The why: Heritage of development

So, why and how did I come to the realisation of decision trees?

Well, I assume I am not the only one who has come across this venture and moment of clarity. So here goes and likely you have heard/thought it all before. I just write it down, so my own mind makes sense.

I have two children and they evolve. Before my eyes, they become bigger, they learn and they come across every awareness level, we all have at moments in our lives. Sometimes more often when we ‘rediscover’ some clarity. Seeing my children evolve and recognizing the moments from before their birth, as the phases they are changing, I began to realize that humanity and from that actually all of the universe and life on Earth in specific, wasn’t really evolving much different. Of course it doesn’t, because every current state of species grows along the same line. But not just physically, we as humans evolve in mind, along the same path. Humanity as a whole follows the same path. I guess someone already made some ‘great unification’ theory, explaining how this is true. Children first learn of input, then of acquiring the necessities to survive physically (cry, find a caretaker). After the moment it feels secure it will live, it learns of its body (aware of ability, not of self), it learns of the world close by, small steps in grasping things, seeing things, then interacting with things. It finds out, that there is a ‘Pavlovian’ effect, Cry and food comes. Cry and attention comes, attention is activating neurons, feeling good. Then it starts to feel comfortable about its abilities and recognizes its interaction and its results. Stimuli and response, but also intent and reaction.

So, that is all fine, it is how a child gets to know itself and learns to be human. YES, but not just humans have this. EVERY species has this. They learn up to their abilities. The closer their neurological network resembles ours and their physical abilities resemble ours, the closer their learning/adapting process seems to ours. This means that it is not the human conscious that causes learning and adapting, but something earlier. Children with low cognitive abilities, still are able to act on simpler impulses. They are still able to adapt, to respond. Life is all about responding.

What I have named above, is actually the fact that humanity grows like all species, and even the whole of life on earth grows in awareness. Like every individual organism that starts live, it has to come to understand what it can do, where it is, how to interact. What it is, depends on whether it becomes self aware. To understand how our psyche works, it is imperitive to understand that our drives, our inner nature, comes from…nature. From the first photosynthetic plantlike organism that consumed sunlight to mix chemicals, up to the actual animals of any size and complexity, it had specific responses to stimuli. Our brains are created after milions and millons of years and millions and millions of generations adjusting into a neural network that is able to respond to stimuli of its surrounding and, in our case, also able to act upon its environment. The responses are the basic results when a stimuli is processed by the body and nervous system. The brain is the center of action, because the signal will be sent there for a decision to be made. As Michael Shermer explained already with Patternicity, it is simply a response to a complex amount of stimuli that might cause the organism harm. If something touches the skin, the skin will send a signal to the brain, the brain will send the haptic values (heat, cold, pinch, puncture) to different parts of the brain that have been previously activated by comparative signals. The build up of the brain is generally the same with every human, when they are growing up, because the same pathways/decision trees are build, based on cultural structure. This is no different with an amoebe or a coyote, just the level of intrinsic complexity differs. Now, this is the base on which I seat my theory of decision trees and I will work this out as I continue to find objective reasoning for it.

To put it short:
The model came to be, based on my research/understanding of how humanity came about ‘religious’ ideas. Like children (or rather children like humanity, being an individual evolved from the ancestral relative), we started having very little ability to cognitively understand the world. We start with emotions. Our parents are our world. Then we start to become able to move ourselves and our parents become our protectors in the surrounding we now see as our world. Then we try to mimic cognitive abilities after we mimicked physical abilities. This will give us freedom, but we still hold to the affection of the parent/protector/ruler of our world. The emotions are still vivid, but we are then moving into a more cognitive phase. We start to understand the world, bit by bit on a cognitive level. But lacking language and the possibility to see causality, we fill in the blanks. We have a ‘magical’ world, because we don’t know everything yet. We see a chair and it is an object, it moves if we move it, but when we kick it, we are surprised it didn’t move. We expect it to behave as ourselves. ‘magical thinking’, agenticity as some scientifically knowledgeable people call it. This was the start on which I based my theory that the way humans think and evolve, is caused by the ‘development’ of inherited abilities. This means that in the same analogous way, humanity will grow as humans grow in their understanding of their life and abilities.

No original ‘sin’

No original ‘sin’

For those reading this who feel that there was a Christ and he had to exist, to rid humanity of its ‘sin’, should seriously try to view the following logic from different perspectives. Not just your own. If you want to be open-minded, you should be able to. The following is written in ‘laymen’s terms’ so people not knowing about the different parts of different religions, aren’t pushed away by reference to reference etc.

Here goes.

The main reasoning of a Jesus Christ to have existed for Christianity, is for his teaching, but moreover for his supernatural link and dying for everyone’s ‘sin’.

To look at things that are represented in words, it is important to understand words. Thus knowing the definition of words that are used. This is a requirement in any situation, because words would be useless otherwise.

Not only is it important to understand the implications of the word ‘sin’, but also what dying means, what supernatural means and what teachings are. Lets start with one and then the other.

‘Sin’ Wikipedia (which I take as a critical platform to provide information, controlled by a global community) says:

sin is the act of violating God’s will.[1][2][3][4] Sin can also be viewed as any thought or action that endangers the ideal relationship between an individual and God; or as any diversion from the perceived ideal order for human living. To sin has been defined as “to miss the mark”.[5]

Etymology[edit]
The word derives from “Old English syn(n), for original *sunjō… The stem may be related to that of Latin sons, sont-is guilty. In Old English there are examples of the original general sense, ‘offence, wrong-doing, misdeed'”.[6] The English Biblical terms translated as “sin” or “syn” from the Biblical Greek and Jewish terms sometimes originate from words in the latter languages denoting the act or state of missing the mark; the original sense of New Testament Greek ἁμαρτία hamartia “sin”, is failure, being in error, missing the mark, especially in spear throwing;[7] Hebrew hata “sin” originates in archery and literally refer to missing the “gold” at the centre of a target, but hitting the target, i.e. error.[8] (Archers call not hitting the target at all a “miss”.)

To shorten the above: In Christianity, Sin is a religious notation to things that are seen as a thought or action of a religious person, that go against the will of their god.

‘Dying’ Again, Wikipedia is my source here:

Death is the termination of all biological functions that sustain an organism.

Well, to be quick to kill any confusion, this is the globally accepted biological definition of dying. Christians will say that dying can also be interpreted ‘spiritually’ or ‘religiously’. They will refer to the illogical promise of death by a god, which then isn’t happening (or the story would have been over right away), so Genesis 2:17 the chapter where the ‘first human’ gets told that if he eats from a specific fruit, he will surely die, would be a failure on both sides. But, after many years, about a couple of thousand, someone came up with this illogical part and ‘quickly’ changed the meaning to ‘spiritual’, making the ‘literal’ interpretation already ‘metaphorical’ from line one. Yet, keeping all of it as ‘literal’ as possible.

So, to use another source to make sure to cover all bases:

gotquestions mentions:

Death is separation. A physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. Spiritual death, which is of greater significance, is the separation of the soul from God.

As you might see, there are some new things added to the equation. ‘soul’, ‘God’, ‘separation’. We will have to distinguish deeper, to make sure we are on the same single page when coming to any conclusion about this.

Persian Mythology

Mythology

Many will claim that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are living ‘religions’, while in fact they fall within the same mythology range as all other magical stories regarding ‘creation’ and ‘gods’.

Other religions have been moved to mythology for having the same base as these monotheistic. The oldest of the three, is Judaism. It is said to go back 4000 years. It is therefore oldest monotheistic mythology.

https://www.history.com/topics/religion/judaism

Hindu Mythology

As you might know, humanity has taken great length of understanding where we came from. As humanity spread out from the centers of Africa, groups became separate cultures. They all started to teach their youngs different stories on how the world was as they saw at that time.

The oldest versions of Hindu mythology are allegedly ranging back 10.000 years. For some basic understanding of the different part of it follow the link below.

https://www.ancienthistorylists.com/india-history/top-10-interesting-hindu-mythology/
https://www.ancienthistorylists.com/india-history/top-10-interesting-hindu-mythology/

Norse Mythology

As you will know, humanity has taken great length of understanding where we came from. As humanity spread out from the centers of Africa, groups because separate cultures and they all started to teach their youngs different stories on how the world was as they saw at that time.

One of those creation myths (as we know that gods didn’t make life), is from the age of Vikings (or most likely before). We could reiterate the full story here (and likely we will do in the future, but for now, we leave you with a well documented version elsewhere:

AoS – Relational allergies

AoS – Relational allergies

Quick base from the AoS method

In this article about relational allergies, we will look at it from perspective of Affairs of the State primarily focuses on getting insight on the following 5 fields:

  1. Politics/moral (want/need)
  2. Weather/external natural aspect (Emotional confrontation by self or other)
  3. Terrain/support (time/space obstacles)
  4. Leader/commander (You choose to address something)
  5. Doctrine/discipline (You set way-points and follow them to the letter)

What are relational allergies?

When living, working or simply interacting with other beings (animals or people alike), we process signals and responses from a structure deep inside our decision tree. They are initially (in case we are doing something that we have always done) on Instinctive level, but if we are still not entirely ‘fixed’ with how to handle an event, it is still being filtered sometimes by the emotional layer (this is where ‘allergies’ are noticed. Allergies are not cognitive, nor are they instinctive, though the behavior we portrait often become so, because if our brain does anything, it will see if the recurring of those allergic stimuli should be made automatic, so the brain has more time for other things.

Relational Allergies can range from simple things like someone dropping a candy wrapper on the floor, to more intrinsic structures, where the allergy is about a complex combination of both cognitive responses and instinctive/emotional behaviors. For example: If someone seems very intelligent/rational in conversation, but when there are actual moments where such person abuses such ‘observation’ of intelligence and actually behaves very irrational, this can cause a feeling of dissonance (irritation). As many people behave this way on certain moments (even intelligent rational people are still people and can sometimes feel empty or get stressed and behave irrational), it can become an unobserved response of ourselves to become slowly or even instantly irritated and behave negatively to such person.

Lets see whether you are able to find such person or event in your own life. This is ‘becoming aware’. In AoS, knowing the weather and terrain is most important. Because what we often want/need is feel better ourselves. We can’t do that if too many things influence us (or too little).

1. What do you find important as a personal quality?

(give one quality, and try to make it as concrete as possible.)

2. Why do you find this important for your own actions?

(Assess the quality and see how you rationalize that it is positive for you, others and generally the environment around you/the person having this quality)

3. And for your feelings?

(How do you feel if someone behaves with the quality in a positive way? Or how does it make you feel if a person is not behaving according to this quality?)

4. Do you feel you have this quality?

(Be concrete and honest. Do you think you have this quality and behave to it consistently, or do you think you are trying hard to have this quality?)

5. Do you recognize people around that have this quality and who does no?

(Can you name one person who you have observed behaving according to the quality  you named under the first question? Can you name someone who clearly does not? Write these names down. Remember, AoS is about you, not about others. You can’t change others. Writing down their names, makes you aware, nothing more.)

6. How does not holding the quality make you feel? (If someone pretends to have this quality but in actions later doesn’t)

(Do you remember a situation where someone normally seemed to behave according to this quality, but later at a certain point failed this? How did you feel?)

Processing reflection

Now, take the answers and write them separate as one piece of text, in the following format:

I like to be <quality from question 1>. I find it important for <scope from question 2> because <arguments from question 2>. I feel <feeling from question 3> when I notice the effects on the world around me. I sense I feel <negative feeling from question 3>. I think I <answer from question 4>. I have examples from my life, where I notice I feel <answer from question 6>.

The question now, is whether you want to improve anything here. Remember, you can’t change others. You for sure shouldn’t make yourself behave negative or different, just to accommodate something that you feel is a positive thing.

Though you have written down a clear introspect on one quality, it doesn’t mean you are right or wrong in it. However, there are three steps left to become seriously aware of the effect and validity of this need/want.

Step 2

If you have been honest in question 4, you will know how consistent you consider yourself to be. In the coming week, try to observe when this quality pops up, or should pop up and it does or doesn’t and how consistent you yourself behave towards it. If you didn’t, what was the reason? Did you think about why, or did it just happen?

When you get irritated about someone not behaving according to the quality, is this person someone you know will normally behave positive with the quality, or is it someone who normally already doesn’t?

Step 3

When you yourself notice you have not acted according to the quality, how do you rationalize this? Do you apologize to another openly, or do you conceal it and leave it at that?

Step 4

If at step 3 you have noticed you concealed it, try to openly ‘announce’ you have not done what you wanted to do.

If you have tried this even once, you will quickly notice that declaring/announcing openly how you feel and how you wanted to act, makes you feel better 1. you have shown to others that even though you missed the opportunity, you are aware (where they might not have been) and you are working on it (if you weren’t you wouldn’t be open about it).

In the previous, you have now addressed all five fields of AoS. Do you recognize them?

If you do, you can be proud of yourself. You have already made a leap in understanding yourself and social interaction.

If you fell you miss some, you can be proud of yourself, because you have already excelled in effort and are on the verge of evolving yourself to a person you want to be.

If you feel you don’t connect to the five, be proud of yourself. You are critically observing and looking at a field of knowledge you might need to research more. Or, perhaps my wording is not connecting. In that case you are welcome to contact me on it through the contact form.