This thread is about both evolution and politics, read description.

[Isaac Clarke]

You can't substantially edit your posts after 1 hour, or if they've been replied to.

Understood, Thanks.

 

[Dragan Glas]

Greetings,

I've taken the liberty of copying and pasting the text:

Hi, I hope you like the synthesizer because I'll basically be using it to talk except for some sentences or paragraphs, like this one.
I'm still a little ill, but even if I were not I find really difficult to read a script, be it in my italian mother language or in english. I don't know why, no matter how much I train, I can't do it. I'll find a place where I'll post the script to let you guys who hate synthesizers read it.

This is the introduction of my project in which I will try to construct the most accurate model of reality regarding humanity and politics up to date.

In this project I will takle many subjects, too many to list them here. Don't worry, I am part of neither the left or the right, the only thing that I care about is the truth, so I can say this with certanty: you won't like this project.

No matter with whom I talked to in my life, the majority of people just oppose me with no good grounds. Yes, I have been wrong many times in my life because, obviously, I am not omniscient; but usually I was less wrong than the people that I were talking with. I don't care if you believe some of your ideas are sacred, be them attached to a wooden cross, or a rubber boot, or to an indian symbol that got misused or, to some funny pointy hats or to whatever it is, because the march towards the truth is as blind as justice.

In this project I'll try as hard as possible to be as objective as possible, but since I'm human I may fail somewhere and since you're human you may find it impossible not to apply your current bias to what I'll be presenting you.

Listen to this, because it's important: when we are born we are in the default position of ignorance.

When we grow up we, obviously, learn things, and some of them, obviously, may turn out to be wrong.

To make an example let's say that when you don't know something important,like the specifics of a business, you shouldn't accept some info about it as gospel just because a person you trusth was the one that told you it, because it's not a trivial thing, it has the possibility to seriously ruin your life! the business could be a pyramid scheme and you may wouldn't come to know it until it's too late, meaning that your wallet became lighter than before.
In other words you must not relay on faith.

When important things are in the matter you should always find a good source for your knowledge. This sounds good and all but I have said it in such an informal and subjective way that it actually means nothing at all.

By "important things" I mean those things that, may, damage other things, things that affect the freedom of other people and the overall health of every living thing.
By "good source" I don't mean your friendly neighborhood youtuber, with its warped views of things expressed with an eloquent and/or emotionally charge way, but by a study in a scientific paper or something similar.

We as humans are more easily moved by people who say things that we want to hear instead of something true.

Now I'll make a synthesis of my current position and beliefs, and I will tell you what I plan to talk about

I am currently an ANCAP (Note: ANCAP means mainly ANarco CAPitalism, but can also mean ANarco CAPitalist if used to describe a person, while ANCAPs means the plural of ANarco CAPitalist.), both because it was my position before starting to make this project and because I don't know either if there's a position where I may currently fit and because I need to finish this project to complete my thoughts, thus don't know what to think.
I have my natural biases and all the other biases that everyone has because we are all humans, and as humans we evolved bias as a favorable trait, among others that I will discuss. In this work I'll try to fight my bias, as I have always done, to better understand the world as it truly is.

Since I am only a single human I will never be able to take on everything in a limited time, be it an arbitrary amount or my entire natural life, since I will lack either the right experience, the data or just the ability to process such information.
My strenght is, my really good ability to connect different informations in the fields that I have familiarity in, because of the habilities and knowledge that I have, so I'll not even tap in fields that I know I could not easily navigate in, like marriage, sexuality, or that funny country that everyone is angry about, because I don't have enough data to work with.

Here I will talk about human evolution, the formation of groups and birth of societies, culture, economics in nature, individuality and individuals, and the way everyone actually interfaces with reality, and thus the world's structure overall.

This is an incredibly ambitious project that takes many years of unrelated research on my part and that took XXXXXX time to complete.
I've released small shards that are, more or less, finished unfinished fragments of this Leviathan of a project, because I didn't know how many months would have passed before I would be able to publish it. These shards are posts on Reddit and a youtube video, to which I may link you instead of making an entire section for them in this project once more.
The previous video that I made regarding my politics is now unlisted, because it was an incomplete thought that I made during one of the heights of my illness. I didn't take neither time to script nor to check my thoughts, but it still came out pretty decently despite everything. I will be linking it too in the description, but remember: it is not accurate to my current views.

SO WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, LET US BEGIN.



Big numbers mean nothing to a human mind, because we can't even imagine them. Try to think of a single dot and then add individual dots in your minds' image until you can't anymore, I bet they're not a lot.
If you want real numbers and accurate latin names I invite you to watch Aron Ra's "Systematic Classification of Life": a 50 long playlist of videos talking about the evolution of humanity and other species. He gets just some things wrong, like what actually is the "Hard problem of conciousness". Episode 49 is the one that I am talking about and is pretty relevant to this part of the project.
So: a long time ago there was a homo specie called the heidelbergènsis. Out of this specie evolved , respectively, homo neanderthal and homo sapièns. A small population of homo sapièns reproduced with homo neanderthal and another with an older lineage called homo denisovan. This hybridization let some sapièns acquire some genes that helped living in new environments, but with the passage of the generations just the "advantageous genes" and some "neutral genes" stuck around in our genome. Homo sapièns is just one specie, or race, doesn't matter what word you want to use to describe it because they're arbitrary anyways, like the word "tree". What is a tree? I'm going to tell you what it's not: a single family evolved from a single population.

I'm getting lost here. So, what I was trying to say is that we're all the same, there is nothing that fundamentally separates one population of homo sapièns from another (and for the sake of brevity and arbitration I'm going to refer just and only to homo sapièns as "humans" since every single homo person that I have met and refered to as such so far have been other members of homo sapiéns and because every single word has been arbitrarily created by, someone else)..

So we're all the same, ok, now what? Now I'm going to talk about primitive lifestyle, technology, culture and the birth of society.
I'm gonna be brief because if you want more science there's good old Aron for you.

Long story short: humans didn't have to climb down from trees and invent stone tools in one afternoon to hunt down cucumbers ten thousands years ago. Much of the technology and lifestyle was passed down generation by generation during evolution. I'd say, with my limited data, that Homo Erectus didn't lìve so differently from primitive humans since it was humans that put an end to the stone age by beginning the manipulation of metals. Humans and Erectus both lived in relatively small groups where everyone had to know everyone else and nobody had to piss off the others too much just to be able to survive nature itself and other groups of people if they were hostile.
They both had stone tools as their technological basis even if humans' ones were more advanced and they had other tools too like bows.
They both were hunter-gatherers because to eat they needed to secure meat, be it via hunting or scavenging, and vegetal sources of food, poorer in nutrients but more reliable to get, which were still difficult to eat since humans hadn't bred them selectvely yet.
From parent to child the knowledge of the caretaker moved onto the cared one so that it may be enough to make this individual a "good one". For the individual to survive it meant to completely integrate with the group and if it didn't it was at a minimum at a disadvantage and at worse dead or exiled, which may be worse in some case.

This evolutionary need to be part of a group is not strictly human. Both hyénas, wolves and lions are nothing alone because altho they're much more stronger and faster than humans, or many other animals, their most important strenght is still in number, not only for hunting but for protection too. We evolved to be social, and to ignore this, is to damage at minimum yourself and at maximum everyone.
In this modern age, I'd say spanning the last 200 years, a greater percentage of humans have been capable of knowing things of real places where they will never set foot in all their lives, and even more recently, thanks to radio, television and internet people were able to know it in real time too.

Now a brief talk about our sponsor: Paranoia.
Paranoia: the irrational fear of the world that kicks in when rational thought either failed or didn't even kick in action.
We're the most paranoid race of all because paranoia helped us survive. Even if you think yourself not to be a paranoid, it's just because you burried your worries under a "blanket of society" that lets you utter the lie "it's fine". It's very similar to "the mighty blanket" that protected you from the monsters of the dark that you were afraid to as a child: you knew that it wasn't a real protective tool because deep down you knew that you didn't fear what was there, but what you imagined could be there.

Your imagination was the source of that fear.

The "blanket of society" works similarly to that "mighty blanket", in fact too well, because, you get told that you have to no longer worry about some serious business, like interractions with very far away and different humans that are out of "your group" or the fact that you're currently living on a spinning rock in the space void that is reality.
I have personally figuratively burned my "blanket of society" and now lìve every moment both appreciating the world around me as the human that I am and understanding it as the more taught person that I have become, being reminded every time that I look up at the blue sky that it is the thin veil that lets us breathe and protects us from the terrifying nuclear fusion reactor that is the sun, and the space dust that are the rocks ten meters in diameter that would hit us every single day weren't it there. I have accepted my paranoia because it's a part of me, and I have set it aside so that I may be able to truly understand the world and thus better my and everyone's lives.

Paranoia, you know you have it. It hits everyone differently because we see the world in different ways, both because of how we have been born and our current life's situation, but more on that much later in the project. Conservatives, republicans, democrats, socialists, liberals and Bob have all different triggers that jump-start their paranoia, their irrational fear of the world that kicks in when rational thought either failed or didn't even kick in action.

This is the end of the fake sponsor.
So, why have I suddently began talking about Paranoia? Well, that's because it wasn't sudden at all, but because I've already said that a big part of our evolution was it: the fear of the unknown, the fear of solitude, the fear of starvation, the fear of being hated and the fear of death, among many more, are the things that push people to want to create groups and stay together,
Staying together. Staying together.
Society.
What is a society?
A society is a group of individuals close enough both physically and culturally to form a long term group in which they, more or less, lìve together. This is a definition that may seem applicable just to humans, but no. Almost every single lifeform still applies to this definition, even if they're not people, if you rework the definition of culture just a little,

As a tangent I can say that humans are the only people that we know of, which I can now say with confidence because humans (and who knows how many of our extinct homo cousins) are the only ones capable of "a certain way of thinking". Altho we have many similarities and common grounds with dolphins, elephants, other monkeys and even cetaceans and squids, there are still things in which there's no common ground, and the one that is common with all other animals is that we're the only ones still extant capable to have a complex inner monologue with a language that we're able to express with others of our specie. This made us the apex of evolution regarding intelligent life on this planet because such tools made us able to form incredibly deep connections with other people by sharing parts of our being that otherwise would be impossible to be known by others and to accurately describe "stuff" and create really complex and incredibly detailed thoughts, which let us set foot where nothing alive was ever before: out dead satellite.

The moon, our door to infinity, which will be for the vast majority hollow space.

Society is something that has existed long before humanity, and it doesn't need that much intelligence to work. Temporary societies get made by some fish to survive predation during migration, many bat species lìve together out of necessity because they don't have much choice in their environment and because living together is safer while sleeping, and ants literally evolved so that different individuals of an hive have different characteristics, more or less suitable to different jobs, and different hives evolved for different environments, all thanks to the blind work of evolution, which has no goal because it has no agency, because it's not alive.

We're a social specie too, so we've many parallels with other social species. This is a thing that we have to accept as a fact if we want to learn more about the world.
Note well: the definition of social specie in science is, and here I quote Encyclopedia: "Social species are genetically inclined to group together and follow a particular set of rules defining interactions between individuals. Humans can be considered a social species because we tend to live in communities instead of segregating ourselves as individuals and dispersing to unoccupied territory.".
Animals like chimps, gorillas, elephants, lions, wolves and bees are some social species that you should already know.

A society is not defined by a geographic area, a certain gene or a holy book. A society is defined by the web of individuals with strong and close enough bonds. Even if the Internet made it easier to bond long distance and to keep previous bonds. they will still be weaker than bonds with closer people because humans need direct interraction to lìve healthly. Society an culture play into one another: a society can be composed by a single culture or by multiple cultures which make a gradient among them, meaning that they have many similarities even if they're different. Some say that different cultures are part of the same society, but that's false: if two cultures are opposed to each other then there is no society among them. Culture is the customs, story and way of life of a group of individuals. This is not only valid for humans, and it doesn't matter how silly it sounds, it's valid for other animals too, for plants, for fungi and for all the other families of organisms that may exist, but which name nobody really cares to remember for their day-to-day life, like protists.

What is culture, really? It's something that emerges with time in groups. To make it brief humans may worship animals, plants and nature as part of their religion, but in this case it's more about having things, even inanimate ones, as object of worship. Animals and plants too can be part of our culture. We literally have parts of our economies and social lives turned to face only our pets and houseplants. Culture is the behaviours that different individuals share, like celebrating a holyday, partaking or following a sport, having a certain way to express your version of your religion, or the way you treat other lifeforms: it can be something, like, owning a dog and seeing it as part of your family, like in many first world countries, or just as tools and possibly food, like in the majority of China or Venezuela because of the economic disaster that those places are.

Here I have to specificate one thing really briefly tho: one may think that to have a culture you have to make active actions, like deciding to move a hand, thus needing something like a brain. To that I say that you don't need a brain to have a culture. All that's alive can do only what their genes let them do. Plants too can move, some even evolved to eat animals, while sponges resemble more plants than other proper animals. The fact that a plant has its DNA saying that, like, it has to grow an apple after receiving certain stimuli is the same as animals having sexual desires and the biological machinery to create offspring.

I simplified my point so much that it almost sounds like a parody of it, but please listen to what I will be saying now because I can not copy and paste what I think immediately into your brain, I need time to explain.

Other examples of interraction among lifeforms that indicates culture, is the mere existance of species of animals evolved to be specialyzed cleaners, or the birds that eat the parasites off larger animals that can't remove them by their own, with the unspoken contract kept up by mutual benefit that the animal getting cleaned will not try to hurt the cleaner. Or the different species of ant that have their own way to live symbiotically with their tree, and to top it off like those bats that vomit up blood for the ones who could not get any that night, creating some kind of social net for those less fortunate in a certain period, deminishing overall misery in their society. Even monocellular organisms can have methods of population control to not destroy their environment because of the amount of resources that their population would need to survive. Coming back to something closer different groups of chimps have different ways to hunt, sleep and even to crack nuts; all of these are behaviours that must be teached by other members of their group or, in the case of rescued baby chimps, they can be trained by humans in adept structures that we created to re-habilitate the wildlife that can be released in nature once they're ready.

Like every other human word, culture has some level of fuzzyness in the description, so what one person means with "culture" will probably be different from someone else's meaning.

This means that to be a social specie a lifeform doesn't need to chit-chat like humans or go to a Mc Donalds. All one needs to have is a culture, and a culture is a positive or neutral interraction that either bring mutual benefits or that doesn't bring detriment with other individuals in that culture. Cultures that are one against the other, instead, require incompatibilities among them, thus requiring negative interractions among its participants.
Loner lifeforms have way smaller cultures that really come into the game just during reproduction or other actions that one must partake to have neutral or positive interractions

Here I want to share a thought that may seem ridiculous to you: if you zoom out your observation lense basically the vast majority of lifeforms are social species.

By the prior definition of social species my statement fits, even if I myself think that it sounds like a stupid thing to say.

Coming back to humans now:

Some think that a culture can be as whide-spread as an entire nation, when in reality ONE culture is not even as spread as ONE small CITY. You see, this ties back to how we evolved:
our ancestors lived in groups of 100 to 150 people tops and thus that's the number of people that we can actively keep in our mind. I've explained it badly here but since this project is already really long and I have already pointed you to "Aron" I'll point you to "Gutstick Gibbon" too and call it a day because I need to go on with my point. Welcome to the internet, feel free to pause the video and work the rubber-tip pen for your phone.

"What's the relevance of that number with human culture? I don't get it?" You may be asking.
Well, simply put you should know very well that every individual is different. Long story short, because of the telephone game, both other people alive during your time and the people that will be born after you, will have a slightly different version of "your culture" from you. Now it depends to arbitration where you want to draw the line between cultures, but at least we can all say that something like "eating avocado and drinking soy" is not a culture, but just a behaviour that can be part of a culture.

So, your culture is quite small, what does it mean? It means that the idea of nationalism is dead on the spot.
Let me explain: long story short during the 100 to 150 people tribes, the predecessor of nationalism, tribalism, was what kept that tribe and their culture from being erradicated from reality. When larger groups were able to form because of the creation of cities and agriculture, nationalism came to be so that large groups of people, more different from each other than before, could find a sense of pride to keep the city morally together, often against other tribes or other cities. Then cities grew into nations and nations into empires and nationalism has always been the greatest tool of the master of bashing heads.

I'm genuinely sorry to say this because I may hurt a naive gentle soul that believes this stuff just because they got taught such, but nationalism is for those who either don't have a true, stable family or that are afraid of those who may be different from them, thus creating a larger, fake family, a lie, one of the many "blankets of society" to cover their paranoia.

AH, see? We're back to that!!

You get manipulated by a figure of power either directly through speeches or indirectly through other people like your countrymen, your friends and your family. This manipulation is used to control your actions in the economy and social relations inside and outside your country. You get played like a doll if you're ignorant enough or, even if you aren't, but the government is too strong, you're forced to be a doll to their will.
Culture ties into society because a large society, to exist, must be identified with some kind of culture that in reality is so thin to have almost no depth at all. If we take the U.S.A. as an example because it's the easiest that I can think of, there are many different groups that say "America is X", without ever giving a definition that is even similar to one another's, and the reason why the parts don't split is literally because they're neighbors and expect "the others" either to change their minds (because obviously they're wrong) or to leave, or, in some cases, they can't wait to make them leave by force.
At the moment of its formation the U.S.A. was the most libertarian country ever, but it immediately became less free when in a couple of years a law about wine prohibitionism INSIDE the U.S.A. was passed. The mantra of the O-G America was basically "lìve and let lìve", but now it's more like "freedom can be reached only by slavery", even if nobody seems to accept that.
To close this paragraph I'm gonna say this: nationalism bad, if you think nationalism good then I politely invite you to begin doing some introspection. You don't need to tell others what you are thinking, just make those cogs grind for your own sake. Think about your life, mostly your childhood. Think about the things that got taught to you and those that you learned by yourself. Think about your life and the people that you share it with and think about what you're willing to lose for something else.

Don't worry guys, I'm still an ANCAP, so for all of you that don't have a nationalistic political stance just go to the video in the description for an intro to ANarco CAPitalism, that will show you the basis of why you're still wrong. I mean, current ANCAPs now still have some wrong ideas, but if you actually work the cogs of ANCAP you can actually get how people should act to have, basically, the best society that can be.

So, here I've just talked about evolution, primitive lifestyle, technology, culture and society. The next part will be about autonomy and the ability to choose.


So, as long as you accept that you exist in this reality, that you're an animal, that you're a monkey, that you're a human AND that you're a person THEN we can continue on this path.

Some say that humans have something special, different from anything else in reality, that makes them both moral agents and responsible for a great amount of their actions, if not all their actions, and some nutter says even about actions that one never took in its life. That's not how it works.

To truly know something we've to use the scientific method wich, in an horrid synthesis, says among other things that we can't believe as true something that isn't "supported enough" and can't say that something exists for that same reason. So yeah, you may have a giant inflatable banana in your backyard called "Doctor Peel", but if you don't bring forth evidence of it it's as good as if it never existed.


Here comes that part of the intro: the default position is ignorance.
What does this mean?

I have realized this while rewatching Shane Killian's First Principles video (I will not make an entire section about it, go to the Reddit link): he described the theist side as "active side" and the atheist as "passive side" in the "theist versus atheist debate" that goes on since immolation was popular.
Dark jokes aside and the fact that I refuse to describe religion in any kind of complete way because of the amount of time that such level of complicacy this argument needs, to be worked into my project.
Anyways in Shane's example the atheist side only happens to be the passive side because it is the ignorance one. Atheism is the lack of belief in a god, not the belief that there is no god at all. It sounds like it's just semantics, but it's not. To be an atheist is to say that you've not enough data to say "with confidence" that you "know" that either at least one god exists or that no god at all do exist (in reality). Here the positions of theism HAVE to bring in that data.

To make another example let's say that you want to understand how cooking sugar and water makes caramel. You just know that it happens but you don't know how. You go to two men: one is an alchemist and tells you that the soul of the sugar fuse with the one of the water to make a caramel soul; the other is a chemist that explains to you atoms and the bonds.
It's up to you to decide who to believe in, but to know what's true, you must, and can only go, with the actual fact, the data. Doesn't matter how much you believe in the caramel soul, because in the end it's all carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.
Anyways this is the point: the passive side is the ignorance side. If, instead, you were an alchemist and a chemist tried to explain to you the real deal then you're both active sides, which have to support their current position every time.

Passive active passive active.
What am I talking about?
People's moral and responsability agency.
Up until proven otherwise we're no different from anything else in the universe,
We're made of the same atoms, the same star dust, that everything else is made of and evolution shaped us without giving us a magic U.F.O. green martian man crystal in the middle of our amygdala.
I'm not completely sure about this, but morality seems to be in part objective, meaning that generally doing things that make life proliferate and be more than before, are "good", and those that make the contrary happen "are bad". This means that in nature the end justifies the means because if on one hand mass extinction can literally just damage the world overall, if after that mass extinction a lifeform evolved that makes life more proliferous then it was worth it. This is because the overall desire of life is to keep existing, so everything that elongates the existence of life is "good" on that moral scale.
Then morality is in part subjective too, depending on the lifeform's preference: for example penguins tend to stay pretty close to their chick for long because... you know... polar temperatures, while other birds just chuck out their chicks from the nest, sometimes even over a cliff.

Here comes the hated but needed list of tangents and definitions:
By "reality" I mean everything that we're capable to interact with. If a parallel dimension literally existed "atop our own" but we would never be able to interract with it in any possible way than it would not exist in our reality, but if they were able to see us then they would be able to interract with us (somehow, magic eyes) and thus our reality would exist for them as part of their reality.
To give a quick one evolution works over populations, not individuals.
By "lifeforms" I mean the different animals distinct among one another, even if they can reproduce between them like domestic dogs and wolves.
By "life" I mean everything that is "alive" at least on this planet, even if this "principle/context/description" applies universe-wide.
By "being alive" I mean that the entity must be able, somehow, to eat and produce more versions of oneself and thus, because of the inevitability of this reality, evolve one way or another. This means that by my personal definition physical viruses are alive (but not the computer ones), but stars are not. This because physical viruses are much more complex systems than stars: they directly interract with other matter to make copies of themself, while stars are masses of heated gas that becomes plasma and at their "death" if they fart strong enough they can heat up other gas in other parts of the universe to make more stars. This is not life, this is much more similar to an avalanche.
Software viruses instead, if we talk about the ones that just make copies of themselves and waste space on purpose, are more similar to a nuclear fission cascade rather than life, since its goal is to waste space instead than survive.


By my definition of life this means that if we were to create robotic creatures, even completely made of metal, that were capable to sustain themselves with their own version of eating and that were able to reproduce themselves in their own way then we would have literally created new life that has never existed before (if you want a stupid example about this imagine either "Terminator" or "Horyzon Zero: Dawn");. Or even if we're talking about the digital world IF we were to have a software environment we could literally code in lifeforms, like "The game of life" or, if we had a magical computer capable to emulate in real time everything about our universe, we would be able to make digital humans indistinguishable from analogue ones; these digital humans may even use robots or other tech to interract with "the real world".
Last tangent: "the real world". It connects back to my definition of reality. Be it just reality, be it a snow-globe, be it a simulation, be it a brain in a can or whatever it's called it doesn't really matter. Our reality is just what we can interract with. Some say that because our reality seems to work on mathematical bases then it "proves" it is a computer simulation, but to that I rebut with "if we were in a magic reality and a great wizard discovered that the bases of our reality were magic would he say that we lìve in a magic spell simulation?". Of course the nature of our universe doesn't tell anything about the possibility that it may be a fake world. The only certanty is that your reality is real not in perception but in essence. A blind person may not see the low-hanging sign, but it's still gonna get hit in the face by it. Lack of perception doesn't mean lack of existence, and perception of things that don't exist don't make them real (hallucinations), everything in your reality is real and it will remain even if your reality is a simulation.

This is the end of the painful tangent. God I'm bad at writing discourses.
So, what was I saying? Oh right: morality and agency.

At least every animal has a moral system of some sort that makes the lifeform survive (here, contrary to the culture segment, I'm not gonna talk about non animals like plants and fungi because that's not that pertinent and another can of worm to open and, frankly, I'm already full of proteins). It doesn't mean that every individual of a lifeform has the same moral system, it just means that the totality of every individual's moral system helps the groups of the lifeform to survive and keep on going. This is not only valid about morality, but habilities and specialization too: different members of a group specialize in different tasks to be more effective.

To keep this mainly on humans our specie has different people specialized and better suited to different fields of habilities and expertise so that the survival and triving of the group may be easier of a goal to achieve.
Where once this meant that your tribe alone was better off, it now means that the entire population of the planet may put together their brains to mutually profit from each other, making everyone's life better.
Too long; didn't read: the fact that humans help each other is a good thing.

I personally have my thoughts about the number of humans that may lìve on the planet at any given time because the resources of this reality are finite until proven otherwise, but I'll either leave it for another part of this project or not and just leave it vague, I don't know. In short: I approve of the freedom of others to have many children, but the thing that both I don't approve and prefer is for the overall number of humans to not be so high that our planet cannot sustain our activities, AND that the resources on it.. Either are not able to renew fast enough or get exausted too soon.
Examples:
1) With humanity's current level of pollution the Earth is turning hostile even to human life.
2) If, let's throw random numbers, with a constant population of 10 billion humans all the nuclear fuel in the world would be used in, let's say, 500 years, with half the overall population it would last far longer.
3) If, let's again throw random numbers, with a constant population of 10 billion humans, in a future when we manage to conrrect all the pollution that humans may make, every human has an overall average of pollution that they can produce before giving out negative effects again, like if the technology can clean out 100 units of pollution a day so you can't exceed that. If there were only 5 billion humans instead then the individual can get to 200 top instead, leaving it more freedom.

What I am saying here is similar to that socialist fallacy of equality where it's "more fair if more people are alive, but suffer much more overall but all the same because of fairness". I say, instead, that I'd rather have overall less humans relatively to the resources avayable so that every single human may lìve the best life with the most freedom that it can. It's like having a bathtub that can house a max of 10 people at a time: the lesser people there are the more space you have.

Agency. What does it mean?
Without using fancy big-boy words and fishing for another dictionary (in the end I went and got one anyways, I am unable to be dishonest... it will be the death of me one day) I'll ball it and say that "agency is the ability of an entity to make a decision on its own".
You may don't like it, I don't care, I'm severely sleep deprived and my caveman brain needs to use the words how I learned them. Anyways this is close enough to one of the dictionary definitions.

So agent entities are those whom act by "their own will", meaning that they do what they desire, even if what they desired was imposed by others.
A thing that we need to clear out right now is a misconception: many use the word "free-will" without making a distinction between it and normal will.
The will of something is to decide what to do by its own (extortion and other things are ultimatums that the entity wants to avoid to avoid damage, pain and/or death, so the entity may willingly do something that in other cases may have not done) while "free will", is, and this is the dictionary definition: "freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention". The latter definition has no basis in reality because everything acts by cause and effect.
Intermission: open the link in the description about free will, for additional data.
Too long; didn't read: I am a fatalist. I not only believe in the concept of Laplace's Demon, but also believe, because there's no reason not to, that if we were to "rewind time and then play it back" the quantum actions would not be different at all, thus leaving us a universe that has everything already "decided" from the beginning.
"Hold on!" you may say "You're a libertarian! How can you ever say that you're a determinist, even a fatalist!?"

Remember will? Even if everything is already written, it is written, at least in part, because YOU want it.
Yes, you do not decide your genes, how you develop in the womb, how and were and when you're born and many things that happen in your life, but the outcome of your life that is you in a moment is still you and the choices that you make are done by your will: if, for example, your harm were never bitten off by a rabid dog when you were little, you may still love dogs, or maybe you still would anyways. We all react differently to the same stimulus and YOU, like, you YOU, would possibly have acted differently in a possible situation IF a moment of your life was different.

The larger the group of people the easier it's to predict their collective reaction to a situation. You can do the same with individuals, but only with enough data on that individual.
ANCAPs constantly say that "the market can predict the needs of people" because yada yada economics. We all know that it works, I don't need to talk about that.

In short I believe that the best way for humans to exist is to lìve in peace among each others, without indoctrination of the children and always living in balance with nature, which means that we treat well our planetary life-support system. If you're confused about what I'm talking about look at what has been happening in Australia with their rivers' water. Yes, the government here is involved, but what would stop that in a global ANCAPistan? Here's the answer:

The N.A.P., which as I already said in the splinter about Vaush's Island, can work only in a society.

With a global ANCAPistan there would be only one global society bound by ANCAP alone. To do something like an ecological disaster is equal to pollution, which is against the N.A.P. You could never do something that damages the planet as long as either you're the only person alive on it, or unless you've a way to fix the damage or even leave the "planet" better off after fixing it because by damaging the planet, which I have already said is literally our planet-sized life support, is to damage all those who did not agree to the act, even those who have not been born yet, thus breaking the N.A.P..
Too long; didn't read: in ANCAPistan both pollution and mass extinction would be, for lack of a better word, illegal.

So, yes, a Fatalist ANarco CAPitalist, I told you that I have no idea where I would land on and frankly I don't care about it that much right now. In short I believe that to reach "fairness" you absolutely have to not steal from other people to give to others, there's no way that any government would fix this problem in a relative heart beat. The change may take centuries to be implemented voluntarily, but maybe it will never happen or humanity will extinguish itself sooner than that.


Now this part is basically closed, not because I've ran out of things to say, but because they are easier to say by using a piece of literature as its back bone.
Don't worry, it's not like that guy that invented horror stories about the american meat industry to pass new regulations based on its fictional book.
This story is realistic because the themes in it are a reflection of an individual's struggles against first the world and then its society and then its society against other societies.
It's a really gripping story which finale got ruined, but at least we know more or less what was the original plan.
Since it would be both a review of the story and part of the project it's separated from this, but published immediately after. I strongly invite you to first watch the show itself tho, since spoilers ruin a lot of surprises.
Anyways if you just call me a weeb you ARE RETA-

Jokes aside the show is called -

Kindest regards,

James

 

[Isaac Clarke]

Greetings,

I've taken the liberty of copying and pasting the text:



Kindest regards,

James

Allright, in it's redundant my eyes, but causes no harm.

 

[*SD*]

Not really sure what you mean by that. DG simply pasted the transcript

 

[surreptitious75]

I do not think morality can be applied to the animal kingdom in general only to human beings
Because it is an abstract concept and to think conceptually requires a pre frontal cortex which only primates have
But the pre frontal cortex of non human primates is not as advanced as that of humans
And so morality is to all intents and purposes a human construct not an animal one
Nature is amoral and so all the behaviour in the animal kingdom will be amoral too
Animals do things instinctively not morally - they have no concept of right and wrong

We are unique with regard to our highly developed pre frontal cortex which is where our sense of morality comes from
But classifying it as either objective or subjective is a false dichotomy for it does not exist as a binary but on a spectrum
For all adult human beings of sound mind have both objective and subjective morality in their psychological make up
Regardless of whether they label themselves as objective moralists or subjective moralists or neither of these

Furthermore there are two types of objective morality - external and internal
External is that imposed on the outside by the unfalsifiable / metaphysical being known as God
Internal is that imposed on the inside by oneself of ones own free will

Sometimes these two entirely different sources have commonality
I for example share objective morality with Muslims with regard to two very specific issues
Even though I have never been Muslim and can never become Muslim even if I wanted to
I also share some common morality with the Prophets even though I do not believe in God
So morality has some overlap between the objectivists and subjectivists - their positions are not mutually exclusive


I would like to add some more thoughts of my own not specifically related to what you wrote but just to generate discussion

Feynman once asked the question what is wrong with not knowing - to which the answer is of course nothing at all Richard absolutely nothing at all
Not knowing is what drives human beings to want to know - hence the famous Einstein quote about imagination being more important than knowledge
Now I am not quoting Feynman and Einstein here because of who they were but rather because of what they said
For the validity of a truth statement lies in the statement itself - who actually said it is of no relevance at all


Death is nothing to be afraid of and for not one but two reasons
You are never going to experience it and it is the end of suffering
[ not to be confused with dying which will definitely be experienced and may involve suffering ]


How does one in the internet age know what is true and what is false
My approach is to not hold onto anything any more than I have to

Someone tells me I + I = 2 I let it be - someone tells me the Earth is flat I let it be
Even though one of those statements is objectively true and one of them is objectively false

The reason why I try not to hold onto anything is because :

Dogma is the death of the intellect - hackenslash
The easiest person to fool is yourself - Mark Twain

The latter is my favourite quote of all time


A useful metric I employ is not to dismiss anything unless it has been falsified no matter how improbable it may be [ a la Sherlock Holmes ]
Falsification is the highest form of knowledge - all it takes to prove beyond all doubt that not all swans are white is just one black swan
Popper should be a household name - his truth is so simple and profound and should be taught in school so everyone knows what it is


The people who have never heard of Dunning and Kruger really need to just to make sure their findings do not apply to them
A strange paradox : no one seriously thinks they are always right but most do not like having to admit they are wrong
That famous Kipling quote about treating triumph and disaster just the same should apply to right and wrong as well


I like to read people who are considered cranks
I read them because they are interesting not because I necessarily agree with them
As I am drawn to how others see the world somewhat different to how I may see it :

Ayn Rand :
David Icke :
Rupert Sheldrake :
Graham Hancock :

Read the first three and just ordered Hancock from Amazon
Does it bother me that many think the above are all cranks
No because what some human beings think of other human beings is none of my business

There is only one person I can think of who I would not read and that is David Irving
Not because he is a Nazi apologist but because his accounts of history are apparently falsified
I say apparently because one cannot make any value judgement about books one has not read


I no longer vote because I accept the will of the people - regardless of what it may be


So plenty of material there to reply to - thanks for reading - assuming anyone has !!!

 

[Sparhafoc]

I do not think morality can be applied to the animal kingdom in general only to human beings

I think it's quite simple to resolve this.

Morality in the human sense, i.e. linguistic, cognitive and codified can't be applied to any other animals because they don't possess language, and therefore the structure of their thoughts isn't arranged linguistically.

But this doesn't mean they can't engage in moral or immoral behavior according to the society they live in. The more important the social grouping is to that species, the more closely actions are tracked. Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours... but if I keep failing to repay my debts, you'll track that and stop grooming me - we see this across all highly social mammalian species. Morality, from a biological perspective, is pro-social behavior and there's ample reason to acknowledge that other species engage in such a behavioral paradigm.

 

[Sparhafoc]

We are unique with regard to our highly developed pre frontal cortex which is where our sense of morality comes from

All primates have a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, but even if this is where our morality is governed, that doesn't indicate that other animals absent such a structure can't engage in moral behavior. Rather, this part of the brain took over or superseded prior functions, in fact, the dorsolateral prefrontal has an executive role in moderating emotional responses, and it is these emotional responses which are where I'd suggest reactions to behaviors originate and are mediated.

 

[Sparhafoc]

There is only one person I can think of who I would not read and that is David Irving
Not because he is a Nazi apologist but because his accounts of history are apparently falsified

Then isn't Ayn Rand's account of morality false, Icke's account of history false, Sheldrake's account of medicine & science in general false, and Hancock's account of history false? How is Irving the odd one out here? Intent?

 

[Isaac Clarke]

Not really sure what you mean by that. DG simply pasted the transcript

I meant that that way ppl can read it without downloading the .txt file, but that regardless of that it looks redundant to my eyes to have both the file and the content in two different messages.

 

[Isaac Clarke]

I do not think morality can be applied to the animal kingdom in general only to human beings
Because it is an abstract concept and to think conceptually requires a pre frontal cortex which only primates have
But the pre frontal cortex of non human primates is not as advanced as that of humans
And so morality is to all intents and purposes a human construct not an animal one
Nature is amoral and so all the behaviour in the animal kingdom will be amoral too
Animals do things instinctively not morally - they have no concept of right and wrong

We are unique with regard to our highly developed pre frontal cortex which is where our sense of morality comes from
But classifying it as either objective or subjective is a false dichotomy for it does not exist as a binary but on a spectrum
For all adult human beings of sound mind have both objective and subjective morality in their psychological make up
Regardless of whether they label themselves as objective moralists or subjective moralists or neither of these

Furthermore there are two types of objective morality - external and internal
External is that imposed on the outside by the unfalsifiable / metaphysical being known as God
Internal is that imposed on the inside by oneself of ones own free will

Sometimes these two entirely different sources have commonality
I for example share objective morality with Muslims with regard to two very specific issues
Even though I have never been Muslim and can never become Muslim even if I wanted to
I also share some common morality with the Prophets even though I do not believe in God
So morality has some overlap between the objectivists and subjectivists - their positions are not mutually exclusive


I would like to add some more thoughts of my own not specifically related to what you wrote but just to generate discussion

Feynman once asked the question what is wrong with not knowing - to which the answer is of course nothing at all Richard absolutely nothing at all
Not knowing is what drives human beings to want to know - hence the famous Einstein quote about imagination being more important than knowledge
Now I am not quoting Feynman and Einstein here because of who they were but rather because of what they said
For the validity of a truth statement lies in the statement itself - who actually said it is of no relevance at all


Death is nothing to be afraid of and for not one but two reasons
You are never going to experience it and it is the end of suffering
[ not to be confused with dying which will definitely be experienced and may involve suffering ]


How does one in the internet age know what is true and what is false
My approach is to not hold onto anything any more than I have to

Someone tells me I + I = 2 I let it be - someone tells me the Earth is flat I let it be
Even though one of those statements is objectively true and one of them is objectively false

The reason why I try not to hold onto anything is because :

Dogma is the death of the intellect - hackenslash
The easiest person to fool is yourself - Mark Twain

The latter is my favourite quote of all time


A useful metric I employ is not to dismiss anything unless it has been falsified no matter how improbable it may be [ a la Sherlock Holmes ]
Falsification is the highest form of knowledge - all it takes to prove beyond all doubt that not all swans are white is just one black swan
Popper should be a household name - his truth is so simple and profound and should be taught in school so everyone knows what it is


The people who have never heard of Dunning and Kruger really need to just to make sure their findings do not apply to them
A strange paradox : no one seriously thinks they are always right but most do not like having to admit they are wrong
That famous Kipling quote about treating triumph and disaster just the same should apply to right and wrong as well


I like to read people who are considered cranks
I read them because they are interesting not because I necessarily agree with them
As I am drawn to how others see the world somewhat different to how I may see it :

Ayn Rand :
David Icke :
Rupert Sheldrake :
Graham Hancock :

Read the first three and just ordered Hancock from Amazon
Does it bother me that many think the above are all cranks
No because what some human beings think of other human beings is none of my business

There is only one person I can think of who I would not read and that is David Irving
Not because he is a Nazi apologist but because his accounts of history are apparently falsified
I say apparently because one cannot make any value judgement about books one has not read


I no longer vote because I accept the will of the people - regardless of what it may be


So plenty of material there to reply to - thanks for reading - assuming anyone has !!!

Ok, I stopped reading at "god is a subjective source of morality".

Before you assert that, please, you've to prove, in this order:
1) the existence of any god
2) the existence of YOUR god in particular
3) the proof that he dictates morals, in whichever way
4) how can morals be objective if a person decides them, making them thus subjective.



And about "animal morality":




Morality evolved for survival, not of the individual but of the group.

 

[Isaac Clarke]

I think it's quite simple to resolve this.

Morality in the human sense, i.e. linguistic, cognitive and codified can't be applied to any other animals because they don't possess language, and therefore the structure of their thoughts isn't arranged linguistically.

But this doesn't mean they can't engage in moral or immoral behavior according to the society they live in. The more important the social grouping is to that species, the more closely actions are tracked. Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours... but if I keep failing to repay my debts, you'll track that and stop grooming me - we see this across all highly social mammalian species. Morality, from a biological perspective, is pro-social behavior and there's ample reason to acknowledge that other species engage in such a behavioral paradigm.

YES! ABSOLUTELY!

That's what I said in the first half of my project: morality is shared behavior that promotes the survival of a group, be it a single "kind" (I explained it in the video) of lifeform or different ones cooperating, like

By working together they get more results that they would've ever had if they were to work alone of with other members of the same respective species.

 

[Isaac Clarke]

All primates have a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, but even if this is where our morality is governed, that doesn't indicate that other animals absent such a structure can't engage in moral behavior. Rather, this part of the brain took over or superseded prior functions, in fact, the dorsolateral prefrontal has an executive role in moderating emotional responses, and it is these emotional responses which are where I'd suggest reactions to behaviors originate and are mediated.

Believe me, it's... much more complicated than that.

We, simply, can observe societies and morality in basically every animal and, as I avoided to talk about in details in my video, in other "kinds" of life too:

1) imagine if every tree evolved to suck out as many resources that it could from the ground to get as large as possible, evolution prevents that because, among other things, one can be just a little different form one's parents and physics exist for everyone; instead trees evolved to live as best as they can BUT leaving space for other trees because, as already said, the individuals of one specie/race/whatever do not "work" to just survive forever, because they will die at one point, rather they "work" to make their specie/race/whatever survive.

2) what I said about trees is valid for other plants and microorganisms too, not counting the fungi, which can cooperate in a inter-kingdom alliance with plants.

3) gut bacteria in animals evolved to not be that armful to the host during normal condition because they can reap the benefits if they give benefits. Mutual beneficial cooperation.

4) the cells of your body are many and different, but your body evolved like that to have a survival advantage. If the cells "want" their specie/race/whatever to keep on existing THEN they must do what they evolved for and keep the body-sized cooperation that they are "working".

 

[Isaac Clarke]

Then isn't Ayn Rand's account of morality false, Icke's account of history false, Sheldrake's account of medicine & science in general false, and Hancock's account of history false? How is Irving the odd one out here? Intent?

I have no idea about what you're talking about.

Edit: I mean, you responded to the guy, but still, I've no idea what those people are about.

 

[Sparhafoc]

Believe me, it's... much more complicated than that.

We, simply, can observe societies and morality in basically every animal and, as I avoided to talk about in details in my video, in other "kinds" of life too:

1) imagine if every tree evolved to suck out as many resources that it could from the ground to get as large as possible, evolution prevents that because, among other things, one can be just a little different form one's parents and physics exist for everyone; instead trees evolved to live as best as they can BUT leaving space for other trees because, as already said, the individuals of one specie/race/whatever do not "work" to just survive forever, because they will die at one point, rather they "work" to make their specie/race/whatever survive.

2) what I said about trees is valid for other plants and microorganisms too, not counting the fungi, which can cooperate in a inter-kingdom alliance with plants.

3) gut bacteria in animals evolved to not be that armful to the host during normal condition because they can reap the benefits if they give benefits. Mutual beneficial cooperation.

4) the cells of your body are many and different, but your body evolved like that to have a survival advantage. If the cells "want" their specie/race/whatever to keep on existing THEN they must do what they evolved for and keep the body-sized cooperation that they are "working".

I think you can take it for granted that (nearly) everyone here is already very familiar with the concept of a gene-centric view of reproduction.

 

[Sparhafoc]

I have no idea about what you're talking about.

Edit: I mean, you responded to the guy, but still, I've no idea what those people are about.

Ayn Rand was the pen name of an American writer who wrote the most selfish, egotistical and anti-social tract imaginable, and it still permeates much of American culture today.

David Icke is basically a professional British conspiracy theorist, most well known for alien pseudoscience. If you can think of an area of wooist nonsense, David Icke's already been there and has all the t-shirts to sell you.

Rupert Sheldrake is a British researcher in the field of 'parasychology' insomuch as there actually is a field to actually study, and is largely motivated by flailing at the scientific method particularly with regards to medicine and neurobiology.

Graham Hancock is a British writer who makes up nonsense about alien visitations in ancient historical periods wherein nothing humans achieved was really their own ingenuity, but always thanks to the benevolence of visiting alien entities.


Basically, the latter 3 are all proponents of pseudoscientific wibble, while the former wrote one of the most antisocial tracts in human history.

 

[Isaac Clarke]

Ayn Rand was the pen name of an American writer who wrote the most selfish, egotistical and anti-social tract imaginable, and it still permeates much of American culture today.

David Icke is basically a professional British conspiracy theorist, most well known for alien pseudoscience. If you can think of an area of wooist nonsense, David Icke's already been there and has all the t-shirts to sell you.

Rupert Sheldrake is a British researcher in the field of 'parasychology' insomuch as there actually is a field to actually study, and is largely motivated by flailing at the scientific method particularly with regards to medicine and neurobiology.

Graham Hancock is a British writer who makes up nonsense about alien visitations in ancient historical periods wherein nothing humans achieved was really their own ingenuity, but always thanks to the benevolence of visiting alien entities.


Basically, the latter 3 are all proponents of pseudoscientific wibble, while the former wrote one of the most antisocial tracts in human history.

Aye, interesting.

BUT the first one... I was confused with the guy who made the political stance of Egoism, so I looked for that name...

Ayn seems to have the right idea, but maybe it's not explained in a way that everyone may understand it.

As I've already said: the lifeforms don't live for themselves alone. Altho they may if it brings an advantage it's not a given. Remember the flyers that live just one day?

Ayn says that you should do things because you genuinely want to do them, not because someone else told you to.

I am a Fatalist ANCAP, I've explained in the project what that means.
If humanity reached the point of global ANCAP, where everyone would be really free, without having their freedom stolen away either by their education, the place or the time in which they were born, a world of interconnected people, without hate and without religion, may give birth to the true golden age for humanity, in which we understand our place in the world and thus are able to better it, both on an individual level and on a specie/race/whatever level.

What Ayn said is right. An example would be:
>Would it be considered charity if someone stole your money and gave it to someone else?
>Would you have done a charitable act if you didn't want to give your money to a person in need but the previous point happened?

 

[Isaac Clarke]

Thank you, thanks to you I've found another person that I mostly agree with:

 

[Sparhafoc]

Ugh

 

[Deleted member 619]

TBH, I glazed. Three times I've tried to pick my way through it, and I can only conclude that the Crackpot index needs some updating for the modern age.

And now Rand...

 

[ldmitruk]

TBH, I glazed. Three times I've tried to pick my way through it, and I can only conclude that the Crackpot index needs some updating for the modern age.

And now Rand...

Doubly so for David Icke.