Tag: Life

Critical Differences and Why I am Alone

 

“Once I am human I will talk to you about things that are of little or no importance! I will avoid religion and politics because if we disagree, you will not like me any more!”

~Mal, Borderlands 2

 

Most everyone I’ve ever lost so far I’ve lost due to disagreement. I don’t mean just mates. It’s the price of asking after things that truly matter.

If my mind was composed of ice cream preference and game strategy perhaps it would be easier for I and those I speak to to tolerate disagreement.

But I choose to live in spaces where choices matter. I choose to ask real questions, with real answers, that would have real consequences.

I did not have my self-esteem systematically crushed as the vast majority of my peers did. I am therefore incapable of flippantly dismissing my view of truth simply to fit in and play nice.

I only retain friends because they are in parity with me on the subjects that matter, or their awareness is superior to my own and they shape my opinion to match theirs, or I am unaware of a critical difference.

These differences mean life and death. Torture and joy. I cannot be friends with someone who ultimately, whether they are aware of it or not, are agents of death and pain.

I’m routinely called arrogant and a host of other negative things for this and my culture has seen fit to isolate me, leaving me in the hands of my family because of this. Offering only a trickle of food money as a token gesture of solidarity with me as a member of the species. Otherwise I feel like I’m in solitary confinement.

This sense of being alive, this sense of ethical responsibility, is openly treated as a mental illness. They tell me to treat life as a gift, but what they mean is juggle faberge eggs like they do, confident that either they are immortal, or that death and disaster will only arrive after they have left.

They prove this every time they get into a car. If they really thought life was a gift they’d act so differently. They’d act more like me. They’d respect the lives of others instead of dismissing the suffering of those same others.

It’s ironic and paradoxical, but one of the reasons disagreements with me are so critical is because I’ve trimmed the fat. I am more able to tolerate trivial and cultural differences than most other humans. Race, faith, social status, nationality, age—these things don’t matter to me as long as you are an agent of joy and life.

I am seen by some as cold and mean precisely because I feel so keenly and try so hard to be nice, not just to the people in my field of vision or those that “deserve” it, but all people, everywhere, forever.

Everyone is so quick to give me a life lesson or ignore me as a toxic failure precisely because I have so much to teach and have come so close to the ethical ideal.

All things considered, I believe I have averted more suffering and death, and enabled more joy and life on balance than anyone else could have under the same conditions. But the problem is so wildly complicated, and each life so unique, that I’ll never be able to prove it.

At best I can only hope that the tools I try to share are picked up by people under better conditions, sufficient to contribute to a positive feedback spiral, hopefully reaching, at some point, a suffering and death escape velocity.

Or I’m just wildly insane and full of toxic memes, and my culture is right to more or less quarantine me. And just in case that’s so, I always try to advocate for mercy and forgiveness for others. So that if that is the case I’ll be worthy of it myself, so that I can continue to be thankful, at least, for things not being much, much worse.

Update: 2016-04-22 0337 PM

I’ve been asked to make a list of those positions which tend to alienate.

Let’s start by saying that philosophically I’m essentially a Utilitarian.

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

For more complete less personal version of this list with reasons and links:

Emperor Innomen?

I personally believe: (In/That)

  • Nuclear power is the safest best form of power so far.
  • AI should be preemptively given full citizen rights.
  • Universal suffrage.
  • Genetic engineering/GMO/Synbio.
  • Geoengineering.
  • A UBI.
  • A cap on wealth.
  • Cloning and cloned meat for food.
  • Selling sex should be like selling any other service.
  • The removal of race, religion, age, and gender status as policy designations.
  • Nationalizing infrastructural enterprises that are too big to fail.
  • Permitting unlicensed fully disclosed medical care.
  • Corporate execution as a legal judgement option.
  • Cryogenics.
  • Punitive prisons are bad policy and ethically repugnant.
  • Political parties should be treated legally like religions.
  • Officially enforced monogamy and all marriage law should abolished.
  • Gun law should be abolished.
  • Drug law should be abolished.
  • Patents and copyright should be abolished.
  • State and local law should be abolished.
  • Crime should be treated as only mental illness and/or desperation.
  • The wage gap is more a product of disposition than oppression.
  • LNT model is wrong.
  • Vengeance is wrong.
  • Life likely didn’t originate on Earth.
  • Communal schooling should be abolished.
  • The brain in some can act like an organic transceiver.
  • Time is an illusion.
  • The hidden variable theory is correct.
  • There is no free will.
  • The MRA movement has many legitimate grievances.
  • Democracy objectively might not be a good idea.
  • Deterrence is mostly a fig leaf for sadism.
  • Some species should be wiped out or reduced to freezer samples/records.
  • Parents do not own their children.
  • Children are oppressed second class citizens deserving of full rights.
  • The animal kingdom needs to be radically reshaped to end suffering.

This list is likely incomplete or will change over time.

Why we’ll always need currency.

Where does currency come from? Ultimately it comes from the need to exchange items indirectly. Why indirectly? Because direct exchange is barter and has limitations which create (or are) resistance. Money comes from the needs created by the weaknesses of direct barter. Barter in turn comes from the mammalian strategy of communication and socialization. Organization itself is a step towards diversity because that’s where advantage is found.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/the-benefits-of-a-long-childhood

Organizational life implies interaction. Interaction is always an exchange. Even a hug or a hand shake has a cost. There will always be supply and demand, since not all demands are material there will always be diversity of supply which means a basis for trade, the long term intolerable weaknesses of barter can only be overcome by currency of some sort or by stasis/homogeneity.

Any optimal society has money/currency. A way to render an abstraction as tangible. A way to externalize commitment and desire. A contract for example is a form of barter. Sure you could try to tolerate the weaknesses of barter but you’re only setting yourself up for either universal stagnation (as a result of trying to prevent…) or re-capture by covert capitalists. (What do you think the mafia/yakuza/triads are? They are competing governments.)

Economy is just an abstracted way of saying movement. Typically expressed physically as matter or energy traveling from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration along the path of least resistance.

Creating these paths in advance and waiting for reality to take them according to an imagined superior state, leading to an objective, leading to a plan for accomplishing that objective, is how one controls and shapes reality. Each of these steps can be debated forever. That’s why we have to actually try stuff.

Societies without money have been tried. They were first after all. It only works in conditions of extreme homogeneity, because only at the simplest levels can barter suffice because of a lack of diversity among goods/services/demand. Simple of course need not mean small, or boring. You can have simple and entertaining huge things. There have been massive barter economies. But they were intrinsically disadvantaged and quickly trumped by the greater diversity tolerance/exploitation of competing systems. Systems which developed from within the older systems. Even the church was forced to adapt or die.

History can be seen as a constant war and progression. A war between social inertia and innovation created diversity. A progression of capabilities growing out of growing tolerance for diversity. Progressiveness vs conservatism. Diversity will always win over the long term because it produces new opportunity/ability or exploits previously unexploitable opportunity.

http://swankivy.com/shenanigans/labels/evolve.jpg

But of course one can reject the earth as it is or ever has been as an argument. One can have faith in imagined superior alternatives because being an imaginative construct it is flawless and infinitely malleable.

So instead of going up in scale, let’s go down. To start with, life is activity. And activity is movement. Like movement explained above. A rock is lifeless because no part of it changes or moves “on its own” (whatever that ultimately means philosophically.) I can’t sit on a rock and get it to hatch, I can’t plant a rock and get a tree. If I could, then it wasn’t a rock, it was an egg or a seed.

The moment it sprouted roots or started to hatch it, by definition had to have an economy.

But let’s go a little lower. If it moved/reacted at all it still had an economy, even if it wasn’t alive. Like if it was made of dry ice and I dropped it in water. Now you have a temperature exchange and phase/material/chemical economy. Go lower and everything has an economy, because it’s all moving.

The lack of economy is a perceptual limitation or an illusion. Like when a tree appears to not be growing because it’s not happening fast enough for you to register. Or when pitch appears to be a solid because of its rate of flow.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/07/18/pitch_drop_experiment_video_science_world_aflutter_after_experiment_pays.html

or lower…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

It can be argued that existence itself is movement, or vibration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

Are you hearing me yet? If you eliminate movement at any point you merely create an insulator around which movement must occur. This is the base reason why external discipline is always doomed to fail and why prohibition creates black markets and why it takes more voltage to get around, or through resistance, etc etc etc, including why you can never dispense with economy/movement/money without hideous cost. (Like saying becoming an inert chunk of rock.)

http://www.lifegem.com/ Ironic really, the only way to mostly escape the economy is to become something often used as a form of currency. XD

Even the body has an oxygen economy. How that oxygen is distributed changes based on the needs of the market/organism as a whole.

Sure, you could make an organism that doesn’t need oxygen. Anaerobic bacteria for example, which in turn just have a simpler and far less capable/diverse economy.

The planet’s surface has a water economy, upon which I modeled my economic solution (ubt/cap) because it’s a proven system. It also has a magnetic economy powered by fission, which is great for us.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field#Importance

All of it is running out. This movement appears to be unidirectional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

The entirety of observable reality is the progression or movement from one state to another. The only point at which we can be free of this is the last point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe#Big_Freeze_or_heat_death