Thank you for this! Much fodder for my database of favourite quotes!
I work very hard to purposely live below the poverty level. I've come to see spending money as the equivalent of environmental decay. And this way, I can legally not pay income tax to fund genocide and many other things that government does in the name of "progress".
Hi Kathleen, finally got a chance to read the article you shared, thank you. I found it interesting and worthy of pondering, but perhaps I had no choice but to feel this way, lol. No doubt genetics and conditioning determine much of our behavior, but occasionally there seem to be dramatic exceptions, for instance those who were hardened KKK disciples renouncing those beliefs. Sapolsky's ideas are certainly worth consideration, if difficult to prove or disprove. I'm all for the study of human behavior, truly that is key to our future. Can our intellect overcome our primitive animal?
Many good points here. We have a profound behavioral issue, and the problem of overpopulation spoken of when I was in grade school is never discussed. Overconsumption to avoid boredom is indeed another key problem which I chalk up to a failure of education to create intellectual curiosity, and our increasingly fragmented societies which no longer revolve around community.
Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will. by Corinne Purtill, Los Angeles Times.
Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, his new book "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will," says: We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there."
So if we want to break out of those chains, it is going to take huge effort. But life depends on it!
I'm not agreeing with the "no free will" concept, but there is some unseen binder which keeps people enclosed in their little life and prevents seeing the world as it is. In another line of reasoning, perhaps Prof. Sapolsky has noticed his own limitations, that being the constraints of the male thought process which gets us into war after war. Again, there must be ways to break out of these thought traps.
All I'm going to say about the Israel situation is that retaliation was neither required, nor necessary nor beneficial. It's another typical male-brain stunt by a certain silver-back conservative. Unfortunately, you cannot airlift anything unless you drop it from planes, there is no landing places.
Kathleen, let me summarize the main problems in a few words and their solutions: Globalization and Centralization. We need to go from that to: Localization and Decentralization.
Exactly on point! Totally agree Kathleen!! There must be limits to this "progress", because the only progress we are making is ruining the planet. That's not called progress, it's called "destruction".
"For these reasons, the paradoxes these fields face are more than mere intellectual or theoretical puzzles. They signal the larger unreconciled perspectives of the knower and the known, mind and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, whose fracture menaces our project of civilization altogether. Our present-day technologies, which drive us ever closer to existential threats, concretize this split by treating everything — including, paradoxically, awareness and knowing themselves — as an objectifiable, informational quantity or resource. It’s precisely this split — the divorce between knower and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known — that constitutes our meaning crisis. The climate emergency, which arises from our treating nature as just a resource for our use, is the most pronounced and catastrophic manifestation of our crisis."
"Cognitive neuroscience drives the point home by indicating that we cannot fully fathom consciousness without experiencing it from within."
"Each of these fields ultimately runs aground on its own paradoxes of inner versus outer, and observer versus observed, that collectively turn on the conundrum of how to understand awareness and subjectivity in a Universe that was supposed to be fully describable in objective scientific terms without reference to the mind. The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity, and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain mastery over."
----------
Crime is when thieves take your things or food etc.; war is the same actions taken by large groups. People regard the "Ten Commandments" as that which originated sin while in reality it was the very basis of civilization. You cannot have both a working social structure and abrogate those basic rules (except about "God").
Yes, some isolated societies work with their natural environment, but I have seen examples of "rescued" uncontacted people sitting in a house in USA watching TV; they adapt to corrupt civilization instantly. The myth of Indigenous peoples somehow being fastidious in their honour of nature is just that, a myth; they, like anyone else, are corruptible. Yes, the "warring tribes of Europe" have historically always been at each other's throats, but if you look you can see the same human nature in Asian civilizations as well. Overall, humanity has been at constant war against Nature (see above quotes) placing us above it at all times (esp in airplanes!) using Nature as our source for ingredients to built our anti-life cities. But Nature always wins and has perhaps programmed in our demise through our own cleverness.
"My belief is that humans are a failed experiment of whatever life ultimately is…"
You are labouring under the delusion that life has purpose, and that such purpose somehow resembles us!
We are not any more evolved than any other creature. Evolution is adaptation to the current environment, which with the weight of 8+ billion humans, we are changing at a rate too fast for even ourselves to keep up with.
And we may no longer be capable of much evolution. Our modern medicine and nutrition mean that just about any child born can live long enough to reproduce. So the "selection" component of evolution is now missing — we are no longer "adapting", but rather, are simply saturating our petri dish.
As an aside, another modern situation is probably limiting evolution. Why do we live longer than it takes to assure the next generation? Because grandparents must have played an increasing role in propagating grandchildren's genes. That doesn't seem so much the case, these days, so there is no longer any evolutionary advantage to living more than 40 or so — except for multi-generational hoarding and eventual inheritance.
John Calhoun had what happens next figured out in the 1970s. He gave rats (and later, mice) unlimited food. Guess what happened? That's on our agenda!
Recently, scientists discovered an Antarctic multi-cellular algae had "devolved" to single-celled organisms. The extra energy required to maintain a multi-celled organism proved to be so much that the selection pressure favoured a single-celled version.
One is remined of Kurt Vonnegut's seal-like, less intelligent human descendants in "Galapagos". Our future may lie in such a direction!
And that would be "progress" if it meant we became more adapted to the environment we had created for ourselves.
There are many balls of yarn being unwound here, hard to make a Cat's Cradle out of that. Looking at the small blue planet hanging in Space, it looks like the purpose of Life is to colonize and fully occupy that planet. But there was an error along the way that resulted in one species developing a way to blow the whole scene up, for no justifiable reason. It's up to us to figure out how this came about, not forget it and go shopping.
"there was an error along the way that resulted in one species developing a way to blow the whole scene up"
Sure! It was essentially unlimited energy.
I would not suggest that we all go shopping; I just think there is very little chance that the vast unwashed masses will "figure it out" and do something about it.
It's the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics in action. In the aggregate, humans can no more resist that then they can procreation.
Thank you for your thoughts! Yes, there are wrong choices being made continuously, as if “Normal” will go on forever. Some people do try to peak out, such as Dr. James Hansen (see https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/ )
And he has been in a lot of trouble many times for that. Most people keep their heads down, take their pay check and go home. And what we know and can’t know, as per Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns and unknown unknowns,” so does P = NP? In his book _The Age of Anger - A History of the Present_, Pankaj Mishra charts the path of the development of “western” philosophy in fine detail, all leading up to its logical (?) conclusion, in such morons as Modi in India? And the likely outcome for society, civil war of all-against-all, especially when the beer-bellies figure out that their pickup truck is obsolete. Then you see how pointless “democracy” is; when, instead of being able to vote whatever they wish from the treasury, people find the treasury is bankrupt in sovereign default. Meanwhile, fools stand in the social space which should contain real government while business and lobbyists call the shots. Every government has fully demonstrated that it is not only incompetent to handle public funds, their actions represent fraud on a grand scale. We are held in these bonds by too many chains to count and the bus has driven off the cliff long ago. So all you can do is complain as loudly as possible. People can’t actually think; they have too many filters in the way. And even if they could see through all that, the next day is back to paying the bills, due to economic slavery.
I do not support any religion, I was just mentioning Ten Commandments as the simplest set of rules that allow civilization to exist. The real Jesus, the philosopher from Nazareth, was a continuous thorn in the side of the Roman hierarchy and so met with the typical Roman fate for such dissidence. As for humans in general, alas, the naivety! “All we, like sheep, have gone astray.” Is there truly free will? Looking at society in general, it is not a noticeable attribute. Chaos is order distributed over time; “order” is merely an instantaneous point in a cascading flow.
I am hoping to get a new post done soon. I don't write to a schedule, or whatever pops into mind; I would not bore you with that. There are many little themes which need tying together.
Thank you for this! Much fodder for my database of favourite quotes!
I work very hard to purposely live below the poverty level. I've come to see spending money as the equivalent of environmental decay. And this way, I can legally not pay income tax to fund genocide and many other things that government does in the name of "progress".
Hi Kathleen, finally got a chance to read the article you shared, thank you. I found it interesting and worthy of pondering, but perhaps I had no choice but to feel this way, lol. No doubt genetics and conditioning determine much of our behavior, but occasionally there seem to be dramatic exceptions, for instance those who were hardened KKK disciples renouncing those beliefs. Sapolsky's ideas are certainly worth consideration, if difficult to prove or disprove. I'm all for the study of human behavior, truly that is key to our future. Can our intellect overcome our primitive animal?
Many good points here. We have a profound behavioral issue, and the problem of overpopulation spoken of when I was in grade school is never discussed. Overconsumption to avoid boredom is indeed another key problem which I chalk up to a failure of education to create intellectual curiosity, and our increasingly fragmented societies which no longer revolve around community.
Thank you, Geoffrey! Maybe the problem is that we have no capacity to make the needed changes. Check this article: https://phys.org/news/2023-10-scientist-decades-dont-free.html
Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will. by Corinne Purtill, Los Angeles Times.
Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, his new book "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will," says: We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there."
So if we want to break out of those chains, it is going to take huge effort. But life depends on it!
I'm not agreeing with the "no free will" concept, but there is some unseen binder which keeps people enclosed in their little life and prevents seeing the world as it is. In another line of reasoning, perhaps Prof. Sapolsky has noticed his own limitations, that being the constraints of the male thought process which gets us into war after war. Again, there must be ways to break out of these thought traps.
All I'm going to say about the Israel situation is that retaliation was neither required, nor necessary nor beneficial. It's another typical male-brain stunt by a certain silver-back conservative. Unfortunately, you cannot airlift anything unless you drop it from planes, there is no landing places.
Kathleen, let me summarize the main problems in a few words and their solutions: Globalization and Centralization. We need to go from that to: Localization and Decentralization.
Exactly on point! Totally agree Kathleen!! There must be limits to this "progress", because the only progress we are making is ruining the planet. That's not called progress, it's called "destruction".
Thank you, Marsha, excellent point!
With society's "Progress", we could build wonderful cities on Mars, like the ones here on Earth, "undimmed by human tears".
A lot if this question of behaviour and intelligence and consciousness is the topic of a new book, The Blind Spot:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048804/the-blind-spot/
reviewed at:
https://bigthink.com/13-8/why-science-must-contend-with-human-experience/
some quotes:
"For these reasons, the paradoxes these fields face are more than mere intellectual or theoretical puzzles. They signal the larger unreconciled perspectives of the knower and the known, mind and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, whose fracture menaces our project of civilization altogether. Our present-day technologies, which drive us ever closer to existential threats, concretize this split by treating everything — including, paradoxically, awareness and knowing themselves — as an objectifiable, informational quantity or resource. It’s precisely this split — the divorce between knower and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known — that constitutes our meaning crisis. The climate emergency, which arises from our treating nature as just a resource for our use, is the most pronounced and catastrophic manifestation of our crisis."
"Cognitive neuroscience drives the point home by indicating that we cannot fully fathom consciousness without experiencing it from within."
"Each of these fields ultimately runs aground on its own paradoxes of inner versus outer, and observer versus observed, that collectively turn on the conundrum of how to understand awareness and subjectivity in a Universe that was supposed to be fully describable in objective scientific terms without reference to the mind. The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity, and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain mastery over."
----------
Crime is when thieves take your things or food etc.; war is the same actions taken by large groups. People regard the "Ten Commandments" as that which originated sin while in reality it was the very basis of civilization. You cannot have both a working social structure and abrogate those basic rules (except about "God").
Yes, some isolated societies work with their natural environment, but I have seen examples of "rescued" uncontacted people sitting in a house in USA watching TV; they adapt to corrupt civilization instantly. The myth of Indigenous peoples somehow being fastidious in their honour of nature is just that, a myth; they, like anyone else, are corruptible. Yes, the "warring tribes of Europe" have historically always been at each other's throats, but if you look you can see the same human nature in Asian civilizations as well. Overall, humanity has been at constant war against Nature (see above quotes) placing us above it at all times (esp in airplanes!) using Nature as our source for ingredients to built our anti-life cities. But Nature always wins and has perhaps programmed in our demise through our own cleverness.
"My belief is that humans are a failed experiment of whatever life ultimately is…"
You are labouring under the delusion that life has purpose, and that such purpose somehow resembles us!
We are not any more evolved than any other creature. Evolution is adaptation to the current environment, which with the weight of 8+ billion humans, we are changing at a rate too fast for even ourselves to keep up with.
And we may no longer be capable of much evolution. Our modern medicine and nutrition mean that just about any child born can live long enough to reproduce. So the "selection" component of evolution is now missing — we are no longer "adapting", but rather, are simply saturating our petri dish.
As an aside, another modern situation is probably limiting evolution. Why do we live longer than it takes to assure the next generation? Because grandparents must have played an increasing role in propagating grandchildren's genes. That doesn't seem so much the case, these days, so there is no longer any evolutionary advantage to living more than 40 or so — except for multi-generational hoarding and eventual inheritance.
John Calhoun had what happens next figured out in the 1970s. He gave rats (and later, mice) unlimited food. Guess what happened? That's on our agenda!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-old-experiment-with-mice-led-to-bleak-predictions-for-humanitys-future-180954423/
Recently, scientists discovered an Antarctic multi-cellular algae had "devolved" to single-celled organisms. The extra energy required to maintain a multi-celled organism proved to be so much that the selection pressure favoured a single-celled version.
One is remined of Kurt Vonnegut's seal-like, less intelligent human descendants in "Galapagos". Our future may lie in such a direction!
And that would be "progress" if it meant we became more adapted to the environment we had created for ourselves.
There are many balls of yarn being unwound here, hard to make a Cat's Cradle out of that. Looking at the small blue planet hanging in Space, it looks like the purpose of Life is to colonize and fully occupy that planet. But there was an error along the way that resulted in one species developing a way to blow the whole scene up, for no justifiable reason. It's up to us to figure out how this came about, not forget it and go shopping.
"One is remined of Kurt Vonnegut…"
"hard to make a Cat's Cradle out of that"
I see what you did there. :-)
"there was an error along the way that resulted in one species developing a way to blow the whole scene up"
Sure! It was essentially unlimited energy.
I would not suggest that we all go shopping; I just think there is very little chance that the vast unwashed masses will "figure it out" and do something about it.
It's the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics in action. In the aggregate, humans can no more resist that then they can procreation.
It all gets back to "Free Will" as per https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/592344/determined-by-robert-m-sapolsky/9780525560975
and that we have passed into social entropy as per Warwick Powell, see https://kathleenmccroskey.substack.com/p/a-proposed-un-dollar
Not all the "unwashed masses" are morons, I was in the shower last Oct 24, I'm not having perpetual war with my microbes, like city people.
Thank you for your thoughts! Yes, there are wrong choices being made continuously, as if “Normal” will go on forever. Some people do try to peak out, such as Dr. James Hansen (see https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/ )
And he has been in a lot of trouble many times for that. Most people keep their heads down, take their pay check and go home. And what we know and can’t know, as per Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns and unknown unknowns,” so does P = NP? In his book _The Age of Anger - A History of the Present_, Pankaj Mishra charts the path of the development of “western” philosophy in fine detail, all leading up to its logical (?) conclusion, in such morons as Modi in India? And the likely outcome for society, civil war of all-against-all, especially when the beer-bellies figure out that their pickup truck is obsolete. Then you see how pointless “democracy” is; when, instead of being able to vote whatever they wish from the treasury, people find the treasury is bankrupt in sovereign default. Meanwhile, fools stand in the social space which should contain real government while business and lobbyists call the shots. Every government has fully demonstrated that it is not only incompetent to handle public funds, their actions represent fraud on a grand scale. We are held in these bonds by too many chains to count and the bus has driven off the cliff long ago. So all you can do is complain as loudly as possible. People can’t actually think; they have too many filters in the way. And even if they could see through all that, the next day is back to paying the bills, due to economic slavery.
I do not support any religion, I was just mentioning Ten Commandments as the simplest set of rules that allow civilization to exist. The real Jesus, the philosopher from Nazareth, was a continuous thorn in the side of the Roman hierarchy and so met with the typical Roman fate for such dissidence. As for humans in general, alas, the naivety! “All we, like sheep, have gone astray.” Is there truly free will? Looking at society in general, it is not a noticeable attribute. Chaos is order distributed over time; “order” is merely an instantaneous point in a cascading flow.
I am hoping to get a new post done soon. I don't write to a schedule, or whatever pops into mind; I would not bore you with that. There are many little themes which need tying together.