We live our lives in part through our memories of significant events, misremembered as they might be, even imaginatively created. Yet we try to be remembered and rehash them consistently, often (where the hell was I going with this?) to the discomfort of significant others. 

Biden's Suicidal Efforts

Destroying America's energy independence.

Destroying America's sovereignty by actionizing the "open boarders" ideal.

Managed the worst military/civilian exodus from a foreign country ever.

Engineered efforts to further restrict freedom of speech through the creation of a Ministry of Truth-like governance board.

Instigated plan to divert veteran health benefits to serve illegal immigrants.

War

 Covert operations that are unattributable and unacknowledged.

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, Tales from the Pentagon, Rosa Brooks, 2016.

The Philosophy of a Fool - 2

As I continue to read Philip Goff's book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe and as I dwell on the fine-tuning argument he makes. Does not "fine-tuning" imply intelligent design and consequently conscious thought?

Given an infinite universe at least 13+ years old as the Earth a finite speck, isn't it hubris to so consider it all for humanity? I question the primary importance of humans in an infinite universe.

See https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/7507271072988730846/273965580282445020 and https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blog/post/edit/7507271072988730846/1951162158017969113 and the following:

If an Omni-God exists, who or which created or caused to be created the human species, then the obvious question is "why?" and not "how come?". Whatever reason you might give can be readily countered with asking why didn't he/she/it just use his/her/its powers to elimate the need? Was God bored, or lonely...?

From Why? Does the Univerxe Have a Purpose, Philip Goff. "But when it comes to a God defined and morally perfect, the Cosmic Sin Intuition does cast considerable doubt on Her existence. If it is Immoeral for an all-powerful being to create a universe like our own, then either our universe lacks a creator, or that creator is not all-powerful and perfectly good. Either way, the Omni-God does not exist."

In a separate paragraph he posits:

    "To my mind, the point at which these arguments fall apart is when they attempt to demonstrate that the timeless/necessary foundation of being must have the properties of the Omni-God: all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good. If we are rationally compelled to accept the existence of a timeless, necessarily existent entity, why not suppose that that entity is the universe itself, rather than postulating something supernatural outside of the universe?" (my emphasis)

Roger Penrose in a 2023 interview made it very clear that AI are not conscious.

Consciousness: A dog knows when it is hungry, but does it know that it knows it is hungry?

Politics, Right v Left by Michael Shermer

 

From Michael Shermer’s 2011 book The Believing Brain, from the chapter on political beliefs

In his book A Conflict of Visions, the economist Thomas Sowell argues that these two clusters of moral values are intimately linked to the vision one holds about human nature, either as constrained (conservative) or unconstrained (liberal), and so he calls these the Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained Vision. Sowell shows that controversies over a number of seemingly unrelated social issues such as taxes, welfare, social security, health care, criminal justice, and war repeatedly reveal a consistent ideological dividing line along these two conflicting visions. “If human options are not inherently constrained, then the presence of such repugnant and disastrous phenomena virtually cries out for explanation—and for solutions. But if the limitations and passions of man himself are at the heart of these painful phenomena, then what requires explanation are the ways in which they have been avoided or minimized.”

Which of these natures you believe is true will largely shape which solutions to social ills will be most effective. “In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institutions, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off.” It’s not that conservatives think that we’re evil and liberals believe we’re good. “Implicit in the unconstrained vision is the notion that the potential is very different from the actual, and that means exist to improve human nature toward its potential, or that such means can be evolved or discovered, so that man will do the right thing for the right reason, rather than for ulterior psychic or economic rewards,” Sowell elaborates. “Man is, in short, ‘perfectible’—meaning continually improvable rather than capable of actually reaching absolute perfection.”¹

In his masterpiece analysis of human nature, The Blank Slate, the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker re-labels these two visions the Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision, and reconfigures them slightly: “The Utopian Vision seeks to articulate social goals and devise policies that target them directly: economic inequality is attacked in a war on poverty, pollution by environmental regulations, racial imbalances by preferences, carcinogens by bans on food additives. The Tragic Vision points to the self-interested motives of the people who would implement these policies—namely, the expansion of their bureaucratic fiefdoms—and to their ineptitude at anticipating the myriad consequences, especially when the social goals are pitted against millions of people pursuing their own interests.” The distinct Left-Right divide consistently cleaves the (respectively) Utopian Vision and Tragic Vision along numerous specific contests, such as the size of the government (big versus small), the amount of taxation (high versus low), trade (fair versus free), healthcare (universal versus individual), environment (protect it versus leave it alone), crime (caused by social injustice versus caused by criminal minds), the constitution (judicial activism for social justice versus strict constructionism for original intent), and many others.²

Personally I agree with Sowell and Pinker that the unconstrained vision is utopian, which in its original Greek means “no place.” An unconstrained utopian vision of human nature largely accepts the blank slate model and believes that custom, law, and traditional institutions are sources of inequality and injustice and should therefore be heavily regulated and constantly modified from the top down; it holds that society can be engineered through government programs to release the natural unselfishness and altruism within people; it deems physical and intellectual differences largely to be the result of unjust and unfair social systems that can be re-engineered through social planning, and therefore people can be shuffled across socioeconomic classes that were artificially created through unfair and unjust political, economic, and social systems inherited from history. I believe that this vision of human nature exists in literally No Place.

Although some liberals embrace just such a vision of human nature, I strongly suspect that when pushed on specific issues most liberals realize that human behavior is constrained to a certain degree—especially those educated in the biological and evolutionary sciences who are aware of the research in behavior genetics—so the debate turns on degrees of constraint. Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories of constrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of human nature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this the Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of human nature. In keeping with the research from behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, let’s put a number on that constraint at 40 to 50 percent. In the Realistic Vision, human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures.

A Realistic Vision rejects the blank slate model that people are so malleable and responsive to social programs that governments can engineer their lives into a great society of its design, and instead believes that family, custom, law, and traditional institutions are the best sources for social harmony. The Realistic Vision recognizes the need for strict moral education through parents, family, friends, and community because people have a dual nature of being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, greedy and generous, and so we need rules and guidelines and encouragement to do the right thing. The Realistic Vision acknowledges that people vary widely both physically and intellectually—in large part because of natural inherited differences—and therefore will rise (or fall) to their natural levels. Therefore governmental redistribution programs are not only unfair to those from whom the wealth is confiscated and redistributed, but the allocation of the wealth to those who did not earn it cannot and will not work to equalize these natural inequalities.

I think most moderates on both the left and the right embrace a Realistic Vision of human nature. They should, as should the extremists on both ends, because the evidence from psychology, anthropology, economics, and especially evolutionary theory and its application to all three of these sciences supports the Realistic Vision of human nature. There are at least a dozen lines of evidence that converge to this conclusion:³

1. The clear and quantitative physical differences among people in size, strength, speed, agility, coordination, and other physical attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are inherited.
2. The clear and quantitative intellectual differences among people in memory, problem solving ability, cognitive speed, mathematical talent, spatial reasoning, verbal skills, emotional intelligence, and other mental attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are inherited.
3. The evidence from behavior genetics and twin studies indicating that 40 to 50 percent of the variance among people in temperament, personality, and many political, economic, and social preferences are accounted for by genetics.
4. The failed communist and socialist experiments around the world throughout the 20^th century revealed that top-down draconian controls over economic and political systems do not work.
5. The failed communes and utopian community experiments tried at various places throughout the world over the past 150 years demonstrated that people by nature do not adhere to the Marxian principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
6. The power of family ties and the depth of connectedness between blood relatives. Communities who have tried to break up the family and have children raised by others provides counter evidence to the claim that “it takes a village” to raise a child. As well, the continued practice of nepotism further reinforces the practice that “blood is thicker than water.”
7. The principle of reciprocal altruism—I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine”—is universal; people do not by nature give generously unless they receive something in return, even if what they receive is social status.
8. The principle of moralistic punishment—I’ll punish you if you do not scratch my back after I have scratched yours—is universal; people do not long tolerate free riders who continually take but almost never give.
9. The almost universal nature of hierarchical social structures—egalitarianism only works (barely) among tiny bands of hunter-gatherers in resource-poor environments where there is next to no private property, and when a precious game animal is hunted extensive rituals and religious ceremonies are required to insure equal sharing of the food.
10. The almost universal nature of aggression, violence, and dominance, particularly on the part of young males seeking resources, women, and especially status, and how status-seeking in particular explains so many heretofore unexplained phenomena, such as high risk taking, costly gifts, excessive generosity beyond one’s means, and especially attention seeking.
11. The almost universal nature of within-group amity and between-group enmity, wherein the rule-of-thumb heuristic is to trust in-group members until they prove otherwise to be distrustful, and to distrust out-group members until they prove otherwise to be trustful.
12. The almost universal desire of people to trade with one another, not for the selfless benefit of others or the society, but for the selfish benefit of one’s own kin and kind; it is an unintended consequence that trade establishes trust between strangers and lowers between-group enmity, as well as produces greater wealth for both trading partners and groups.

The founders of our Republic established our system of government as they did based on this Realistic Vision of human nature, knowing full well that the tension between individual liberty and social cohesiveness could never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and so the moral pendulum swings Left and Right and politics is played mostly between the two 40-yard lines of the political playing field. This tension between freedom and security, in fact, would explain why third parties have such a difficult time finding a toe-hold on the political rock face of America, and typically crater after an election, or cower in the shadows of two behemoths that have come to define the Left-Right system. Even in Europe, where third, fourth, and even fifth parties receive substantial support at the polls, they are, in fact, barely distinguishable from the parties on either side of them, and political scientists find that they can easily classify them as largely emphasizing either liberal or conservative values. Haidt’s data on the differing foundational values of American liberals and conservatives, in fact, generalizes to all countries that have been tested, and the chart lines from country to country are virtually indistinguishable from one another.

I believe that the Realistic Vision of human nature is what James Madison was thinking of when he penned (literally) his famous dictum in the Federalist Paper Number 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.⁴ If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Abraham Lincoln also had something like the Realistic Vision in mind when he wrote in his first inaugural address in March of 1861, on the eve of the bloodiest conflict in our nation’s history that he knew would unleash the demons within: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”⁵

References

1. Sowell, Thomas. 1987. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. New York: Basic Books, 24-25.
2. Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking, 290-291.
3. I present this data in much greater detail in two of my books: Shermer, Michael. 2003. The Science of Good and Evil. New York: Henry Holt/Times Books. And: Shermer, Michael. 2008. The Mind of the Market. New York: Henry Holt/Times Books.
4. Madison, James. 1788. “The Federalist No. 51: The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments.” Independent Journal, Wednesday, February 6.
5. Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O.: for sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O., 1989; Bartleby.com, 2001. https://www.bartleby.com/124/.

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The Jewish Question

 Why anti-semitism? The reasons most frequently given are not reasons but elicit further questions. According to Microsoft Bing's Copilot, "One reason is that Jews have served as scapegoats for over two thousand years, meaning they are irrationally blamed for societal problems." And that scapegoating generates conspiracy theories. That is not a reason but more a partial definition of anti-semitism. And finally, theological differences between Judaism and Christianity. 

Would is strange to me is that the Jewish historical story in the Old Testament is studied and believed by most Christians as though it were their story and not solely that of the Jews. Talk about cultural appropriation. .

From ChatGPT 12/23/2023. Supersessionism, also known as replacement theology or fulfillment theology, is a Christian theological doctrine that holds the Christian Church has succeeded the nation of Israel as God’s chosen people. This belief asserts that the New Covenant through Jesus Christ has superseded the Mosaic covenant, which was exclusive to the Jews. Historically, many Christian theologians, including early Church Fathers like Justin Martyr and Augustine of Hippo, were supersessionist. The doctrine has been a core tenet of various Christian denominations, although some modern Christian communities and churches have moved away from it in the interest of Christian–Jewish reconciliation12.

Learn more

1en.wikipedia.org2theopedia.com3simple.wikipedia.org

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The Philosophy of a Fool

 Morphic Resonance (sheldrake.org)- Memory fields involving behaviors, habits, and other non-genetic forms are passed through evolution as memories. We are connected "across time."

Panpsychicism - experiments show that most humans are aware that someone or some people is staring at them. Also, about 50 percent of dogs and cats are aware that their owners are returning to the home in advance of any possibility of seeing, hearing, or smelling them.
Why are we here? If our universe continues to behave as it has in the observable past, our sun will explode in about 5 billion years and, obviously, our earth will cease to exist as we know it. All life will have been extinguished.

David Hand: dark data, AI. 

Rupert Sheldrake - Author and Biologist

What If there was no universal origin, like no Big Bang?
I just began reading Why? The Purpose of the Universe by Philip Goff, Oxford University Press, 2023. While I'm only halfway through the first chapter, he has repeatedly said that he intends to show why he believes that the universe has a purpose. So, at this point, I'm asking myself, does not "purpose" imply intent? As far as I know, the universe, disregarding panpsychism (a different discussion), is material. Objects of matter do not possess the mental acuity or consciousness that would produce an intention. Consider a decorated Christmas tree. It certainly serves a purpose but within itself, it does not have a purpose. The thinking, conscious individual who erected and decorated the tree had a purpose. Likewise, the universe cannot have a purpose, but does appear there is the possibility that if the universe is not infinite, its creator is purposeful. Scientists, for the most part, believe the universe to be infinite. Consequently, given such an unfathomable size, who the hell are we to question the universal purpose or expect our minuscule lives to be of value.
In Chapter 2, Phillip goes on to develop his Value-Selection Hypothesis by describing the complexity necessary for a universe that created and sustains life as we know it. Thus, cosmic purpose. Why so complex? Why not create a very simple universe and then create life forms that thrive in such a universe? In any case, The question seems to be why is there life? If life has a value, to whom or to what? Of course, from our perspective, life is valuable, yet as a whole, without purpose. The perceived purpose and value exist only at the individual level.

Philip refers to our universe as having value. That value is fundamental. And that value is the purpose. If he means value to humans, why would we be singled out about all other previous, current, and future life forms?  And regarding panpsychism, how do we know that humans possess the most advanced form of consciousness? Hubris?
 
Regarding the fine-tuning of the universe, it seems that during creation the creating entity would have made it more perfect, compressible, and simpler given the purpose that humans experience value. Since there were no life forms in our universe before there were life forms, why create them anyway? Something, by nature, just has to exist? Self-creating?

Philip Goof rejects the multiverse theory in part because the other universes would not be fine-tuned to life as we know it. Why could not others contain the exact same elements in the exact same balance? Or, why could they (who or what is “they”?), with different elemental constants, create and sustain a quite different life form dependent on different constants. Say, a water world.

Evolution of brain = survival not accuracy. Once you are afraid the brain will do anything to protect you to include memory loss and tunnel vision.

Memories are fragile and inaccurate. Each time we remember an event it is modified by our current selves and restored as changed. Our brains create anew.
Does consciousness exist outside of the brain? Is the brain only a tool that permits us to experience consciousness?
 
Free will: biology determines what choices we make. Early life experiences in great part affect the adult frontal cortex and predetermine decisions/actions. Character is predetermined by levels in hormones (genetic). The development of the frontal cortex can override, to some degree, the effect of genes. Experience and environment do not change your genes. It changes the on/off switches of the gees. Regulatory controls.
If there is no free will how can we be accountable for our actions?
 
Anti-matter is the exact opposite of matter.
 
Atoms only appear to exist when a conscious observer looks at it.
Physics-biology-chemistry isn’t enough to explain why I know I am.
 
Why do we exist? Why does the universe exist or at least appear to exist?
 

 The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. 

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

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