Category: Philosophy

Root Your Own Brain

Free will may logically and physically be an illusion.

But there is another way that you are not the master of your own mind that is useful to know.

There are three huge forces at work in your body besides your consciousness. Probably others.

1. Your symbiotic systems.
2. Your enteric nervous system.
3. Your unconscious brain processes.

In order to root your own brain you currently need to spend a great deal of time learning how and implementing it.

Meditation, biology, neurobiology, lucid dreaming, neuropsychology, public relations.

The cost of learning to do so is high in terms of time and effort. However, realizing you aren’t (yet?) in full command has immediate benefits. And the concept applied to choices can carry you in a more comfortable direction.

You may not need to learn to command them, to make peace with them. This is the real source of ancient concepts like unifying “mind body and spirit.” A modern program of internal peacemaking is possible.

There are a seemingly infinite number of variables no question, but you may chance on solutions easily if you at least begin looking. And they might feedback. Gains empowering further gains.

I’ve noticed that my mood is best over the long term when I try to cultivate a concept of compassion for all the “people” trapped inside me. That sounds weird. Let me explain. I use people first of all just to cultivate compassion. If I say animals or systems or pets even, we tend to dial back compassion, that’s unwise. Also, humans are wired to relate to other humans, which means that a metaphor using hypothetical people is easier to process.

Now, the enteric nervous system is a living thing. It’s my guts. It feels things, it has nerves and does a lot of information processing. Having it is like being linked to a large blind and deaf pet snake. What and how I eat is really the only substantive way I have to be good to it. And I should, just generally, but also because when I am, it in turn is good to me.

There is a scientific basis for this:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

Every aspect of your mind also has a time element. It’s best to realize there is a past self, a future self, and a present self, and they all have links to each other. Your past self for example has made decisions which your present self is now dealing with. Your future self is making requests of your present self at all times as well. You will eventually be your future self so it’s wise to listen, however, you ARE your present self and it is the only self truly capable of feeling. You can’t feel the future until it’s the present. You can remember feeling from your past self, and memories themselves can cause feeling in the present self as well.

It sounds complicated but really it’s intuitive after you think about it and sleep on it a few times.

Why I say that brings us back to the people inside us. There are literally parts of your brain that are in a sense very separate from you. Like your guts, they can be thought of as organs and their feedback takes every possible cognitive form. The phrase five senses is extremely misleading. You actually have thousands. These thousands mesh to form your entire reality. Every modular and integrated bit of your sensorium is composed of sensations which are senses. They just aren’t direct linkages with the outside world. But they are built on that data and are thus every bit as valid.

Your sense of physical orientation for example is a sixth direct sense. Your time sense is an indirect one. Your sensation of proportion, the distance from your eye to your hand for example. And on and on. EVERY aspect of what you think of as reality come from these brain “organs” which aren’t always discreet organs. This goes to neuropsychology. You don’t need to understand all that to make use of it. You can just realize that you have a whole bunch of back brain processes going on all the time and they don’t all happen instantly.

Memory and learning require sleep cycles. Remember the compassion and people inside thing? Well, imagine there’s a second person, a second mind, trapped in your mind, and it only gets to be awake when you’re asleep. If you don’t give it good sleep it will be miserable, and it’s misery is partly your misery. Be good to it and it will be good to you.

Don’t let your future self tell you to pound coffee because you want career advancement for example. Being awake is a short term benefit anyway. Being awake or asleep right now is hardly ever worth having a lousy memory and being unable to learn things properly later.

My system of ethics is universal externally and it recently occurred to me that I should apply it internally as well. And just aiming the concept inwards fit and inspired this essay.

I feel like it could turn into a book almost hehe. It’s such a massive subject and I feel like I can parse so many elements of the human condition in this way usefully.

I feel compelled to point out why one can accomplish with a hacked or unified mind. Extremes of human accomplishment spring to mind and there are many, but really I think the most informative is Quang Duc and other self immolators.

We know, for an indisputable objective fact, that it’s possible for a person to train themselves to not feel pain. Not everyone can do this of course in their context. But it’s important and informative to realize that it’s physically possible and has a firm basis in reality.

I share that not to scold or inspire feelings of ineptitude but to inspire with a concept of what this line of thinking might be worth to you.

Earlier I mentioned a symbiotic system as well. By this I mean all the life that lives in you that isn’t even human. Most people are aware of the bacteria in their gut and on their skin but people tend to think of it as mostly a pest when in fact it’s a protective ecosystem.

There’s good evidence that your appendix and tonsils exist to provide shelter for beneficial strains of bacteria. Some hospital born skin infections can only exist because things done at a hospital temporarily strip away that skin based ecosystem.

Now again, some compassion applies here, not in the sense that bacteria can feel, (though that is debatable imo at the colony level: https://futurism.com/bacteria-can-use-electricity-to-communicate-across-species/) but in the sense that you can choose to be either mean or nice to your bacteria.

I think it’s unwise to take a genocidal approach. And the harm done by the overuse of antibacterial soap supports that. Extend and apply this concept where ever you can. Don’t be over zealously clean or filthy. The filth thing is a factor too. The bacteria aren’t very smart. They need you to manage their civilization basically. You can’t let it turn into a giant slum because that’ll hurt it and therefore you.

It’s important to point out that all this applies to other actual people as well. This is why altruistic groups do better than selfish ones.

The Apex

See also:

Avoid my Mistakes

Your Emotions are NOT Under Your Control

Issues Index

The purpose of this post is to give a reader and myself the ability to quickly match a given social issue with our position on it.

Issues to my mind can be roughly sorted by duration or scale. For now I’m going to generate two lists then, topical and general.

Topical Issues:

Trump’s Immigration ban:

Issue Position: Trump’s Immigration Ban

Trump Election Protests:

The Trump Protests Were Stupid

Trump Generally:

Trump’s Silver Lining: Big Reasons Not to Lose Heart

General Issues: (In no particular order as yet.)

Gun control:

2nd Amendment and Related Links

Prison:

Prison

School:

The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

Kids:

The Final Underclass

Things every kid should know.

Universal Basic Income:

One Possible Solution

Nuclear Power:

Nuclear Advocacy’s Failure

The Drug War:
PR and Persuasion:

Ending and beginnings

That’s Why I Stopped

Avoid my Mistakes

The State:

An argument in favor of the state.

Your Emotions are NOT Under Your Control

This notion that emotions are controllable is shared social mythology, not science.

“Conscious emotion is in a way a red herring: the feeling and behavior prompts are surface responses the initial mechanism orchestrates … Emotions are things that happen to us rather than things we make happen. We try to manipulate our emotions all the time but all we are doing is arranging the outside world so it triggers certain emotions, we cannot control our reactions directly. “~Joseph LeDoux, Professor of Neural Science and Psychology, New York University.

We hide from it to avoid the hard problem of free will and the resulting problem with culture based on that myth.

These facts undermine virtually all of our excuses for harming others and lauding ourselves. From the work ethic to prison to democracy, to identity itself and even religion.

Sorry, you’re just a meat machine too and you live inside a great big lie. The sad fact is that OTHERS have more control over your emotions than you do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

You know… I’m reminded of the Chinese parable of hell, the one with the long chopsticks. Where in heaven they feed each other and in hell they all starve because they can’t feed themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons

Our emotions are literally a lot like that. So quit being mean to each other.

Specifically you can start by supporting a basic income and making prison tolerable.

One Possible Solution

Prison

See also: http://underlore.com/avoid-my-mistakes/

The Ethics of Adblocking

I’d just like to point out that the shadiest of behaviors in the context of digital advertising are logically ethical if you grant the premise that charging for data copies ever is ethical.

(Charging per hour to create or manage data is entirely different as that is equivalent to charging to build furniture or the like. Also privacy rights are not intellectual property law.)

Essentially, logically, you are either a hardcore intellectual property law abolitionist like myself, or you are in favor of commoditizing and privatizing every single bit. If at any point you say with regard to profit seeking shenanigans “that’s going too far” you’ve become logically inconsistent, cherry picking, and hypocritical because “muh income” is a fallacious argument you’ve already accepted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_the_sunk_cost_fallacy

Either every piece of data ever (including every individual elemental digit, letter, bit, concept, shade, or symbol) should be exposed (to protect profits) and someone’s property, or it should all be confidential (the opposite of open to perpetual “fraud” inspection) and free (as in speech and beer) where the concept of “owning” a piece of data is a contradiction in terms in the same way now that the idea of owning a letter is.

Logically, you really have to pick one. But of course humans are free to be illogical and what we have here as a result is in essence a religious conflict with an infinite range of denominations.

As an IPL abolitionist, I adblock on principal first, safety second, and mental health third.

That third one is really important and rarely if ever mentioned. Neurologically and psychologically you can’t actually disregard an ad. It gets filed and processed by your brain regardless of your conscious will. You must first see something to choose to disregard it, and by then for some brain processes it’s already too late.

(Don’t think of an elephant right now. See? Too late.)

The cumulative impact of these unwanted intrusions is harmful to cognition in my opinion. You start getting false impressions about ratios and popularity of certain concepts and new defaults form in your mind that aren’t actually majority positions. These false positions are crafted expressly to open you to further manipulation.

The preferable situation is to it impossible to own any abstraction. You may take credit for discovering or inventing it, but you don’t ever get to own it. That is, the selling of copies or access is legal but it’s also perfectly legal for the buyer to in turn sell copies as well. This would put everything in the public domain that isn’t private, like medical records and your personal stuff. Restricting the sharing that data would be handled case by case from other directions on other grounds, such as privacy violations not profit or quasi-property protections.

Any effort that literally can’t or won’t exist without the the current IPL system profit motive, wouldn’t or couldn’t, and that would be the price we pay for the utility gained on the other end of everyone being able to remix everything and all software and art and the like being collaborative.

The Trump Protests Were Stupid


cw6ulthusaairo6

The Trump protest is completely stupid and this baby’s version “my first protest” gotta start somewhere argument is horse shit.

Try starting somewhere that matters.

They DAMAGED the progressive movement by making it look like what the right and HRC/DNC has always said it was. Whiny spoiled pampered little millennial closet autocrat socialists that can’t do anything but cry till they get their way and only respect democracy when it’s rubber stamping their will.

The entire trump protester movement disagreed strongly with the following statement:

“I’d rather legitimately elect someone I dislike than illegitimately elect someone I do, because I respect democracy.”

Where were all those fuckers when the dem primary got stolen and where are they on the mindnumbingly countless other issues happening then and now that BADLY fucking need mass protest, like the fact that we’re the proud owners of the largest prison population ON EARTH!

What the ACTUAL fuck.

The Trump protesters might as well have been paid for by the Koch brothers. They couldn’t possibly have been more helpful to the 1%.

It was pathetic and stupid and quite literally fascist.

Also people whining about the popular vote need to read a fucking civics book. The reason we have the college is to keep a handful of gentrified cities/states from ruling the rest of the country from on high gilded-age style.

The point of democracy is to distribute power, not just across people but geographically as well.

Our elections aren’t anything like democratic because every single election has been minority rule. The majority ALWAYS either doesn’t vote or voted for someone who lost.

The “popular” vote has NEVER won an American election. From the very beginning it’s been this way. Remember, originally it was just white male land owners. The country and this voting system has NEVER enfranchised the majority. EVER.

But funny how everyone’s quiet about it when THEIR side “wins.”

“Hypocrisy” just doesn’t even say it.

The solution is single transferable vote. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI) That won’t ever happen because progressives have ADHD and no sense of focus.

The right continues to stomp us because while we fight over different futures, they are fighting for the one shared past.

underlore.com/liberal-hate/

Thanksgiving 2016

Thanksgiving is a difficult time for those of us who do have perspective or those of us who adhere with conviction to social rituals.

Both can apply of course and to those poor souls I wish proportional good luck.

The hardship of the latter is logistical and often emotional. The pressure of putting on or attending the event can be substantial to put it mildly. Many people feel quite forced, and some literally are if they are under 18 or are otherwise beholden.

This pressure (ironically thankfully) doesn’t apply to me. My true family is quite small. My extended family for one reason or another lives entirely separate lives from mine. Likely this is a good thing as our extreme differences would only bring us pain were we forced to be together.

The second hardship however, perspective, is for better or worse one which most vexes me. I feel like it hits me harder than most. I could argue this as a fact by way of statistics. But justifying my use of oxygen is not the point of this writing. I simply wish to share some of my perspective to publicly announce my gratitude and to maybe help those who share something of this issue.

Things across the planet are embarrassingly grim for a species that likes to call itself “advanced.” (Click image below for merely one ironic example.)

But that’s not the whole story. Perspective isn’t just awareness of atrocity. It’s also awareness of what isn’t news. As Theodore Parker said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Accordingly, if I were capable of making a truly complete list of all the people to whom I am grateful and why, it would consume the storage capacity of the world. A list invariably leaves off names and of course memory is always incomplete anyway. I truly love my few friends and family and I’m confident they know how I feel. (Indeed, poor souls, they graciously hear about it with great frequency.) For those whom I can’t honestly say I feel love there are always degrees of positive regard.

This includes you. More than most on Earth in fact, simply by virtue of reading my blog. I am thankful to every person who has spent even a single intentional second reading my blog.

Beyond that I care about every person ever. Even the monsters. I care about everything in the universe which is capable of feeling. And I am grateful even to things which cannot. Such as the chair I’m sitting on, or the rice in my bowl, or the bowl itself. I am grateful to the humans that provide me these things, and that list is extensively long to a person with perspective. Very possibly even so long that it encompasses all humanity.

Think about every human being whose actions, inaction, choices, and nature contributed to transforming sunlight and dirt (and of course I am grateful for the sunlight and dirt as well) into a delicious bite for me to enjoy and be grateful for.

Every person I angered who didn’t bash my head in with a rock, every person whose efforts made it safe to move the food from field to store, every researcher whose product kept me alive to this point, every tax payer who’s ok with a bit of their payment going toward keeping me and tens of millions of others from starving, and on and on. I’m grateful for all of you and I thank you on behalf of myself and all those who would but can’t for whatever reason.

I am grateful for every agent of pain and death reduction and joy and life magnification in existence. If you can look at your life and honestly say that you bring more joy and life than would have otherwise been here, you are a good person and have my personal approval and respect. If you do not and wish you did, then let me say you can possibly start soon and you still have my gratitude for your sincere desire to do so.

If you are an agent of pain and death however, you have my pity. I pity your victims and I pity you. The future must be terrifying for you simply because you have a shrinking place in it. Change is coming that will exponentially weaken your ability to do the harm you do. The cosmos lacks a sense of vengeance, so it’s possible that your pathology will be ultimately rewarded by life. But that only makes the choice of becoming an agent of life and joy all the more worthy of gratitude when it’s a choice. But you should hurry.

I don’t think it’ll be your choice for very much longer. I hope to see a future where causing unwanted death and pain is essentially impossible because we have constructed such a compassionate and accurate culture that the reasons for wanting to torture and end others just don’t exist any more.

And here we arrive at the real reason why I am so pandemically grateful. You are all on balance marching us towards a glorious future. A UBI is coming, the friendly AI is coming, the reactors are coming, the post-scarcity era is coming, and while you may not agree these things are good, I assure you, they are. And I thank you.