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.