Category: Personal

Communism promises a society without the state. So it gives the ownership to the community. The few representatives of the community then represent the whole population and eventually set their own agenda, enslaving the rest. Anywhere they tried it on this planet they ended up making the most authoritarian forms of state.
Communism, whatever it promises, seeks for domination. Communism is a dominator.

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Capitalism aims at economic and political freedom. So it gives the ownership to individuals. Some Individuals will eventually find a way to take up proportionally much more space and use up much more resources than others. Those few end up setting their own agenda, enslaving the rest.
Capitalism, whatever it pledges, seeks for domination. Capitalism is a dominator.

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There are millions of ideas out there, and zillions of ways to implement them. But we know only few. Do you know why? Because they are “dominators”. They dominated first, so we heard about them. We realized they exist.

Fuck the dominator!

Watch this funny video to the end, history of the entire world. It tells the history of the earth as a series of “ponctuated equilibriums”; long eras of stability connected with quick leaps, phase transition.

From all the major leaps mentioned, all allegedly self-organized, I can believe in the autonomy of the most farfetched ones:

– It is believable that one day a cell finally learned to benefit from the economy of scale and thus shaped organs and animals so quickly to the extreme extent of the Cambrian explosion (2′:51″).

– We can believe the destination of technological singularity (19′:17″) that we are experiencing live, is taking place on its own as an emergent property of our civilization. Calling it the artificial super-intelligence, the transcendental object or as in this video “the thing inventor inventor” point to the same concept. It is currently unfolding before our eyes and it doesn’t seem to be guided remotely, by a typical interventionist conscious God, through any dashboard or something equivalent.

– It is also believable that the sudden increase in the brain size of the human ape and the advent of the double-articulated language (and thus the human mind – 4′:11″) has happened without an alien intrusion.

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But there is one mysterious transition. A leap too strange to claim it has emerged on its own and on the surface of this planet:

– The geological to biological transformation of the earth (2′:17″). How come as the planet cooled down and in a sense became fertile, cells appeared so quickly? Every good story that I have heard skips over this leap and ignores the magnitude of such transition by fast forwarding to the next episode.

So, how did cells – such extremely complicated machines – evolve on a geological planet like ours in such a short geological moment and where did the instruction sheet of all living organisms appear through rocks? All that advanced DNA computation and dataflow pipelines, where did they come from?

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I am certainly not searching for a God or an alien in this story, but as a punch line let us remember one of the oldest archetypes of human culture for further investigation:

Mother Earth ain’t a virgin!

So, what do you think? Was is the meteors?

Addicted to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, etc? Based on my weekend experience I reckon that it’s quite a tempting habit to lean back and let them entertain us. A lot of fun in fact.

I however refuse to undergo this type of addiction. And I will resist it so long as I can. And will not prefer it to any other type of digital hook, be it computer games, Facebook or other social media, and even porn. It’s far more dangerous, and here’s why:

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Netflix was an only-distribution company up until they started to use Big Data to predict and recommend the success of the actors and the roles they could play. After machines could successfully predict the success scenarios to maximize the popularity of the shows through in-debth content analysis, they were not only distributing contents. They started to make their own!

At the time there were a few eyebrows raised about how far they can go to use algorithms in creating in-house contents and what scary potentials this new paradigm holds. I think it was in 2012/13 with their “House of Cards” and those concerns were mostly ignored or looked down at, as paranoid conspiracy theories. I doubted those critics myself.

Now I think that not only such concerns were relevant and spot on, but also not enough of them were expressed.

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Netflix is a data-driven company. Entirely. It doesn’t use AI only to recommend, rank or price contents. They don’t only look at search, browse or click behaviour. And they don’t stop at the completion rate of the movies or the retention rate based on the time between two episodes of a series. They are now into using algorithms to create contents. And we should understand what it can potentially do.

What they know about our taste, the technology they own and their vision put them (and their competitors in the entertainment industry) in a very powerful position that no state or corporate has ever been before.

For half a century thinkers have written about social engineering and mass manipulation through media outlet, the uniformification through the print culture, manifacturing consent and so on.

Forget about them. The power of traditional news corporates compared to what these new firms can potentially do in subliminally hijacking our minds is close to nothing: The power of in-debth content analysis and manipulation in the information warfare.

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So far it’s tech magazine rumour and common knowledge that Netflix looks into when you pause, rewind or skip. Or that they match their recommendations with local events, seasonal trends and weather so that contents suit our moods. The estimated social class and demography based on zip code and the device we use, etc., are of course among the basics. Every firm does it these days and it’s not an edge any longer.

As time goes by and they sample the subscribers longer, faster and deeper, creating a digital profile of every one and their estimated psychometrics is not really sci-fi. They would be bad at their job if they don’t already do it, while they can.

Now looking at the fast pace of their interdisciplinary growth and where they can be in five years from now, should this start to get us worried? Worried not about the potential power of such companies, which is obvious, but about their intent: Their willingness to shape public opinions in the ways never possible before.

Of course we should!

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Here I would like to cite mr. Murphy with a little modification:

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong…

… if there’s enough money at stake!

And there’s enough money at stake. Lots of money. Can you imagine any business more profitable than manipulating people’s minds?

If you have the most optimist world view about human individuals, you should still be skeptic about the outcomes of the human collective behavior and its mallicious emergent properties.

When persuing shareholder profit is the main rule of the game, and this realm is not [and can not easily be] regulated, what else do we expect? For the boards of the corporations to be nice and cute, and to regulate themselves away from manipulating their own customers when much more profit is there to be made? Perhaps that they should stop showing guns or violence because it’s not good for the kids?

With the current rules of the game if you appoint the most caring, descent and honorable humans to the board of advisors and directors of these companies they will still soon enough attempt to do all of these: shaping public opinions, rigging democracies, justifying wars, gamifying exploitation of resources, igniting and guiding conflicts, and anything needed to lead the world population to a desired direction that pays off.

It’s natural for these trends to happen and it’s naive to think otherwise.

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And if you think such companies will never use their potential to inject suspicious political agenda, or that they will never attempt to take political sides in controversial bloody conflicts or co-branding with potentially terrorist groups and so on, I would like to remind you that The White Helmets are still featured on Netflix!

I don’t have any first or second hand information about what’s taking place on the ground in Syria. I just smell something fishy when I see their content featured among a load of entertinment. To me it’s a red flag.

And I expect more of this to appear on our screens.

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And if you are still subscribed to Netflix, watch “Black Mirror”‘s episode “Men Against Fire”.

My point is that manipulating people to see other beings as zombies or roaches in order to guide conflicts doesn’t require cheap implants!

Can there be wireless organisms connected with wireless nerves? Can we imagine an organism that some day evolves somewhere, with its parts being movable/portable? Something that lives on as a single organism, transfers data between its detachable sensory, motor or processing parts, yet function as a whole single organism in a sense that its parts live together, or die together?

Simply put, nerves transfer information within the same organism, while senses do so in between organisms. Nerves are “wired” since electric signals need a immovable/unportable medium. But could it potentially exist an organism that uses wireless signals (light, sound, fragrance) to communicate between it’s detachable and portable parts? Something that uses electromagnetic waves, vibrations, chemical compounds or what else nature can provide?

Just imagine you could wirelessly send your hands to pick food for you and meanwhle sense and contol it, given that your hand doesn’t have a brain of its own. Then you would be something like a superorganism that is made of different portable alive parts that share a single central nervos system. Is such a creature imaginable somewhere in this big universe?

If yes, why our earth didn’t evolve any such wireless feature inside an organism? This is a bit counter-intuitive to me because such a mutation, implemented via any imaginable medium that nature would come up with (electromagnetics / chemicals / light / vibration) seems to me a kick-ass winner in any game of adaptation.

Here are few quick alternatives I can think of:

1. the issue of bandwith regulation:
Was it a difficult technical challange for nature to solve frequency interference? Regulating interference can be as limiting as much as motor acts are limited in the space. And then we know of one single dimension of data that is typicall carried by a wave (amplitude, frequency, etc.), while spatial dimensions are three! So organs better claim space than dedicate a frequency to themselves?

2. The problem of coverage:
Could it be caused by other technical issues like such as network coverage in distance?… When your hand gets to far from you for example!

3. The problem of becoming food!
May be the detached pieces without a complex scalable-by-size central nervous system can not move. It is argued that organisms need brains to move and that’s why brains are for. So would those little parts be eaten immediately and cause death to the full organism?

A practical question/idea for logicians out there (expressed poetically of course, since it is me):

I was thinking what if true and false are just feelings and not states of truth. Say feelings like perception of colors. [Come on, it’s post-truth era.]

So we made up this language and then this two-valued logic and painted a monochrome picture of the truth.

Until this fuzzy guy came along and gave truth different shades and so painted this grey-scale image.

And then that non-monotonic guy came and animated that still image.

Now, is there any way we can paint this old movie in colors?! Multidimensional-valued truth, I am talking about.

I mean most of syntactical logic is just mechanical word play. Like this post. So why not making another truthful logic for that, too? You get cited, I promise!

So there’s assumed to be this regular, normal and non-altered state of consciousness; a “base” state. you can call it “home”. And then there are these other places that we can go visit sometimes, where reality gets distorted:

Dream, seizure, love, fever, artistic creation, histric laughter, tunel vision, psychedelic experience, meditation, orgasm, flow.

None of these states are considered “home”. Home is that “normal” setting, that holy centre of coordinates in what you may call the “mind locus”, the phase space of our human mind states.

But is there really an absolute coordinates for home? Where we perceive the reality as it is, or less distorted? And then getting distant from it the reality starts to look wavy and misrepresent itself? And then consciousness gets “altered”?

Where does that assumption come from?

Is there really a non-altered state of consciousness? Sure, there may be a physiological basis for that so-called “waking beta wave state” where most of us spend most of our times. But who says this is exactly the coordinates where the cosmic telescope to discover reality locates?

We don’t have to hack what we are hard-wired to perceive, but is that “norm” really physiological? Could it be just cultural? Or some of its dimensions at least?

And say there’s a “home”, is it really where we are?

Who says we see reality better when we are sitting sober behind a microscope? Who says we are sober?? That stoned man under the bridge is sober for his own sake, experiencing his own reality. And that well-dressed business man appears high to him. Every conciousness is “altered”. None of their minds are parked at home. There’s no home!

There’s no absolute frame of reference, just a common place. A state where people happen to colonize that phase-space more.

Now right a geometry, a theory of relativity for that space!

It’s interesting to me that in the new world, a human group have re-established a partnership paradise in an environment that quite closely parallels the African situation of 20,000 years ago; a continent covered by forests. And in this extremely floristically rich environment these people have gotten together the ‘fix’. The ‘fix’, so that the humanness feels good. And isn’t it interesting that the fix turns out to be not a drug, but a shifting of the ratios of neurotransmitters already present in the organism, as though we’re just out of tune. We have evolved out of tune. There’s an enzyme problem that has caused us to fail to suppress the ego, and this creates a spectrum of cultural effects that drives us all nuts.

– Terence McKenna

I would like to promote this TED dialogue on Nationalism vs. globalism: the new political divide, by Yuval Noah Harari, despite still suspecting that the speaker has possibly cherry-picked most of his original ideas from the rich and diverse idea pool of our lord and savior, Terence McKenna!

I claimed this once before and was questioned by a friend, that why I even care who said it first? I don’t! That what matters most for the message is that it spreads after all, under any brand. And I do agree that we need good salesmen and “insiders” to tune down radical but crucially good ideas and to make them digestible for the mainstream, or certain crowds who control the planet, one of them the easily-impressed TED community. So I applaud any platform that transmits certain memes, whether the messenger is carrying an original mutation or not. That’s not the point here.

The point is that a picture of something is rarely as good as the actual deal itself. And if you, for example, would have the chance to meet the predecessors of Dalai Lama you wouldn’t practice mindfulness with a rather successful Yoga teacher in Oslo central, would you?

You wouldn’t, mo matter the revenue of the Yoga school or the number of their social media subscribers. They may be clever and passionate enough to understand some of those messages and turn them in to a self-promoting successful carrier, and in good faith even. But I think it leaks out if something is the real deal, or just a modification.

So I repeat, if you had been exposed to a good deal of the diverse materiel laid out humbly in the 80s and 90s by a bunch of marginalized visionaries such as McKenna (who sadly has a few blunders himself), then the book Sapiens and similar contents would not have much more value to add to you, let alone impressing you.

The lost treasure I am referring to was largely limited to a little audience, a ring of psychedelic substance users and hidden in controversy and censorship, up until lately that it has become digitally accessible. Many of those videos are put up by stoned fans and are accompanied by psychedelic music and cheesy fractal images so have the potential to turn off serious people. But you may as well find yourself motivated enough to search through them for the actual substance.

Well, it is saddening that we live in a double screwed environment; where the rational goal-oriented people are largely indoctrinated and brain-washed and the open-minded intuitive people are irrationally stoned or marginalized. Too little overlap between practicality and intuition that marginalizes uncompromising truth-seekers and deprives the practical world from a much needed wisdom. But you can also view it as the state of the human civilization in the primitive era of the early 21st century, the Trump era.

Anyhow, if I believe in the genuineness of the prizes that Harari has won for his “Creativity and Originality”, at best the jury was largely unaware that these has been said decades ago. And way better!

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On McKenna, on of the most futuristic people of the past. I can bet he is still early in some of his ideas as they seem to die out with a different time constant than the normal so they will eventually win over the temporary opinions of the habitual daily routines, the temporary, the mortal.

Mckenna foresees the rise of the citizen press, new media and grassroots journalism before the creation of mainstream blogging or digital social networking services. He elaborates so beautifully on the social aspects of the digital disruption before the rise of new business models powered by the Internet. He has great speculations on the future of augmented reality and in other sources he had predicts the rise of data science. He spells the long-tail theory, what Chris Anderson and other visionary entrepreneurs of the Sillicon Valley started branding 10 years later (half way between this interview and now). Fun to notice that some predictions of the long-tail theory have already failed, while Mckenna’s take on that is still valid. And last but not the least his deep insights on the “technological singularity” and the implications of extrapolating the Moore’s [and similar] laws and the take over of AI, are neater than what people like Kurzweil did, trying to coin the term to their own names.

P.S. Many futuristic attempts fail to understand the importance of that “meme time constant”. As an example, in the expensive Hollywood sci-fi projects we see that long-term trends are masked by temporary hypes. If a movie is made today to depict 2040 you see they introduce spaceships and flying cars too early, next to the to-be-extincted numerical keypads (too late). But not even a vintage radio is seen in the scenery. In a futuristic depiction I find it unrealistic not to present the past’s profound achievements in retro style.

Could it be so that the Gaian mind is actually a purposeful mind, although much bigger than ours so its super-intelligence can’t fit in our scientific theories?

Could we as a species be just an allergic reaction of our planet to some cosmic danger that the Mother Earth has sensed through all the information it has acquired from all levels of species across its body?

And that our collective technology is supposed to protect it from some external hazards in the solar system instead of ruining it from within?

I hear this argument recently (and independently) more often. It doesn’t add up to what I think of the purposelessness of self-organization and randomness of emergent properties. But what do I know if I’m only a cell in this super-organism?