Here is an interesting and well-documented Q&A page on UFOs: I research the history of UFO reports and investigations.
Tag: thought
Buddhism and ethical signalling
Buddhism is very much a system of ethics. Buddhist practice is founded on the Five Precepts of refraining from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and the irresponsible use of alcohol.
In most Buddhist traditions, these precepts are often taught as if they were fundamental to the workings of the universe. But how can morality be fundamental to the workings of the universe? How does it really even matter to human beings?
If we think of a human being as a signaling system, we may be able to show that ethical thoughts and behavior are of fundamental importance to the system itself.
Human signaling systems signal internally, within themselves, and externally, toward other people. Our most important signaling system is the one we share with that person who is most important to us, our mate or best friend. Let’s confine our discussion to this sort of primary signaling system.
If I lie to my partner or cheat her, I may gain something outside of our shared signaling system, but that signaling system will suffer. And when that shared system suffers, my own internal signaling system will also suffer because it will contain errors. It will no longer be in its optimal state. Similarly, if she lies to me or cheats me, our mutual signaling system will become less than optimal as will both of our individual, or internal, signaling systems.
My own signaling system cannot grow or become optimal without my partner treating me with the best ethical behavior she can muster. And the same is true for her with respect to me. And we both know this.
We would be good to each other anyway, but it is helpful to see that our being good to each other has a very practical foundation—it assures us optimal performance of our mutual and internal signaling systems.
FIML practice is designed to provide partners with a clear and reasonably objective means to communicate honestly with each other. FIML practice will gradually optimize communication between partners by making it much clearer and more honest. In doing this, it will also optimize the operations of their mutual and individual signaling systems.
To my knowledge, there is nothing like FIML in any Buddhist tradition. But if I try to read FIML into the tradition, I may be able to find something similar in the way monks traveled together in pairs for much of the year. I don’t know what instructions the Buddha may have given them or how they spoke to each other, but it may be that they did a practice with each other similar to FIML practice.
In any case, if we view human being as a signaling system, we may be able to claim that clear signaling—that is, ethical signaling—is fundamental to the optimization of that system.
Signal quality
Schizophrenia is characterized in part by difficulty in telling the difference between internal and external signals. My guess is that virtually all “normal” people are characterized by their difficulty in telling truthful signals from bullshit.
Normal interpersonal relations are conducted with signals that have low resolution. By that I mean, signal references are rarely unambiguous. In fact, they are very often not even truthful. An ambiguous signal will frequently be interpreted wrongly and lead to problems as serious as those that result from untruthful signals.
The same is true in the public sphere.
Because low signal quality in the social/interpersonal realm is so common, we typically do not identify it as a problem. Furthermore, because we don’t know what to do about it even when we do notice it, we largely ignore it. But that does not mean it isn’t a huge problem.
FIML practice can fix this problem for participating partners. In the future, brain scans may help fix it in the public sphere.
Psychopathy and brain scans
I believe that many institutions/societies are controlled by psychopaths.
A recent claim by the psychologist Oliver James, supports this belief. In his words:
This dark triad of characteristics is very likely to be present in that person in your office who causes you so much trouble. Whether you work in the corporate sector, a small business or a public sector job, the system you are in is liable to reward ruthless, selfish manipulation.
The likelihood of your daily working life being sacrificed by a person who is some mixture of psychopathic, Machiavellian and narcissistic is high. If you do not develop the skills to deal with them, they will eat you for breakfast. (Source)
Psychopaths can act as individuals or in groups. We would do well to re-purpose the word sociopath to mean simply “a group that is made up of psychopaths or that behaves toward other groups in a psychopathic manner.”
James says that the rest of us need to develop skills to deal with psychopaths. The science is not there yet, but I hope the day will come when brain scans are good enough to help us detect psychopathy and lies. Then, if used properly, there would be far less lying and cheating in government, science, academia, the corporate world, and so on. My guess is that if psychopaths and liars can be reliably identified and/or prevented from lying, society in general will become many times more efficient than it is today. That would mean much less work with much better outcomes for all, psychopaths included.
Repost: Metaphors, words associations, and paralinguistics
If we consider spoken language as a complex linear system, we will be able to use it as a pretty good standard for understanding individual psychology as well as interpersonal communication.
All words have words associated with them. Though we all share many of the same word-associations (coffee/beverage; booze/drunk; etc.), we also all have an abundance of word associations that belong only to us. I suppose this is fairly obvious, though I am not so sure it is well enough appreciated.
Morality
The physical universe is probably amoral.
The laws of the physical universe—the ones we know—do not say much about the evolution of life. And they have even less to say about the evolution of human societies and human consciousness.
Good moral behavior is essential for the scientific method to work. If many scientists lie or cheat, we won’t get good science.
On the interpersonal level, FIML practice both requires and encourages moral behavior. At first, partners may only notice that they are required to tell the truth, but as they continue practicing, they will come to want to tell the truth.
This happens for very concrete, even objective, reasons. I know that if I don’t tell my partner the truth, we will both lose. And if I do tell her the truth, we will both gain.
Morality in FIML practice—i.e. telling the truth—is not difficult because the units of a FIML discussion are typically very small, usually entailing just a few seconds of conversation/communication. The payoff for telling the truth in FIML practice, however, is huge. Partners will notice profound and beneficial changes in all aspects of their psychologies. This happens because partners’ senses of who they are will shift from a core with a secretive ego to a core with an interactive truth-telling process. Clean, clear language and a clear conscience transform human being.
FIML may prove that morality is fundamental to human consciousness. This statement is not based on feeling or wishful thinking because you have to behave morally to do FIML at all. For individual psychology, the payoff from FIML can be greater than from science in many important areas.
FIML notes
- FIML may look like low-hanging fruit, but it isn’t because the basic technique goes against normal linguistic behavior and can cause anger in someone who is not trained or has not entered a prior agreement to do it.
- FIML is based on simple principles:
- the basic communication group is two people
- the basic unit of communication is the “psychological morpheme,” which arises/occurs at a discreet moment in a conversation
- psychological morpheme are identified and discussed as soon after they arise as possible (within seconds in most cases)
- this is to avoid having them index large libraries of habitual thought and feeling
- partners must care about each other
- partners must agree to be honest about their listening and speaking
- this kind of honesty is quite simple; you don’t need to tell all but only what has bearing on what you said or heard
- if partners are honest with each other and sufficiently skilled to catch psychological morphemes very soon after they arise, they will come to see how fundamental to their their view of themselves and each other are the many mistaken interpretations they make concerning each other
- With practice, FIML insights can and will replace static assumptions about personality, ego, internal autobiography, and psychology.
- This happens because FIML practice will show both partners how mistaken interpretations occur and what their effects are.
- FIML encourages and greatly supports honesty or ethical behavior between partners.
- FIML ethics can be stated objectively.
- As partners practice more FIML, they will come to understand/experience how important basic FIML ethics are for both of them.
- FIML will not work if one or both partners is lying. A little bit of fudging will work for a while, but partners will soon realize that there is no need to fudge. Much greater gains for both of them will be made if they always do their best to tell the truth.
- Good ethical behavior is not hard in FIML practice because the “psychological morphemes” that are its basic subject matter are so small it does not feel threatening to talk about them honestly. Indeed, it is a great relief to talk about them and discover that they are/were mistakes, which is usually the case.
- FIML can be understood as a game between two people who have chosen to be honest with each other.
- As such, this game has rules that help partners deal with communicative ambiguity and misinterpretation as it occurs and in its smallest units.
- Playing the FIML game will clear up communication mistakes between partners.
- It will also clear up many emotional problems between partners, and the world(s) they live in.
Paul McCartney on Acid
Repost: FIML and Bernard Lonergan’s GEM
One aspect of FIML that continues to delight me, even after years of practice, is how so little can give us so much. In a nutshell “all” FIML does is stabilize and clarify our communication with one other person.
FIML does this by removing error and resolving ambiguities between two people. FIML cannot do this perfectly, but it does it well-enough that partners will experience a level of mental and emotional clarity that had not been available to them before.
Reasons To Reject
Good post by Robin Hanson, well-worth reading.
An excerpt:
…we are in the habit of collecting reasons why things might be bad ideas… With a library of reasons to reject in hand, we can do simple pattern matching to find reasons to reject most anything. We can thus continue to pretend to be big fans of innovation, saying that unfortunately in this case there are serious problems.
The semiotics of rejection neatly explained: The “sign” (the new idea) “calls up” (indexes) a “library” of (preformed) “reasons” to reject it.
FIML practice, of course, greatly alters the status quo of how partners communicate with each other. And that changes how partners understand each other and themselves. And that is a huge benefit, but why believe me?
The temporal, semiotic matrix we all live in
The temporal, semiotic matrix we all live in is a work of imagination.
We project the future, imagine the past, and are restricted in the present. Another way to say that is we imagine all three, quite poorly.
The present is restricted, especially, primarily, because we rarely can speak freely. We can’t speak freely because we fear that what we say might be misunderstood, misremembered, remembered for too long, or told to the wrong people.
What we say today in a spirit of creative exploration may harm us in the future when it is taken out of context or given a different weight than we had intended; also, times may change and our words won’t sound right any longer.
This is a terrible situation for humans to be in. We do it to ourselves in many different ways. Speech should expand our degrees of freedom but it generally only limits them in most situations.
Interpersonal speech should be creative, exploratory, very often non-conclusive, wondering. Then why do we fear being misunderstood, misremembered, remembered correctly but out of context? Even by those closest to us? The reason is we do not know how to fine-tune our speech, how to adjust the erroneous minutiae of speech that lead to huge misunderstandings. A single word, a single expression can get you killed in the wrong place at the wrong time. In “polite society” it can ruin your reputation, cause you to lose your job. How can any of us be creative speakers, vibrant human beings, if we are afraid of making even a single misstep?
The place to look for fixing this problem is in the moment-by-moment exchange of ideas/memories/feelings that happen during communication with the person or people who are most important to us. And the way to do that is practice FIML. If you cannot bring the present under conscious control—that is, if you are forced to imagine what someone means rather than ask—you cannot be free. Your imagination will be filled with mistakes and self-deception. The same will be true for your partner. There is no way out of that trap except FIML or something very much like it. When the present is filled with illusions, so must be the past and future, everything.
How we process big ideas and the semiotics behind this
I want to discuss a few big ideas with the intention of showing how our internal or culturally underlying semiotics determine how easy or hard they are to accept.
Most thinking people can accept the possibility of atheism. And most atheists can accept the possibility of there being a God or gods or other realms. Atheists who are staunch physicalists may find it harder to do this, but most of them can.
Most thinking people can accept the theory of evolution.
Most thinking people can and do accept the scientific method. Fewer, but many, people understand the limitations of the scientific method.
The theory of evolution and the scientific method can both be stated briefly and in simple language. They are not hard to understand. The limitations of the scientific method require a bit more thought as do the nuances of evolution, but a crude understanding of either is not hard to achieve. Similarly, physicalism is not hard to state or understand.
The simulation argument (that we are living in a computer simulation) can also be stated briefly and is not hard to understand. Many people now accept this argument and admit that it is possible that we are living in a sim. In fact, some physics departments are actually studying the idea. Here is one example: Scientists plan test to see if the entire universe is a simulation created by futuristic supercomputers.
For most educated people in industrialized regions of the world, it is not difficult to accept or seriously consider any of the above theories or ideas.
All of the above ideas can be very revolutionary if you go from not accepting them to accepting them. They revolutionize our metaphysics, our sense of existential reality, our sense of what kind of a world or universe we are living in.
In contrast, ideas that are socially revolutionary are harder for many people to accept, or even consider.
It can be hard to have a calm discussion about inherent problems in the American capitalist system, for example. Or to have a reasonable discussion about the anomalies of 9/11. These subjects, though fascinating, are difficult for many people because they fundamentally threaten the power-and-money hierarchy upon which their social and psychological beings rest.
FIML is an idea that, like the ideas above, can be stated briefly in simple language. This does not mean it is not revolutionary. And this does not mean that FIML will not be difficult for many people to accept. It can be difficult because FIML practice revolutionizes interpersonal relations. I know that if it is done correctly it will bring about a revolutionary improvement. But viewed from a distance or as a mere idea, I also know that it will appear threatening or trivial to many people.
The sim idea was dismissed as trivial by many people just a few years ago. It has gained much wider acceptance since then. It is a delightful idea and not threatening or dangerous at all. It can renew your sense of who you are and where you are.
FIML practice is much like that. It is delightful and not threatening or trivial at all. It will renew your sense of who you are and how you relate to other people in wonderful ways. Just because an idea looks simple does not mean it does not have deep implications. If a new idea challenges our sense of who we are socially or psychologically, it will be more difficult to accept than if it challenges “only” our metaphysical or existential sense of who and where we are.
Ravi Shankar
whatever happened to european tribes?
Difficult problems
This article, How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation, describes something we all know is happening—political campaign donations and lobbying deeply skewing American politics and social structure.
There is no simple way to fix this problem. There is no big fix that will make everything better. And each small fix usually causes other problems that need fixing. Here is a paper on how difficult it can be just to get reasonable disclosure regulations for corporations: Information Disclosure and Corporate Governance. Disclosure can harm long-term goals by giving away valuable information to competitors and it can cause CEOs to focus on short-term goals to raise their pay. Is there any way Congress would be able to figure out how to write good disclosure laws and then to implement them? The answer is no.
Congress may be able to do something in other areas, but “legalized bribery” will continue to come into play even when lawmakers know what is right.
It looks to me that the kind of government we have now is trapped in the past and will never be able to innovate or provide for the best interests of the population. My semi-realistic, semi-utopian hope is that we replace our “representative” Congress with a very large body of citizens—roughly 30 million—who will be better able to crowd source legislation that works. To be a member of this large “citizens congress,” all you will need to do is pass qualifying tests. There would be no age limit. There are many procedural systems that could be used to guide and funnel information to the right people, and many ways that we could figure out who the right people are. Here is a website, DAGGRE, that shows one way of using crowd sourcing to make better forecasts. Forecasts are fundamental to sound policy decisions. We have a long way to go, but I think the direction is more or less thataway.
Edit: Here is some more good reading on this topic: Why Do People Defend Unjust, Inept, and Corrupt Systems? The study behind this article can be found here: On Social Stability and Social Change: Understanding When System Justification Does and Does Not Occur.
The paper claims that people resist change in the systems they live and work within due to: 1) low personal control, 2) being unable to escape the system, 3) being dependent on the system, and 4) being in a system that is being threatened. This seems about right to me. From a FIML point of view, we might say that non-FIML interpersonal systems are profoundly dependent on static semiotics—system norms—because non-FIML interpersonal communication contains far too much ambiguity for people to effectively challenge those norms, or even to speak about them in many cases.
American Buddhist Net 