Tag: thought
A world without mothers?
Guerini suggests: “The use of your own body would be considered a sign of social inferiority and poverty. A natural mother would be considered potentially irresponsible, like mothers who currently opt for home birth, refusing the hospitalisation and medicalisation of the process… Natural childbirth would first be treated as irresponsible, then criminal.
“Remember that there can be no Medically Assisted Procreation (MAP) without the selection of spermatozoa and of embryos… When technoscientists get involved in the process of procreation they want to set the characteristics of each of these elements, choose them, modify them and determine the end result.
“The laboratory environment transforms the birth process into a technical operation: the embryo becomes a product to be selected, improved, rejected or transformed”.
Guerini explains that there have long been some feminists, notably Shulasmith Firestone, who acclaim artificial reproduction as “liberating” women from “biological tyranny”.
And she predicts that artificial wombs will be demanded, like MAP, as a “right” for everyone, including “transgender” people.
These are “false rights”, says Guerini, and need to be exposed as such.
“Having a child cannot be claimed as a right, neither for a heterosexual couple nor for a homosexual couple, nor for a single woman or man. There cannot be a right to have a child. The capacity to generate life cannot be claimed as a new right by men who identify as women. Procreation can never belong to them”.
Science, Buddhism, and FIML
In some ways FIML practice is a science.
Partners seek the best data available to determine what is being said and/or how they are communicating with each other. Their communication becomes highly objective in the sense that each partner trusts the other’s description of what they said more than their own subjective/emotional impression of what they think they heard. Based on this data, partners are able to continuously upgrade their understandings of each other.
FIML uses an extrinsic formula—the rules of FIML practice—to make this happen, and in this it also resembles science. FIML has an objective, clearly stateable and testable method or procedure for attaining its results. FIML results are also objective in that great satisfaction and better communication are measurable. FIML can be falsified by having many partners do it and not get good results, and in this it is also scientific.
In some ways, though, FIML is turned 180 degrees away from science. This is so because FIML does not have any extrinsic belief or value system that requires submission of the intrinsic, individual, unique mind of either partner. Partners who do FIML can only look to themselves to free themselves from the constraints of extrinsic beliefs, values, semiotics, behaviors, ideas, concepts, and so on. (This does not mean abandon the extrinsic, but rather become free of the constraints of the extrinsic. FIML practice, by paying close attention to speech moments, will help partners do this because they will see precisely where the rubber of extrinsic values meets the road of their self expression and/or listening.)
The FIML method gives partners the tools they need to perceive what Buddhists call the thusness of their unique individualities. The thusness or suchness of being cannot be apprehended through extrinsic semiotics, but can only be experienced by the individual.
Science, in general, does not give us insight into our suchness. Yet FIML practice and Buddhist practice, by using methods that are similar to those of general science, can. FIML differs from science in that it does not make any claims about what is objectively true “out there.” But FIML does claim that partners will vastly improve their communication with each other, and following that vastly improve their understanding of their existence, the suchness of their unique being.
FIML may constitute an improvement on traditional Buddhist practices because FIML uses objective rules to unite two people in the pursuit of truthful communication. It is different from the traditional practice of one person pursuing “truth” alone in that FIML provides the means for each partner to constantly check his or her work against the other partner. An individual alone is easily subject to fantasy and illusion. FIML is also different from traditional group practices where a group is led by a master or guru. In these practices, the master may be subject to the limitations of solitary practice while the group may be misled by that. Additionally group members will have a very strong tendency to base their understanding on extrinsic semiotics provided by the master, not the true suchness of their individual being.
slightly edited, first posted NOVEMBER 18, 2012
Tired of this world
I have to admit I am tired of this world. All three Abrahamic religions and all, or most, of their sects are fighting over how to kill or save as many Palestinians as they can, many favor killing.
American and Western neocons are vying with other top players for control of the world. Gaza and Ukraine are stepping stones in that contest.
The low-mindedness and vulgarity of this, both the dramas and the ludicrous rationalizations, are unbearably self-limiting, inexorably destructive.
As individuals we have almost no say in any of it. Social media is a dead zone for thought, truth, decency. The best ideas or inquiries are shadow-banned into a silence worse than death. It’s the neocons doing that as well.
In the Abrahamic traditions there is actually a scriptural basis for genocide dating back some 3,000 years. In this crazy world, actual fighting and killing today in Gaza and Israel is actually based on those scriptures. Doesn’t that actually refute the whole religion, all three branches of it?
Christians run and hide from that conclusion because they have no other vocabulary or conceptual network to fall back on. Faith is good but not blind faith.
Too many voices I had respected are complacent, if not complicit, with the neocon slaughter. I am not surprised. I knew they would be.
Until the MIHOP raid on October 7, they had seemed to me to be maintaining an appearance of diplomacy, preserving their ability to speak to the public as best they could.
I viewed that as a kind of Buddhist upaya, a means to a worthy end.
But when the means are grotesquely disproportionate and violate all moral standards except the most severe, I can’t take it anymore. It’s definitely not a worthy end anymore.
In Ukraine, I read another 100,000 men have been killed over the past months in the obviously futile counteroffensive forced on them by neocons. That too is genocide.
Ukraine has been destroyed by neocons. Half the population has fled forever and many hundreds of thousands, especially young men, have been killed. The neocons provoked that war too and everyone with a brain knows it.
Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences w/ Diana Walsh Pasulka
The brain as a guessing machine
A new approach to the study of mental disorder—called computational psychiatry—uses Bayesian inference to explain where people with problems are going wrong.
Bayesian inference is a method of statistical reasoning used to understand the probability of a hypothesis and how to update it as conditions change.
The idea is that people with schizophrenia, for example, are doing a bad job at inferring the reasonableness of their hypotheses. This happens because schizophrenics seem to be less likely to put enough weight on prior experience (a factor in Bayesian reasoning).
Somewhat similarly, “sensory information takes priority [over previous experience] in people with autism.” (Bayesian reasoning implicated in some mental disorders)
Distorted calculations — and the altered versions of the world they create — may also play a role in depression and anxiety, some researchers think. While suffering from depression, people may hold on to distorted priors — believing that good things are out of reach, for instance. And people with high anxiety can have trouble making good choices in a volatile environment… (Ibid)
The key problem with autism and anxiety is people with these conditions have trouble updating their expectations—a major component of Bayesian reasoning—and thus make many mistakes.
These mistakes, of course, compound and further increase a sense of anxiety or alienation.
Like several of the researches quoted in the linked article, I find this computational approach exciting.
It speaks to me because it confirms a core hypothesis of FIML practice—that all people make many, significant inferential mistakes during virtually all acts of communication.
In this respect, I believe all people are mentally disordered, not just the ones who are suffering the most.
I think a Bayesian thought experiment can all but prove my point:
What are the odds that you will correctly infer the mental state(s) of anyone you speak with? What are the odds that they will correctly infer your mental state(s)?
In a formal setting, both of you will do well enough if the inferring is kept within whatever the formal boundaries are. But that is all you will be able to infer reasonably well.
In the far more important realm of intimate interpersonal communication, the odds that either party is making correct inferences go down significantly.
If we do not know someone’s mental state, we cannot know why they have communicated as they have. If our inferences about them are based on such questionable data, we are bound to make many more mistakes about them.
The Gospel of Gaza: What we must learn from Netanyahu’s Bible lessons — Laurent Guyénot
In a speech in Hebrew on October 28, Netanyahu justified the Israeli slaughter of civilians in Gaza with a biblical reference to Amalek.
You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember. And we fight. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza and in all other regions in Israel, are joining the chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that has started 3,000 years ago, from Joshua ben Nun, until the heroes of 1948, the Six-Day War, the October 73 War, and all other wars in this country. Our hero troops, they have one supreme main goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy, and to guarantee our existence in this country.
In Netanyahu’s Holy Bible, God gives his chosen people Palestine, and the same God commands them to exterminate the Amalekites, an Arab people that stands in their way. Yahweh asks Moses to not only exterminate the Amalekites, but to “blot out the memory of Amalek under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:19).
It was left to Saul to finish them up: “kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” Yahweh instructs him (1Samuel 15:8). Because Saul spared the Amalekite king Agag, Yahweh withdrew the kingship from him and drove him mad: “I regret having made Saul king, since he has broken his allegiance to me and not carried out my orders” (15:11). The holy prophet Samuel, who had a direct line of communication with Yahweh, had to butcher Agag himself (“hewed Agag in pieces,” in the Revised Standard Version). Yahweh then gave the kingship to David, who proved a more obedient exterminator, for example when he put the people of Rabba “under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon” (2 Samuel 12:31).
I hope this essay will inspire Abrahamic readers to reflect on the actual words and meanings in the Old Testament. I respect all moral religious peoples of all faiths but am also aware that for many religion is a cult, sometimes a dangerous cult of Satanic violence. The ancient Greek, then Christian, and sometimes Jewish term that most unites the Abrahamic traditions with Buddhism is logos. If we see God as logos we can also see the Buddha as logos realized on earth and the Buddhist path a kind of worship or reverence for logos. ‘Theologically’, Buddhists are sentient beings who are attracted to the Tathagata-logos. It is their good karma to be drawn toward logos. Others are blind to logos and sometimes repulsed by it.
A core Buddhist teaching is clinging to words is dangerous. The Buddha prohibited writing his teachings down because he did not want them to turn into scriptures that would be worshipped without being understood. This is why Buddhism defines itself as a mind-to-mind teaching. Buddhists who understands the Dharma well enough transmit it mind-to-mind to others who want to learn it. Buddhists do not proselytize or believe others are lost for having different practices. Buddhists respect and support all traditions and practices that encourage wholesome, ethical thoughts and behaviors because they all lead to logos. ABN
A disturbing meme on more levels than one
This is a disturbing meme. Besides its obvious principal meaning it also carries a second meaning—when (and if, but almost certainly) terrorist attacks start happening in the West, Western peoples will become enraged. The more attacks, the more the rage. The more the rage, the greater the support for a hot WW3. The extremely one-sided, unnuanced pro-Israel positions taken by Western nations, especially USA, appear to support having their populations enraged with war fever. In this light, years of open borders appear to have been part of the plan for WW3 leading to Western world domination. Will they pull it off? Can they? Once the missiles start flying at home, which side will you be on? ABN
Concepts don’t exist — as objective, phenomenological, cognitive, or neural structures
The case for removing concepts from cognitive science and AI research
It can be difficult to convince someone that concepts don’t exist. Everyday experience appears to provide overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Concepts are not only intuitively perceived to be active in daily life, they are also a widespread feature of theories across AI and cognitive science, where they are assumed to be necessary for symbolic and logical thought¹. Most who read the title of this post would be tempted to brush off the argument as patently, demonstrably absurd. It’s akin to trying to convince a European 500 years ago that God doesn’t exist, when everything around them appears to be evidence of, and indeed presupposes God’s existence. Any contrary argument is likely to be taken as the result of sophistry or word-wrangling, or because some critical piece has been neglected.
Despite their seeming obviousness, it is worth noting that there is still no complete and unambiguous explanation for what concepts are, or how they work on thoughts —and indeed how to program them into AI. The human ability to learn and create concepts is multifaceted and complex. AI theories and implementations generally only touch on one or two of its features, while neglecting large numbers of counter-cases. This has lead some researchers, notably Lawrence Barsalou, to suspect that the way we think of concepts is flawed. Perhaps the whole notion of concepts — as a native mechanism for grouping experiences — is untenable.
This article is well-worth reading. Below, I have made a few notes based on my reading of it. To my eye, it demonstrates the existence of consciousness as a thing, the existence of a very real subjective world, the high probability that this subjective world is not entirely confined in your head, that consciousness is a primary of existence and not confined to our brains, and also, importantly for this website, why FIML works so well.
(The sections in quotes are from the article.)
Firstly, concepts: they exist within consciousness and are used to reason, analyze, communicate, organize, and so on. They are probably a features of consciousness itself, depending on how you define them. They need not be stable.
Secondly, FIML:
To begin with, there is no scientific experiment or empirical observation that can be used to prove that any given concept “exists”, and by extension that concepts exist at all.
No. FIML practice provides unlimited empirical observations that concepts exist. FIML is a scientific experiment and can easily be repeated as many times as you like.
To objectively prove that any given interpretation matches reality, you would somehow have to compare your subjective mental concepts against an objective view of the real situation. But the latter isn’t possible.
Yes, it is possible. FIML is precisely that—a means ‘to compare your subjective mental concepts against an objective view of the real situation’.
FIML accomplishes this by allowing two subjective consciousnesses to objectively compare their mutually ‘subjective mental concepts’ against each other. To claim that ‘an objective view of the real situation’ can only be achieved by some other means is absurd. The very best means to objectively compare subjective states is to have two honest informants compare them based on a shared micro unit of communication in the real-world in real-time. This is what FIML does.
Continue reading “Concepts don’t exist — as objective, phenomenological, cognitive, or neural structures”The discreteness of concepts is a built-in requirement of language itself, one that does not necessarily reflect what an individual mind is doing.
‘I need to make some GOOD comments about men’ — Christie Laura Grace
Hey guys. I need to make some GOOD comments about men.
1. When I first started speaking out, I was anonymous on Twitter. I had just started my case with the federal government (2021). I was thrown under the bus–especially the first year by people who said they had my back–but it was not by men.
Men, great men, were my primary supporters during that time, and still are today. The bulk of them were, and have been, complete gentlemen to me–in every sense of the word. Famous or not, several men have been such a rock for me. I have mentioned them by name previously. They come from all walks of life–medical, academia, insurance industries, military, former hostage negotiator and lieutenant–these guys stood up for me, stood in front of me, protected me, gave me great advice, and helped keep me safe during some rough times when I was receiving serious harassment and threats, which a few came to my person in real life–especially last year.
In 2021, I was afraid to use my real name in public and speak out, and some of these guys had Zoom calls, phone calls, and met me to let me know they had my back, and they were not going anywhere. They are still here today. You know who you are. Thank you!
2. Men are receiving a lot of heat these days just for being men. They are not appreciated. I wish this was not the case. Many men, good men, are being treated poorly, and unfairly. I wish this was not happening. I know you could blame feminism or whatever it is, but I know this is happening at scale–even in politically conservative and religious areas, and I am oh so sorry for this. I know this is going to change at some point.
Continue reading “‘I need to make some GOOD comments about men’ — Christie Laura Grace”Israel controlled at the top as means to stage large war with ‘stable endgame’ — letter from an astute reader
you may not be aware of all sides of reality with israel , but there is a stream of thinking that posits israel was created by euro-british interests ( largely but not entirely ) —financed by them quite early, with many intentions, but ultimately to solve the british french and other problems in maintaining their control over the middle east as they pulled out after ww2. they pulled out of other places to, and massive wars happened ( india-pakistan-banglesh wars, for example)—-in the wake of pullouts/retreats
so with this thinking, israel is controlled somewhat at the very top, as is the u.s. and elsewhere with a purpose to bring forwards and structure the conditions for big big wars, that are hard to pull off.
since there are still some people that want a practical path towards preventing ww3, this would mean a stabile endgame.
for israel, they will probably unilaterally attempt an endgame to this chapter of conflict if it does not spin out of their control to a wider regional war, which i believe it will because of the incentives of all sides and parties to this conflict and tertiary interests.
what would a plan for you be? i’m curious. i find most israeli’s i know are impractical and just go along with the government game of managing conflict. with palestinians, its easy to say they have no agency and just throw your hands up and blame israel for subverting everything. that kind of attittude, whereever it comes from is fine if you are a virtue signaller and enjoy being right, but it still doesn’t settle on finding a solution to conflict.
it has always been the case the birtish and others draw national lines that are devised to leave lasting conflict.
the very existence of gaza as a rump territory was a political-geographical landmine place quite purposefully. but also, because it was easy NOT to move people, but moving people is always what large colonial nations have done .
Continue reading “Israel controlled at the top as means to stage large war with ‘stable endgame’ — letter from an astute reader”Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: How to Understand Emotions | Huberman Lab Podcast
UPDATE: I highly recommend this video discussion for all Buddhists and all practitioners of FIML. Barrett describes the fundamental reality of human consciousness as it grapples with emotion, sensation, bodily feedback and general states of physical being. Her insights are 100% consonant with Buddhist philosophy and FIML practice. Both FIML and Buddhism differ from what Barrett is saying only in that in addition to the emptiness, impermanence, and vagueness of human emotional states they also see human thought, belief, interpretation, perception and comprehension in the same way. In FIML practice, these deeply important uncertainties also include language, semiotics, communicative acts, and the psychologies associated with them.
At one point, Barrett says she is not saying there is nothing there or no truth to emotional states. She is just saying they typically are not clearly definable and often mistaken. Exactly right. I would add that Barret sees a very important part of the underlying problem of human psycho-spiritual existence but she only sees that one part and offers no more than a description of it.
FIML practice provides not only a more accurate description of the problem but also a method to greatly enhance our understanding of all human states of being as they occur in real-world, real-time situations. FIML differs from traditional Buddhist practice in that it offers a robust practice for two people to use together.
To emphasize a major point: Barrett has caught a very big fish but is holding it by the tail only. Buddhism is based on the whole fish as is FIML. Both Buddhism and FIML offer deeply important ways to deal with the whole fish. FIML adds a precise practice between two people that speeds up understanding. Buddhism claims there is an ‘ultimate reality’, a Buddha mind above and beyond the ‘relative reality’ of mundane uncertainty and clinging. FIML provides deep psychological understanding and correction of the mundane problem while also allowing glimpses of Buddhist ultimate reality. Barrett, Buddhism, and FIML all are addressing the same thing from different points of view. ABN
UPDATE: This video is a delightful 2+ hours discussion, not to be missed. Buddhists will enjoy how it elucidates Buddhist teachings on the Five Skandhas and how they underlie Buddhist understanding of human psychology.
It is also an excellent description of why you must do FIML. It provides a detailed and nuanced picture of why FIML practice is essential for full optimization of human psychology, language use, semiotics, and mental functioning. FIML has no content and does zero to define you or anyone. FIML shows you how to gather information and discover for yourself.
FIML is a method that allows partners to isolate significant (or not) moments during real-time, real-world communication that can be identified and agreed upon by both partners and thus become objectively analyzable (in the sense that both partners agree on what the moment was or what it entailed). That is how language can greatly help us understand how our speech, sensations, emotions, bodily states are functioning in the real-world in real-time.
The hard part about FIML is you cannot at the inception of a FIML moment sit back, like Barrett and Huberman, and just wander around pleasantly talking about theories and ideas within a well-defined (and restricted) scientific paradigm.* The first moments of a FIML query are by definition unexplained and undescribed to both partners.
Once identified and described the unique, idiosyncratic import of those moments will be discovered. And often what is discovered will be of next-to-no importance or be some sort of mutual or one-sided mistake or trivial misinterpretation. At other times, deep and deeply interesting patterns or critical associations will be discovered. At those times, you will be able to clearly see how your habitual mind is functioning in a real-world, real-time situation.
Since FIML moments are moments, they are small enough and well-described enough for partners to mutually clearly understand and admit what has happened without reservations. This is extremely refreshing, especially when experienced scores and then hundreds of times. There is no other way to get this information and mutually understand it than FIML practice.
* I do not mean to slight or dismiss Barrett or Huberman here. They have provided a superb description of an extremely serious problem and also illustrated how science today has not solved it. Barrett mentions how serious the problem is but does not provide a solution to it. Knowing the problem is there is a good start. It’s like identifying a disease. Solving the problem as FIML does is the next step. FIML treats the disease and largely cures it. I 100% agree with Barrett when she emphasizes how serious this problem is. I see its seriousness as being even greater than she does. This problem is far worse than a few mistaken convictions in law courts or a persistent fog of interpersonal confusion. It is a constant ever-present demon in all of us and it leads to enormous suffering, sadness, violence, murder, tribalism, worse. As for science, FIML is a subjective science, possibly the realest and most important subjective science there is right now.
In Barrett’s vocabulary, basic FIML works with the very fine ‘granularity’ of emotion/ sensation/ interpretation. A next step after identifying these granular moments during FIML is to analyze/ discuss how they are related to other granularities and also less granular more abstract habits or mental states/ conditions; this is where in Barrett’s terms FIML ‘adds dimensionality’ to our worlds. What is remarkable about FIML is the dimensionality we add is based on mutually agreed objective idiosyncratic data.
Around the 1:30 mark and beyond, Barrett describes what Buddhists know as the Five Skandhas — 1) form/ percept/ stimulus, 2) sensation (bodily action), 3) perception (more detail and feedback), 4) activity (more detail, feedback and abstraction), 5) consciousness/ mental state (delusional, or within relative reality). The Five Skandhas, of course, are fractal, dynamic, fast-moving, multi-granular, and describe/ categorize bodily-mental states at all levels of delusional/ hallucinatory/ relative ‘reality’.
‘Get your butterflies flying in formation’. ABN
Israel’s Biblical Psychopathy — Laurent Guyénot
…Yahweh, “the god of Israel,” is an angry and lonely volcano god who manifests toward all other gods an implacable hatred, and ends up considering them as non-gods, him being, in fact, the only true god. This very clearly characterizes him as a psychopath among gods. By contrast, for the Egyptians, according to German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, “the gods are social beings,” and harmony between them guarantees harmony in the cosmos.[8] There was, moreover, a degree of translatability between the pantheons of various civilizations. But Yahweh taught the Hebrews contempt for the deities of their neighbors—making them, in the eyes of these neighbors, a threat to the cosmic and social order. Yahweh is essentially, says Assmann, a theoclastic god: “You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods, on high mountains, on hills, under any spreading tree; you must tear down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their sacred poles, hack to bits the statues of their gods and obliterate their name from that place” (Deuteronomy 12:2-3).
Yahweh may be a character of fiction, but his hold on the Jewish mind is nevertheless real. “To appeal to a crazy, violent father, and for three thousand years, that is what it is to be a crazy Jew!”[9] said Smilesburger in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. Jews have been taught by Yahweh to keep strictly separate from other people. Food prohibitions serve to prevent all socialization outside the tribe: “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).
The nature of the covenant is not moral. The sole criterion for approval by Yahweh is obedience to his arbitrary laws and commands. To slaughter treacherously hundreds of prophets of Baal is good, because it is the will of Yahweh (1Kings 18). To show mercy to the king of the Amalekites is bad, because when Yahweh says, “kill everyone,” he means “everyone” (1Samuel 15). In the biblical historiography, the fate of the Jewish people depends on them following Yahweh’s orders, no matter how insane. As well said by Kevin MacDonald:
The idea that Jewish suffering results from Jews straying from their own law occurs almost like a constant drumbeat throughout the Tanakh—a constant reminder that the persecution of Jews is not the result of their own behavior vis-à-vis Gentiles but rather the result of their behavior vis-à-vis God.[10]
If the Jews follow Yahweh’s command of alienating themselves from the rest of humankind, in return, Yahweh promises to make them rule over humankind: “follow his ways, keep his statutes, his commandments, his customs, and listen to his voice,” and Yahweh “will raise you higher than every other nation he has made”; “You will make many nations your subjects, yet you will be subject to none” (Deuteronomy 26:17-19 and 28:12). This sounds very much, actually, like the pact Satan proposed to Jesus: “the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage.’” (Matthew 4:8-9).
If Israel follows scrupulously the Law, Yahweh promises to submit all nations to the domination of Israel, and destroy those that resist. “Kings will fall prostrate before you, faces to the ground, and lick the dust at your feet,” whereas “the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish” (Isaiah 49:23 and 60:12). Nations must either recognize Israel’s sovereignty, or be destroyed. Yahweh told Israel that he has identified “seven nations greater and stronger than yourself,” that “you must put under the curse of destruction,” and not “show them any pity.” As for their kings, “you will blot out their names under heaven” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 24).
Scientists propose sweeping new law of nature, expanding on evolution
…Titled the “law of increasing functional information,” it holds that evolving systems, biological and non-biological, always form from numerous interacting building blocks like atoms or cells, and that processes exist – such as cellular mutation – that generate many different configurations. Evolution occurs, it holds, when these various configurations are subject to selection for useful functions.
“We have well-documented laws that describe such everyday phenomena as forces, motions, gravity, electricity and magnetism and energy,” Hazen said. “But these laws do not, individually or collectively, describe or explain why the universe keeps getting more diverse and complex at scales of atoms, molecules, minerals and more.”
In stars, for instance, just two elements – hydrogen and helium – were the main ingredients in the first stellar generation following the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago that initiated the universe.
That first generation of stars, in the thermonuclear fusion caldrons at their cores, forged about 20 heavier elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen that were blasted into space when they exploded at the end of their life cycles. The subsequent generation of stars that formed from the remnants of the prior generation then similarly forged almost 100 more elements.
Here is the abstract from the paper:
Physical laws—such as the laws of motion, gravity, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics—codify the general behavior of varied macroscopic natural systems across space and time. We propose that an additional, hitherto-unarticulated law is required to characterize familiar macroscopic phenomena of our complex, evolving universe. An important feature of the classical laws of physics is the conceptual equivalence of specific characteristics shared by an extensive, seemingly diverse body of natural phenomena. Identifying potential equivalencies among disparate phenomena—for example, falling apples and orbiting moons or hot objects and compressed springs—has been instrumental in advancing the scientific understanding of our world through the articulation of laws of nature. A pervasive wonder of the natural world is the evolution of varied systems, including stars, minerals, atmospheres, and life. These evolving systems appear to be conceptually equivalent in that they display three notable attributes: 1) They form from numerous components that have the potential to adopt combinatorially vast numbers of different configurations; 2) processes exist that generate numerous different configurations; and 3) configurations are preferentially selected based on function. We identify universal concepts of selection—static persistence, dynamic persistence, and novelty generation—that underpin function and drive systems to evolve through the exchange of information between the environment and the system. Accordingly, we propose a “law of increasing functional information”: The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions.
link
Well, well, well, I like that highlighted sentence. That is precisely what FIML does. FIML practice affords partners numerous opportunities to examine and analyze how their communications actually function, and from that choose or learn how to improve their communicational and psychological functions, how to optimize them. FIML is an acronym that stands for Functional Interpersonal Meta Linguistics. Function or functionality is not just a buzz word. It describes an active dynamic process which, for sentient beings, is the stuff of experience. In this sense awareness and experience along with functionality can be understood as primary components of the universe and everything we know. Karma also describes a process of conscious functionality, each bit of which has consequence. It describes a dynamic, dramatic reality of being and becoming and is best not understood merely as a judgement of reality. ABN
Email exchange on war & power in today’s world
It is a strange time. Because there was some kind of takeover full domination and depopulation plan, yet it was based on also having hegemony. Hegemony is breaking down, but the domination and depopulation plan is still in motion. Maybe this is how it should go, but it doesn’t seem that way. Maybe there is a notion they can do both at once—however this seems epically stupid. Also it seems this whole plan was put into motion by people who are now geriatric hard to know because it is all secret.
I do suspect British Royal Family and other euro royals are big players. Then organizations set up by the American robber barons in the Early 1900s. That used to all be quite naked to the public but the advent of PR put it in the shadows. The UK royals are all in on the money and put their faces everywhere in Canada and Australia. Much like you see the UAE royals have shops and hotel all put up portraits of them. That is Raw power. Much like Xi making everyone study Xi thought.
The one thing that got me thinking lately is the economic cost of a wrong view. I mean each wrong view likely costs us some amount as we make poorer decisions about everything else. Think of the economic cost of someone vaccine injured. But then all the other bits of lack of information. How much time we spend on such things. And then the cost to society when people are massively misinformed.
J
I agree with what you say and also I think the possibility must be considered that the cabal in the West has a super weapon which nobody knows about but them. This weapon would be powerful enough to ensure victory against any and all opponents on Earth. I do believe this is a real possibility and cannot be dismissed.
Continue reading “Email exchange on war & power in today’s world”
American Buddhist Net 