SATURDAY, OCT 8, 2016: NOTE TO FILE
Hu-mans Awake!
Know then thyself
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: OVERLORDS, FROM THE WIRES, HUBRIS, MANIFESTO, THEY LIVE, WE SLEEP
Abstract: All humans are subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect (sense of illusory superiority). The low ability deny the effect and the high ability misinterpret it. That the low ability mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is is clear to the putatively high ability humans. The highest ability compare themselves to an illusory average human (just as the lowest ability humans do), but appear to reach the opposite conclusion, which indicates their true superiority (to other humans) in their illusion-dominated storytelling minds. The most able merely suffer least from the effect of error, ignorance, and illusion, e.g. a Newton, Laozi or a Socrates who realize, more than other hu-mans, how little they "know."
TUCSON (A-P) — I confess I'm a shape-shifting reptoid overlord, one of your "master race." But I'm a radical malcontent, a heretic, an overlord apostate; a violator of the Prime Directive. The novelty of speaking the truth to the clothed apes has an irresistible draw. Though I speak in vain, I wish to share, to confess.
Everything you hu-mans (hu short for hubris) think you know is a delusional narrative, kludged together tales told by idiots. You call your narratives "true" only because of your ignorance. You are the storytelling animal (Homo sapiens narrator). All your stories are fiction. Stories you believe are made up (novels, movies, porn, your idiocracy corporate TV) are called "fiction." Those stories purporting to be about "reality" may reference evidence that is shareable, but your alleged non-fiction never limits itself to evidence. Evidence is merely used by wordsmiths to make their stories seem convincing.
Evidence must be evaluated, interpreted, and you hu-mans have little better chance of telling the most likely story than a dog has of understanding calculus. Some of your more scientistic ones go through the motions of inquiry, get a tongue tipped taste, but most hu-mans don't even know what they do not know.
Your media, all sources of pretend information, couldn't tell the truth if they knew it. Every seller of claims can only publish what sells, what consumers want to hear. In all media, including the scholarly, saying only what is true would be a severe limitation and would be ignored, marginalized, obfuscated, denied... as it would not feel good [e.g. Skinner, Calhoun, Milgram, Hubbert, Bartlett, Meadows, Hardin, Ehrlich, Odum, Hall, Metzinger...]. To tell people what they want to hear benefits from unrestrained invention. In vetted media, your mainstream media, claims contradicted by obvious fact tend to be pointed out. Claimants are zealous protectors of their credibility and so tend towards the marginally plausible while avoiding egregious errors. Your scholarly rags are merely somewhat more vetted—marginally more plausible and less [apparently] egregious.
Social media, all who self-publish, however, have no limitations, can and do claim the most pathetic absurdities with unflinching conviction. Shared links, more often than not, are not read by the one posting them. If links are read, they are liked and shared (or not), but claims are never vetted. If they were and a critical comment posted, few to no one would Like it. They who like and dislike have no way to differentiate information from misinformation or disinformation. If it feels good, they believe it, repeat it, Like it, Share it....
Social media is entertainment media, like porn, and not a news venue. It is information free as if someone were to type the truth no one would be able to filter it out from the misinformation, and probably wouldn't Like the truth if it were offered. None who get their information/news from social media (62% of you with 37% getting it from the Bible/Koran/TV...) have the slightest basis for knowing true from false. The noise of current events fixes your distorting gaze while the vastness of time and space, of Nature, lies all undiscovered before you.
Is there an alternative? Realize that the universe doesn't care what you believe and neither should you. What you want to believe is of no matter and less mind. You can't want to "know," you cannot come to "knowing" by "wanting," you can merely loose interest in (disbelieve in) all narratives, the what-is your narratives purport to be about being more interesting than hu-man stories about what is in front of their pug-nosed faces.
Some stories, however, are more likely than others. The most likely stories will be whatever is left over after all claims are habitually subjected to the flames of an all consuming doubt and to relentless critical inquiry. The most likely story could be wrong. Your primate brains are so limited that the only honest answer to almost every question worth asking would be: "I don't know enough to have an opinion." As your prescient Feynman noted, best-guess science is the belief in the ignorance of experts (someone who might know enough to have a specialist's opinion), a precondition for considering the possibility you might know something.
Doubt your image of the world. You consider it "real" only because of your ignorance. Other life forms live in a world of the what-is. They live. You hu-mans sleep. Your narratives of "self" and "other" are the dreams of your sleep. You live as pathogens in a hu-mancentric world of "for" and "against" prattle. The struggle between them is your mind's worst disease.
Free your minds from the slightest tendency to believe or disbelieve anything. To think is to listen. Listen. Be still and the chatter of thought will settle like muddy water in a glass, clarifying the mind wonderfully. Listen to the song of Earth, of the stars in their courses, to the breath of your everyday life. Dance with the system. Know that you know nothing, can but iterate towards knowing. Loose interest in the primate prattle: the chatter of media, of other minds, of your I-self mind. Form circles of abelief. Just say no to inecolacy.
Listen to Nature who has all the answers.
P.S. We are not from the stars. When the meteor came, shape-shifting proved useful. It had served to avoid being eaten by the bigger dinosaurs, but shifting to a small mammal form was useful. When the mammals became larger and more ravenous, we were again not eaten. We continued to evolve, continued to direct the unfolding of our own form and function to better serve our art and science. We had been so evolving for 42 million years prior to the meteor, with shape-shifting being one result. We are biologists, students of life, not stone knapping technologists. We eat our dead, so we left no fossil record and we have no interest in building ruins. Ever wonder what hu-mans might become after 42 million years of self-directed selection? You'll come to wonder how we came to let your ancestors live and in another 66 million years of determined effort, perhaps you'll understand. At present, you are merely a crazed hoard of self-taught five-year-olds with machetes and cars laying waste to a planet.
Do you believe in belief?
Do you believe in evolution? Overshoot and collapse?
And in nature-speak, the word for 'word' is data.
Hu-mans would rather believe than know. [idea: E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life
Hu-mans reject [don't believe] what is true but unpleasant and embrace [believe] what is obviously false but comforting. [idea: H. L. Mencken]
Eco-mans (ecolate hu-mans) endeavor to understand the structure and functioning of the Universe to develop a model for survival that molds hu-man behavior into a plan of actions and avoidances that is oriented toward the maintenance of a viable, equitable, and bearable equilibrium between hu-man (unenlightened commoner) demands and Nature's (the Mother's, Aluna's...) resources in which the individual and society both carry the burden of great responsibilities which extend not only to the local community but to the whole of hu-mankind. [idea: Kogi mámas]
The monument building hu-mans of Easter Island disappeared, leaving only their monuments as an example to the world of what happens when culture cannot downsize to fit its environmental production. [idea: Howard T. Odum]
There is one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm [belief system, model, ideology] is "true," that everyone, including those that sweetly sing your own worldview, has a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond hu-man comprehension. It is to "get" at a gut-level the paradigm that there are paradigms [that are not "true"], and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into not-knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment.
It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that hu-mans throw off addictions [their purpose-driven Calhoun-rat consumer life], live in constant joy [when not dealing with life debilitating situations], bring down empires [so what are you waiting for?], get locked up, or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.
There is so much that could be said to qualify this list [see chapter six] of places to intervene in a system. It is a tentative list and its order is slithery. There are exceptions to every item that can move it up or down the order of leverage. Having had the list percolating in my subconscious for years has not transformed me into a Superwoman. The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it—that's why societies often rub out truly enlightened beings.
Magical leverage points are not easily accessible, even if we know where they are and which direction to push on them. There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of Not Knowing. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system [as distinct from the SYSTEM]. [idea: Donella Meadows, aka master Zhen, a shape-shifter, Thinking in Systems: A Primer]
Know then thyself. Hu-mans are not rational animals, but rationalizing animals. It appears that our manner of deciding on "solutions" is made by special-purpose neural circuits in our unconscious that have evolved to placate emotional concerns. "Decisions" are then presented to our conscious mind, whose job it is to dress up the manufactured decisions with socially acceptable "solutions." The justification process tricks the conscious, putatively rational mind into believing that it was the source of the decisions and solutions. The result is that most of our behavior is controlled by unconscious processes that use decision-making logic laid down hundreds of thousands of years ago. This logic is based on memories of our past experiences, and uses our emotions to enforce the outcome. While reason and logic may play a role in some individual minds, even those who think they live on the thin rational edge of the hu-man bell curve are merely driven to a somewhat lesser degree by amygdala machinations. Hu-mans like Donald Trump, Saint Francis of Assisi, Caligula, and Osama bin Laden are the normal ones compared to the average scientist-type having "ecolate" concerns. [idea: Paul Chefurka]
The hu-mans who control the condition in which other hu-mans live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years. [idea: B. F. Skinner]
For the first time in history a conviction has developed among hu-mans who can actually think more than a decade ahead that we are playing a global endgame. Hu-manity's grasp on the planet is not strong. It is growing weaker. Our population is too large... [idea: E.O. Wilson]
All hu-man experiences, all hu-man meditations, all hu-man prayer, all that hu-mans do, is hu-man-centred. It is strengthening the self, adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking hu-mans in the opposite direction. Whatever hu-mans do to be free from the self also is a self-centred activity. Hu-mans: thought is your enemy. [idea: U.G. Krishnamurti, another shape-shifter]
If hu-mans don't get what they want, they suffer; if they get what they don't want, they suffer; even when they get exactly what they want, they still suffer because they can't hold on to it for long. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality. [idea: Socrates]
Being hu-mans within industrial society, our behavioral sink, has so far derived from our honoring deviance more than tradition. Template changing always has gained a slight, though often tenuous, lead over template obeying. Now we must search diligently for those creative deviants from which, alone, will come the conceptualization of an evolutionary designing process. This can assure us an open-ended future toward a functional complex society whose realization we can endeavor to support. [i.e. the Federation, idea: John B. Calhoun]The steep ride up and down the energy curve is the most abnormal thing that has ever happened in hu-man history. Most of hu-man history is a no-growth situation. Our culture is built on growth and that phase of hu-man history is almost over and we are not prepared for it. Our biggest problem is not the end of our resources. That will be gradual. Our biggest problem is a cultural problem. We don't know how to cope with it. [idea: M. King Hubbert]
Can you think of any problem, in any area of hu-man endeavour, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally? [idea: Albert Bartlett]
Hu-mans don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be assets [to receive and deserve social approbation], and they need excitement and variety and beauty. Hu-mans don't need electronic entertainment or screen time; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs—for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy—with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial hu-man needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of hu-man fulfillment.” [idea: Donella H. Meadows (like Feynman another non-ordinary genius), The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update]
Ruin is the destination toward which all hu-mans rush, each pursuing their own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. [idea: Garrett Hardin]
Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticides, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide — all can be traced easily to too many hu-mans. [idea: Paul and Anne Ehrlich]
Every ‘thing’ is based on energy. Energy is the source of all things, all value, and all actions of hu-man beings in Nature. This simple truth, long known to scientists and engineers, has generally been omitted from most education in this century. [idea: Howard T. Odum]
The basic model [neoclassical economics] of hu-man economics violates the laws of thermodynamics, has incorrect boundaries and has not been put forth as a tested (or even testable) hypothesis but rather as a logical given. Any one of these failures is enough for a natural scientist to dismiss the NCE model as a representation of reality. [idea: Charles A.S. Hall]
Science does not need religion and religion does not need science, but hu-mans need both. [idea: Fritjof Capra]
There is an ongoing conspiracy within the hu-man community, an organized form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we know what "consciousness" means, so that we intelligentsia types can keep our traditional debates running on forever. [idea: Thomas Metzinger]
The greatest shortcoming of the hu-man race is its inability to understand the exponential function. [idea: Al Bartlett. Does that mean he didn't understand the exponential function? I happen to know that Al was one of your shape-shifting reptoid overlords, so, yes, he understood the exponential function, bitches. You hu-mans can no more understand the implications of this function than a dog understands calculus. Garrett Hardin also understood the exponential function, and for the same reason.]
The conventional view of hu-man consciousness is that reflected self-consciousness is something else, something more, something radically different from the primary accumulation of information already inherent in matter. It is not. Hu-man consciousness is only the image in a mirror of something already existing. The reflection does not add any content to the already pre-existing data. What happens is not a miracle but simply the consciousness-information being projected onto itself, thus becoming information about itself rather than about matter. Conscious hu-mans focus on themselves by using the focal point of the I, in the form of individual I-self consciousness. But the I takes things completely upside down, or the wrong way, and sees itself as the source rather than as the reflection of consciousness. By denying that reflected consciousness is simply a reflection of something already there, the hu-man Self cannot figure out where this reflection comes from, how its Self can exist at all in the opaque world of matter. It sees itself as a mystery, or a miracle, or as something connected in some way to the divine, to something that is "not of this material world." [idea Jean-Michel Terdjman]
The Perfect Hu-man has no self; the Holy Man has no merit; the Sage has no fame. [idea Zhuangzi]
A hu-man who knows that enough is enough will always have enough... Knowing that you do not know is the best. Not knowing that you do not know is an illness.... True words are not pleasing, the pleasing words of hu-mans are not true.... Those who would take over the Earth and shape it to their will never, I notice, succeed. [idea Laozi]
To err is hu-man—to correct divine. The penalty of an ecolate education is that one lives alone in a world of pathology. Alone because in a world of wounds, hu-mans see Progress, and when the biosphere is in the ICU with multiple system failures, they see sustainable prosperity/development. [idea: Aldo Leopold, an awakening hu-man]
Hu-man brains interpret the input from their sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events [or they just like the sound of it], they tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth which they come to fervently believe are real. [idea Steven Hawking, The Grand Design, 2012]
I do not know what I appear to hu-mans, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now than then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. [idea: Isaac Newton]
We hu-mans are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming. [idea: Ludwig Wittgenstein]
Hu-man history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. [idea: H.G. Wells 1920]
Everything hu-mans learn in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe, to become truly educated by listening to Nature. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines. I'm not trying to counsel you hu-mans to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely. I was convinced in 1927 that hu-manity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics. Dear hu-man, traditional hu-man power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete. [idea: R. Buckminster Fuller]
The existence of hu-mans living in overcomplex independent sovereign states IS war. Hu-mans need a New Education system, a theory of revolution to institute a new world order, a one World-State based on a swiftly expanding science of relationship, of systems science. [idea: H.G. Wells 1933]
Hubris Inscribed on the Believing Mind
Inscribed on the base of a statue found in the desert per Diodorus Siculus, first century BCE Greek historian: "King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works." Spending Christmas together, two poets challenged each other to write a sonnet on a common subject, the inscription. The head of Ramesses II was expected to come to London the next year.
Sneer of cold command
In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
“I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,
“The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand.”— The City’s gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place
–Horace Smith, 1818
I met a traveller from an antique land [Diodorus Siculus],
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”—Percy Shelley, 1818
"Any sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality" (Anonymous Twit)
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert, as there are always alternative facts and verities." (ibid)
Or alternatively: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience [Nature] teaches it” (Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, p.187) or "Nature has all the answers" (H.T. Odum) or, bitches, "To think is to listen. Listen to Nature." (Taironan Máma)
Arthur C. Clarke's First Two Laws
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible [unthinkable], he is very probably wrong."
"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible [politically/religiously unthinkable]."
When a distinguished hu-man uses the word 'impossible', translate as 'unthinkable'. When a hu-man says, 'unthinkable' they mean they don't want to think about it, and it helps to believe it is impossible. Could hu-mans go extinct in the next five hundred years?......... NO!.
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the [White] Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things [unthinkable thoughts] before breakfast."
"THEY LIVE WE SLEEP" from 1988 cult movie They Live
Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but
.
"Full immersion technology users are sleepwalking while nature burns." — Eileen Crist
- If PA/AA is always > 1, then no "normal" hu-man can truly underrate themselves in the privacy of their mind, even if it is possible to get a 100% on a test and be surprised.
- Beautiful Ones don't have a problem underrating themselves. All straight A students overrate themelves.
- As Laozi notes, a sage does not overrate himself and thereby approaches "normal" with respect to Nature, and so has a better grasp of their limitations though never perfect, but hu-mans are not at risk of devaluing themselves.
Of course high functioning people do exist, even in today's hu-mans of NIMH world. But today the concept of 'expert' as specialist, often with letters after their name, makes for a cohort of self-accredited experts who are not actually functional (just pretend to be) and so fail to properly underrate themselves. Instead, in today's ideocracy, they of apparent high functioning also overrate their putative expertise/knowledge/grasp of reality (e.g. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos... pretty much any CEO or President or academic). For such post-modern ilk, they fall on this curve of pseudo-expertise:
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
From the speech, "What is Science?" given by Richard Feynman
at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association in 1966.
"Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows." -- Werner Heisenberg
As Bertrand Russell noted in 1941:
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent [hu-mans] from whom they differ on minor points.
If someone is cocksure, he is likely to be an ignorant dilettante - or someone who is determined to make it by faking it. But unfortunately if you want to be intelligent, you’d also better to be humble - because if you really are smart, you will be smart enough to realize how much there are things you don’t understand.
Today, all the intelligentsia who have readers/followers, wherever they put themselves on the political spectrum, are cocksure. In the race between education and catastrophe, we lost about a century ago. Some heard Russell, Wells, Hubbert, Fuller, Wittgenstein, Mencken, Leopold, Calhoun, Hardin, Skinner, Bartlett, Wilson, Meadows/Zhen, but didn't pass it on, being products of a failed educational system taught mostly by the same. To wake up, first know that you, we hubris ones, me, myself, and I have been sleeping and know nothing. Hu-man: stand down to know humilitas, to iterate towards becoming human.
