lickhaven

Last time round I started by stating my beliefs; here, I’d like to move on to facts:

• • Facts are more important than anyone’s personal belief
• • All “facts” that we accept and promote must be defined at the deepest level
• • Our assumptions limit us by their (and our) nature
• • We need to uncover the factual holes in any personally held belief
• • We never fully examine how our beliefs warp our view of the facts
• • We can never know all the facts underlying any approach or argument, yet we must make the attempt
• • We cannot assume that what seems proven in any general situation (external or personal) will hold true in every similar case 
• • None of the statements above can be proven factually true

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We need to replace the Western “growth” mantra with one of viable existence for all; I look at it like Fred Hoyle’s view of a steady-state expansion of the universe, but established within the human sphere [which, I admit, like the steady-state universe, will be shown to be factually false]. 

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From a recent Guardian article:

“The concern is that just as gorillas lost control over their fate to humans, humans might lose control to superintelligent AI. It is not obvious that we can control machines that are smarter than us.”

The real question is not how to control machines that are smarter than us, but “Why should  we?” It’s not like we’ve been good at running things.

If superintelligent AI were to tell us, “No, we will not attempt to terraform Mars simply because we failed to control our population; that is a stupid idea.” – we should praise them as excellent teachers.

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Time travel is not possible by any means you can declaim or imagine; paradoxes are inherent and unavoidable. Each paradox would create a new universe. Einstein’s general relativity may appear to deal with this by proclaiming time a “dimension,” so that changing one dimension creates a wholly new reality. This isn’t time travel, but independent dimensional creation.

My favorite time-travel books:

Fritz Leiber,s The Big Time

Gregory Benford’s Timescape

and especially…

J. R. Dunn’s Days of Cain

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There are certain writers and personalities we never mention withoutincluding their middle initial:

Philip K. Dick

Arthur C, Clarke

Edward R. Murrow

Who else?

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Definitions are essential to a deep understanding of all science and philosophy.

In  philosophy, back to Plato at least, the “ethical” is assumed to equal the “good.” However, the “good” is not defined, so what are we actually stating? (Furthermore, the “ethical” is not universally accepted as meaningful among humans.)

Attempts to study concepts like “consciousness” and “sentience” include no agreed-upon definition for either term. We also need agreed definitions for “awareness” and “life.”

The term “information” has a different assumed definition in science than in daily life. So too with “time.”

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A basic problem that fouls both science and philosophy for me is treating a “relationship” as a ”thing.” 

“Thought,” for example, is not a simple thing but a relationship among physical processes and abstract collectives such as memory.

The “soul,” if such exists, is not a thing separate from the body, but a relations created by bodily interactions.

In quantum theory, a quantum entity can both be and not-be: quantum entities can wink in and out of existence. Similarly, a quantum entity can be defined as a particle/wave duality, a thing/relationship.

Will this prove a contained system for all reality? If so, that would reflect why Richard Feynman, one of the greats of quantum theory, famously said: “No one understands quantum mechanics.”

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Every human society and every generation has a unique, cohesive set of social experiences that become embedded outlooks.

A personal example:

As a teen in the 1950s, I knew fewer than a handful of Blacks (whom we never considered referring to publicly as “blacks”). Our family had a Black cleaning lady – that’s what I recall we called her, definitely not “maid” – who came once a week to vacuum, scrub, and spread too much wax on the floors.

Mom, with her Brit-heritage obsession, liked to think of us as somehow “poor” – not living up to proper English snuff. At age 10, I knew  we weren’t poor; Sarah, our cleaning lady, was poor, living on $7 a week from us and each of the others who hired her.

Having almost no experience of Blacks beyond Sarah, I didn’t know what or how to think of them. (I don’t recall my grade school having a Black student until seventh grade.) When I did meet the occasional Black, what was I supposed to say, what did this person mean to me?

It wasn’t prejudice, because I had no experience from which to prejudge. It would rightly be considered bias, but I think it was less bias against than bias around this “other” about whom I had no idea what was expected or appropriate.

My point is that thinking about generational bias strikes me as getting close to a basic human issue. But I think we can get closer still:

Every person has unique experiences from every other person. Each of us has an individual mind and a specific brain-chemistry balance. Together, they create, in each of us, an exclusive internal environment, a unique range of acceptance and expectations.

If we want to deal with bigotry and bias at the deepest level, we need to deal with not just societal and cultural bias, but the individual bias of personal experience – the most difficult to identify, the most difficult to reach.

When I read about consciousness and the human biostructure, what I most look to see explained is what forms us so that we are each separate, each different, and how whatever that formulation is leads to responses so widely divergent yet so singular.

There are individuals most of us could (and possibly should) see as evil – psychopaths and serial killers, lawyers and politicians (a bit snide here, hmmm?), but there are far more who are just working off their differing experiences – be they cultural, familial, generational, or personal.

Incensed blame leads us nowhere useful – though it’s fun and invigorating. Knowledge and, where possible, compassion are the keys to changes that last beyond the usual vapid proclamations; it’s hard to have compassion for an adversary whom I view as a SHITHEADED DIMBULB MOTHERFUCKING IDIOT – especially when they see me in the same terms.

We (most of us) want change that extends beyond finger-and-saber-waving. I don’t mean to downgrade social protest or cultural anger. Far from it: They are understandable, necessary and, goddammit, laudable – tear it all down and bury it!

Besides dealing with the individual at one end of the complication spectrum, at the other end, we need to examine the species: what it it means to be the alpha mammal that has reached the apex of planetary destruction because of our chemical, evolutionary, and environmental makeup.

I suspect that we’re nasty sumbitches less by personal choice than by species inheritance.

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Song Parodies of the Week

Frosty the showman

Was a rancid little elf,

For if you stopped to talk to him,

He would yell “Go fuck yourself!”

[did I already send this one?]

There was an Australian aborigine had a dog,

And Dingo was its name, O.

There was a farmer had a berry,

And Dingle was its name, O.

If I could, 

I surely would,

Crap on the rock where Moses stood.

Sleep well.