NFT’s are the new high. Virtual drug as I would say. But what, why and why am I against it?
First thing: I am against blockchain in general for a simple reason: It increases the heat exhaust into our environment to create blocks and to mine for ‘Proof of Work’. This therefore is counter productive to what humanity should be doing, as lowering the carbon emission and improving climate stability/dynamics.
I am against NFT, because it plays on the psychology of people to make the blockchain a technology REQUIRED to be kept, because someone would lose a truckload of money if we would choose to remove it. AND it is just for leisure. NFTs have basically NO value (you can make NFTs with value, but that is not what it gets promoted for now).
Everyone is full of it:
We must safe the environment.We have to reverse the damage done to the climate. But at the same time, we are buying into the luxury that makes us feel cozy.
Blockchain was a dream to become rich. Those that got into Bitcoin early would be millionaires (and many are now). But that is passed. All Blockchain does is cost energy to maintain (it is nothing but virtual, meaning if the net goes does for even one single second, all cryptocurrencies will be useless) and everyone knows better, so from 1 cryptocurrency we now are on our way to have 7.7 billion different cryptocurrencies, because basically you can make a separate one for every person in the world. There is no regulation against it, if it is, it is automatically defying the reason that blockchain was first adapted by the darkside of the web.
The world is being sucked into a web of virtual blackmail and either nobody sees it yet, until there is too much at stake to stop, or nobody cares and want their piece of the pie before they die.
You decide what you think is best….for you…or your children.
“Nothing is evil which is according to nature.” – Marcus Aurelius
A good start
Think of a person you know. Whether that person is a close relative, or a person far far a way in some forgotten place and time. Imagine that person that has the best intention to the world. The best impact. You would consider that person to be a ‘good person’, right? Why so?
We often find the person that has the most relatible behavior to what we would want to instill on the world, to be a good person. It is the bias of our own emotion and empathy that causes us to consider a person as good. Not just someone that acts like we do, but a person that acts like we WANT to do. This is the person we most often see as good.
Now turn it around. Think again, close and home, far and wide, for a person that you think is a bad person. A personification of evil. Yes, that one. Whether it is a man or woman, killed one or millions with their bare hands, or caused such grief it would be considered equal to as if he/she had killed those. Did you find such a person? Of course you did. Again, we find people that do the farthest of what we would do, the worst, the most evil, the most bad person alive. Not just farthest from what we do…but what we imagine we would do.
Can we agree, from this moment on, that someone we think of as good, is a person that upholds the highest positive values we can imagine (want) and a person that upholds the oposite, or undermines the earlier mentioned values the most, we call a bad or evil person?
If you can agree to the above, you are already quite a step further down the line of acknowledging what the end of this post will tell you (no peeking!)
See no evil, hear no evil
“Half of the results of a good intentions are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good.” – Mark Twain
In the previous paragraph, I tried to show you, that there are distinct features to what you will see as evil or good. These distinctions are very important, but the most important part of them is, to understand that they are SUBJECTIVE. It is what you want them to be. The power of upholding your own moral compass depends on the will to believe that what you do is right and what you envision as good IS good, and visa versa.
But imagine that you were actually wrong? Look at the item you hold as good (whether you have rational reasons to accept this as good or not), and see it as evil for a second. Can you? No? It will be hard, but there are reasons you can’t easily change your view. They are the ways your emotions have been ‘etched’ on the cognitive biases you have created/enforced, in your neurology.
“You can think of anything to be good, until the aftermath of the action shows you otherwise.”
People that you might think as evil, have done the same as you, but visa versa. Even sociopaths and psychopaths don’t automatically wake up in the morning: ‘Woah, I need to do something superbly evil today, or people will not think I am a psychopath!’. They wake up as Joe next door, mind you, married and playing in a soccerteam or hard laborer at their company. They don’t intend to do evil, they tend to approach their ideal of good as best as they can. This ideal can seem bad to you, but imagine you have been searching your life for what is good and you found out all around you are dellusional and lying people. Even if they don’t, if you believe it, it will mean those are bad. We can agree that lying is bad, right? Being dellusional is not a healthy treat, right?
Evil is as evil does
So, why do we think that someone did good, even if that person has a history of violence? And now I will come with a very dangerous example, because I myself find this man to have changed the world for the better, as many do: Nelson Mandela. He fought against apartheid, by many means. He did so by being a lawyer, by presumably using militant force against citizens (these days called terrorism or rebelism). Thanks to his effort new generations of humans live more equal to each other.
Another person, who many think was good, is someone I do not think in any way represents what is good:
Che Guevara. He fought for freedom of his people in Cuba, but used such brutal force and enjoyed violence at one point, that I can not find myself to agree with anyone wearing a Che silhouet shirt. It is, to me, a utter sense of ignorance of history.
These two are examples of many people, ranging from Mother Theresa, to Ghandi, to worse examples like Stalin, Hitler and Mohammed ‘the prophet’. Sainthood can be attained by showing good, even when being bad. As such, if you don’t openly ‘do bad’, you are not seen as bad or evil (example most vile is Mother Theresa, who gained sainthood, while she openly has shown misconceptions on the need for human suffering on more than one occassion).
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
As you will know from this page, it is in no means a religious page. Even the opposite, it is rationalist and atheist. So why use this phrase used often, regarding an imaginary place from contemporary religious writing? Because of the meaning that is indistinctive calling from it.
The general idea of a place called ‘hell’ in judeo-christian religion, is that of bad omen. If you go there, you did something bad (or not enough good, depending on the perspective of religiosity). In general, all participants of this believe that if you do evil, you go to this place.
Regardless of faith, if you equate ‘hell’ as destructive and negative impacting the environment around one, you could say, that one easily causes unwanted negative effects, while wanting to do good things.
You can think of anything to be good, until the aftermath of the action shows you otherwise. The same is true in reverse. How many stories or movies have you watched, that you were sure the bad guy was bad, until at the end, the real cause and effect was differently explainable, making the bad guy the good guy all along? Yes, that is right. Until the point where the protagonist in the 12 Monkeys accepts that HE is the one who brought out the disease, all viewers are thinking that HE is the good guy. Now a more heavier load is the latest (year 2020) ‘phase’ ended in the ‘MCU’ Marvel Cinematic Universe), where the bad guy Thanos was portrayed as such a rational guy, that his reasons for doing what he did almost seemed good.
Good measurement, evil insight
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. – Will Rogers
Now, I did add the ‘almost’, but the most important thing to remember is, that good and evil don’t exist. They are constructs in our emotional-cognitive worldview. They are concepts, a hatstand for combining observations into a more complex judgement.
Once you forget about the idea of evil and good in the judgemental sense that even the best religions and politics try to hold you on, you will start to make better judgement for yourself. Remember, any human is as good as you, you are as good as any human.
We, as a species are in a weird predicament. Our entire species, no matter what culture, is in trouble with a new version of a virus that we have been threatened by several times over the last few years. Now we can go into large detail on what the virus does and how it is a danger to young and old. But the bigger problem isn’t the virus. It is our sudden inability to distinguish between usable patterns and non-usable patterns (aka superstition/conspiracies).
Super stitious
Humans have prided themselves (especially from scientific perspective) on our ability to distinguish patterns and to use concepts regarding patterns that exceed our visual observation. However, as a species, we have learned many things parallel and these things haven’t all be correct.
Some of the most obvious superstitious items that have been lingering in western society for a long time, was black cats and walking under ladders. There are many more, but these most likely everyone knows. Lets consider the claims and see why they exist and why they are bogus (or not).
Bad luck
‘Black cats bring bad luck’. For one thing, when in the dark, black cats are hard to see. When a cat is in heat or are fighting, their screams sound very very unearthly. Combined with the fact that because they are hardly to see in the dark and when you do see them, mostly you will see the prying eyes that judge you as all cats do, it makes them mysterious and scary creatures.
So, if someone stumbles (literaly) on a cat in the dark, one can say: That is bad luck. But if more people admit this has happened to them (black, brown, grey, turtleshell, whatever color the cat had), the patterns starts to become very easy. Sometimes someone repeats it as a joke, sometimes someone wants to be the middle of attention and reiterates the story altered or that of another. Eventually, the story sticks and people start to create constructs in their minds that will RATIONALIZE the pattern that they should be able to distinguish. For some, all cats become a danger. Others stick to the specific story. If we take a look at when the superstitious tale about cats started to diminish, we see a trend with street lighting. The more electric streetlights (and therefore continous bright) the less the story would stick. Nobody tripped over cats in the dark anymore. Cats don’t like looking into bright lights, so they would mostly look away, diminishing the ‘scary judging view’. Additionally, more and more people in western countries started holding cats as pets and their different breeds started to make the stories less ‘general patterned’.
Math and geometry magic
Then how about ladders? This is more of a goofy thing, where people took religious concepts into realworld situations. A ladder against a sil will create a triangle (often almost perfect), which people from abrahamic religions would adher to 3, thus trinity. This combined with the fact that a ladder is mostly used to bring things to a height (like paint or water to clean windows), it could happen that someone got some of that paint or water on them when walking under a ladder. This seems to be the most legit version of rationalizing illogical patterns. It is better to not walk under ladders, though there is no actual ‘superstitious’ reason for it.
Con spiracy
Most often we seek patterns that are biased to what we want. This is logically, because we as an organism, want to trust on our ‘instincts’ to get us easy food and lazy life fast and easy. If something falls in our expectations, we are easy to accept it as confirmation of our bias, so we don’t have to venture into scary territory. When we add confirmation bias on confirmation bias and the bubble/box we keep ourselves in, is not broken, we will claim that something is true. Our subjective observations can not prevent this mistake, because we are less ‘intelligent’ than we think.
Masked truth
The problem is that most of our actions are hidden from ourselves. Our thoughts are only a small portion of our cognitive activity. When we are children much of our thought is new, because much of what we observe is new. We conduct investigation. Question everything. But when we get older, things we have observed before, are processed by our brain automatically. Much of the patterns that we have recognized and determined (whether right or wrong) as some kind of causal effect, will remain beyond our future vision. These patterns then cause an automated reaction in our brain, a reflex/instinctive behavior, and we are then sometimes wondering why we behave a certain way in certain situations. We, depending on what values we have before learned, decide these actions are having special meaning. Nothing is further from the truth. If we were to have learned of these behaviors before, we might have thought differently about them.
Blurred vision
But the result of this ‘masking’ of our own behavior by the fact that our identity is only a limited part of ourself cognitive awareness, is that anything we observe afterwards depends on the way we have created the filters before. These filters are the automatic processing of patterns by our brain. The reflexes and instincts. Anything we observe and think is objectively processed, is not so. It is always subjectively processed. Depending on our reference frame and our internal processes. This causes us to never see clear.
20/20
How can we prevent that we fall for the most obvious of mistakes in superstition and conspiracy thinking? By taking the first step back that is possible and be honest that whatever we observe will NOT be the whole of the pattern and what we will think of it is NOT determined by the moment alone. Once we are honest to ourselves and say: Look, whatever I think will be influenced by how I became who I am and judging things based on that will not do much more than confirm my bias. Take a 360 perspective first. Look at it how you think it is, BUT then also look at it totally opposite to what you think it is (But that is only 180. Correct.). If you have a clear overview of where you might be right and you might be wrong, shift the burden of proof halfway against and halfway for yourself (and yes, then you have 4 directions).
Conclusion
The most important part is, acknowledging that you are human and that humans are nothing more than primates with additional neocortex functionality (aka selfawareness). Also, as soon as you think you are clear on a subject, expand your view, include more parts. If the pattern from smallest to broadest part concur, it is more likely to be correct.
Question: Is all determined or do we have what theists call ‘free will’? Does the universe determine everything, or does causality cause the choices we make? In this article we will explore the questions to hopefully result in the conclusion that in reality the universe determined causality causes choices in quantum realm.
To determine whether all is set in stone, or is changeable by our own intent, we need to have a couple of things clear. What does ‘determinism’ mean and what does ‘free will’ mean? And more over, what do they imply for our question.
Determinism, in philosophy, theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Determinism is usually understood to preclude free will because it entails that humans cannot act otherwise than they do.
Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, guilt, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actions that are freely chosen.
As you can tell from reading the part of Determinism, it clearly states: Precludes free will. As such, IF Determinism is true, then Free Will is impossible. And inherently, if Free will is possible, Determinism is void.
A very very brief history of everything
Now, we can start talking about how the universes processes are continuously evolving and this means every thing that happened before caused what comes after (this is the mental awareness of time). And yes, on the scale of the cosmos, there is little we can do to change it. Now, lets zoom into the star called sun which holds about 9 large planets in its grasp, which themselves often have moons, circling them. One of them is covered mostly by liquid water and from a closer distance contains vegetation.
Are we calling determinism or free will here? When there is no selfaware actor yet?
On that globe, something happened during the last several million cycles of that globe around the star. In the constantly moving waters, friction and processes have caused proteins and amino acids to combine and fold, creating selfreplicating entities we will call ‘life’. All this, was caused from an initial moment that later lifeforms that are able to be aware of themselves will call ‘The Big Bang’ (fools, you don’t hear sound in the vacuum of space). For millions of years, it seems this life changed and differentiated due to several causes in the way the selfreplication requires chemicals and how the surroundings caused the natural selection of cultures with traits to overcome obstacles.
Are we still talking about deterministic processes, as life is fully dependent on two factors: Internal processes and external processes?
In the last 700.000 years something interesting happened with the more and more complex lifeforms, these primates who live in groups that are creating communication, that requires labels for ‘imaginary’ concepts like ‘other group’, ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘day’, ‘night’ etc. A creative bunch those primates.
Are we already talking ‘free will’? Or is this still determined by all previous processes?
So…which is which?
There is basically several flows that coincide and have their way depending on the amount of force applied. A. Cosmic evolution B. Biological evolution C. Animalistic instinct D. Human Civilization E. Human individuality
The starting movement causes us to be on a globe spinning silently in space. The complex folding of proteins, due to several interacting revolutions of spheres causes live to evolve. Life has caused changes to the environment as environments have caused changes to life and the way the latter reacts. Primates evolved into socially grouped species. They evolved to an awareness and size that caused them to create ‘concepts’ of mind. The individual primate genus Great Ape, family Homo Sapiens is able to choose his food and decide his short term and long term goals. But the before mentioned lines still influence his/hers.
As you can see, there ‘two’ options above, but the lines are several outcomes after those choices. Where on the line is your choice resulting? You can’t know yet.
So, while most things in the universe go without any choice made, including many of our own behaviors, some things are still what we as humans determine. If we CHOOSE not to do something, that is not automatically based on all previous processes. Yes, certain choices are more likely to happen, but as water can go two ways even when the Planck length determines the maximum deviation of particles. (this is an oversimplification of how even the smallest thing you can think off has a smaller resolution at base).
Forget about free wil, about determinism. Learn to understand causality. Though things CAN go a certain way, it doesn’t mean everything DOES go a certain way. In hind sight, things have gone a logical amount of steps that seem to have been determined (much like collapse of a wave function in Quantum Physics) by those steps…however, they are only that, in hind sight.
Determined causality causes choices in quantum realm
A Quora question: A religion has god(s). Do gods have religion too?
The question is regarding gods, not one specific entity. It is a simple question actually. some have only mentioned why (on an emotional subjective level) they feel they should answer this question regarding their specific fantasy. The question is very simple really: If A requires B, can B have A? The question can logically be pulled apart:
A can have B.
B can have A.
results A can have A
results B can have B
Now, A is a religion, B is a god (not a specific one, a general concept of a super being): A can have B, religion can have a god? Yes, it can, we know this, as monotheistic and deistic religions, but also polytheistic religions have one or more gods or senses of such. B can have A, in all sense, we have a imaginary situation. Religions are constructs of humans regarding life and its requirement to conform to the will of a non-existing entity (in the sense of a theist this entity does exist). Now, before we continue, we should consider whether gods are intelligent. What traits require intelligence and what traits are required by intelligence. And do gods require either. Now, for a god to have any influence in reality it requires to be aware of that reality, right? Think so. For a god to have influence on reality, it requires ability to reason, right? I think so, as intelligence equals ability to solve problems. For intelligence to exist, it thus also requires problems. Now I will not go into any mention that someone’s specific god is required to be perfect, because that invalidates the whole idea of a god (something in state of perfection doesn’t change nor can it be influenced or influence anything that is not perfect. If it could it would immediately render it imperfect and as such either shifts goalposts or renders its core purpose invalid). Because religion is a way of handling certain issues in life (making sure people have ‘answers’ to questions they feel they require answered), we would wonder whether gods could have such existential crisis. If they are intelligent, they have problems, if they have problems, they have questions (how do I solve this, why does this issue exist). If they exist, they have (like humans) self-awareness, or they have no intelligence, so they will wonder why they themselves exist. If someone claims they do not, they add special pleading. As such, we come to the conclusion that gods (if they could exist) can have questions that require answers which they might not be able to answer, as such they might even fabricate a proxy that is beyond their own understanding, which answers these questions, soothing the ‘mind’. So, can gods have religions? Yes, in the occurrence that gods would be real, they too would be able to have religions (even one without any gods).
You could prove your consciousness is separate of the functioning of your brain, IF it could exist without physical processes. Good luck in that.
You will find, it is impossible to have consciousness without physical processes. Why? Because of the way that the actual stimuli and their responses are causing us to have anything to be aware of.
Consciousness, or awareness, means nothing more than: ‘being able to respond to’. In other words, a single-cell organism is aware of barely anything. That is why it can do barely anything. Still it responds to stimuli on the level that its complexity allows (Pressure change, temperature change, lack of food).
Multi-cellular organisms have (depending on its species) more awareness of change in its surrounding. For instance: Pain receptors, or temperature receptors. Almost all complex-cellular organisms have a neural center that processes the different signals from receptors in a layered manner. This is what we call the nervous system. In vertebrates, this system has developed pretty similar in most species. Every animal is aware of its surrounding, depending on the amount of senses it has (sensible receptors, but senses is shorter). These senses have, through generations, been specialized at receiving a specific type of stimuli. Some for the electromagnetic spectrum we call light. Others for pheromones or aerosols. Some have tasks almost indistinguishable, yet for different speed and reasons. The skin has nerve endings for pain/heat/touch signals, the tongue for chemical imbalances, like the nasal cavities.
With worms and insects the signals from such senses go to nerve-knots. With vertebrates to the brain/neural center.
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