Monday, April 14, 2008

A failure of evolution?

Ok, so we are all familiar with natural selection. Different organisms competing for survival in an environment. Ta da. Well, why should one species, willingly create a new organism that it can see is not dependent on it? This new organism restricts and coerces the behavior of the initial organism to act contrary to its instincts (which it has evolved for its environment, for its survival). The new organism has the advantage of reshaping the environment to make the original organism dependent upon it. The new organism is proliferating itself exponentially, while further compelling the original organism to act against its nature.

The new organism requires the initial organism less to exist, it is becoming autonomous.

Why would the original organism do this? It is myopic, its "Reason" hardly extends beyond the present, yet it is deluded into thinking that its "Reason" legitimizes its actions as "superior" though they are obviously to the detriment of the organism.

Original organism: Homo sapiens sapiens
New organism: civilization

We can see what's happening but too many are too complacent to alter the course of events. We are throughly the domesticated property of the new organism and would struggle to subsist without it.

Yet, animals can become feral.

It is obvious, particularly as we advance in the fields of artificial intelligence, and computer science, that the system does not require us, in the long run, to maintain itself. "Reason" is not a prerequisite for survival. "Morality" is not a prerequisite for survival. Since the impetus is efficiency (maximization of output/input (ratio)) when it is no longer efficient to utilize the original organism, it will cease to persist in the environment, which has been throughly altered from the original organism's native environment.

Now, thanks to technological singularity either
A. The environment is such that the new organism is not fully autonomous and the original organism can do no more to aid in the proliferation of the new organism

and either

1. the environment is such that the original cannot sustain itself (and the new organism can no longer survive in the environment)

or
2. the environment is capable of sustaining the original, but not the new organism

or

B. The new organism is capable of proliferating itself and the original organism cannot sustain itself in the new environment.


Now, assuming the odds are even for any of the three outcomes, the new organism has a 1/3 chance of surviving.

Obviously, the desire to "take matters into its own hands" has sufficiently crippled the original organism, weakening its evolved survival traits and altering its environment until it hardly reflects its native environment.

Yet, it does this willingly.


A failure of evolution?

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Moral system? (I don't want to rant in dry, dry analytic-dom.)

Actions do not require justification. The concept of morality is a means to control people. Our concepts of good/bad are social constructs; linguistic constructs that have piecemeal definitions, inherited usages overtime intermingle with temporally disparate, contradictory usages and there are no well-defined criteria to establish their usage in new instances.

A lot of what our society places into us (e.g. the English language, etc.) cannot be immediately removed, however, this does not mean that we should feel indebted to society or to necessarily embrace it. Thus, the naturalistic fallacy: since society instills the moral system or our concepts of morality and since we can't undo everything that society has done, we ought to do what it deems acceptable.

The beautiful apprehension in "morality" is when you are aware of the amoral nature of action. Action is free from justification, there is no reason action should be justified. The urge to justify your actions is a sign of your domestication. Certain people are so systematized that they feel anxious when forced to act, they do not know how to act without being told what to do.

Our society simply overindulges the senses, overstimulates us, hyper-entertains, eradicates detached thinking, imposes, restricts, regulates, castrates, decays: our society kills life.

The cattle that dwell here are domesticated and can no longer survive on their own; they willingly divest their power (or don't seek to reattain it), they will away their will to life, in exchange for luxury (the manifestation of their domestication).

A fine example is the health industry; humans with illnesses are leeches on society. We do the entire human race a disservice by prolonging their lives and proliferating their genes. The future generations (if we feel the need to care) are further dependent on the system.

This society has nearly exhausted itself.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

FAFSA and death

(I wrote this a few days ago elsewhere and decided to (re)post it here. )



Many of my friends fear death. I cannot understand this. I think it is because it is utterly arational. No one of the living deals with death, they deal with a loss or some effect on the living. Death cannot be rationalized and many of my friends that fear it are science/philosophy sorts. The virulent desire to reduce everything to a list of linguistic propositions creates such fear of the living world in them. It is a sense of power, this reduction that theorizing provides them. Death eternally transcends reduction.

We are perennially upon this side of the veil, death is on the other and we only perceive things that spiral towards death. Death is our essence. The true separation from reality is this rationalizing, thought is a rupture in being. Thought reduces what is to a proposition or description: a greying carapace that excludes directness, experience, authenticity.

This vitality is what we all separate ourselves from in our instituitions, hierarchies and grey tomes with their reductionist prose. We separate ourselves from beauty when we reason about the source of that beauty. We separate ourselves from morality when we reason about the source of that morality. We separate ourselves from being when we wonder about the source of that being.

The world is given before us, but we prefer to reduce it, feeling an apotheosis in the reduction, in the greying of the living world. A living world frightens the analytic mind; a mind that persists on reduction. Death is the convergence of the living world, and this frightens the philosopher, the scientist and the profiteer. Death, our essence, frightens the "rational" mind-- the "rational" mind abhors death, abhors itself, and spirals on in self-perpetuating fantasies and dreams of the full greying of the world.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

is it our nature to destroy our nature?

The system maintains and proliferates itself at the expense of its constituency. As population increases each part is less valuable and if it doesn't optimize the system's performance it is altered or terminated (psychological control via. anti-depressants, etc. or death by non-conformance to laws/rules (typically implicit like the work week, etc.)).

The system currently supports 6.7 billion people. It weaves us together; my dinner contains food from four different countries, my clothes were made by children in Indonesia, the soccer ball I used yesterday was made by a child in Pakistan.

The distance makes it easy to justify actions. Actions don't involve people like interactions with friends or neighbors, they involve statistics. It is much easier to severe ourselves from our intuitive behavior when we deal with abstractions. Humans in nature deal with, typically, groups of twenty people. Foraging tribes never grow larger than that. The system interweaves us with 6.7 billion people. It is humanly impossible that we should interact with them in the way we interact with our friends; we lack an intuitive propensity when dealing with abstracted humans. I would never force someone to make shoes for me for a low wage, or grow more food for me than for them, yet these actions are condoned when I buy shoes or purchase dinner. Many people justify it through comparative advantage as a mechanism for stabilizing a global economy. Or they say "those people willingly accepted that job". How are you using "willingly"? I do not want to be in school or do mundane work for the rest of my life, yet I am in school. Am I willingly in school? Is the only criteria at this point that someone did not put a gun to my head (though an even slower-death equivalent looms over me if I don't conform)? If this is the correct grammar of "willingly" then we should examine the system that creates "willingness" in such extreme disparity.

The systematization of humans/animals through coercion persists, and increases as we approach technological singularity. We create our body of knowledge and extend it as a means to power. The world revolves around this and its effects as subjugation and indoctrination manifest with increasing strength.

The world spirals on and we attempt to transcend it through devouring it; this is what we are becoming, world-devourers. In our attempt to transcend it, we must remove ourselves from it, the way we remove ourselves from other people in order to subjugate them. Technological progress makes this easier, since nature is reduced to fuel, is seen as frightening and antagonistic. A byproduct of this reduction is its obliteration, which obliterates our world. It decays and becomes a figment or an anamnesis. It makes it easier to loathe it while justifying our dessication of it and our eventual transcendence.

We, however, will be not appeased, will not be satisfied at the destruction/transcendence of our terrestrial bounds; our bones and flesh are remnants, death manifesting our terrestrial nature. We will have to escape death; this will require the abandonment of our senses, very subtly built up from death and a terrestrial world. We sense decaying objects, so we will have to abandoning them, these reminders of our mortal nature. Yet, what substitute is there? Metals, elements, these are all mortal in a sense, are all decaying. Even if we successfully discard our terrestrial "carapaces" and the senses that came from them, we are stuck with our language. Our ever evolving, adapting, changed language. The last heirloom of our mortality. Language stretches back to that primal state-- an intimate connection between lovers, between friends and family, corroded through time. Simply reduced to a vessel for performativity.

How will this be discarded? Along with its specters that, in dim shadows, or down-moments in processing data become more fearsome as we drift further away from our nature? Oblivion is the final resting place for us no matter how far we push ourselves. This does not have to mean that we should have to loathe the living. Society is the amalgamation of shattered dreams that we exist in.

As long as it persists, we are caught in a dream without a dreamer.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

To become unfettered (return the horizon!)

Here, I will look at forms of coercion, and many dangers that lie within them. In general, I will be attacking institutions.

Political theory is typically based off either of the following:
(1) Man is inherently good.
(2) Man is inherently malevolent.

If we start with (1), there is no need to establish a government. If we start with (2) what justifies that establishment of a government? If people are intrinsically evil and a government is established by people, you have intrinsically malevolent people erecting hierarchies and coercive domains that simply give some intrinsically malevolent person/people power over another.

If people are neutral, then you have a similar problem. The systems they erect are neutral and you can either have someone act benevolently in a position of power or malevolently. There is not a decision procedure to determine between people (as good/evil), so again there is no justification for establishing a hierarchy of power.

Post-enlightenment philosophy shows that there are no "moral facts". This means there is no justification for government, since we would have only arbitrary agreement upon a certain concept. This would be coercive (by its arbitrariness). If there were a justification, everyone would agree that it is "good". Yet, the nature of the word "good" cannot be tied down to any intrinsic definition, these attempts produce a naturalistic fallacy. So they would all be agreeing that the justification is what? Intuitionism cannot guarantee that everyone has the same intuitions about "good". We are at a loss for justification.

Even if everyone agreed on a specific concept, by enacting a law and a reward/punishment system, people would not be acting out of an intrinsic good, for the threat of law looms over them, coercing them. But again, it is only an arbitrarily agreed upon law, since there is no justification for it.

Animals, when removed from their natural habitat become pathological. Domesticated animals display symptoms of boredom, depression and neurosis. Humans are animals. Humans also are no longer in their natural habitat. The majority of animals in their natural habitat enjoy environmental stability for the majority of their existence. In society, with exponential technological growth, humans do not have stability. As time progresses, they have less stability, since the introduction of new technology and information reshapes their environment.

As societies advance and become more developed suicide rates rise, neuroses proliferate, depression, sleep disorders; these all increase. People working in coerced positions lack a sense of autonomy. In nature humans are autonomous in such pursuits as food acquisition, etc. There is a fulfillment that we lack in society since food acquisition is trivial. We work, mindlessly for capital which assures us our food. We invest very little in the acquisition of food (those of us that have jobs). Methods of coercion are increasingly psychological. Children and adults receive pills that help them focus, help them sleep or stay awake, calm them, mitigate depression, etc. The system covers up the symptoms it creates in people. We are quickly approaching genetic modification and eugenics. Humanity has been throughly domesticated.

Technology reshapes the world through a process of innocent introduction. When early humans began using horticultural methods, they could still scavenge. It was in addition and insured that they would have a secure source of food. However, as time advanced and these methods were extended, the wild areas became rarer. People no longer had the option to scavenge, but were now compelled, against their nature, to till the land-- to perform menial tasks for food. The car is another example. Most people are dependent on cars, to get to work, etc. The introduction of the car presented an option for people. The world was not yet structured to coerce them. They had the choice of walking or riding a horse, since people lived near their workplaces. Now, cities revolve around cars. The majority of the population is fettered to cars or mass transit.

There are many problems with society, but the most devastating flaw is that any technological society will proceed to a technological singularity. Beyond the "horizon" of the singularity, humans will be incapable of functioning: things will be too complex for any human or group of humans to understand, or to exert any influence upon the system. We are building ever firmer shackles.

Brain-computer interface technology, or sufficiently developed AI will be necessary. At this point, there is no stability and in fact no initial environment on which beings develop, but rather a self-developing environment. It also means that emotional intuition will flicker away, this is a by-product of non-quantifiability or non-optimization being purged.

Since we lack any moral fact, or ideal society, what is the technological progress for? That is, what are we progressing to? By the second law of thermodynamics, we cannot possibly hope to achieve a stable state somewhere. By the same law, we also cannot hope to achieve indefinite "progress" since new technology requires other technology and we have only a finite amount of energy. There will be no autonomy and only an increasingly complicated and rigorous language. Things that are non-quantifiable or non-optimizing will be discarded.

Life in the state of nature is the only sustainable existence. It is the only environment that preserves autonomy.

(The door has been opened, some attempt to close it; instead the threshold should be destroyed.)

Saturday, March 15, 2008

A trilogue

I am basically posting this for the "liberals" and "leftys" that vote Democrat.

This comes from an internet discussion my good friend Mike P. started. There is some other guy that Mike P. knows that I don't know. Then there is me. The guy I don't know has a standard defeatist Democrat voting view. This is not an attack on him, but rather is vital to point out since many in the Obama camp think similarly.

Mike P. (He quotes from a Nader site):

"War with Iran.

For Nader/Gonzalez, it's off the table.

For Clinton/Obama/McCain - "all options must be on the table."

Nader/Gonzalez would take war with Iran off the table and call for full court diplomacy.

Clinton/Obama/McCain would keep options of war with Iran squarely on the table.

Earlier this week, Admiral William Fallon - under Bush pressure - quits as the head of the U.S. Central Command.

Esquire Magazine this month portrayed Fallon as the one U.S. military leader - among the many in the Pentagon who oppose war with Iran - who could stop Bush/Cheney.

It certainly won't be Obama and Clinton - who have to prove to the military industrial complex - with its unchallenged, bloated, wasteful military budget - that they too are tough guys - especially when it comes to the Middle East.

Nader/Gonzalez would reverse U.S. policy in the Middle East - from the fertile crescent to the Straits of Hormuz.

Clinton/Obama/McCain will not.

That's one reason why we're running this campaign.

Because Nader/Gonzalez are on one side of the political fence.

And Clinton/Obama/McCain are on the other.

If you want perpetual war and occupation in the Middle East, vote Clinton/Obama/McCain.

If you want a chance for a more peaceful future, work with us to put Nader/Gonzalez on the ballot throughout the country.

Thanks to your efforts last week, our road-trippers are now on the ground in New Mexico, collecting signatures to get Nader/Gonzalez on the ballot there.

Today, we turn our attention to Arizona.

Arizona is a much bigger lift.

To get on the ballot in Arizona, we need to collect 40,000 signatures by June 4, 2008.

And we need to get started next week.

Thanks to the two corporate parties, the estimated cost to get on the ballot in Arizona?
$50,000.

Our people are on the ground in Arizona and ready to go.

Over the next ten days, we're looking for 500 of you - our steadfast supporters - to give $100 each to help fund our ballot drive in The Grand Canyon State.

And to give the good people of Arizona a chance to vote Nader/Gonzalez in November.

For their entire public lives, Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez have sided with the growing peace movements in the Middle East and around the world.

Against gale force winds in the United States, they have followed the path less taken.

Now, the choice is clear.

The drums of war or a muscular peace initiative?

Clinton/Obama/McCain or Nader/Gonzalez."


Guy that I don't know:

"i really do agree with you.

but i am going to vote democrat this time, i think.
i wish nader could win, but i've decided to vote democrat because i'm so terrified of republicans and i now live in a state that doesn't always vote conservative.

anyway, i think obama means what he says. i've never trusted a mainstream presidential candidate before now."


Me:

And thus another head of the hydra prepares to strike:

If you agree with one politician, yet are voting for another you are relinquishing your autonomy (however far that goes-- we are already talking about a process for selecting leaders); you are another coerced vote and the alluring pose of the two party system has seduced another citizen while reinforcing its preeminence and ensuring its longevity.

To utilize statistics:
In 2000, of the people that thought "Nader was the best candidate" only 9% actually voted for him. If they had not taken a mentality like yours, and had voted for Nader he would have received 30 million votes, without being in a single debate (he was barred from them)! That would have made it very close to a three way tie.

Remember democrats are heinous too, Clinton is responsible not only for NAFTA, WTO, etc. but also severe restrictions on welfare and increases on death penalties (extended to crimes that don't involve murder or manslaughter).




There, you should respond if you have some other point to make. Everyone who is "liberal" or whatever has no real excuse for voting Democrat, unless you are pro-globalization, pro-war, or have a further justification for it.



Wednesday, March 12, 2008

remiss

Yes. I have been remiss. I will not be doing the 3 times a week thing anymore.

In fact I don't know how frequently I will post on here. I should do it more, but I already realize that stuff is fucked. But it is still good for you people to apprehend that. I will try to post stuff about "alternatives" or whatever, so you can at least do something slightly worthwhile.