Category: Philosophy

A “voluntaryist” society is a contradiction in terms.

(“voluntaryist” is the dumbest most redundant sounding word ever. Why can’t they just call it a voluntary society like they understand grammar and syntax? But at least I can honestly claim to have independently invented “Volitionism/Volitionist” 🙂 oh well, anyway…)

A “voluntaryist society”…

WTF

I find it amazing that people can engage in this level of doublethink. I say doublethink because ignorance alone simply can’t explain it when in fact the ignorance can be cured in a single logically obvious sentence.

The whole point of society is to exploit economies of scale, and you can’t, physically, logically, as in square-circle can’t, have a society of true individuals without some degree of hierarchical control over the individual by the society.

You must do one or the other or your society will be destroyed from within eventually:

1. Edit people in some way such that their desires/will do not induce society destroying actions.

2. Constrain people with such desires/will from doing harm.

The End!

All this claptrap about systems of dispute resolution makes the fatal assumption that there IS a resolution all parties can agree on. But reality is bound by no such edict.

It’s like a meta-myth, a belief that the concept of irreconcilable differences is a myth.

Can society be made more free? Yes, obviously.

Can it be improved by additional freedoms? Yes.

Can punishment itself be feasibly removed from society? Yes.

Can a society be constructed that gives maximum feasible respect to the sanctity of volition? You’re goddamn right it can.

HOWEVER!

Can everybody get what they want? > No. <

I’m so tired of this debate. It’s virtually identical to debating creationists.

Libertarians of this extreme are little more than right wingers who want to build a society around the excuses they need to allow their compassion to atrophy entirely, while having their ego stroked for being good people at the same time.

http://underlore.com/islanders/ (And its links, which are admittedly months of reading.)

Open Response to Words of Encouragement

I appreciate your words of encouragement, and your heart is clearly in the right place but I’ve misspent my life learning to debate since I was 16.

When I got access to the Internet the very first thing I did with it was find a place to debate what I considered to be at the time the most important issue facing humanity, religion.

I never stopped. I simply changed topics and my views as information forced me to evolve.

See, I actually don’t feel that strongly about most topics by default. I realize now I have a nature and nurture trait allowing me to be critically open minded. All it takes to change my position is fact.

Establishing that fact and what that might require depends on the subject of course but I’m always willing to revise my position in favor of reality.

Ironically my desire to climb into my filter bubble is proof of this fact.

I am admitting that I’ve wasted my life for the most part laboring under a false assumption. That people from their opinions rationally and then invest emotionally, when in fact they invest emotionally first and then rationalize that emotional position, regardless of facts.

I’ve been called flavors of autistic my entire life. I realize now that this emotional difference in me is what allows for critical thinking.

In effect I’ve been writing for humanity thinking humanity operated like off duty scientists when in fact if I wanted to influence humanity I should have utterly abandoned logical rigor and instead learned music and public relations.

I realize that controversy is not the opposite of persuasion. But look at my blog, look at my book. I’m not being opposed, I’m being ignored. That’s the real opposite of persuasion.

I and my work are non factors.

Maybe in the distant future when this era’s Internet is downloaded and parsed by an AI, my memetic legacy if any will be noted and recorded, that is I’ll be recognized as having gone on record ahead of the curve, assuming the future plays out remotely like I expect, but little else.

These things I’ve written about will come to pass, or will be taken care of being of people far better at influencing the mob than I am, people who already agree with me and don’t need my logic to inform them.

People like you for example. Clearly you have more patience and more people skills. I can’t even drive or make a phone call. All I can do is write and I’ve been writing the wrong things, especially considering my social position, or lack there of.

I have ~1000 followers on G+and around 500 daily visitors to my blog but 99% of my comments come from a group of readers who I can count on my fingers. A group that tellingly doesn’t even include my family. Though in their defense we speak in person.

The people who agree with me don’t feel the need to read my work because they agree, the people who don’t have no desire to challenge their views, and if they do they’ll pick a more meaningful socially opponent than me.

The sad fact is when it comes to the expression of a fact or piece of logic, it really doesn’t matter what is said, but rather who is saying it. This fact is sad because if I had believed that when I was 16 maybe I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to explain the obvious to the oblivious.

There are over a billion English speaking people on earth. And exactly one person has downloaded my book on smashwords and no one has reviewed my book on amazon.

I’ve gotten one outsider comment on my blog in the last 6 months, and the ads on my blog made literally less than a penny’s worth of bitcoin in a similar amount of time.

The offhand remarks of even the most vapid super model or brain damaged athlete or drug addled rock star influence humanity more than my entire body of work.

My only consolation is that being open minded has allowed me to join sides with the winning team (technology.) The world will turn out as I expect or better or I’ll be too dead to care. Though I must admit it probably will have nothing to do with my efforts.

I am rebuilding my life and trying to recover from or work around my disabilities. I’m in my 30s but I feel about 15 in terms of life progress, only I’ve already had my chances to build social circles and accidentally start a family.

Any progress I make now is going to be fiscal or deeply personal.

Sell your soul for a glass of water?

“I sold out long before you ever even heard my name.“ ~Tool

I am beginning to understand why people of means are callous and ignorant, or at least act as though they are.

It’s primarily because I think that low cost (owing to information’s unique supply logistics) intellectual pleasures can’t compete with the gene subsidized sensual pleasures which, by and large, require resources to experience.

A good example is comparing the most boring hike in the woods with the best artistic depiction of a hike in the woods.

No writer, no painter, can truly compete with the pleasure channels accessible only via the senses.

Of course this line is blurring as various forms of simulation get more adept at fooling those senses and processes to give up their dopamine reward for simulated experience. Which is why games and movies are so popular. (And why advertisers own you like so much livestock.) They are dopaminergically speaking, close to the real thing. But sadly they cost resources as well, at least initially in terms of equipment purchase and constantly by way of feeding that equipment. Environment and content costs being the minimum.

Manipulating the brain’s built-in environment renderer is the ideal solution. As per lucid dreaming. But sadly, that’s a single-player exercise for the time being and such an option doesn’t exist for a wide range of minds, until such time as technology opens the door.

I say all this because I find myself in a situation where I am simply waiting for my body to motivate me. Sitting here writing about what I think in the meantime. Because I can’t afford to go do what I would do, resources permitting, and I’ve just about exhausted the acceptable (to this brain state) and available intellectual stimuli afforded me by my status and economic picture.

So here I sit, waiting until outside stimuli or bodily needs present a sensual opportunity with a profit margin in excess of writing about the wait.

That this is a viable solution speaks to my comments above because simple passing hunger or thirst, if nothing else, will in practically no time at all accomplish this goal. And when I am done feeding my pet body, my enteric nervous system will no doubt be affected, feeding back into my mood, which will become congruent with this new state, allowing for a different set of options. Lather, rinse, repeat. Until such time that this bodily need becomes sleep and I experience that disconcerting yet all-too-common time jump we all experience, and its fleeting glimpse into a world of infinite variability and vividness, which really utterly dwarfs reality in every positive subjective sense. At least for me. Maybe your dreams are hollow and dim.

Until such time as we can truly harness the gene to reflect the will of our memes, the gene will utterly dominate the lives of humanity. And those who have learned to (or lucked into the resources allowing them to) placate and manipulate those genes toward the end of influencing the memes will continue to rule humanity.

Oh, look! Bitterness and frustration. New(ish) mental states. I wonder how long till the desire for a simple glass of water will shut out my rage?

Sidethought: Is this why so many faiths include fasting and other forms of body denial? To drown out with their own hunger, thirst, lust and the cries of all those people they are praying for instead of actually helping? Could this be a factor in the many instances of religion seeming to inspire psychopathic behaviors?

“Power over a man’s subsistence amounts to power over his will.” ~Hamilton, Alexander

“You can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.” ~Norman Borlaug

Not My Country

This country tis of thee

Sick land of misery

Of thee I sing

Land where the richest thrive

Land where the poorest die

From every mountainside

Apathy rings

 

My native country , thee

Land where you lied to me

I sing of you

Land where we can’t survive

Buy food and stay alive

From every mountainside

Let real truth ring

 

Let music swell the breeze

Let all the homeless freeze

I cry for you

Land where the dollar sign

Is seen in every line

If you can’t earn a dime

Too bad for you

 

Freedom is a dead word

It’s value now absurd

To thee I sing

Land where my father died

Believing all the lies

From every mountainside

Let shame be seen

~Jayn Cameron

Thought ramble.

(Perspective disclaimer.)

Anyway… The human body is a space suit for the brain. A way for the brain to link to the world yes, but primarily a way to survive in said world.

There are three ways to expand your sphere of influence in this context. To adapt the environment to yourself, find an environment already suitable and travel there, or adapt yourself the environment. Everything that has meaning about a person is in the brain. I am firm on that point. I am not my arms or legs or liver, but I most definitely am my memories, my feelings, and my experience. The only reason my body is remotely me is because what is really me extends into those things. My nerves.

Ok so we can look at a person and we are so used to looking at people that we come to think that this is what people, which are brains as I just explained, look like. But what if another kind of brain evolved? What if other brains took different options? What would a brain in a suitable setting look like? What would a brain adapted for life on land look like? The answers are terrifying because these models of life aren’t fantastical or alien they are ubiquitous and completely disregarded at best or shamelessly exterminated or consumed by us.

Indeed I’m having the worry that intelligent feeling life on this planet might be more common than unfeeling life if you simply expand  your scale a bit. I am not the first to have this idea. It’s in fiction everywhere. But this is the first time I thought about it from a purely anatomical perspective. If you hardened my neurons against the elements and made them more physically flexible, or maybe even blended them with muscle tissue so they could individually contract, what would that look like? A blob? A large moving mold? A jellyfish? And aspen grove? I’m looking around at my world from the brain’s perspective and I’m realize that half of what I see could be brains that have found various ways to dispense with their body.

What if the skull has cut us off? I don’t like where this is going.

As I’ve realized before the only thing special about us in this context materially is the ability to exit our biosphere completely. But what if that’s only because our condition leaves us totally blind to a far superior method of escape? What if the answer to the Fermi paradox is that radio is completely crappy as a communications tool, and that space ships or physical travel is an equally crappy travel mechanism? What if they are watching us for resurgence? Would you bother talking to an anthill? What if the thickness of the skull prevents reception? What if that’s why ancient cultures cut holes in their skulls and did other gruesome things to their heads? What if that is the real purpose of a crown? What if that is the source of power and divine right? What if that is how warriors came to be rulers again and again not because of the fighting but because of the head injury?

I’m tempted to not share these things since each would be a story idea maybe and I’m not supposed to share and I’m so powerfully broke. But whatever, I love writing and I love talking and fate has kept me alive so far. Failure to gain is not the same as loss. Maybe someone will help me.

Why study consciousness?

Inspired by:

(I could do a post on virtually every statement and question in this video but my writing doesn’t profit me, and the world you’ve created requires that I seek profit. You people don’t even comment. So if you want more than the bare minimum I write to keep myself sane and entertained, help me to profit from my work, or share your profits with me.)

There are subjective answers and such but for me the best practical answer is that consciousness informs ethics. We don’t care about sawing a rock in half because we all agree it has no experience, no consciousness, no qualia. We care about sawing a kitten in half because it is not like a rock in this way, and a brief look at human monstrosity and the actions of sadistic psychopathy depends intrinsically it would seem on a situation where the object of torment is somehow down graded in only one universal way: Being less conscious. Being less human. Being more animal, or being more false.

So not only is the study of consciousness important, it is in what one might call the hierarchy of endeavors actually paramount.

For there are two axiomatic features to existence which give it “meaning” or “value” universally and those features are existence, and enjoyability, neither of which are possible without consciousness.

Assuming a rock doesn’t have an internal experience, then in a way that rock doesn’t exist. There is no experience/consciousness for “Mr. Rock” therefor there can be no existence and no enjoyment/suffering.

It’s a popular idea well explored in fiction that one must consider two things of any action, and one is axiomatically more important than the other: can we do a thing and should we do a thing. Understanding consciousness is the very foundation of how we determine what should be done.

One could very easily argue that the core problem with the world today is a pandemic lack of empathy, and what is empathy but the recognition of consciousness in others coupled with value for it? And could it not also be argued that this recognition is linked to degree of similarity assessment. Such as is lacking with the cliche racist idea (or with how we treat arbitrarily selected animal species) “well they don’t feel pain the way we(I) do.”

I think a system wind fascination with this idea is part of our fascination with zombies. Zombies are humans minus experience, freeing us from all constraint that awareness of secondary experience bounds us to.

So to sum up the study of consciousness is the very core of what it means to be human if you define human in the same sort of sense as you define what it is to be humane.

See also: https://plus.google.com/+BrandonSergent/posts/GyYMZ4wLZN4