Fools' Wilding

Once upon a time, people looked up to the better educated. Religious people were better educated, scientists were sublime, but industrialists, who were considered awfully important to our economic wellbeing, were regarded rather more as egotists who loved power. Still, we tended to abide by them.

Eventually, the clerics once graduated from our most elite colleges, where religious principles were paramount, morphed into that once-beloved Jeffersonian dream as climbers in the meritocracy. Sublime moral merit then became intellectual merit as bestowed upon those whose families - according to Protestant premise and pretense - had demonstrated merit by their wealth. Clerics became uneducated big-box fools or tools.

By now of course, the hoi polloi began to have a hard time trusting these merited folk, once they learned to cash in on the family franchise. Even scientists seemed to be gunning for gold. No-one had the public good in mind, or so it did seem. 

Maybe too much power was bestowed to politicians, and maybe they liked that power a bit too much. The man became the image, first in politics and then in general. Image was something that could be manufactured and cleansed and cultivated and finally made distinct from the man, and later from the woman. 

As our economy grew so grew the advertising industry, which helped to separate ourselves from our images, never mind the image of a brand name. After being bought and oversold, brand-names lost their identity too.

This is the process which I call wilding. The funny thing is that the actual wild is always in a kind of dynamic balance. Just now the earth herself is trying to put our intense and mechanically powererd human gyrations right, on the way toward homeostasis, which is alwaays the way of life. The forests burning is not something we can fix, any more than we can fix the weather. Anyhow, we've put NOAA out of commission, which just seems stupid.

I'm a strange one myself. I've never seemed to have a lot of interest in inventing myself or my future. I love things most which happen along, almost never assuming that I could do better if I just had the right kind of want and went for it. 

My "intelligence' has been certified in a variety of ways. Just as college had become more and more competitive - merit-based, as they called it - I was admitted to MIT, CalTech and Yale among others. Silly me, I chose Yale, which still had a fine engineering school and seemed to want me. I spun through engineering and physics before landing on Chinese Literature and then landing in a school for gifted children where I became headmaster. 

By now, were it not for some inheritance and a loving family, I would be very poorly off indeed. Perhaps I'd still be wandering with my little camper, which I do sorely miss. I can't imagine it would be any worse than the life I now have, though I do really like my own realization of eclectic mid-century modern in a very old house. 

Anyhow, our newly reborn mechanistic wilding, now powered by Artificial Intelligence, will indeed allow the globe to recover from us as we get pesticided, parasited, climate marauded and therefore burned and frozen out. As our politicians increasingly find scorched earth preferable to letting go of their power and wealth. Racism is the best prod toward inhumanity, but any kind of polarization will do if you wish to manipulate we the people. 

Like the tuxedo-wearing drowned once aboard the Titanic, our wealthy will look very silly scrabbling to survive. Social climbing isn't much help as an exercise toward survival. Sure, you may live longer on your super yacht, though that will only get you a front row facing earth's end. You won't know a thing about joining in to man the lifeboats.

And yes, I do mean to say that nature is running her course and that there's nothing we can do about it. We also are a part of nature and not apart from it, or did you really think we would somehow understand everything and set ourselves apart? That dream has gone all wet. 

The Irony of Advertising and AI

Many if not most of us have wondered about advertising revenue once Google started to provide an AI answer first. One supposes that they are aggregating eyeballs again in the ingrained certainty that monetization with follow. Once you own the network, you get it all by virtue of the network effect. 

But the really radical notion would be to harness AI to provide honest advertisements. It would seem trivial to parse the web to let us know which thingamajig or whatchamacallit is the best thingamajig or whatchamacallit. 

We all know we've been suffering gaming by the ad industry since forever. Well, at least since radio and television. The creatives in the industry look for ways to make mediocre seem really really good. As a kid I wondered why they often touted what was worst about the product in some sort of reverse psychology bid. Tout the things the viewer doubts.

The real question underlying all this stuff is why we cede the public good and goods to the wealthy for their exploitation? Do we really buy their own self-assessment that they deserve their wealth because of "merit." 

Merit is a word that can be parsed so very many ways; none of them providing any satisfaction about usage. In our particular economy, merit is approximately equivalent to getting away with something, meaning one small step away from theft. Cory Doctorow provides sound enlightenment on this topic in his Enshittification thesis.

But really the key term here is "gaming." As in, the bigger the company the more it games us. And guess what, now we offer ways to game the future by way of prediction markets. Seems to me that this might incentivize destruction, given how much easier that is than to make something. Entropy and all. 

It also does seem a given that AI will pretty much level the field (I'm being ironic) for prediction, making this a fraught topic for regulators. It was quickly obvious that one shouldn't be able to bet on a human's future demise. But what about disease trends or costs or climate change?

If you're motivated to make money on the basis of doing no demonstrable good for anyone, you're certainly likely to devote your personal quota of cleverness toward making as much money as possible. Our uniquely American form of religious capitalism provides the perfect cover. Greed is almost your duty here. All praise creative destruction!

I'm by no means a mortal enemy to capitalism, properly regulated. Global corporate capitalism should not be something we want to encourage though, since for capitalism to operate properly there must be competition. Once upon a time we understood this. More recently we seem to have decided that consumer cost is the proper measure for anti-trust actions, or lack thereof. 

But a good AI prediction engine would have to be able to demonstrate how different the temporary price relief is from destructive competition when you use investors' money to sell below cost and drive all the small fry out of business. It's perfectly predictable that the result is uniformly higher prices, after a relatively short while. Then there's the ultimate nightmare of Amazon which can dictate the price for nearly anything. We're always being sold a pig-in-a-poke. It's just that the scale has become immense. 

My own pet measure is the growth in income disparity between workers and the ownership class. And the biggest trouble there is that the economy has now been groomed such that we are all forced to put retirement funds into ownership-class holdings in order to keep from losing money ever more quickly. And we still can't touch the growth available to those who control our stocks and bonds. 

We're almost literally enslaved to self-destruction now that investment in your own business risks almost immediate failure unless you're lucky enough to be a sellout. You might have the choice to purchase a franchise or a brand dealership, though you'd better have some sort of insurance. Your doctor, your insurance agent, your old-folks home will all sell out sooner or later. 

Meaning you could join a hedge fund, but then you'd have to join the forces of destruction and strip the world for parts. You need real wealth to do that.

In my personal memory it was once quite trivial to find a place to live affordably on minimum wage. When I started college it was at the most expensive university on the planet, but the $5K, which included room and board - when books were cheap - was held by me in a savings bank from paper-routes, lawn mowing, pool cleaning and work in a bicycle shop.

What happened!! Corey Doctorow provides a pretty good start. But in my simpler terms, we've simply shrunk the cost of amoral behavior. Everybody's doing it. Morality is impossible without physical interaction with other people. We Americans have wiped that off the map. Once a week in a big box church doesn't count.

That's because, ironically enough, the bigger the church the more blasphemy. Isn't the impersonation of God the biggest blasphemy of them all? Meaning you make a person of God, then you get your personal God and then your put words in His mouth, and learn to channel the enchantment of we-the-people who think that following rules will make us straight. Following a ruler. Ruling the world. Be square.

Really it should be no wonder that evangelicals follow MAGA. This president is the very definition of ironic, given that he demands respect but shows none.

I did once ask a Chinese fellow who wrote a very popular book on humor. He was techie and with-it, in the technical sense. But when I asked about irony in Chinese, he quoted a stock sort of humor devoid of any irony at all. Which got me thinking that maybe you actually need God to have "real" irony. Absent God, there's no real standard about what to expect. There's always plenty of humor, but not the sort which undermines certainties. The MAGA folks seem not to know irony.

Happy semiquincentennial! May God have mercy on us all. Orthogonal relations are not natural. God is not a square. There is no manual for goodness. You're an idiot if you don't know God; reality incarnate.

Absurd Belief in Mechanism and Predator as King

I can't ever seem to come up with a cogent proof or even explanation of my discovery of the primordial nature of emotion. I think I may be the only one who finds it strange that we consider emotion to be some recently evolved epiphenomenon vaguely related to how critters are stimulated to move around. 

Well, no actually I think I'm the only one who thinks that emotion is central to the motion of living things. Most people think emotion is more like social glue, moving us along the way toward caring for others, and especially for our kin. It's a genetic thing. Just like predation.

We actually - most of us - seem to think that movements are based a kind of calculation, which is the equivalent of a mechanism in the mind. Numbers are, of course, abstractions. That term - abstraction - means to take from, as in take the concept of numbers from whatever tokens were used to count with. 

Descended from that is abstraction of every kind. The perfect is abstracted from the real and movement is created in the same way that energy is abstracted from fuel. There are no perfect circles in physical reality but our abstraction of them seems to approach perfection. We call that progress.

Bad idea!

Operation on abstracted representations is what intelligence accomplishes, or so it's often thought. These intelligent operations are conceptual, meaning that actual things don't get moved around. Ideas get moved around and then when something clicks in our mind we make a decision. 

Wrong!

Any actual mind must operate in or as something which is physical and at least partially mechanical, and which therefore requires energy, meaning force, to make its moves. The eyes don't see without motion. The mind doesn't think without emotion. Emotion triggers the use of force. Like that guy who almost ran me down the other day because he sees red when he sees a bicycle.

Once the moves are made, we can preserve them with tools like writing and depiction. Some moves are preserved in coded reproductions, like books or the digital simulacra of books. We build on good ideas, as well we should.

Ideas are conceptual representations which seem, as Plato suggested, to be primordial themselves. There's no inventing an idea. Things come first. 

Maybe emotion is something that evolved along with social interactions, perhaps to keep us safe, and to guide DNA recombinations or something like that. Maybe complex emotions require complex thinking, in just the way that language does. But are there really any complex emotions? Is there a calculus to emotion?

I say there isn't. That's because I also say that emotion has always been an aspect of cosmos. I say that because, number one, there's no good definition or explanation of time without conceptual operations. My meaning here is that there are no concepts which don't have a physical or linguistic approximation for them. Time is conceptual and not physical.

I leave the chicken/egg problem of which came first between physical and conceptual or mental operations, because it doesn't require a resolution. Conceptual operations, if there were ever any in the abstract, require no force or energy but for the caveat that there are no conceptual operations withouts some actual physical substrate for mind. There is no prior "space" in which God exists, which is hardly the same as to suggest that there is no God. 

There is no physical motion that doesn't start with a mental emotion. Physical objects move toward and away because of the conceptual arrangement of their components. Physical motion is always accompanied by the exchange of gauge particles. Among moving creatures, all of which concentrate aspects of God, emotion triggers motion which might trigger more emotion and so forth. 

I'm not talking about your God if your God tells you what to do and how to behave. That's a man-made God, which is a contradiction in terms.

Anything that builds away from the clockwork of entropy participates in life-direction which is what we know as forward in time. If there were no emotion there would only be decay. Living things don't move backward in time. They only decay, which is something which happens only after the life is mostly gone.

Fully abstracted mechanism - artificial intelligence, for instance - can never be alive. The reckoning we are now up against is utterly existential. Once we fully relinquish our living decision-making, we will have succumbed to social decadence and decay. Well, OK, sure, we're already well along that path. That's because the thinking of corporate "persons" is already artificial intelligence.

Corporate persons run on the abstracted "power" of money, which is a token for want which is conscripted from each and every one of us without so much as our nevermind. It's no different from computer chips running on electricity and logic. There's no emotion there, apart from the predatory glee of those who control and benefit from the corporation. 

These corporate controllers think they win because they're smarter than you and me. Which used to be true when they were allowing meaningful work to you and me. Now their predation rests on the destruction of anything small enough for them to gobble up. Our government has become accessory to the crime.

Modern machines, including thinking machines, are incredibly useful. But we need to invent a new politics or the balance of nature will be lost forever. Politics, and not rule-making religion, is what keeps society moving in a life-affirming direction. If your pastor delivers you rule-based methods for following the good you must run away as hard as you can. Otherwise you'll end up hating people that don't believe or behave as you do.

As you might easily imagine if you've read this far, I'm not a believer in C.P. Snow's separate worlds of the sciences and the humanities any more than I believe that God is beyond the bounds of thinking and living. These are artificial divisions not unlike the ones that say we must depend on experts to make our personal decisions. 

Of course we should and must depend on experts to guide us. But as much as we must resist the charlatanism of preaching, we must resist the supposition that we're not as competent as our betters who make us shrink beneath the power of their money. 

There is no other meaning to "factory" than that. The sotweed factor (my bid for the Great American Novel) is a purveyor of tobacco as protagonist, meaning the pusher of drugs meaning the taker of advantage of our weakness. Naked Lunch kind of thing. There is no need for post-modernist mumbo jumbo (though I myself find it quite helpful) to understand the 'discovery' that it's all about power. 

We need to make it about the good again. That means we need to stop trivializing emotion (and women and people of color upon whom we white folks project absence of agency by reason of too little intelligence and too much emotion which is nothing other than the imposition of type on the basis of power. 

Resist! Let everyone type themselves. No kings. No pretenders to God.

We have a funny notion that thinking is something that the brain does. We're looking in the wrong place. The brain is more like a switchboard for concepts taken from books and lectures and classes of all sorts. The "things" with which the mind works are never enclosed in or by the mind. That would squander too much energy. The mind works only with abstraction, while the things stay where the were. We waste lots of time trying to figure out how the brain works. 

Most of what we think is in the mind remains outside us. Our mind catalogs similarities so that we can abstract various types. Memory is simply the re-running of perception, and not a storage and retrieval mechanism. There are always emotional triggers when what you see matches something that you saw. When a conceptual ordering makes sense of perception. See something or feel something seldom enough and it will disappear from your mind. See only artificial things and you'll lose your mind altogether. Living things can tolerate only so much change.

No change in our external environment and we hallucinate. Too much change and we hallucinate. We lose touch with pace and direction and just keep on keeping on. We become haggard.

Emotional feeling is direct to the mind. Perceptual feeling requires impingement on sensory organs. The identification of types is an abstraction from perception, and not the statistical analysis which Artificial Intelligence composes types from. The difference is emotion, something mechanism never has. 

The Big Bang was a very emotional event.

Here's Google Gemini's summary:

Emotional primordialism is the philosophical concept that emotion is not a byproduct of higher intelligence or a recently evolved mechanism, but rather a fundamental, foundational force built into the fabric of the universe and life itself.

While mainstream science often views emotion as an evolutionary tool—social glue to protect kin, or a calculation to guide survival—emotional primordialism flips this script. It argues that emotion is central to all physical motion and life-direction.

Here is a breakdown of the core ideas behind this concept:

1. Emotion Precedes Motion

In this framework, physical objects move or react based on the underlying arrangement of things, but for living creatures, mental emotion is the necessary catalyst for physical motion. Essentially, living things do not move through cold, mechanical calculation; they move because they feel. Without emotion, there would be no impetus to push against entropy.

2. Cosmic Scale, Not Just Social Scale

Instead of treating emotion as a localized psychological phenomenon or a genetic trick to keep species reproducing, emotional primordialism positions emotion as an intrinsic aspect of the cosmos. To put it poetically: the universe didn't develop emotions down the line to help humans bond; rather, the universe has always possessed an emotional substrate.

3. A Rejection of Pure Mechanism

This philosophy stands in sharp contrast to strict mechanical or computational views of consciousness. It posits that a fully abstracted mechanism—like Artificial Intelligence—can never truly be alive because it operates purely on logic, statistics, and electricity. It lacks the primordial spark of feeling that defines organic decision-making and keeps life moving "forward" in time against cosmic decay.

4. Perception vs. Abstraction

Under this view, the brain acts less like a storage drive and more like a switchboard connecting us to concepts that exist outside ourselves.

• Perceptual feeling requires our physical senses to be triggered by the environment.

• Emotional feeling is direct to the mind, acting as the fundamental difference between organic recognition and a machine's statistical analysis.

In short, emotional primordialism suggests that emotion is the literal energy of life—the driving force that prevents decay and guides existence.

Back to Nature; Gene editing of embryos

Artifice Artifice Artifice Wow!

Many women can hardly go out without being made up. Stories are made up. We call them fictions or lies. Lately when I see someone coiffed for the screen, it's hard not to see the animal beneath the disguise. What's made up highlights what is true. 

I've been reliably stern about the miracle of life; that we shouldn't mess with it as much as we do. I guess I'm in line with Ernst Jünger (who I have yet to read), seeing all technology as being about power. He's pre-modern in time, but post-modern in fact.

Curing disease when we can seems the right thing to do, as does the artifice of clothing and houses. We've been evolving in that direction for a very long time. But how can we cure our minds of artifice when we start messing with the life-force of evolution. Should anyone be deciding what sort of people we want to bear? Is it OK if we're just 'curing' diseases before the fact? 

Isn't that a lot like jailing criminals before they commit a crime, since we might easily predict that they will. I know I'm reporting from the minority here. I understand that China is about to start tracking citizens according to their likelihood to be critical of the government. Or, haven't they been doing that for a while now? It's positively Trumpian, which just goes to show that we're hardly ever the real innovators.

Isn't gene editing identical to artificial intelligence? It won't be long before we can order up beauty and intelligence as we like it. We'll set the AI loose on the genome. But what do we do with the monsters that will likely result? Will there be guarantees? Will there be insurance?

Look, I don't actually mind things or people being made up. There is no such thing as an authentic me; though I am authenticated by everyone who knows me. They know when I'm making myself up better than I ever could. 

Now the New York Times wonders who will benefit from AI? Isn't it obvious that the answer is, of course, the cheats, the liars, the power-mongers. Power bettors on the prediction markets. People who play the spread market to market, and can't loose. 

Long ago I suspected that insurance companies would scotch self-driving cars. It's still a somewhat interesting question, given the massive awards made by governments to wronged people. Will the resolution of that one tilt us back toward public ownership of all of it? We'd better not call it socialism, which is, strictly speaking, public ownership of the means of production, in Marxist terms. 

I'm not sure anyone wants that sort of socialism. The market economy works, except that it works far too well when it gobbles up our futures by gobbling up the public good. The public good is what we the people must own. Or, as an economist friend suggested from Spain where they can seem way more open-minded than we are, we need to differentiate between needs that are inelastic and those which more easily blend with adjustable wants.

That would include communication industries as descended from the once productive Post Office. It would include energy, to end the gift of resources to those who can afford to exploit them. It would, of course, include clean air and water, as well as the preservation of wildlife and parkland. 

A whole lot would be left over for private business, especially once surveillance capitalism is demolished by block-chain engineered privacy for all of our communications activities. Social media belongs with the Post Office. We the people should decide where advertising billboards and postings might be allowed, digitally or otherwise. 

Influencers have to be out of politics and out of healthcare. I truly resent that we have to worry about measles again. Meaning that we have to divorce the attention economy from both those arenas. Money out of politics, duh, and profit out of healthcare. These are not commodities. They are necessities.

Finally, without objection, we need to end the 'creative destruction' which uses futures investment to price goods at a loss, for the purpose of driving local smaller enterprises out of business. We need local business more than ever, because we need local shoppers walking our downtowns. It's almost impossible to run a restaurant anymore from what I hear. We can't reserve good taste for the wealthy alone.

In my frenetic travels around the country, by bicycle, car, motorcycle, and eventually while towing a little camper, I've gone from the pleasure of tasting local fare to the nightmare of nothing but national chains with lines of cars around the block. This has made me very sad. Factory designed and processed food never tastes good.

I honestly don't think humans are done evolving. The very last thing I want to see is for us to take over the processes of evolution by virtue of our excessive pride in human intelligence. I'm fairly certain that, ultimately, AI will guide us to understand that there is no intelligence without emotion. Which, among other things to me, means that our evolution will largely be a moral evolution. 

Sadly, while we were moving smoothly in the direction of moral evolution right up until money in politics put partisanship on steroids and prevented us from knowing how to talk to one another. We were making so many strides against racism and sexism and homophobia. So many strides toward preserving our natural environment.

Corporate persons controlling "progress" is nothing but Artificial Intelligence on steroids. We've all forgotten the high of holding the tobacco companies accountable, along with all the other polluters and poisoners. Corporate persons managing money is what stopped our evolution.

Finally, what, really, is the rush? Actual human progress is not automatic, we have to work for it morally. The powers that be want us to be afraid of nature, based on a false understanding of evolution as survival of the fittest. Think wealth of the merited. Same thing. Wealth alone should never be a badge of pride.

Evolution is about changing species within a changing environment, and not about competition. competition is for sport and not for living. There. is no merit in finding ways to beat your neighbor.

Intelligence is a social construct and not a permanent asset of neurodivergent techies. I once ran a school for "gifted" children, and therefore resonated with this recent Intelligencer article from New York magazine. There is no measurable trait which endows you for a lifetime. Your intelligence is mostly a reflection of the bonds of love and community which you enjoyed. 

Sure there are sublime masters in all fields. There is no sublimity in mastering your fellow humans.

What is AI really about?

Charlie Chaplin did a good job of showing the indignities of mankind serving machines. Fordism wanted our hands, and for our minds to be asleep, apart from manipulation. You can't think any private thoughts that are wafty or lofty when injury is on order. 

I'm no Marxist, but I do think everyone should be familiar with his thinking. He wrote about tools - the means of production - being alienated from yeoman craftspeople by capitalist ownership. As factories grew larger, owning your own tools became mostly impossible. The tools became very expensive machinery housed in very expensive real-estate. 

Wage slavery is still slavery.

Why do we celebrate our enslavement? Progress as we mean it is no liberator. Sure, it's nice to eradicate disease and sleep soundly in nice houses that are part of safe communities. By now, niceties would feel like regress. Driving on the highway was once fun, so why do we want to give driving over to AI? What's the rush? Can't we bring back the walkable bikeable city? Eradicate the parking space and give us packet switched universal transit that's never in the way of the people.

I was younger when I worked as a bicycle mechanic, but we did own our personal set of tools. That felt like the owner was cheaping out on us, though it was really no burden. A good mechanic has his own tools. My colleagues made fun of my Craftsman set, but I earned their respect with my skills. 

My first bike job supplied the tools, which I was too young and without wherewithal to purchase myself. I suppose it's like many knowledge-workers now, who bring their own laptops and phones. But I did like using my own tools. I also liked the work. Within my lifetime fewer and fewer people are allowed to do work that they like, meaning more and more people work for The Man. Some are even happy doing it, if they get paid enough.

How many movies depict the pain of being measured against AI? You make the Matrix, and then you sell out for fame. Faceless or same-faced robots acting like ICE agents. Minority Report on steroids. The dehumanization of people who don't seem like us has to remind one of Naziism. 

Unlike Fordism, AI wants your mind and not your hands. It's wants your intention before you act. Instead of fear of injury, there is fear of irrelevance if you can't learn to keep up with the sorting and collating and summarizing of long tracts of text that are being fed you way too fast by the monstrous machinery you serve.

AI represents the wedding of capitalist ownership with the amoral all-in-for-money operation of the corporate person. AI is a corporate person on steroids, and is certainly nothing that you can own yourself. Ownership is reserved for corporate entities with reserves or debt in the proportions of sovereign states.

Sure, corporations can be formed to do good things. Bit one still might wonder about internal governance which can seem and feel like tyranny, even within non-profits. I know this from persona experience where I've encountered tyranny in Universities and within churches. If you don't hate your job you're not working.

Don't kid yourself that the "inventors" of these AI machines "merit" the wealth they accrue. They're certainly not the smartest or most talented people in the world. They're sorted purely for excess greed. The ones who come out on top know how to make money, and especially know how to assure the investment community that money is all that they're about. 

And we've all been recruited as funders of capitalism, unless we want to risk inflation debasing our savings, or are willing to take the risk to fund local industries which carry far more risk than the big guys. The company owned retirement is long gone or long defaulted. We're all on our own now, which is how the powers that be see themselves and how they like it.

If you take the bribe to work for or with AI, you should know that you must leave your morals at the door. Kind of like being forced to say nothing about safety issues in a factory. If you don't make the profitable query someone else will.

When I finally left my most recent tech job, there was a bunch of equipment I had to leave behind. AI wasn't on the horizon yet, but the cloud had destroyed my ability to vouch for data security. CEO's were easily able to roll their own services regardless of my HIPPA responsibilities. Holes were being poked in my security infrastructure, and I didn't have the budget to patch them. Never mine the endless teaching about workers' obligations toward keepiing sensitive data secured. Dead ears. It's all too confusing.

And now today I learn that we're on the road to figuring out why acupuncture works. What a travesty! What a tragedy! Now all wonder about how those ancient Chinese came up with it is dissolved. We in the Great White West always seem to imagine the protoscience of trial and error, and what? Word of mouth?

What if what happened was more like insight, I ask. These days, given all the evident corruptibility of superiority in medical knowledge, and all the evidence of influencer-based pseudo-science, a little genuine insight could be a useful thing. Unsanctioned insight ist verboten.

Do we really think that we can understand everything? To my mind, it would be tragic if we could. A dictatorship of knowledge would become inevitable. Right and wrong would be absolute, in just the way the Big Box churches teach it. 

Many of us have been dumbed down enough to think that there are absolute answers to moral questions. Some of us even get militant about it. Take abortion, or some of PETA's actions. There are always moral questions raised when we exploit the gifts of nature. Our attempts to create genetic stowaways, or to make reparations against climate tragedy will always entail new tragedies of their own. The ecosystem adjusts to where reintroducing extinct species is approximately equivalent to the introduction of invasive species. 

Our hubris knows no bounds already!

Look, science can only account for material knowledge, metric understanding. The physical is not the All.

We missed a beat with quantum physics. We keep trying to subsume it into things we can make work for us. I'm sure that some of quantum physics will prove useful, and likely already has. But what we never did take note of is that there is no media in quantum entanglement. That would have to mean that there is no information transmission, since an identity can't share with itself. 

Categorically, for me at least, quantum physics indicates that we are always enmeshed with reality which is both pysically and temporally distant. Machines don't do that. The zeros and ones of digital machinery can't handle states which are both zero and one at the same time . . .  until touched.

Sure we can get unbustable encryption by computations so complex that they'd be as difficult to crack as your very identity. But another way to achieve the same ends might be to ensure that there is an actual identity behind any information that is transmitted. Accountability would go a long way toward mitigation of much vandalism against public understanding. 

And then we're back to governance, and our inability to trust even that. Make no mistake that wannabe tyrants work hard to undermine trust in governance, leaving a vacuum for the wealthy to bust into. 

There can be no worse time than now to loose the bonds of knowledge and understanding to any an all with a click. I don't mean that we should reserve knowledge and understanding for an elite. I mean that we lack adequate moral understanding. We still believe that unmitigated "progress" solves all problems. We don't know how to order our progress. The wealthy are always unaccountable. The choiceless poor always pay for it.

We need to slow down to find and then enhance the benefits to society before we loose those bonds. We have to trim back our exuberance about exploiting any and all natural resources for the benefit of the wealthy. The public good should not be bought and sold. But that is what is happening right now. Is it really urgent that we build these massive data centers as a further affront against the poise and equanimity of our living planet? Is there any aspect to bitcoin that will be benefit the public good?

It's as though we really do believe that we'll figure everything out. I, for only one, would consider such an end to be extremely boring. Death by another name. To live is to wonder.

A long time ago, a parent at the school where I taught Chinese gave me a book he thought I should read. He was an evangelical, and the book indeed had a kind of universalizing premise that Chinese civilization would always be inferior to Western Civ because of the "alphabet effect" which was the name of the book, I think. The book was trash and offensive for its cultural chauvinism, making some sort of argument that only an alphabetic language can make sense of the world.

I left the book behind after one of my many moves. I left a lot of stuff behind in that particular move, but I agonized about that one book. I think I made a political decision, but now I wish I could refresh my memory by opening the book. 

Here's the Google blurb:

The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization by Robert K. Logan argues that the phonetic alphabet fundamentally shaped Western thought and society, fostering individualism, abstract science, and logical analysis, in contrast to more concrete Eastern systems. Logan traces the evolution from oral culture through writing to modern electronic media, showing how the alphabet's structure influenced everything from codified law and monotheism to the analytical style of Western civilization. 

Naturally, I've now finally decided to read Edward Said's Orientalism of whose thesis I've long been well-aware.

Interesting question: Does one credit AI, as in cite the author? Ethically, it's obvious that one must credit AI in school, though that makes a more interesting dilemma, since you're not supposed to use it in the first place. Like telling your girlfriend you know she cheated on you since you read her private diary, except, kind of, in reverse. 

It's by no means clear that "individualism, abstract science, logical analysis, and electronic media" have gotten us to a good place. By that same logic (!!) which implies that the ends distinguish the means, if we kill the planet then Logan is wrong in his basic premise. 

Well frankly my dear, I think that this question is more like the abortion question than it is like 'do you want to cure disease or don't you?" Meaning that there is a kind of absolutism about "progress" here, and damn the climate, full speed ahead. If someone wants to get to Mars, then let him go regardless of the consequences for the rest of us by destruction of the commons.

There are plenty of abortion-like questions which, like privacy, should remain outside the law, which must only tinker around the edges while the rest of us remain in discussion. 

It's easy to escape life, but it's really hard to escape responsibility for destroying it. On that at least, we must all agree.

The other secret of quantum physics has gone unnoticed. It was already evident with Einstein's relativity theory. All matter is always in motion. Which then means that all matter is in a different universe than all other matter by reason of time dilation and the Twin Paradox. 

Long ago, Plato took note that concepts are eternal and not the product of invention. Even our patent law honors that observation. Living things are moved by conceptual reality. Indeed this is my definition for emotion. Mind apprehends concepts, built as they generally are upon physical reality; the world of perception that is the province of science. Emotion is what triggers action in a living being. Evolution is built on something much quicker than the problem-solving which makes up science. 

And it's wrong of us to retrofit scientific trial-and-error problem-solving into the development of Chinese medicine. With or without language the mind feels a match - directly without the mediation of sensation - between actual reality and a mind-held concept. We run and hide from a lion not because we've decided to, the way we might decide to buy a house. The mind/matter match hits us in the move-it baby move-it nexus, which is felt as fear and which transits all sorts of mechanisms which promote flight efficiency and effectiveness.

It's especially powerful when what you recognize is a lover or a mother or even a named pet. Proper names will never belong to mechanisms unless we project our personalization onto them. So many of those I used to help make computing technology work would name their 'puter and even make incantations to it. But who feels a connection to the proper names of patent medicine?

Think of how much time you spend in front of screens of various sizes and configurations. In my dotage, I find myself in tears far too often for what I engage with on some screen. Emoji-land can't replace the real world, though that's where the economy wants us. It's no mystery why screens are so cheap. Think of the manipulative power behind them!

Somehow I've deluded myself into thinking that it's enough to emend in this tiny way our sense of reality. I delude myself that people might awaken to a difference between the real and the imaginary; that a life defined by money is not a life at all. 

I'm no radical. I have no particular political agenda, and I mostly fear idealism. I can't believe in a God who tells us what to do, but I'm not a deist either the way our founding fathers were. God is not only a First Mover. God is present in every aspect of life.

And only semi-incidentally, I think we're nuts to expect alien life to appear. Sure it's just plain logical that there must be life elsewhere in the cosmos, but it's physically quite impossible for us to know it physically. I mean unless you think we'll surpass the speed of light. Which won't make any difference, since emotional bonds will be broken long before physical contact.

I've died once in my life, by drowning, along with a few near misses. The only thing important about that is that I experienced time dilation, as in my entire life present in the instant of death. A real present experience. We keep treating time as though it were distinct from the other dimensions. I maintain that it's not. 

Being present for your own life as a whole is not so different from being present with a work of art. You can't do it piecemeal. 

It fascinates me that we now exist in a local cosmos which depends on a shared constancy for time that is far beyond all reason. We account for physical time dilation with all sorts of tricks, but the net sum-total result is that we individuate our instance of life in the cosmos to the same extent that our current rendition of oligarchic despotic corporate global capitalism wants and needs each of us to be individualistic. That, by its accomplishment, is the very definition of cosmic solipsism. There is no other civilization in the cosmos that would have us in this form. We would represent no-one apart from ourself, and civilization would remain invisible and distant.

First we learn to love our neighbors as ourselves, and then to make our decisions for the good of the whole. Which means to reinvigorate and possibly to reinvent democratic governance. We don't have to be ceding ownership of the commons to the clever inventors of ways to become richer and have more power. Even for them, any gratification would be done in a cosmic instant. There is no vitality in bigger and better yachts.

What's the rush? Somewhere in the back of our minds most of us, perhaps ever so vaguely, fret about the evident fact that neither the earth nor the sun will ever be eternal. Which is to exclude all other individuals (persons or civilizations) in just the way that Jews and persons of color have so often been excluded from humanity. There is nothing so special, cosmically, about humans, but death is also not the end. It's only the end of being trapped in and by time. I am not so enamored by my own personality that I want or need it to go on forever. Ditto the human race (so far). 

But I am certain that there is more to life than we shall ever know, and always shall be. Please let's learn to live and let live before it's just too late. Why kill all of our dreams at once?

And, you know, if emotion weren't part of the cosmic process then all the little particles would just fly apart to fill all voids, time would stop and, but for God, the void would be voided. Time is a function of life and not of physics. Physics can't touch God. But we've been wrong to think that physics and God are different forms of comprehension. How cool is that?!? C.P. Snowdrift.

Goodreads Review of After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a very satisfying read for me. I couple it with my recent read of Ruth Garrett Millikan's Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language and Natural Information. Both books scrape away much wordy nonsense, in the one regarding morality and in the other regarding philosophies of language.

Millikan cuts through dense philosophical tomes to replace most theory with what seem to me the utterly sound observation that we pick up words quickly and easily by noting what others mean by them. Gone are wacko considerations of qualia and color naming. It clicked with me.

With MacIntyre there is the same no-nonense getting to the essence about what virtues really are. He seems to have refreshed his own philosophy rather late in his career, where reading Kuhn on scientific evolution/revolution goaded him to place philosophical reasoning in its proper historical context. There is no final reckoning to morality.

Just as there is no final understanding which might be arrived at in and by science, there is no moral understanding which can be stripped away from its historical context. There is only mild despair when the reader comes to realize that individualism is destructive of morality, or that bureaucratic government and industry contribute to the fracturing of a unitary narrative self.

I say 'mild despair' because so much of contemporary life truly is an improvement on what once was. But he does identify the usual suspects for what remains wrong: inequality of opportunity, the ceding of character to be distributed among the many separate roles a modern person must compose. He also doesn't fail to take note of the totalizing composition of our world when motives are outsourced to money.

Here is my own maxim: At no point ever will human competency and intelligence surpass the combined natural wisdom of all life together on earth. Meaning, among other things, that no good can come from the attempt. In MacIntyre's terms, there is no proper "practice" which destroys our living substrate. Virtue requires a practice within which it may be defined, and there is no virtue in the practice of destruction when no public good comes from it.

I can't attempt to summarize, since I'll have to read the book again. The sentences are long and require antecedents to be kept in mind longer than this old mind can hold them. So instead, I want to meditate on his casual and unexamined usage of "intention."

We all must have a narrative for our lives, and that narrative is meaningless without intention. This also seems to mean that there is a telos. There is no teleology to history, and we will never discern what might be the ends of mankind. But a narrative must have a direction if not a goal. And without intention that direction is meaningless.

But without examination "intention" seems to relate to reason and the intelligence of problem-solving. If that were the case, then sophisticated AI's might be said to be alive. The reason that they won't ever be alive is that they are apart from the intricate matrix of emotion that ties us to our world, and especially to our fellow humans.

Decisions don't come first, emotional response does. So intention is triggered by a feeling and then the narrative rationalization follows. Character, or a character, is composed by feelings and not by intelligence. Intelligence relates to a practice, and intelligence takes many forms. Many human problems can't be solved logically. One can't trouble-shoot one's way out of an attack.

History has no telos. Humans must if they are to be good. I am not a good student, but I have studied a bit of the philosophy of language, and have read a bit about consciousness. As with virtue, our reads about these matters borrow their logical positivism from science. We should know much better than we do what language isn't and what consciousness isn't. We have the cart in front of the horse with those and so many other matters. Our premises close our minds. Which is to say, as MacIntyre does, that we can't remove ourselves from history, nor know our ends which we can only want.

I surely do intend to read his subsequent books.

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Dear Indi.ca

Thanks for dropping the 'white empire' discussion for a moment. While I don't believe there can be anti-white racism (given that the heuristics of race locate whiteness with privilege) hating on a racial category is still corrosive. It can only invite more racism. 

I may be in a minority in this space, but the 'corporate as AI' argument you present is a much better way in to what is so wrong with global arrangements. All AI is bereft of emotive fellow-feeling. Indeed, that would make a fine definition for AI.

There was never a good argument to allow corporate "people" to enclose the public good. But no argument was ever made, since we've been brainwashed into thinking that only corporations can promote "progress." It's the economy, stupid is a stupid thing to say. The bigger is not always the better.

Reversing flows of authority away from local may be much more important than both politics and the economy. Local newspapers, local business owners (v. franchisees), local and public shopping. 'We the people' are meant to have the authority to make this happen in these United States. Leave the "global authority" space to science and art, and leave public safety and dignity to politics, including the dignity of work-spaces. Public spaces have lost much of their dignity in the US.

The postal system should take over email and social media, and monetary policy needs to move away from the absurd notion that money is a neutral medium for exchange. Bitcoin be damned. 

Advertising as the root of our economy is itself corrosive. Public spaces can easily become far more inviting and interesting than to vegetate in front of a screen of any size. It's far too easy to coach AI into exciting human emotions that the AI doesn't have. That, in itself, is atrocity. Money as the goal for work almost compels the practice. Engaging work has its own rewards, but salary differentials need to reflect the social and public good rather than to encourage private wealth.

Once you feel certain of your thinking (influencer think), you've already gone AI. Don't do it, Indi! Doubt is good. I don't doubt that I'm a racist. There's always more work to do.