, actually. Mostly, that there wasn't so much "intention" to adopting gasoline as there was immediate profits to be made.
Is this our role?
To consume? Short answer, "yes". Long answer: "Yes", "probably" , and "maybe not".
"Yes", we are exactly as every other living thing: consumers of available resources producing something useful; either in our existence, our help propagating life, or production of waste products which feed something else that supports the environment we need to eat (sometimes consumption is actually a useful action in proper perspective..cleanup and sustenance).
"Probably"..Based on current example, the role of humans is exactly as you stated: to consume everything we can get our hands on, increasing exponentially until we destroy ourselves and most, if not all, living things on the planet.
"Maybe not", (there are some big IFs in this): Almost every fiber of our System of systems has been created with feedback mechanisms to modulate consumption. The problem is that those feedback mechanisms have a plus sign instead of a negative sign (incentives vs. sales taxes, production quotas instead of production limits, lower interest rates instead of higher, tax code "dependent" deductions instead of charges). Also, the exponential growth rate is problematic at first glance because we don't see how it can continue. That's the beauty of it: it can't, and so it won't. The maybe comes into whether or not humans will recognize the real danger as a threat (to profits?), reverse the signs of their feedback mechanisms, and manage to Be the Potential that they possess: protecting Earth from asteroids while making our actions intentionally useful to the future, rather than stealing from it.
In the case of our perceptions, the exponential rate is better than a linear slope because it looks more like we are going to hit a wall. Some people are trying to do something about it now, all over the world, so there's some chance of at least saving the realization of what happens for the record.
Okay, one more:
Is our perception of life merely a perception precisely like our light spectrum sensitive eyes?
No, Keanu. That's just dumb. You can do better than fall for that.
MEANING is an illusion: LIFE is absolutely amazing when we drop the pretense bullshit that every Ted, Dick, and Pope try to shove down our throats and indoctrinate everyone as babies with belief in nonsensical crap (Good, God, Gurus). A purely random universe still allows things like energy-based beings, psychic connections, alien races, planets made of chocolate, etc. An anthropocentric universe where humans are "created" to live on one Garden of Eden and drive Escalades with aluminum rims on giraffe hunts is bizarro world.
We are here, right now. The lack of "meaning" means that we have one shot at a limited life to be useful beyond our imagination and contribute to the future of everything. If that means picking up a shovel and planting a tree, perhaps that tree will learn to communicate with some tree on Betelgeuse. We don't know. The possibilities of all of this trivial circle jerking we call a life are endless, and the more we get caught in the quicksand of marketing and somnambulance, the more we cut ourselves off from those possibilities.
Do be do be do.
That's what life is.
When we drop the mystical pretenses, and embrace the chemical influences that produce Love, Hate, Anger, Hunger: isn't that more amazing when we think it just developed day after day after day, species after species after species, eons and eons and eons....until right now..when we can reach out and touch a child and feel the jolt of pleasure from it and appreciate those billions of years of work to give us this moment and tell someone about it over thousands of miles?...
....and then we want to go out and slap some dumbass with loud pipes and a Cheney/Bush sticker on his Harley.
Good and Bad: there is no more 'meaning' to the chrome on his gas tank than to the pleasure of our child's touch...but one is useful to the future of everything and one is just Blind Faith consumption. Kinda makes you want to be an anarchist, doesn't it? The problem with liberals is that they are the ones who should be using the death penalty for assholes and defending the values of the future, instead of protest signs and sit-ins.
Lots of questions, sorry.
I think you are trying to confuse yourself more than you need to (by reading something written by a lunatic..me).
>> "Particles may have certain properties which allow them to maintain existence >>(exclusion principles, quantum levels, spin, etc), and thus,
>> are useful to themselves as opposed to randomly decaying under the rule of >>entropy."
These particles are the essence of existence? Why would we perceive them? How does this relate to consciousness? Or, are these particles consciousness, and people are merely vessels that only perceive daily life on our dust collection planet w/in a tiny spectrum of light?
Start with this premise: Mathematical formulas cannot produce a random number.
Ergo, no amount of mathematics will tell us where anything came from that does not have some type of order.
The substance of the universe is not a vacuum, but a random quantum 'foam' of particles appearing and disappearing.
If one happens to pop into existence that is stable (i.e. useful to itself), then the existence of that bit of order will influence other bits of order to be stable also. From that order comes more order See Chaos Theory. Off the cuff, I would say these are the quarks, since they are least stable of fundamental particles, and mostly, they need other quarks to remain in existence.
It relates to consciousness almost not at all. That relationship is transferred all of the way up the chain of increasing order through evolved usefulness of living things, which comes after the evolved usefulness of matter itself. I think consciousness is an advanced state of useful memory tricks. It was useful to extend the physical senses by remembering that tigers hide in shadowy places, so remembering to walk around those places on the way to the water hole was an evolutionary advantage. The increasing complexity caused by DNA's affinity for glomming on more molecules led us to things like teaching children to avoid those places BEFORE they ever see a tiger, and then, Believing in the power of tigers to suddenly appear out of darkness, and then imagining the shape of a tiger in the patterns in the sky and following that shape to find other water holes. Communication glitches let people to believe that tigers created water holes, etc.
Existence cannot negate randomness, but it can harvest it and affect the overall randomness in a particular space, the harvesting of randomness to maintain matter creates a slight influx of energy/particles which I believe may be what is called "gravity". Outside of the local universe, the effect is minimal, and randomness is still random. Whether or not a Big Bang occurred and created a 'bubble' of some type would be a good question to ask, and whether there were multiple little bangs instead of one big one. The treatment of a purely random background as "ether" puts a different spin on the Hubble constant and whether the red shift of stars is from a Doppler effect or a slowing over distance and time due to an interaction with the ether.
Why would we build machines that can translate other spectra for us to see?
See answer below about space travel, but add a dose of curiosity.
Then, you said,
Isn't the TRANSITION of decay to existence the "net useful" part?In other words, isn't it at the tipping point of decay when all the action happens (destabilization, dessication, de-everything)?
>>("If the increasing complexity is greater than the action of random decay, the net >>result is a continued existence of a thing.")
Isn't our transition the useful part -- for individuals AND whole species w/in the bell curve?
The transition is where the usefulness is determined in the moment as living things convert either decay or randomness into living matter. That does not determine the total sum of net usefulness, however. Net usefulness (or net FUTURE usefulness) is the ratio between the total usefulness of the individual (including all offspring and influences over( let's say 6 sigma on the curve for fun)the period after death until their influence is lost in the noise...MINUS the total consumption that they caused. In other words, most species are 'measured' by their continued existence in a stable environment, and individuals long after they are dead. If the species is consuming their environment, they are net consumptive, and will eventually be extinct. Everything gets an equal chance to TRY to live, nothing is granted the RIGHT to live, except within the physically limited human concept of a society, where the rules are based on the social contract.
In this regard, were we sort of meant to find, extract, and burn all the carbon pockets, trash the planet, then act as interplanetary spores to provide the randomness effect on other dust collections?
Here's where the rubber meets the bottom of the prisoner's feet: There is no meaning to it. We simply came into existence as another living species, with the same opportunities to consume and exist (alongside many other hominid types at the time). The difference with homo sapiens lies in their illusion of everything having been caused by some intention, which is simply a projection of human beliefs onto the natural world. This is the parasitic part of Intention: it convinces us of two things: first, that the things we do were intended, and second, that things done not by us must have been intended also. Rarely is the first as true as we believe, and even more rare is the second. The more we think, the more we think we have intentions and the more 'meaning' we find in everything, which leads to our mistaken belief that the smarter we are, the less we can be fooled.
I have to separate the following into two questions:
If not, then why do humans have a persistent archetypal fantasy to fly -- that lead us all the way to outer space?
I think this is simply the desire to accumulate 'more'...a natural tendency of all animals. The difference is that humans managed to eliminate their predators and diseases, and also find much more energy than we could handle wisely.
-- wasn't this part of the motivator of internal combustion and not electric motors, knowing that carbon held more potential energy (rooted archetypically -- not so randomly)?
Tough part (answering with my typical Bullshit): yes and no. The major motivator to internal combustion was marketing and profit. People were more conservative by nature in those days, and the electrics were quiet, limited to the elite by expense, and more reliable. The hand crank starter kept women from the IC engine cars until the electric starter was invented. By then, Freudian marketing techniques were employed to make quick work of the "manliness" of noisy, smoky engines and the expanding population and cities demanded growth of manufacturing, jobs, and speed in general (time is money). Ford opened up the roads to the common folks who made enough money selling eggs to buy a car, and the next thing you know, there's a tractor in every pot field and a chicken in every Senate seat. Pollution wasn't even considered hazardous until gasoline leaking into sewers started blowing manhole covers over the tops of buildings. I don't have a good answer for this, actually. Mostly, that there wasn't so much "intention" to adopting gasoline as there was immediate profits to be made.
Is this our role?
To consume? Short answer, "yes". Long answer: "Yes", "probably" , and "maybe not".
"Yes", we are exactly as every other living thing: consumers of available resources producing something useful; either in our existence, our help propagating life, or production of waste products which feed something else that supports the environment we need to eat (sometimes consumption is actually a useful action in proper perspective..cleanup and sustenance).
"Probably"..Based on current example, the role of humans is exactly as you stated: to consume everything we can get our hands on, increasing exponentially until we destroy ourselves and most, if not all, living things on the planet.
"Maybe not", (there are some big IFs in this): Almost every fiber of our System of systems has been created with feedback mechanisms to modulate consumption. The problem is that those feedback mechanisms have a plus sign instead of a negative sign (incentives vs. sales taxes, production quotas instead of production limits, lower interest rates instead of higher, tax code "dependent" deductions instead of charges). Also, the exponential growth rate is problematic at first glance because we don't see how it can continue. That's the beauty of it: it can't, and so it won't. The maybe comes into whether or not humans will recognize the real danger as a threat (to profits?), reverse the signs of their feedback mechanisms, and manage to Be the Potential that they possess: protecting Earth from asteroids while making our actions intentionally useful to the future, rather than stealing from it.
In the case of our perceptions, the exponential rate is better than a linear slope because it looks more like we are going to hit a wall. Some people are trying to do something about it now, all over the world, so there's some chance of at least saving the realization of what happens for the record.
Okay, one more:
Is our perception of life merely a perception precisely like our light spectrum sensitive eyes?
No, Keanu. That's just dumb. You can do better than fall for that.
MEANING is an illusion: LIFE is absolutely amazing when we drop the pretense bullshit that every Ted, Dick, and Pope try to shove down our throats and indoctrinate everyone as babies with belief in nonsensical crap (Good, God, Gurus). A purely random universe still allows things like energy-based beings, psychic connections, alien races, planets made of chocolate, etc. An anthropocentric universe where humans are "created" to live on one Garden of Eden and drive Escalades with aluminum rims on giraffe hunts is bizarro world.
We are here, right now. The lack of "meaning" means that we have one shot at a limited life to be useful beyond our imagination and contribute to the future of everything. If that means picking up a shovel and planting a tree, perhaps that tree will learn to communicate with some tree on Betelgeuse. We don't know. The possibilities of all of this trivial circle jerking we call a life are endless, and the more we get caught in the quicksand of marketing and somnambulance, the more we cut ourselves off from those possibilities.
Do be do be do.
That's what life is.
When we drop the mystical pretenses, and embrace the chemical influences that produce Love, Hate, Anger, Hunger: isn't that more amazing when we think it just developed day after day after day, species after species after species, eons and eons and eons....until right now..when we can reach out and touch a child and feel the jolt of pleasure from it and appreciate those billions of years of work to give us this moment and tell someone about it over thousands of miles?...
....and then we want to go out and slap some dumbass with loud pipes and a Cheney/Bush sticker on his Harley.
Good and Bad: there is no more 'meaning' to the chrome on his gas tank than to the pleasure of our child's touch...but one is useful to the future of everything and one is just Blind Faith consumption. Kinda makes you want to be an anarchist, doesn't it? The problem with liberals is that they are the ones who should be using the death penalty for assholes and defending the values of the future, instead of protest signs and sit-ins.
Monday, September 27, 2010
20 things Auntie Says..from FG
Tommy got me started. Blame him...;-)
Auntie says,
1. Any action taken based on unquestioned belief is evil.
“Do be do be do” -Frank Sinatra
2. Everything in moderation, including moderation.
3. People do shit. They have reasons for doing shit. IN THAT ORDER.
4. Intention is an action subroutine of the ability to imagine ourselves in some possible future. Belief in that intention is a parasite that increases consumption rates, and therefore increases reproduction and drives even more belief and more consumption. Belief in the illusion of free choice prevents moderation of belief.
5. Cold fusion is not cold.
6. Anything you think you know for sure is probably fucking wrong.
7. Hope is what got the Jews to get on the trains.
8. Resistance may be futile, but then, so is cooperation. It’s just a matter of timing.
9. Love is a chemical reaction in our bodies to natural phenomena. It is not “the answer”. It is not God. It is the sexy part of fucking.
10. Death is not a question, nor a beginning, nor a doorway. It is the End of an individual: a bargain we received in exchange for sex. If we didn’t die, we wouldn’t need to reproduce. If we didn’t reproduce, we wouldn’t adapt fast enough to fit the environment as the environment changes.
11. There is no “meaning” to the universe. It just fucking IS. That is the distilled wisdom of God: “I Am”. If you understand this, then you can understand the lack of a need for a god.
12. Ideas are like armpits: everyone usually has at least two and they both stink, and someone else has two just like them, only cheaper.
13. An idea is not property. You don’t own the fucking universe. It allows you to exist out of sheer chance. Contribute to its future or die.
14. Money is Soylent Green.
15. Time is not a dimension. It is a comparative sequence of events. Measurement of time is an oxymoron. You don’t “measure” it, you create it with a clock.
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime; doubly so.” -Douglas Adams
16. There is only one universe. That’s why it’s called that.
17. There is nothing supernatural. It would be “outside” the universe, and by definition, could not exist. There ARE many things that are unexplained. Belief won’t change what they are or are not.
18. My border collie is probably smarter than your honor student’s principal, and she rolls in rotten animals to smell good. She just doesn’t believe in it as a methodology.
added:
19. Inertia sucks.
20. "Dig your heels firm unto dirt-- and where is the dirt going?" -Frank Herbert, "The Jesus Incident"
Auntie says,
1. Any action taken based on unquestioned belief is evil.
“Do be do be do” -Frank Sinatra
2. Everything in moderation, including moderation.
3. People do shit. They have reasons for doing shit. IN THAT ORDER.
4. Intention is an action subroutine of the ability to imagine ourselves in some possible future. Belief in that intention is a parasite that increases consumption rates, and therefore increases reproduction and drives even more belief and more consumption. Belief in the illusion of free choice prevents moderation of belief.
5. Cold fusion is not cold.
6. Anything you think you know for sure is probably fucking wrong.
7. Hope is what got the Jews to get on the trains.
8. Resistance may be futile, but then, so is cooperation. It’s just a matter of timing.
9. Love is a chemical reaction in our bodies to natural phenomena. It is not “the answer”. It is not God. It is the sexy part of fucking.
10. Death is not a question, nor a beginning, nor a doorway. It is the End of an individual: a bargain we received in exchange for sex. If we didn’t die, we wouldn’t need to reproduce. If we didn’t reproduce, we wouldn’t adapt fast enough to fit the environment as the environment changes.
11. There is no “meaning” to the universe. It just fucking IS. That is the distilled wisdom of God: “I Am”. If you understand this, then you can understand the lack of a need for a god.
12. Ideas are like armpits: everyone usually has at least two and they both stink, and someone else has two just like them, only cheaper.
13. An idea is not property. You don’t own the fucking universe. It allows you to exist out of sheer chance. Contribute to its future or die.
14. Money is Soylent Green.
15. Time is not a dimension. It is a comparative sequence of events. Measurement of time is an oxymoron. You don’t “measure” it, you create it with a clock.
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime; doubly so.” -Douglas Adams
16. There is only one universe. That’s why it’s called that.
17. There is nothing supernatural. It would be “outside” the universe, and by definition, could not exist. There ARE many things that are unexplained. Belief won’t change what they are or are not.
18. My border collie is probably smarter than your honor student’s principal, and she rolls in rotten animals to smell good. She just doesn’t believe in it as a methodology.
added:
19. Inertia sucks.
20. "Dig your heels firm unto dirt-- and where is the dirt going?" -Frank Herbert, "The Jesus Incident"
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