Do your best. Speak the truth.
Referencing the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision, Hawley describes how American legislative bodies have effectively abrogated their power to legislate and allowed that vacuum to be filled by unelected bureaucrats and the judiciary.
This talk is well-worth listening to.
A new cosmic-scale estimate on the evolution of intelligent life figures that “there should be at least a few dozen active civilizations” in the Milky Way.
Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, Christopher Conselice who led the research, explains: “There should be at least a few dozen active civilizations in our Galaxy under the assumption that it takes 5 billion years for intelligent life to form on other planets, as on Earth.” Conselice also explains that, “The idea is looking at evolution, but on a cosmic scale. We call this calculation the Astrobiological Copernican Limit.” (Research sheds new light on intelligent life existing across the galaxy)
Buddhist cosmology has long claimed that the universe is teeming with sentient life.
Two other basic ways to figure the probability of intelligent “communicating civilizations” existing in the universe are:
From a materialist point of view, conscious life is a sort of ordinary phenomenon that could arise on many planets under a wide variety of conditions; therefore it must have arisen many times in the cosmos, including within the Milky Way.
From the “mental universe” point of view, thought itself is a fundamental part of the cosmos underlying everything in the universe; thus the evolution of many intelligent “communicating civilizations” besides our own would be expected.
I betray my poor education by admitting that I had never heard of W. V. Quine’s “indeterminacy of translation” until last week*. My ignorance is especially egregious as I have worked as a professional translator for many years.
Maybe I had heard about it but had forgotten. I am being self-reflective because FIML practice is deeply, fundamentally concerned with the “indeterminacy” of translating one person’s thoughts into another person’s head.
Quine’s thesis is not just about translating from one language to another, though there is that. It is much more about the fundamental impossibility of determining what anything means well enough to “translate” it into another context, a next sentence, into another person’s mind, or even “translating” your own speech from the past into the context of your mind today.
If I had known about Quine, I probably never would have thought of FIML because his ideas and the slews of papers written on “indeterminacy of translation” surely would have made me believe that the subject had been worked through.
As it was, I have plodded along in a delightful state of ignorance and, due to that, maybe added something practical to the subject.
In the first place, I wholeheartedly believe that speech is filled with indeterminacy, which I have generally called ambiguity or uncertainty. In the second place, I have confined my FIML-related investigations mainly to interpersonal speech between partners who care about each other. I see no solution to the more general problem of indeterminacy within groups, subcultures, or linguistic communities. Until brain scans get much better, large groups will be forced to resort to hierarchical “determinacy” to exist or function at all.
For individuals, though, there is much we can do. FIML practice does not remove all “indeterminacy.” Rather, it removes much more than most people are aware is possible, even remotely aware is possible. My guess is FIML communication provides a level of detail and resolution that is an order of magnitude or two better than non-FIML.
That is a huge improvement. It is life-changing on many levels and extremely satisfying.
FIML does not fix everything—and philosophical or “artistic” differences between partners are still possible—but it does fix a great deal. By clearing up interpersonal micro-indeterminacy again and again, FIML practice frees partners from the inevitable macro-problems that micro-ambiguity inevitably causes.
Moreover, this freedom, in turn, frees partners from a great deal of subconscious adhesion to the hierarchical “determinacy” of whichever culture they are part of. Rather than trapping themselves in a state of helpless acceptance of predefined hierarchical “meaning,” FIML partners have the capacity to sort through existential semiotics and make of them what they will with far less “indeterminacy,” or ambiguity, than had been possible without FIML practice.
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If we consider humans to be complex signaling systems or networks, then it is readily apparent that each human network signals within itself and also is connected by signals to other networks.
In A signal-based model of psychology: part one, we said:
the only significant interpersonal signaling data we can really know with significant certainty are data noticed, remembered, and agreed upon by two (or more in some cases) people engaged in significant interpersonal communication (signaling).
More recently, in Indeterminacy of translation and FIML, we discussed W. V. Quine’s thesis, which describes;
the fundamental impossibility of determining what anything means well enough to “translate” it into another context, a next sentence, into another person’s mind, or even “translating” your own speech from the past into the context of your mind today.
When we analyze a person based on vague ideas like “personality,” “psychology,” or “cognition,” we are principally assigning ambiguous referents to amorphous categories. We have more words but not much more understanding.
Cognition is a huge grab-bag of a word that means almost anything, as do the terms psychology and personality.
If we replace these terms with the concept of signaling networks, we gain specificity. For example, rather than analyzing the “cognitive-behavior” of a person we can more easily and profitably analyze their signaling.
The advantage of examining signaling rather than “cognitive-behavior” is signals are quite specific. They can usually be defined pretty well, they can be contextualized, and their communicative intent can be determined with reasonable specificity.
To be most effective, signaling analysis works best if we abandon the idea that we can accurately analyze the signals of someone else, especially if we do not analyze our own signals at the same time.
Moreover, a signaling analysis will work best if we do it with:
Sad to say, it can be difficult to find two people who fit together in those ways, but that is how it is. Much of this problem is due to social expectations, which presently greatly reduce opportunities for clear, honest communication. And much of this is due to how we normally conceive of a person, as a bundle of vague things that cannot be pinned down.
The ideal signaling analysis will be done between close friends with the above qualifications. A signaling analysis will not work well, if at at all, if it is done between a professional and a patient. A professional psychologist would do the best for their patient by teaching them how to do signaling analysis with a friend. If they don’t have a friend, maybe one can be found; if not, a different approach should be used.
But you don’t have to have “problems” to do a signaling analysis. Everyone will benefit from it.
Signaling analysis works because partners learn to work with good data that has been generated between them during real-life situations. Having this data allows partners to do micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis on it. And these different levels help them see the specifics of a particular signal exchange, the immediate context of the exchange, and the larger social or historical context from which the exchange has derived some or much of its meaning.
For example, if clear data on a tone of voice has been agreed upon, both partners can then explain the micro antecedents and context of that data, the meso context of those antecedents, and if necessary the macro context that gave rise to either or both of those. The same outline applies to all micro data, be it tone, gesture, word choice, body language, reference, etc.
With practice, a new way of understanding communication will arise in partners’ minds. Rather than having a vague “cognition” about some poorly-defined “emotion” or “personality trait,” partners will find that they can benefit much more by simply analyzing what actually happened based upon data they both agree on.
It is very important for partners to do many analyses of specific micro-data, a single word or phrase, a single tone of voice, a single gesture, etc.. The reason for this is we can’t accurately remember much more than that. When we try to do more, we are pushed immediately out of specific micro data into vague meso or macro generalities that constitute nothing more than general categories with general references to other general categories. Rather than analyzing something that has actually occurred, we instead argue about general emotions, vague traits, unsubstantiated assumptions about “personalities,” and so on.
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Do your best. Speak the truth.
This video is a good example of the teamwork used by Antifa. These are not “organic” protests.
Click on image for best video version.
Empathy literally means the capacity to recognize the emotions being experienced by another sentient being.
It is almost always bound up with sympathy and compassion. Empathy as we normally think of it is a good thing, a liberal thing, a Buddhist thing, a kindly thing. But is that a good thing?
When I first read William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience in my late teens, I adored the poems and illustrations of the Songs of Innocence and largely disliked or ignored the Songs of Experience. I liked the joy, innocence, and passion of the Songs of Innocence but not the sober truths of the Songs of Experience.
Culturally, as far as I can tell, America is infatuated with the innocence of empathy, but not the sober truths that should go hand in hand with it.
If all people were nice and kind and never did bad things, it would be good to be innocent about empathy. But not all people are good. Indeed, most of us are only good sometimes and some of us are really bad a lot of the time.
Do you have the capacity to recognize the emotions being experienced by a person intent on doing harm? Doesn’t our current sense of what empathy entails leave out empathy’s evil twin, the bad emotions and intentions of other sentient beings?
I don’t know if it is still true today, but Japanese tourists visiting the USA used to get mugged and raped at levels well above their percentage of the population. The reason was, and maybe still is, they were too innocent and could not perceive the evil intent of their new “friend” or the cool dude asking them for the time.
This happened because Japan has less violent crime than the USA and because Japanese tourists were not able to imagine or read American situational exchanges. And this shows that empathy for evil is based both on expectation and culture, which are close in nature.
The Buddha said that we can only really know another human being after long association. Even he cautioned about being innocent and empathizing only with the good we see in others while failing to recognize the bad.
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The video below is interesting and well-worth viewing. It is about universal digitization and collection of all individual human biological and genetic identities.
(The vid is also about population/birth control, which is much less interesting.)
Universal digitization of everything human is inevitable. I see no argument that can credibly deny that, save human extinction. Technological advances are all but impossible to stop.
Digitization of communication led almost immediately to the collection of all digitized communication in the NSA database. The USA cannot abandon that database because if we do, other nation’s will continue with theirs and quickly outpace us.
In this way, many/most technologies can be used for aggression and there is no way to stop that or protect against it except to research and develop those technologies ourselves. This basic idea is true for digitized technologies as well as medical and genetic ones. And it is true for all nations capable of doing the work.
Bioweapons research cannot be reliably banned globally, nor can genetic research which will eventually lead to designer babies. If we don’t do it, someone else will. And whoever does it best will gain a great advantage over rivals who have eschewed that field.
EDIT: There are three other parts in this series on Bill Gates. They can be found here: The Corbett Report.
In deeply fundamental ways, freedom of religion is our most basic right and our most important. Freedom of religion must also mean freedom of philosophy, thought, belief, cognition, psychology, mentality, sensibility, being. Freedom of religion is the lifeblood of the individual as responsibly defined and acted on by that individual.
Our beautiful system honors the individual by protecting the rights of every individual to freedom of religion, speech, assembly and, I wish, association. This system depends on our exercising our rights fully and responsibly. Individual responsibility is implicit in our system and crucial to its smooth operation.
Start time prompted to 48:10.
It is well-known that psychedelic drugs can induce religious experiences, as well as cure depression and other psychological problems.
Many people today and in the past have had these experiences and praised them effusively. In recent decades, scientific studies have corroborated this side of the history of most of the world’s religions.
A new study published last month adds even more weight to the religious value of psychedelic drugs.
..Respondents reported the primary senses involved in the encounter were visual and extrasensory (e.g. telepathic). The most common descriptive labels for the entity were being, guide, spirit, alien, and helper. Although 41% of respondents reported fear during the encounter, the most prominent emotions both in the respondent and attributed to the entity were love, kindness, and joy. Most respondents endorsed that the entity had the attributes of being conscious, intelligent, and benevolent, existed in some real but different dimension of reality, and continued to exist after the encounter. Respondents endorsed receiving a message (69%) or a prediction about the future (19%) from the experience. More than half of those who identified as atheist before the experience no longer identified as atheist afterwards. The experiences were rated as among the most meaningful, spiritual, and psychologically insightful lifetime experiences, with persisting positive changes in life satisfaction, purpose, and meaning attributed to the experiences. (Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects)
Individual psychology is a locus or node within a larger social system.
More precisely, individual psychologies are particular signaling systems within larger social signaling systems.
It is valuable to see this because general analyses of signaling systems—even those having nothing to do with human psychology—can shed light on human signaling systems, including both individual psychology and many aspects of sociology.
When human psychology is viewed as a signaling system, we can readily see that narcissism is bound to occur because narcissism is fundamentally a simplistic signal system. (See Narcissism redefined (yet again) for more.)
When human sociology is viewed as a signaling system, we can similarly see that parasitism is bound to occur because the exploitation of one system by another is a fairly simple matter. (See Social parasitism in ants and humans for more.)
In like manner, we can see that social hierarchies importantly have evolved because they are simple and decently efficient signal (communication) systems.
We can also see why hierarchical system often are overthrown and why they often do not arise in systems where they are not needed. For example, no hierarchy is needed for a language system once the basics have been established. A parasitic or authoritarian group might impose a hierarchy on a language system, but that’s a different animal.
When individual psychology is viewed as a signaling system, we can see that a great deal of what we consider “disordered” or “ill” within that system is fundamentally a problem of the signal system itself and not the “personality” we have mistakenly abstracted out of that system.
Indeed, most of what we think of as personality is nothing more than an individual signal system attempting to conform to its understanding of the larger social system within which it exists. When science is applied to “personality” erroneously conceived, we arrive at the many psychometric tautologies on personality traits we now have. Psychometrics have limited value for describing societies, but are frequently misleading, even damaging, when applied to individuals. In this, they resemble BMI data which originally was used as a marker for the health of whole populations, not individuals, and which can be misleading when applied to individuals.
When we view individuals as signaling systems rather than personalities, we can immediately see that these systems can and should be optimized for better communication. Indeed, this is the real job of psychology—optimizing individual signaling systems. Not just treating “personality” disorders.
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Stated more clearly: Culture is nothing more than the context of the languages we speak.
In this sense culture defines our words and phrases; and in this sense, our psychologies.
This means that if you think or feel something, you probably can find a way to speak about it unless you are trapped within the context of your language.
For example, just think of anything you are afraid or embarrassed to talk about.
For some of those topics, you may have a friend (or stranger) with whom you are able to speak. Very traumatic experiences can be exceptionally difficult to speak about because they tend to be unique or uniquely horrific; so normal language in almost all contexts won’t get you there. You will feel inhibited, tongue-tied, embarrassed, afraid, timid, mute, isolated.
Traumatic experiences are an extreme example of how culture/context is not able to overlay all of our experiences. This is a core reason we turn to professional listeners—therapists, clergy, etc—to deal with trauma, though often we are even afraid of them.
Artists also provide us with unique experiences set in unique contexts. If well-done, or more importantly well-publicized, art may change the culture/context for many speakers. In this area, goodness lives alongside propaganda and hype. Many speakers feed the frenzy and feed on it.
In Buddhism, speech is a vessel of delusion as well as enlightenment. Buddhism provides an excellent context for speech because it fully recognizes the meta-contexts of impermanence, emptiness, ignorance, delusion, and suffering.
If you have experienced trauma, as we all have (it’s relative), you are in a good place to understand that traumas can be very small yet agonizing. And they can repeat often, causing constant suffering, sleeplessness, helplessness.
If we can see that traumas, both small and large, are outliers from whatever culture we are in, then we can also see that the way forward is to make our culture into something that can speak about them.
When culture is as small as one person—you alone—you can be free in many ways but also will get stuck on your traumas. With no way to speak about them with others, they will distort your thinking, carry weight they should not have. Disturb everything you do.
When culture is as large as two people, great freedom is possible. Two people just need to realize this. If they do, it’s a small step to realize that profound cooperation solves their cultural “prisoners’ dilemma” better any other solution.
I cannot escape my trauma if I lie to you because my context will instantly become inauthentic, stultified fully as badly as my trauma always has been. So, I won’t do that. And you, my partner, are as smart as me so you won’t either.
Cultures are contexts for languages because cultures have rules. A two-person culture also needs rules. Best to figure most of them out for yourselves but also best to start with some very important basics. And these are: meta-cognitive rules that allow for accurate meta-communication.
Here is a set of rules that can start you off on a new way to communicate: How to do FIML.
New facts may come to light and alter the picture we have today. But as of now, it does seem that China (CCP) at the very least deliberately concealed the seriousness of their COVID-19 outbreak, thus causing global pandemic.
What’s worse is it also looks, as of today, that they may very well have engineered the virus and released it deliberately or negligently. Either way, it’s bad. Of course, deliberately made and deliberately released is the worst.
Consider matters from the point of view of the CCP. On the one hand, if they honor the trade deal they signed with Trump, they are doomed to a slow death as the CCP cannot survive for long under the regimen they signed onto. On the other hand, if they renege on the trade deal, they will also be doomed and probably to an even quicker death.
This double-bind they are caught in—either way, we lose—is their probable motivation for unleashing COVID-19 on the world if that is what they did. And almost all signs point to some version of them having done that.
The least version of this scenario in their minds would be: “We are more used to adversity than the West/USA and we are better at controlling our population due to our authoritarian system. Therefore, we will survive this COVID-19 better than the West, so it is to our advantage to cover it up.”
The worst version of this scenario in their minds would be: “We have developed lethal viruses and we have vaccines for them. Now is the time to unleash them on the world. We will prevail and within a short time control the entire world. We will start with COVID-19 and follow up with a second or third virus as conditions dictate.”
I would be astonished if Trump and the Pentagon have not considered all of the above and much more. Thus, I must conclude that we are already responding to the threat.
Seizing CCP money in the West is one response already being discussed in public. What will we do about potential follow-up viruses? I don’t know. I do not see how a second or third bio-attack, if launched, can be prevented or contained since one could easily be initiated in thousands of places simultaneously.
American Buddhist Net 