Maps

There is a map in the mind, a sense of how the world beyond our immediate experiences works. This is a map initially organized around very broad assumptions & continually revised by the experiences of life, though for some more thoroughly-developed maps the openness to revision may be slight. Where we can interpret our experiences as consistent with our map, we accept those interpretations more easily; where they disagree, we suffer cognitive dissonance or delusions of good and evil, with the good being those experiences our maps say we should be having, the evil a road that really shouldn't be there if we are where we think we are.

There is another guide available, an alternative to intuition as described above, and it is logic; this is the principle that a sufficiently detailed understanding of the road we've travelled so far will empower us to predict it's future course; not so much a maps as a principle of map-making(hypothesizing). In this predictive function it is immensely more reliable than uninformed intuition, just as local city maps are more useful for navigating cities than are world maps for navigating the same. City maps are useless outside of cities, however, and logic likewise fails us when we don't have access to data with which to make new maps. So we make up stories, fall back on the maps of our childhood; we dust off our intuition as it was developed before we got it hooked on logic, and wonder that we don't still have the passion for exploration & map-making we had as children.

I think that the human capacity for forming & revising models of reality, for usefully criticising our own belief systems & those of others, is gradually atrophied by conflating what is logical with what we believe, or worse, dismissing our logically-inconsistent beliefs as simply untrue. Because everyone's beliefs seem illogical when you aren't the person who had the experiences they're based on; when you don't have the data available to distinguish an ordered grid from a scattering of random intersections, judging truth by how apparently logical it is leads to framing most ideas as those of fools & liars. In a world where no one considers themselves either, this practice may breed conflicts.

God(probably not the first)

Our belief in God is the measure of how much our humanity influences our view of reality, of how much sense we think the world must naturally make. God, Maker of Sense.

He will exist, under one name or another, for as long as people seek control over their lives, as long as people care how experiments turn out and whether their loved ones live or die. He's the role-model we look to when we try to imagine a world different from the chaos we're given, when we look for a humane reason for events to have fallen as they did. Our first belief in anything about persons in general is an archetype; our beliefs in the capacities of people, including ourselves, stem from our beliefs about the character of God, our ideal person. Inasmuch as we try to live up to this character, we are reflections of it.

This is the close association of religion with social community, where both personal character and the character of others is judged by assuming a shared aspiration to the same ideal. This is the fear of outsiders, whose character cannot be so reliably judged, and in whose company our own identity is threatened. These are the one or several personalities our cultures all seem to deify, hold up as role-models to admire or vilify or choose among for guidance.

It's too simple to dismiss these imagined heroes just because they exist only to help us know ourselves. All the blessings and damnation of our world rain down alike from our ability to pull sense out of the chaos, and without doubt this will be the skill on which the final judgement of humanity turns. Our fate will be decided by the assumptions with which we make it: Whether we think the world a humane place, and seek to control it by being humane, or imagine it rational and seek to control it with better assumptions, our guiding light is the image in our heads of a person succeeding at our task, of how they would do it; it's only while we can't see a way to our version of success that God exists, because that's when he's still needed. As a reference point.

Light is a good metaphor here: It reveals more, the closer you get to it; the world is better understood as you better understand how a person could ever understand it, as you more closely sympathize your notions of Self and Creator. But it blinds one as a focus of attention; worshipping someone on the basis that they made You is nothing but finely-tuned ego-worship, as indeed is a life occupied with self-congratulation & self-forgiveness. We all need a better self to live up to, whether or not we ever find one, but a life spent on self-judgement is one spent cultivating biases in our assumptions about the world; it will never make sense as long as we believe it should to us as we are now, nor for as long as we think we understand God.

Stories

More and more, I find that the world people live in is not so much a reality to which we react, but rather a fantasy without a place for the findings of systematic research. The most relevant influences on our decisions aren't physical events, but rather the opinions of our peers & our likelihood of being excluded from our social groups. This is why holding a belief against the antagonizing influence of others is held to be such an achievement(once the belief becomes accepted truth, anyway): anyone can be alone and experience something only they know about, and thereby find belief, but an effort is needed to keep that belief in the face of criticism from others. It is this sort of perceptual integrity that is celebrated in the word "faith": the judgement of reality according to a non-social standard.

What we understand to be true is largely decided by those in power because taking such liberties with truth has always been the province of authority; we recognize authority by its confidence in describing reality to us, and truth as the utterance of those in authority. This is central to the success of theistic religions in spreading their models of reality across the planet: they were couched in the words of gods and deified prophets. To this day, it would seem absurd to find physical laws and mathematical formulae shared as freely as quotes of the famous. And yet these are the summaries we use to understand our world.

These are fundamentally different criteria for determining what is true, and each has it's virtues: where one has greater predictive power, the other is more satisfying. To say that one or the other standard should be satisfied exclusively, or even primarily, is to disregard their functions in favour of our own preferences & values. Humans like stories, and throughout our cultural history have described and remembered the world through parables & folk tales; if this method seems functionally obsolete when technology lets us study the nuts & bolts directly, it is nevertheless the one to which we are physically and culturally optimized. All the data & predictive power in the world is useless to someone stuck looking for a main character to identify with.

This perspective mutes, I believe, the arrogance implicit in the popular approach to treating science denial with greater science education; it isn't just ignorance that makes people dislike the methods of science. Students will keep asking to be shown the relevance of their education to their lives, keep asking what they'll ever use esoteric facts of chemistry for, because this is a valid criticism of being drilled with data absent any overarching themes or principles. Given the importance of such a network of associations to learning in general, it is unsurprising that the systematic presentation of knowledge to children only rarely produces adults who retain a substantial portion of their early education.

Factuality

The value of another person's opinion lies not in the opinion itself, but rather in their qualifications as a speaker of relative truths. Facts, though, or objective truths, work just the opposite; their speaker is wholly irrelevant to their value, which is rather a matter of their consistency with the most other facts.

Unfortunately, the factuality of facts is a matter of opinion, so we still mostly get them in that form along with all the *actual* opinions. Whatever the merits of taking things on faith, there's no denying that it's something we're asked to do for most of our lives; facts about our world are rarely delivered with their bona fides of background & context. This is because the world is run by the best speakers, who have no reason to lend credit to a process that can undermine them; the most well-intentioned politician must be careful of which facts they mention and when, lest they provide an argument against their own position. This is what it means to be a politician, and why one must be a politician to be a leader in our society.

The truth is, objective facts just aren't relevant to the majority of human endeavour. Every single person who is engaged in studying nature, or suffering it's ill effects, stands among a thousand engaged in managing their families & arguing with their neighbours. We're more a social species than a curious one, so it isn't surprising that our shared values favour prioritising social & economic concerns over concerns about reality.

I'm not entirely sure this is something we, as a species, can get away from.

Sparks from Scratch

Social problem values approach
Outlining mechanism of productive activism
Don't have to target children, just appeal to existing values intelligently to reshape behavior; structure behavior to allow parents to continue natural value-instillation process on children. Trojan Horse social manipulation, where the truth is neither told nor shown, but rather appealed to as the final arbiter of which course is right. If humans will distort truth given to them, it remains only to make them find it themselves.
But how to inflict this direction onto the parents? What are they almost all capable of wanting that may be dangled ahead to make them move?
Community. Like-minded, uncompromising community. Everyone may be counted on to push upon their children any behavior or belief which inspires in them a sense of belonging; the continued prevalence of religion testifies that these values and beliefs need not be reasonable.
So maybe community, and the results of its desperate necessity, are of first importance to this.
What I want is to find a way for the human need for community to encourage inspiration-experiences in youth, and facilitate this by a mechanism based on the real physical and psychological needs of humans. This is the only path I see toward an increase in our effectiveness as a species, baring another energy revolution comparable to the fossil fuel one. Ingenuity will soon and again be our greatest resource, but only if we don't let it starve in our comfort.

Like being able to fly, but for the price of having to find it boring

Good and evil are components of the one whole heart.

But what are these cogs in the moral machine? Evil, as I mention elsewhere, is a term of dismissal for what is inconceivable for ourselves, what we could never do or think or believe. Good, to hazard a guess, is what we invest our selves in, what we work at or value or, yes, believe. Our beliefs, after all, amount to a distinction between which actions or states we consider good, and which we consider evil(bad, wrong, not necessarily biblical); issues on which we are neutral have no component of belief to speak of, just knowledge.

It is not difficult to see how these two should be opposed, nor how they work together. The evil is the unknown, the alien and the Other, earth and the temptations of material reality; it is definitely not the good. The good has already been experienced, is known and comfortable and loved; it is definitely not a challenge.

This is what happens: we experience the unknown, and good battles evil. In doubt we find confusion, and lose our way, but if we persevere ignorance may always be conquered. Those faiths which vilify evil embrace the value that it has already been beaten by the wisdom of their particular faith, and now finds strength only in the hearts of unbelievers. Faiths which propose a balance or cycle of good and evil, on the other hand, express the view that learning is a continuing process, unpleasantly magical, and advise focusing on the magic.

Appleseed

If you never invest the effort to know how much work it takes to feed yourself, all you can really know is how much work it takes to buy food.

The work needed to grow food will be slightly reduced over time as skill grows, but will vary mainly with climate conditions; harder to farm in drought, easier when you've done it your whole life.

The work needed to buy food INCLUDES the work needed to grow it, as well as any other costs the food grower wishes to pass along. So if it is true that the efficiency of centralized production is passed on to everyone else as free time for other pursuits, the farmer should be paying less per meal he grows than we would each do on our own, and in turn each of us should be paying this same reduced price.

See, this is what actually justifies centralized agriculture, the idea that streamlining production means less work for everyone. But in a system which prescribes that the maximum amount possible be charged for any product or service, products and services become grossly overvalued just because of the amount of work needed to buy them.

It is the human influence on pricing, in other words, which sabotages the potential advantages of centralized production.

Resourcefulness

What we're looking for isn't a way to deal with the whole of the natural world, which after all we've already dominated rather successfully, but rather a way to deal with humans in particular.

Further, we would like to accomplish this without changing the way we deal with the world as a whole because, again, the exploitation of available resources whenever possible has been a very successful strategy for producing wonderful results, physical feats of human will unmatchable by any human body.

But as humans increase in number, we become much more of a factor in our own environments; the natural world as a whole is populated more by humans, and so in dealing with the natural world we are dealing with humans much more often than we have to when smaller population densities are the norm. Put another way, as more resources are tied up in sustaining human lives, human lives occupy a greater share of the pool of resources available to our species.

Where we encounter conflict is in attempting to manage our human-form resources the way we do resources in other forms. People don't like being treated the way people like treating things, and with enough people to deal with this starts to really, really matter. The only obvious solutions to such conflict I can see are either reducing the presence of humans in the natural world, and thus allowing exploitation to continue as a viable strategy; or changing the attitude of our relationship to the rest of Nature to something less exploitative, less objectionable when applied to humans, and thus allowing our population to continue growing without artificial restraints.

What we cannot do, what we obviously don't stand for, is when we surround ourselves with other people and then proceed to rape them in the manner in which we rape areas of woodland or waterways; humans have an unfortunately high incidence of saying no to things.

Just Add More Salt!

Life will hurt you. This is what it means to be alive; selection pressures, the difficulties circumstance brings, have been intimately connected with who we are since the microbial days of yester-eon, and there is no reason to suppose ourselves exempt from this process. What we Have done, however, is develop a much faster strategy of dealing with such problems. Where nature from time immemorial has seen lifeforms change and reform in response to adversity, we humans have learned to adapt our circumstances to ourselves. It is the world that now learns to meet our demands, not the other way around. We haven't quite taken to calling ourselves gods, for after all who wants that kind of responsibility?, but have at least gone so far as to proclaim ourselves second only to a God.

This attitude promotes numerous problems on the very simple basis that it discourages addressing causes and encourages finding fixes. Each generation is born into a giant stew pot of social problems and expected to solve them without making any fundamental changes to the systems for which they Are problems; education will be improved by having better schools and better teachers(however that happens), not by considering how children learn; poverty can be addressed by giving things to its victims, not by considering how they come to be such.

Further, this strategy we are encouraged to pursue finds its way into our daily lives. Our health problems are the fault of the medical industrial complex not healing us sufficiently, rather than having anything to do with nutrition or lifestyle. Depression, dissatisfaction with one's life, is actually treated by chemically altering the brain rather than modifying the life; I cannot stress enough how amazing and disturbing I find this approach, tantamount to pleasing a dog by grabbing its tail & wagging it manually. Even our relationship problems become a matter of convincing the other to change for us. It has become commonplace to view problems as isolated events to be tackled like math problems, a job for this or that product or service to deal with, rather than as the logical consequences of our previous actions.

I cannot say at this point that one strategy is fundamentally superior to another; such a distinction hinges on the consequences of each, and I am not sufficiently educated as yet to make it, either with regard to social problems or individual ones. Though the history of the planet is rife with hardships which were best suffered by adapting to them, can't say that this is universally the case. I Can, however, note that one's ability to fix problems, to modify one's circumstances in response to adversity, declines with age in our society; old people are naturally less physically able, and in a world that identifies one as their job this translates into a loss of power. Sooner or later, we all find ourselves at the mercy of our circumstances, left with nothing and no one but ourselves to count on(if you're lucky and they aren't, the significant other you're counting on to save you from this will outlive you). The life you build will fall apart as surely as everything else, and in the end your only resource will be the person it has made you, the experience and lessons of hardship, triumph, and failure. If you endlessly demand that the world shield you from these lessons, you are in essence starving yourself of this resource.

Patterns

Empathy is an expression of the human tendency for pattern-perception, namely the pattern of correlation between feeling and behavior. If I build a friendship with a person, establish a mutually beneficial relationship involving habits of give and take, then find one day that I am let down in a time of need without explanation, I should justly feel anger and betrayal. If I experienced this same buildup and let-down at the hands of a computer, I would rightly be judged a neurotic who needs to get out more. My experiences in these situations are identical, but in the case of the computer most would agree that I'm seeing a connection between behavior and intention that isn't there, because computers aren't people. We know they aren't people, because we don't see in them the pattern of behavior we see in people.

What if this ability of pattern-perception, linking feeling to action, were absent? Whether because feelings themselves are absent, or the connection just isn't made, it does happen sometimes that humans will not see other humans as people any more than they will see computers as people. If they grow angry in such a situation, it is over just as petty an issue as "it" not working like it should.

So. Mistakes of empathy may occur at two extremes: as an excess which makes us think of things as people, and a deficiency which makes us think of people as things. But I ask again, as I have elsewhere, how is a mistake to be gauged  What is the "right" amount of empathy to feel, the True pattern, which accurately reflects reality?

I find myself speculating on the extremes. Is the personality of another person entirely my own creation? Is there Really a pattern to reality, or just a very large opportunity to find things to understand?

Fools & Madmen

Since I was in high school, my moral tendencies have hinged on the practice of consideration, one I've seen referred to as mindfulness elsewhere. The idea was that people wouldn't hurt each other if they really knew the consequences of their actions, or I'd they did at least it would be done responsibly.

I think now that what I've been advocating is empathy. Not the passive sort which we describe people as either having or not, but the active, sustained effort to understand why another person feels as they do. It is so very easy to dismiss someone as crazy, stupid, ignorant or evil, but that's because these are passive labels, applicable only to people you don't care to explore any further but instead wish would change.

But we all rationalize, so at any given moment it is very likely that a person's actions make sense To Them. They have a brain very similar to yours, a mind shaped by the human cultures we all share, a life of seeking the same basic needs. And this very same propensity for dismissive stereotyping, I might add :l

Arrogance

Figured it out.

We learn from each other, compare and trade wisdoms and beliefs and perspectives, and through this grow individually and grow together. If you have bad ideas and weak convictions, you benefit most from this process while enjoying it least; if you are confident and wise, you gain nothing and feel awesome about it.

Wise and unsure is a problem, though. Someone with a good idea they don't believe in strongly can be steam-rolled out of it by a relatively complicated bad idea; if you don't understand something, but want to be thought to, you kinda have to agree with it. It's a rule, though admittedly one that defeats the purpose of discussion.

When two such persons meet, and if neither is aware of this process, the most complicated belief on a given subject will end up being accepted by both regardless of how consistent it is with reality.

Ergo, if you are unsure of the validity of your beliefs, but find them apparently more intricate than those of others, such beliefs must be restrained from overpowering the potentially good, if perhaps simpler, ideas of others, something I would call a destruction of wisdom.

To be clear, this does of course presume that my ideas Are more complicated than yours, something we can't know for sure without discussion. A risk, to be sure, but in most cases of my experience not a large one.