I was recently asked as part of an application to take part in a technical program (related to the building of digital IDs using blockchain technology), what my superpower was and what I would use it for and how villains would try to misuse it (or something like that). I assumed it was meant to be humorous, but this was my reply.
My superpower is appearing supremely dull and uninteresting while possessing piercing insight and analytical powers. I would like to empower individuals, aka humanity, via technology. Villains, i.e. governments and other mafias, are increasingly seeking to use technology to control individuals.
We are truly at an inflection point in human development. Software is taking over the world. This technological advance has produced the capability to communicate and work with fellow humans from across the entire globe. Advances such as this have also occurred across a whole range of disciplines and spheres. This new technological interconnectedness creates huge new opportunities from the benefits of cooperation, but also produces great non-linearity which makes the future more unpredictable. Unpredictability represents unforeseeable threats.
Governments have a primary agenda, which is continuation of government, whereas humanity has (or should have) a primary agenda which is continuation of the existence of humanity. Governments view technological empowerment of the individual as a fundamental threat, since the cooperation it permits disproves the requirement for centralised control and exposes the failures of centralised control. Governments are therefore seeking to use technology as the means of maintaining supremacy.
We are already seeing this with “vaccine” passports etc., which are actually nothing more than movement licences. Coming soon : social credit score, online centralised government databases, online centralised non government databases which can be coerced by government agencies under threat of legal sanction, video surveillance using facial recognition, monitoring of all online activity, censoring of online comment not in keeping with the official (usually untrue) narrative, CBDCs with in built programmability to limit the freedom to spend. This pathological behaviour is now normal from those who secure public office across the entire planet. Their intentions have been made clear.
We cannot stop this technological advance but we can provide a cooperative and anti-authoritarian alternative to centralised government controlled systems.
Cooperation takes different forms, but all require trust. Commercial cooperation is founded on contract; the ‘actionability’ of contracts enables the parties to trust each other. Other forms of cooperation, such as voluntaryism, are founded on free will and mutual understanding which leads to trust and this enables the choice of doing something because it is good or right, rather than required by threat of sanction.
Trust is absolutely the key component of cooperation. In the digital world, identity is absolutely the key component of trust.
The challenge we face is to create the means of allowing individuals to possess their own digital identity without allowing that identity (and all its associated data) to become the property of the state.
By providing for a privately controlled digital identity, we maintain the ability for the individual to maintain their autonomy. Autonomy is the essential component of integrity. Integrity is the essential component of good judgement. And good judgement (like not trying to genetically engineer viruses in labs to be more harmful to humans) is what is needed to avoid falling prey to unforeseen non linear threats.
Month: October 2021
Ideology
Ideology has three functions: To inculcate robotic mental algorithms in people; to get us to demand our own subjugation; and to ensure power for a select few to dominate and control society.
Ideology is not a political system. It is a way to make normal people willing to fight, potentially to the death, to defend what takes over their thinking, removing the intervention of the mind. This is done by the loading of ideological words combining to form a mental algorithm automatically processing social, political and moral decisions. So, kind, well-meaning people can turn into callous, judgemental monsters
But, ‘I think, hence I am’ still applies. Tolerance of disagreement is nil because it is felt a full-on personal attack. Ideologues have an on/off switch. You’re either with them or against them. Lacking any shade, nuance or subtlety, they are semi-robotic in their blind obedience. Their excluded middle is like a computer- on or off. Possibility is anathema- the on/off switch forbids it
The third aspect involves the few ideologues running the show. Some will be deluded thinking they are working for the supposed objectives of ideology that promises a Heaven on Earth that never comes. But all will systematically and callously use ideology to con people for the sole purpose of ensuring absolute control and power over them.
Once you see through the manipulation, the aim of all ideology is power for its own sake. Fascism, Communism, Socialism, virtually every political ‘ism’, bar perhaps humanism, are cruel and dishonest methods with the sole aim of domination and power. Many Centrists will deny this.
They do differ in the speed and urgency. Where far left and right are happy to use force or cruelty to get power. So called ‘moderates’ tend to be happy with long term manipulation and deceit. But all want power and moral supremacy for a few. Cliques of power obsessed ‘holier than thou’ manipulators pose as moral supremacists
Ideologues loathe disagreement, thinking compromise and cooperation irrelevant. Democracy stands aloof to the gaggle of ideological and authoritarian systems of the Left/Right spectrum. Authoritarians try to present it as encompassing the entire selection of political choices. The idea of rejecting Left, Centre or Right outrages them. Democracy is, thus, their greatest enemy and they, ours.
All ideologies boil down to: reducing people to a semi-robotic state of blind obedience; to engineer self-defeating demands for mental and physical subjugation; and to satisfy the lust for power in a select few. It is a nasty and dangerous scene. When left fights right, it is only a sordid squabble over who will get the power. You can be certain none of them care for us.
Logical operators in the human brain
originally here :
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6848697754173091840/
This is about how we think. Much comes from work in the late ’70s. As with most useful things, once you know, they seem to be common sense. Academics who loathed it, silenced others who understood. Ironically, I owe more to the one who was most distressed.
It’s much easier to respect people if you have some idea how they think. The popular view failing to distinguish between the mind and thinking believes that our brains are logic machines. This desperately under-estimates, even degrades humanity
Logic is vital but it is only a tool. Logicians have struggled to work out how to apply logic to change. The paradox of the arrow illustrates this. If you try to describe its flight without using circular words such as momentum, change or movement, it’s quickly obvious that movement denies logical description. You can go on splitting movement indefinitely, making no end to the task
What we do is as simple as it is clever. We see intermittently. By observing before and after and observing qualities that have not changed and those that have, using logic to compare before with after, we deduce that despite not fully seeing it, change has happened. We get to grips with causality this way. Bits of glass were once a window, broken by a brick
The process is possible because our consciousness is timeless, enabling us to remove time references (which may cause consciousness) from before and after to make the deduction. We have never not been now.
Logic cannot describe change but we use it to recognise and engage with it. Efforts using ‘Deontic logic’ fail because they try to turn a tool into part of what it is working on. It is desperately futile trying to tack time references onto before and after
Another issue is that the logic used by many academics who believe it is master of thinking is classical logic. But our brains use electricity and electronic logic differs in the way it handles the connective ‘or’- what they call ‘the excluded middle’. This is crucial. (Other connectives are: ‘and’, ‘not’ and ‘implies’)
In classical logic, ‘or’ includes the possibility both could be true. In language we use ‘either’ to change the ‘or’ into its electronic equivalent when it will not let a situation where both are true. In an electric circuit, things are ‘either’ on or off. They can’t be be on and off
This post has covered how important logic is as a tool in our thinking but assuming logic is exclusive master of how we think is wrong. It has noted how important it is in recognising and engaging with change and, for the geeks, the classical logicians’ thinking logic is the sole key are doubly wrong in that electronic logic lies beneath words and consciousness
However, the classical logicians’ use of ‘or’ hints of something else. It is in words we use, a foil to logic, the non-logic in our heads.
We think using words and that strange ‘or’ where it can mean ‘one and the other’ as opposed to electronic logic, where ‘or’ must mean ‘either one or the other’. This contradictory situation suggests two huge things: the existence of non-logic and something about the link between synapses flashing away, to memories, words, feelings and beliefs.
The Second Paradox of Reason, evidence of non-logic, applies. We reserve mental effort of applying logic only to sensory input and information we feel is necessary to live our lives. An overwhelming quantity of input is shuffled off in the form of non-logic into memory which we may, very likely never will, dip into when deemed necessary
This vast, chaotic sea of non-logic contains permission for contradiction… just as it can be accessed by our consciousness so it engages with the place where only electronic logic may apply. The logic of electrical impulses engages, maintains and creates non-logic. Classical logic is enabled by consciousness.
Non-logic is accessed by consciousness. Loadings on words enable us to be unconsciously contradictory while genuinely believing what we think is the soul of pure sanity and reason. Our ability to make mistakes is a form of freedom from the iron grip or despotism of electronic logic.
Words can mean much more than we think. The way meaning behaves is strange and liberating. Creativity is unconscious. It is rooted in the phenomenon resulting ideas are not the sum of the ideas that they came from. The same applies to meanings and also to the utility of invention, despite the determined way the process happened. In this way, there is freedom in determination.
It is easy to recoil from such seeming complexity to find wisdom in Milton’s observation of the fallen angels:
“In discourse more sweet
(For Eloquence the Soul, Song charms the Sense)
Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate-
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argued then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and apathy, and glory and shame:
Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy!”
On the other hand, philsophers possess a certain form of vanity, that tempts fate.
We have three domains. Conscious thought, memory (all memory is unconscious) and the domain of electronic logic where words and classical logic have no place. Consciousness is a tiny scrap; memory stands between it and the mechanics of the brain.
The key to all this is consciousness enabling access to memory, a grasp of causality and perspective on time without which we could not be timeless. Every time I hear a linguistic philosopher, I despair that the plunging depth of the unsophisticated shallowness of intelligent, educated people should generate such appalling ignorance.
Humans so debased are in danger of being considered worthless.
Most of the foregoing covered old ground from a different perspective. The new part was observing Electronic Logic appears to apply in the mechanical working of the brain where Classical Logic applies in conscious thought… but with non-logic smuggled in through loadings of words.
What we intend is not always what the words mean. Non-logic can influence how we think through the loading of words because words relate to one another. (We can only identify contradiction, not imagine it).
In this way, words can associate with one another in thinking, oblivious to consciousness. This process can create a three dimensional internal view of the World, its rights and wrongs along with moral, social and political objectives. To consciousness all this seems intuitively true, right and correct… without realizing these beliefs are the result of a construct smuggled into their thoughts by loaded words creating what they believe.
Once installed, this strange creature takes possession. Its primary objective is survival. Like a cuckoo chick, it eliminates any beliefs that might threaten its becoming the sole ‘loved one’. Although consciousness is denied the right to question this construct, it is quite capable of defending the creature that enslaves it to the death, on the basis that once all competing beliefs have been wiped out, ‘I think, hence I am’ still applies. Reduced to the ultimate servility, consciousness becomes the willing and ardent slave of this mental cuckoo.
People so wretched are called ideologues
That chaotic place, between where electronic logic solely applies and the classical logic of conscious thought, is perfect for ideological possession to take hold. Non-logic puts delusion, fantasy, and ignorance itself on the same level as perspective, fact and expertise. In such a place opportunities to exploit uncertainty, fear and a yearning to ‘make sense’ of things abound for the cuckoo to build a fake reality. What you think makes you who you are; that you think makes you.
So possessed, people are not themselves – literally. That is because they are slaves to something they let take over. The survival imperative secure, the second one is to spread the word to make others build the same mental prisons and turn into their own prison warders.
Sticks and stones may break my bones… but words can silently destroy humanity. Ideologues live in a mental prison unaware they made it themselves. Question them and that cuckoo will tell them it is you who is all things bad and inhuman. I can think of nothing more desperate, pathetic, gross and socially dangerous.
I have covered what many academics would extend to a lifetime of scribbling. But if only a few words are useful, far better than the unspeakable negativity of modern Academic Relativism. Thank you for your patience.
Democracy & Utopia
originally here :
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6850853338796331008/
If only people realized.
Utopia changes in parallel with reality, complete with all human magnificence and failings. It is the best we can do in the circumstances… which are always changing. Thus, Utopia is dynamic and cannot, strictly, be looked at or identified because the moment you’ve seen it, it has changed
Authoritarian politics is run by people who think they must be right, meaning obedience by everyone else is compulsory. It assumes a fixed Utopia either as the status quo or some promised Heaven on Earth, to con people into accepting mindless obedience and conformity, aka mental subjugation
Democracy is the only system that exists to find out what to do. It is ideal to engage with change and to constantly focus on an ever changing Utopia.
This is staggeringly simple. But all I hear is people attacking democracy talking about tyranny of the majority and saying voters are stupid, venal and incapable of understanding sensible compromise necessary for positive cooperation. They say democracy ushers in authoritarianism. As they gleefully destroy the only system that can engage with change and is not authoritarian, they are the stupid ones
The almost total failure of the Universities to make any significant advance in political and social theory for 70 years caused this. They should be urgently held to account. Civilization needs foundations- all they have done is undermine society.
CBDCs
originally here : https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6849384247061450752/
There is a danger of a massive assault on an assumed social and political freedom. The right of everyone to spend money as they wish, with a few exceptions, may soon be history
“Programmable money is designed with in-built rules that constrain the user. These rules could mean that money expires after a fixed date or its use is restricted to a certain set of goods. This would affect digital currency acceptance and has obvious legal implications.”
““There could be some socially beneficial outcomes from that, preventing activity which is seen to be socially harmful in some way. But at the same time it could be a restriction on peoples’ freedoms.”
https://lnkd.in/dNWFuguqhttps://lnkd.in/dRYfZ4CN
It is staggering people seem unaware what’s happening in plain sight. In Britain, this could be the greatest change in money since the end of over 300+ years of the de facto slavery of serfdom introduced by Normans and the arrival of ‘the cash nexus’. Victorian Tommy or Truck shops and payment in company tokens were, rightly, made illegal.
We could see an attempt to destroy the fundamental right and freedom for individuals to spend their money as they wish. The key is in the word ‘their’. “…. it could be a restriction on people’s freedoms.” As understatements go, this takes the biscuit. “Socially harmful” ? More like: ‘socially catastrophic’
That this is being discussed, with little or no apparent understanding of the enormity and danger of such meddling, speaks volumes. Politicians may believe they can, at last, control markets. The Bank of England and, it seems, most British politicians resemble a 12 year old holding a sub-machine gun wondering if it might be a good idea to use it to scare the pigeons instead of sticking to an air gun or catapult
The sheer disrespect is breathtaking. The plan appears to be to reduce the rights that go with the possession and use of money. Politicians, bankers and the super-rich, being ‘responsible people’, will retain the right to use money as they wish. The rest of us may soon find we will only be allowed to spend in a way the state thinks is good for us. What they might really mean is ‘what is good for the state’. The impact on national prosperity with the possible eradication of the black economy is unknown.
It may sound strange, but many of the super-rich are frightened. Although isolated, I suspect a number may oppose any plan to reduce money held by the vast majority to little more than a device to permit approved behaviour knowing, in time, such imprisonment could be the final straw
I know this sounds extreme. But the possibility of state manipulation of the right to spend is an enormous step. Among other things, it could be a spectacular assault on the principle of trust and respect. Without these, what happens to compromise and cooperation that hold commercial activity and society together?
Marxist Intersectionality
Originally posted here : https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6850772685568401408/
Politicians keen to strip individuals of agency try to transfer it to abstractions without agency. Classes do not exist as physical things but individuals do. A class can be identified by wealth, culture, religion, or bodily features. Quite ghastly.
This is most convenient for ideologues intent on domination. In a cake-and-eat it approach, abstractions are fit for group punishment. Individuals stripped of agency are blamed and punished en masse, regardless of belief, kindness, intention or humanity. It is malicious, unjust and inhuman to smear wholesale guilt on people.
But classes are crucial in the inter-subjective. There, skin colour can be super-important; for others, it’s money and, for millions, it is caste. Caste is a class(ification). It is possible for a class to have agency in the inter-subjective but a non-sense in the physical world.
We share an interest in respect for individuals. Being individual is common to all, except ideologues who need rescuing from close to total servility and denial of their own humanity. The individual and the collective are not opposites, as if supporting one denies the other. This cruel and somewhat stupid attitude often held by highly educated people, is based on ignorance of the inter-subjective.
A long line of, usually, academic theories from Marxism through to today’s Relativist philosophies and Woke prompt people to dismiss common humanity with the immature blyth certainty of spoilt 13 year old know-alls
When you hear people talking politics as if it were all about oppression of one abstraction over others, listening between the words, what they really mean, is the denial of individual agency and human morality in favour of mass guilt, and punishment backed by an attitude close to criminal judgementalism. And guess who will carry the banner of this poisoned ‘justice’?
I am astonished that we put up with such unjust and cruel behaviour. Perhaps it is because there has been virtually no progress understanding how society works for over 70 years. Where science and technology made massive advances, thanks to Relativist philosophers, and I suspect political influence, we are now threatened by people intent on forcing inter-subjective affairs onto physical reality.
As non-logic, a product of the suspension of the rule of non-contradiction exists in the inter-subjective, they are trying to force illogicality onto reality. Colonisation of the sciences is part of the project. At best, this is a recipe for injustice, and social disaster at the worst. They play with fire, like 13 year olds left alone with a box of matches.
Pushers on phones use phenomenal technology to sell drugs. Meanwhile, abstractions are on the way back thanks to people worse than thieves intent on the destruction of knowledge and society to sate their lust for moral supremacy. Deniers of humanity usually, a few years on, wish they had never been so stupid.