Synesthesia vs. Dyslexia

I don’t have “dyslexia”.

If you are curious, I am a “grapheme-color synesthete”. It’s a different thing.

Or argualbly of a “phoneme-color” type. (They are sisters)

It’s the most comon type of synesthesia out there. Means seeing inevitably fixed colors in letters and numbers.

It usually helps folks to get better with spelling. In my case too. However, there are corner cases that this ruins life for me. I am blind to them and appear dyslexic.

The [personal] problem is that my consonants have unique and saturated colors. The wovels on the other hand are grayscale and mostly transparent. So the wovels get melted and merged with their consonant neighbors. In fact they get their colors from their neighboring consonants.

That makes mixing vowels much easier. In the particular case of “o” and “u” it’s even worse. They are both quite glassy and they sound similar. So it is random to use them in the right order if they both appear in the same word.

I always thought I am lazy or too dependent on colors for spelling.

But in fact I just can’t learn words that follow that pattern. Words such as “customer” or “corrupt”. As we are blind to our blindspots, I wouldn’t know this without a feedback. I didn’t see those as misspells to judge if they’re systematic or not, until my previous manager pointed out that specific pattern in my reports.

No matter how many times I leave marks or set signs or rules, I will never learn the right spell when it comes to those words and I will end up tossing a coin again. It’s just not worth the effort. Similar issues appear in coding too.

The wovel transparency issue applies to both alphabets that I know (Arabic and Roman). Wovels are transparent / grayish and same-sounding consonants have the same color in both alphabets. When I tried to learn a third alphabet (Cyrillic) things quickly shaped that way, too. Except for the cognitive dissonance of color mismatch between similar looking letters (such as “И” and “N”) that sound different. Which makes it harder to learn them for me.

“И” sounds “I” and should be white/milky transparent but it is red at the first glance because it looks like “N”.

Point, I am not “dyslexic”. I am “wovel color blind”, brought up to outsource spell-checking effort to colors, which did not turn out to be a full-proof approach.

P.S. By the way I live inside my head. I think you should too. As long as you talk about it.

Tech’s purposeful adictivity

spiral

As a product enthusiast who has gone through enough material on the so-called “habbit-forming” digital products, as a data scientist who has created models on the cognitive addictivity of apps and smartphones, and as an amateur magician who understands the art of deception, I approve of the contents of this article.

Luckily I have worked for ethical firms, and I have some self-control mechanism in place, so I didn’t end up doing any harm.

* * *

Just a week ago I caught myself again rolling in bed for two hours passed midnight, being confused and restless. That I have forgotten to check or write or read something. I was constantly looking into the notifications of my phone and certain apps. Until I realized that I have read this somewhere. I am being manipulated. I knew how it works and I could do it to others myself, yet it works on me!

The notification slot machine explained in this article is just one way of mindfuck that smartphones give you, so you come back for more. There are many more tricks.

There is this thing called “psychometrics”. Originally it is the science of psychological measurements. In the world of business, it has much simpler applications; From the data you produce using tech, those who run the figures and numbers, can sometimes measure some states of your mind, and use it in any direction they want.

So far I haven’t said anything new. But, there is one thing that you need to know:

Typically, the psychometrics of tech are not committed to your happiness. They are committed to your addictivity.

And they work!

P.S. Just came across another example:

Nima, we care about you and the memories you share here. We thought you’d like to look back on this post from 1 year ago.

Bullshit of the day; said by a robot. True that I liked to look back on this post from 1 year ago.

Facebook doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me, my life and my happiness. The programmer and the product owner related to their code has just found another way to maximize the monetization and maintain their high salary. They lie systematically to keep you in the platform.

P.S.1. The Minus Trillion Dollar Question. How many people (let alone other beings) we harm remotely during our lives, without seeing or registering them?

P.S.2. Nice someone wrote this so I don’t have to do it.

The universe is inside us!

“The universe is inside us. It’s in you and you’re in it.”

1. Conscious realism

In his TED talk, Donald D. Hoffman claims that reality not only is not the same as our perception but also may have nothing to do with it. According to his “conscious realism,” the objective reality can exist as the source of cause and effect in the world. Still, to our counter-intuitive surprise, our perception had not needed to map it in any “real” way, but only in a helpful way for fitness.
According to this approach, the fact that we can “map” the reality and make it in a useful way, such as an objectively verifiable CAD-like software, still does not imply that our very basics of geometric perception have anything to do with reality. Instead, they are just yet another practical approach to interacting with it for survival.
His central thesis that evolution may favor fitness and not reality is hard to grasp for two reasons. First, it is at odds with our dominant scientific belief system, and we are not used to doing science that way. But a greater problem, in my opinion, is that his radical ideas are difficult to grasp for us humans since we may have been deceived by evolution from the very early stages all the way till now. Thus this deception may be deeply rooted in us.

I used to carry similar thoughts when I wrote this piece (Persian, 2003) for the philosophy section of the a popular reformist newspaper in Iran, though the article was not accepted – being labelled as an idealistic subjective viewpoint.

2. Relativism of geometry

I always thought that the geometry of our perception must be deceiving, simply because we have thought and worked it out with our brains. But I never imagined I would go this far to question the whole set of perceptual and intruitive axioms of geometry. And I am intending to do it here.

Let’s break the foundation of a geometric construct, such as any modern axiomatization of a geometry, into two sets:

1. Logical rules of deduction
2. Geometric axioms

Where did we get group 2? From our intuitive perceptual assumptions. They are intuitive so they must be right, we thought.

Playing with these two sets we have constructed intuitive (but not real) geometries that gave us engineering that – so far – helped us to survive better, so we assumed they must represent some sense of an objective truth. What went wrong? We took the latter too seriously. Our “intuitive/perceptive geometric assumptions” did not have to do anything with reality!

Evolutionary biology is the base of geometry, not the other way around.

Evolution is not probably the base of reason and logic (group 1), but it is the foundation of some of the intuitive axioms of geometry (group 2). Because of the intuitive and useful deception of this group, the resulted geometry and thus the whole physics and engineering we built on top of that was only a construct of our basic perceptions. Self-consistent, intuitive, and useful. But not real.

The catch is that the intuitive geometry that we built could be just a random artefact of our evolutionary path. Its axioms come from our profoundly biased perception, and we never fully doubted them, with a systematic and comprehensive map.

It was a historic choice. From Ancient egypt to Pythagoras and then Euclid we based our reasoning and built our sciences on top of a deceiving set of axioms about time, space, scale, and other fitness arteficts of our evolution. They were axioms of survival, not axioms of reality.

Did we make science on top of the most intuitive, yet most deceiving branch of it, geometry? Geometry is not pure math and reasoning. It did not have to be as universally as valid as logic, number theory or algebra. But it was assumed to be. Very simply put, the axioms of group 2 were just the artefact of our evolution and could be theoretically undermined, rewritten or completely deconstructed.

Omar Khayyam of the pioneers of Geometric Algebra said a millennia ago:

“Whoever thinks algebra is a trick in obtaining unknowns has thought it in vain. No attention should be paid to the fact that algebra and geometry are different in appearance. Algebras are geometric facts which are proved by propositions five and six of Book two of Elements.”

Khayyam was deceived himself and thought it in vain! Attention must be paid to the fact that algebra and geometry are different, in appearance, and in essence. Algebra *may be* a universal base for reasoning but geometric facts are just deception of our perception thatappear intuitive, to us. He even got the word “trick” right, but mistakenly refered it to “algebra”, instead of the “geometric facts”.

3. Deconstructing intuitive axioms

Things get shorter and more massive when they move, mass is energy, gravity is the curvature of spacetime. Objective experiments showed werid and counter-intuitive results fundamentally different from what our perception had suggested.

In the 20st century, two new perspectives in physics, relativity and quantum theory showed that the geometry of our cosmos may be so different from our basline instinctive or cultural intuisions. Or that the reality may be a generalization of our deceived range-limited perception. It may be far worse than that. The reality may have actually nothing to do with our perception after all.

This is not trivial. If you think this is what quantum mechanics has so far claimed, you are still deceived. This is far more radical. Thinking of cosmos, did we ever manage to remove our basic ingredients of intuitive perception from our written objective math? Even in the context of modern geometries, although we constructed slightly different topologies and geometries (say Riemannian) , weren’t they all still profoundly biased due to some of our wrong yet intuitive axioms?

In my manuscript on higher dimensional Euclidean geometry 20 years ago I touched upon the relativism of geometry. But I – sadly – did not deconstruct the Euclidian axioms and only generalized them to higher arbitrary dimensions. Historic mistake in sync with the society.

It is hard to think and not intuit [perceptually], but setting ourselves free from our perception and knowing that this may actually be a more scientific and “real” approach, although less intuitive (biased), brings new possibilities and we were unaware of those possibilities, as Hoffman says too.

In my interpretation, we never reconstructed it all perception-free. Until recently, and may be in string theory, or M-thoery may be we find axioms that are borrowed from objective experiments more than the perceptual bias? It’s not enough if you ask me.

Reality is not intuitive. But the good news is that it is achievable and objectively testable.

Now, let us deconstruct some basic intuitive axioms in new ways in disagreement with our perception, and still use reason and logicalcomputers  (useful Turing machines) to rebuild new profoundly different geometries for cosmos. Then we double check its theoretical results and implications with old or new experiments.

And things start to get interesting:

4. Theory of spacescale

And now, ladies and gentlemen, let me deconstruct one of the most profoundly intuitive axioms of all geometries and sciences that you know of. And then briefly build on it to surprise you with its exotic implications. My time is short to elaborate now, so spitting out the short story:

I am asking, what if “small” and “large” are the same thing?

Of course counter-intuitive, but ignore your bias for a moment and read this:

Hoffman compares the faith of two organisms with simulation: One organism with a realistic perception of the truth, a “linear” fit-ness function of a given resource. The other with a non-realistic, wrong perception of the truth, a bell curve fitness-function. The truth sends the first organism to extinction, because it takes too much or too little of that resource. The deceived organism which has the bell curve fitness function, responds to the “just right” amount of that resource due to the distorted bell curved perception, whereas the organism who saw the truth, dies!

The organisms who could intuit about relativity, quantum entanglement, or wave-particle duality (things that we know from our experiments), die if their true vision did not help them fit from early days. Instead, we, deceived creatures who don’t even understand that time is space, reproduced and survived.

Back to the bell curve perception: We have intuitions about ”left and right” directions, “cold and warm” temperature, ultra and infra” light frequency, “in and out”, “past and future” time, “small and large” size, etc. They are not necessarily telling us how the nature works, but they are two asymmetric sides of a stimulus and have evolved in us to fit and survive.

Now I ask you what if “small  and large” are actually the same thing in two different directions? Such as “back and front” in space.

Let’s deconstruct the basic intuition we have about “scale” and build a geometry on top of that exotic axiom where scale is a dimension in space.

Roughly speaking you get what you may call a 4D manifold, made of three spatial dimension, and one “scale” dimension. It’s like spacetime but “time” is replaced with “scale”. And they are unified.

I will get back to you why, with more accurate and formal description of this manifold and possible metrics on it, but for now accept from me that from which ever direction you move on the surface of it you get back to where you are. (the 3D surface of a 4D sphere, as an even-dimensional space can be combed due to the Hairy Ball Theorem, it has no singularity.)

If we simply assume the non-intuitive axiom that “scale” is “space”, despite the fact that just like “time” we perceive it very differently, then it has mind blowing theoretical results. Here’s one of them.

5. The universe is inside us!

This can simply be an implication of unifying scale and space on a combable 3D surface of a 4D sphere (3 space + 1 scale):

Choose a direction around yourself, literally any direction. Up or down, it doesn’t matter. Then zoom in it.

Look at your hand for instance. Say you zoom into one of your cells, any of them. You just keep straight and don’t turn. Then you zoom into it till molecular level. Then atomic level, and you see quarks and what not and when you zoom enough guess what you get: The whole universe! The one and the only universe. The exact same universe that you are in it. And you can repeat.

This video was probably made to demonstrate this visual effect of zooming from intergalactic to sub-atomic levels, but can actually be an implication of the “spacescale axiom”. Ignore the tilts and the cheats and the wrong microscopic objects that it shows, it is a good visualization of what you may expect from this theory.

And yes, it should have approached the woman on a side of the earth when the planet became visible. We expect to lend in the same eye of the same woman, not elsewhere, if we go on a straight line (a geodezy) on the surface of the 4-ball.

This video may be a bit better. It doesn not tilt and its sub-atomic particles seem more size-realistic. But it does not loop.

Here, zoom in scale may be just like moving in a physical dimension. It is not believable, but the theoretical predictions of this theory are objectively testable by experiments.

Just like space and time being the same thing was never intuitive. But was predicted by theory and then approved by experiments.

What if I claim “space”, “time” and “scale” can be all the same thing, and interchangeable? Despite our perceptive bias.

You zoom in something and it gets bigger, and you get close to something and it gets bigger. Same, same. Don’t stay biased. Remove your euclidean axioms.

Scale is just a direction in space? Is it just like “forward and backward” althought we percieve it differently as “in and out”? Just like time that is a dimension but we sense it as “past and future”, although they are just the same and interchangable?

The universe is inside us?

It’s in you? And you’re in it?

It’s not intuitive. But can be real.

P.S. Few days after I quickly drafted this, Alex Grey published his “Body, Mind, Spirit” and appeared on my social network. My claim is this, but in every direction you turn your head:

In fact a one-sided space (such as the Klein bottle) you would actually look into your own eyes, face to face.

I set a mirror in front of your mirror.
To build an eternity,
out of you.
– Shamlou

Revolution or Reform?

vincent-callebaut-paris-smart-city-2050-3

Imagine this hypothetical landscape: You live in 2300. Humanity is still around and somehow through calculated global programs, colonizing mars or deadly wars has reduced its earth population from ten down to three billion already. And has fixed it there. The earth is tolerably warm but sustained.

Politics:

Countries are provinces of the world federal government and they have different state rules to practice their local cultural differences.
Different races campaign politically to defend the continuation of their gene traits and complaining about the others reproducing more than regulated.
The word “freedom” has mixed meanings and is used with the word “from” not to be misunderstood.

Economy:

There is no centralized money and even digital currency is just a hidden layer of the world economy that some expert may still look at.
People use public services more than their private properties, however that’s a cultural thing; Everyone is given a minimum of private ownership by birth, and several times during their life span. People can lose their private stuff accidentally or choose to donate it at will, however the world welfare system may restore it for them.

There is a notion of money, but that is negative (like debt) which is calculated by an individual’s cost of living such as their footprint as long as it is calculably affected by their personal choices.
Therefore there is no money. There is fine.

Business:

Growth of companies are limited through regulating their shareholder’s wealth. New-capitalism is practiced safely.
Work is constitutional right but voluntary and companies act more like temporary social games shaped by entrepreneurs and closed and cashed out once they serve their purpose. Land and land resources, infrastructure, utilities, transport and media belong to the public and can not be bought by companies or other legal entities by the world constitution.

Every citizen is granted an equivalent of some work/office space and work equipment after a certain age. They can use the equivalent of their office space for individual business or they can exchange it with an equivalent of that when they get a job or build a company.
Education is too a constitutional right and voluntary. People get educated to fit the available work opportunities. Public education is accessible globally and private education is the service that educational companies serve.

Democracy:

Terms above are regulated by the world federal government, which is a distributed post-digital consensus system on the Internet. Democracy is not a hard-coded system and is a complicated structure for collective decision making by humans (and partly even by pets and rightful animals). It senses and collects data from different levels of humans’ lives and aggregate it organically to sense what people want (implicit voting) and thus regulates the society democratically. It’s optimisation will be focused on human’s psychological level and it’s well being. Feeling good is a constitutional right. Citizens get notified about the important updates of their local or federal rules depending on importance and relevance to their lives, and can always overwrite their predicted vote or temporarily exit the decision-making networks voluntarily. Politicians, lawyers and developers aid the machine. General assemblies are held by politicians who are themselves through the machine. Newer versions of democracies are be deployed. All citizens of the world have constitutional right to access the overall simulations and predictions that the system provide based upon the latest rules. Cultural differences will be shaped by local rules decided by the local people at the time. Climate, genetic differences and culture will self-organise the world to a peaceful multicultural equilibrium.

Legal system:

Over-scaling is a unified crime. Occupying other’s territories, violence, killing of rightful beings, exceeding the individual footprint limit, are all forms of over-scaling and will be fined by custody or private property depending on the degree of crime. People scale for sport in the virtual world.

Celebrities:

Plato, Darwin and Mandelbrot are more famous than Einstein. Few nerds know Obama. No body knows Kanye West. But there’s this terrible dancing monkey all over the fucking virtual world.

Other species:

People talk to pets through chips and devices. Eating animals (and humans!) is highly regulated and lab-grown meat (and a lot of other lab food) has taken off. People consume them according to their fashion, taste and lifestyle.

Animals or humans are not being slaughtered in the real world unless there is a legal warrant or a specific type of digital authorization signed for it. Of course people (and pets) still cheat when you don’t see them, but machines watch, warn and stop the cheaters who kill “rightful animals” illegally. There are debates around the definition of that term. Say there is a list including mammals and big land animals. There are debates and protests to include or exclude a certain species.

In Spain (or north Africa?) they still chase bulls in a safer and non-fatal form of bullfighting. And those who love fishing have to go to, let’s say china, because it’s still legal there.

Parenthood:

There are still families, although people are free to live in different social settings and move on to new groups. This will be reinforced by cultural differences in each region and the cultural differences will be maintained.

Psychology:

People take things for granted. They are civilized and they behave but they can easily get depressed and die a fragile life if they get isolated. It’s called “laziside”.
People have become even lazier than us in a sense that they have outsourced their surviving “actions” to the technology and thus they have also outsourced many of their “sensations” because keeping them is not crucial. Shortly, many sensorimotor functions of the brain are practically outsourced to the machines and that’s worrisome due to the depression and numbness that it creates.

Sport:

For the reason mentioned above, “nature gyms” are all around and somewhat mandatory to train people to practice their sensations in the absence of some practical technologies. Professional sports have become intellectual. People compete over their “nature gym” skills by using their physical, social and cognitive skills to show off that they are best. There are cognitive games in the “nature gyms” where people look into each other’s eyes to read feelings and stuff like that. Sex comes to sport with different forms of convertors.

Architecture:

Nature and civilization are mixed up technologically. Buildings breathe and cities are self-sustained. Rooms rotate and change size and adapt with the light conditions democratically by the wishes of people in them.

The list goes on.

A future landscape that is missing a lot of unimaginable technological advances or their cultural artefacts. Just one in a zillion possibilities. Just fantasize and expand it on your own vision.

Then, question:

Is it fun? Should we start talking about a scenery like this? If yes, should we discuss how we should act accordingly to move towards something like this? And not further away from it? Should we wait till machines do it for us?

Or should we – really painfully – go extinct?

Functional Empathy

Here it comes a call for addressing an unpleasant need. A need for recognizing a broader definition of some modern and civilized traits of psychopathy that will functionally include every one of us. A hidden angle of our truth that we need to face and recognize, as this can be the main cause behind the biggest problems that our world faces today.

Hell

A phrase from hell: At any cost

A simple mechanisms has become the fuel for our capitalistic growth and the driving force of our technology: Boards of corporations are pressured by shareholders to make decisions as quick as possible to deliver profit at any cost.

The profit is measured by money, a totally fake entity, and that is not where the problem lies. If it was, would be totally fine to play around with a fake thing that does not pose a danger. That would be as harmless as playing a video game.

The problem lies in those three words: “At any cost”. A capitalistic mantra that is designed to exclude all the affected “unavluable things” that can suffer as the byproduct of our value maximization. Wherever this term appears it could be replaced by longer phrases, articles and albeit books if we had decided to ellaborate on that. As a result of every single act of our value maximization, lives and feelings of many beings are fractally at stake. Our capitalistic ideology can not afford such uninmportant semiology, thus it refers them to hell; at any cost.

A conventional psychopath has a “good story”

Psychopaths are portrayed by public as ruttless killers with ugly faces and creepy eyes.

Conventional psychopaths, activated or not are just people with relatively smaller or less active amygdala (the so-called empathy center of the brain). Biologically they are hunters or parasites fighting for their own survival, only that their victim can easily be another human from a close social proximity, aka a “tribe”.

A killer, raper or torturer will not acquire that title until they fit in the same pictured frame or same short story, together with their human pray/victim. A conventional psychopath gets detected and makes newspaper headlines only when their crime have a short and comprehensible story for our simple minds, carried on our primal brains.

We will not understand that an abusive tie between two humans exists or hurts, until it can form a comprehensible story and touches the limited range of our human emotions.

Modern humans are functional psychopaths

We are all very likely to be functional psychopaths.

This will strike us to know that a shareholder or consumer of an irresonsible business and the victim of that business can easily be two people in a one-way and abusive bond or relation unknown to both sides. And sadly even more so unknown to the abuser than to the victim. Somtimes the victims get to understand who is running over them before the abuser starts to care.

Forget other species, only between the humans functionally psychopathic bonds are much more common and statistically widespread than urban instances of anti-social crime that make headlines in the media and spark national outrages. You don’t know them because they lack a comprehensible narrative, a “good story”.

As a shareholder or a consumer of an unethical business that delivers profit at any cost, we may already be remote psychopaths with effects worse than the movie characters in slaughterhauses, as we are living off harming many other victims. Only that the prays are not close members of our tribe. We just don’t know or see them.

We need a more general and philosophical definition of “psychopathy” beyond the conventional psychiatric terminology that limits that concept to just an anti-social disorder.

We need that broader definition of psychopathy to see and understand what our increasingly powerful collective civilization is doing to the world and ultimately to ourselves.

We need that for the survival of our species.

Greed before empathy, A recipe for extinction

With power comes responsibity. Why? For survival.

Now imagine tribal/local empathy with global influence.

Do you know how to wipe out a species from inside? Empower their individuals, without accordingly granting them an increased level of empathy. Their equilburium will collapse and they will harm each other to ultimate extinction.

Capitalism is the last instrument that we have used to follow up with this recipe.
Capitalism increases the range of our individual power much faster than ever before, while not helping our empathy circle growing any bigger. As the workers of the capitalistic machine we are not supposed to feel that something is wrong as long as we are functional.

Our global influence is in action to harm many other beings, while our tribal empathy is fairly satisfied inside our own social bubble. That is why we naturally feel fine and follow the system until a danger comes to our visibility and touches our basic emotions and stimulates our rather weak empathy that is much smaller now than it should be with respect to our power.

Our empathy is tribally limited

Human society was during its longest history of evolution a scattered group of isolated homo tribes. Reletively recently our society has scaled up to have become this huge interconnected network. Still at every point and at each individual it is just a local tribe. And each of us is just a naked ape with a primal brain that hasn’t evolved according to the fast pace that it has created in its environment.

We are still naked apes playing around and messing with the nature with technological tools. We are equipped with things that we don’t understand although we have collectively made them. As individuals we still run around with our ancient brains that doesn’t seem to have added many brain circuits to that of our prehistoric ancestors. And particularly to their amygdala.

The empathy mechanisms in that brain has evolved slowly as social mechanisms of control, to assure the survival only in a tribal level. As for most of our evolution our behavior could influence things only within that limited social structure.

We have no care or attention whatsoever, towards the creatures outside our social proximity. This made us a regular animal in the nature, until our power surpassed the borders of our fine-tuned empathy and reached beyond our tribe. Ever since we have been blindly increasing the territory of our influence faster than the territory of our affective understanding and in an ever acllerating pace.

The modern interconnected world has stretched our influence way beyond the visible range of our cognition, let alone the much narrower circle of our affective empathy. We have no care or attention whatsoever towards those who get trapped outside our narrow empathy circle, let alone the affected beings completely outside our visible zone.

All you need to do is to ask yourself this one question: How many people (let alone other beings) you harm during our lives, without seeing or registering them?

We are much moer terrible than what we want to believe we are.

We need functional empathy

To systematically neutralize our “functional psychopathy” and reverse some of its harms we need to invent “functional empathy”. Our natural empathy is way too limited to carry such burden.

In order to reduce the unpredictable harms that technology causes to the environment, it should start to feel it to decide whether or not it should change it in that direction.

That one principle with any interpretation, could have saved us from much of our modern problems and could made our growth much more sustainable and genuine. And should become prioritized with something even more aggressive the capitalism itself.

How could we potentially use our technology to “feel” the world is not to be addressed here, but that poses the fundamental question:

How can we care for something that we don’t see?

I will not try to answer this right here. We need to build a paradigm. I will try to throw some ideas later with sparks I see in the world of big data. Empathetic data-driven decision making.

A blueprint awaits us. Help if you agree!

Congratulations! Mergers are coming for your food

Bayer proudly acquired Monsanto for $57B $66B. B means Billion.

To anyone out there who doesn’t quite [care to] understand why this is terrible news:

It’s very much understandable that we don’t like politics and it is fair that we don’t want to waste energy and nerve on potentially bad, or irrelevant news. It’s also very natural that we do not really know by heart what is the difference between $66B and say $66M. Or remembering that one of them is 1000 times bigger than the other.

Three quick questions

1. Do you eat food sometimes? Any kind of food.
2. Do you think you will be alive in 10 years from now?
3. Do you NOT work for Bayer or Monsanto or hold shares in any of them?

If your answers are positive, then yesterday’s final approval of Bayer buying the unethical evil firm, Monsanto, will hurt you and your children PRETTY SOON.

It will certainly affect you negatively in 10 years from now. It will make you and your family afford less food, in a more polluted and wasteful environment. Even if you are not a farmer or you are completely outside the supply chain.

And it doesn’t matter where you live!

Should we care?

We may not care that such mergers inflate prices. We are confident that we will afford it, no matter what. Or that they are just playing with “money” which after all is a fake entity.

We may as well not care that they make farmers lose their jobs. Afterall it is inevitable. Right? (However, on its right time and after the RIGHT process!)

Mergers will control market in the future with their monopoly. Is that the biggest problem?

No.

The problem is that they will feed us what they want, at any cost for our body or our environment. Well, they are not our enemies. They just don’t care! They are after one profit and your lif is the cost!

That’s how they will poison you in a long run and pollute your surroundings. No cinspiracy theory. It’s simpler than that.

Industry-sponsored research and monopoly of big money

I am not a naturalist actually! In fact am pro GMOs and some of its applications. And some of the sustainable biotechnological innovations the big firms come up with. But when it comes to research there are principles.

It is a problem when big firms hijack science to rush profit instead of letting it be where it belongs to help a sustainable development.

Technology should move forward humbly, and with cafreful considerations.

Not everything that can be made should be made!

Such mergers patent natural development and abuse their monopoly later. Even worse. they make unnatural and dangerous developments that will hurt us in a long run. They lie to you too. Look at the sugar scandal that just leaked out at the same time, after half a century.

Final word

We are in trouble already. We should – today and not tomorrow – rush anything that will reverse the mess that we have made with our planet, not to make it worse. The only thing we don’t need now is a $66B acquisition like this that will end our hopes.

So you may want to read about what happened yesterday, act upon it, share some petitions, or be prepared to act against the next evil merger.

These mergers borrow from your future to add value to someone else’s now.

It’s a big f*cking club and you AIN’T in it!

Let’s wake up.

Psychopathy in Politics

Unpredictability of an embarassing election

The most powerful nation on earth, the geography that still absorbs the best and most courageous minds on the globe, has managed to narrow down its three hundred million population down to two embarrasing choices. For their president, and commander in chief.

The two-party system is locked up. Money has reinfoced its power. In once being the land of the free and the home of the brave, people do not choose their faith freely anymore. America is no longer a democracy.

On one side the democratic party secretly back-stabbed Bernie Sanders, for a politician with a careless history of interventionism, bully and arms sales. On the other side a TV host with the scariest promises rarely heard in that level of power became the finalist of the republican party. And his rhetorics has already polarized the country in two or more hostile clusters.

It is hard to predict how the US (and the world) would look like after each of the two. But indeed harder to especulate that with Donald Trump.

Psychopaths and politics

I have no access to clinical diagnosis of Donald Trump and neither do I much belive in those labels. But Donald Trump is depicted by its opponents as a narcissist, or sometimes even a psychopath. These labels officially speaking cover the bottom one to four percent of the range of human empathy. True or false Trump has an attitude.

And I myself know of a politician who was certainly a psychopath by any possible measure. Those who have followed the Iranian politics would recognize the Ahmadinejad of Iran. Both are primitive and instictive enough to have been resembled to monkeys or alpha gurrilas.

But how can an average ape climb up the ladders of human power hirarchy and reach some of its highest tops? Showman ship? Trump is called a Narcissists who posseses not much quality and especially not related to the job of precidency, though he is good at mimicing the values around him and growing bigger by sucking the juice out of the things in their environment, without many considerations.

So if it is so that Trump has some traits of Ahmadinejad (and that he is a so-called Energy vampire) he should not morally hesitate to backstab his supports in the long-run and after they served their purpose for him.

Ahmadinejad which was the forced choice of the Iranian hardliners and took the power with coup by backstabing the rivals brutally, quite quickly started to make trouble for his companions and friends. That included eventually many conflicts with the supreme leader who had paid a big price by taking his side while they stole the votes of a nation in the Iranian 2009 election with the help of the military.

A psychopath’s strategy is defined by “self” and not so much tied to the long term goals of a greater whole, their environment, the constitution, a regime, a party, or an establishment. Their circle of empathy can be literally as tight as their skin boundaries, which enforces no commitment whatsoever, even to their closest friends. The core values of a psychopaths – self benefit – does not change, but the means of reaching those goals may change quickly by any change in the environment; A change in the environment, such as being elected.

The interaction of our politicians within the bubble around them is still driven by the primate brain evolved in the groups of 100 to 150 people. Now that the man kind is connected, such small selfish traits of parasitic behavior or psychopathy, and a minor flaw in practicing empathy can have world-wide effects and can spark terrible disasters that would destroy us all together.

It could have been a better approach in political science, to study the interaction of our politicians and how they play with the strings tied to them in their social organizations. It is crucial to follow up how people have climbed up the ladders, driven by their psychology, to see what damages they may cause in that system later.

Back to Trump and Ahmadinejad and that breed. Assuming that These folks have got no empathy, it is likely for their Amygdala (the so-called empathy center in the brain). For the moment that AI is still not that scary I think that the lack of empathy in power is the most important danger that the human kind faces. No empathy for the underdog means no empathy for the superior or colleagues and it brings pure uncertainty. A psychopath will not play within the rules. In this case Trump would probably have difficulties to show long-term commitment to any system, any party, or the establishment. He would not be committed to his fundraisers and lobyists, unless they make sure they have the means to control him during a future precidency. Do they?

If Trump is a real narcissist or psychopath he will serve himself only and this is generally the recipe to guess what his next step is. In this case he will not collaborate with other psychopaths within the system either, and will eventually make trouble for them and perhaps for the whole establishment. He would probably cause trouble for the other centers of power around him.

If Trump truly is a manipulator and his circle of empathy includes him and no further, then I think his precidency would have similarities to Ahmadinejad’s precidency in Iran, only that it is scaled up to a global level. Study the path of Ahmadinejad and may be that patterns is educational.

Clinton on the other hand, has a curropt history but she is more of a sane person.  She will play within the rules and will serve an establishment. She will certainly collaborate with a good chunk of moderaltely selfish people, and will thus manage to cause some well-thought damage to the world. To optimize a local benefit of a group of elites that is quite bigger then herself. Clinton would be the continuation of the status quo. An increase the inequality gap and destruction of several other countries in the middle east would be foreseen from now if Clinton takes power. About Trump, we don’t know nothing.

One thing is that Anti Trump leftist camp fails to see that even for the main body of Trump supporters, this is a class war. And well, both sides need the majority and both play the same card this card since afterall this is still a democracy in form, and cannot be officially run by the elites for the elites, just yet.

Face-off type of comparison and focusing only on the personality of a candidate is misleading, but we can claim that if we get concentrated evil in Trump, we are getting distributed evil in his alternative. So go and especualte for yourself which one causes more damage and to which group. I don’t have the data for that.

There is a hirarchy of power anywhere you look at. Psychopath (and that term includes all of us in some levels) will cause damage for those who are on their blind-spots, i.e. outside of the empathy circle. And none of us have a universeally stretched circle of empathy. At least to keep the human kind intact and for the survival of our own species, it is important to bring to the public, the skills we ALL need to posses, in order to defuse the psychopathic traits around us, so they safely inhibit and ignore the careless harm that they can cause to a much greater whole. This way, may be we ultimately avoid or postpone the singularity that is awaiting us.

Smart House

It will be interesting to see what kind of things Zuckerberg will show off. This is a big gamble for one of the most successful people out there in a long run. It may create a hype right now, but in a couple of decades things can look funny, silly or try-hard.

I can’t see this effort in 30 years, to be something like 1984 Apple ad that people still talk about.

He would probably focus on things that he has in hands and they are good at: face and speech recognition.

But let us hope for a variety of non-AI technologies alongside AI to shape a livable future smart home. Some can’t happen today, but he could push to conceptualize/implement some of these:

– Home energy optimiser with central light control
– Self washing huge windows
– Animated carpets
– Illuminating interactive art
– Recursive spaces and scalable halls
– Cloud based Mood analyzer (Happit brand!)
– Augmented reality fashion room integrated with the above
– Advanced AI back-scratching robots!

And looking at things culturally may be such innovations turn out to be more important, for the sake of sustainability of the exponential growth of tech and its artifacts:

– Stupidity reflector
– Manipulation resistor
– Random joke maker
– Relationship break up alert
– Alter-ego booster
– Cool neighbor finder
– 3D fashion closet
– Sleep optimizer with dream detector
– Standardised EU-approved sustainable self-promoter

Although people would still fry eggs in the future, a robotic chef is ok. A human-like physical robot is just dumb.

Also a contrast of old/new, like a blend of future and old technology would be more visually beliavable than getting rid of everything that is so 2015. Also ritual stuff from all over the world improves the scenery.

More ideas appreciated in the comments. How would you imagine your own future smart home?

PS. Also who will live in a futuristic home? Kids. So may be you can ask them for inspiration

Surreality

I fail to take any side in this. My heart feels every one involved in the picture. My mind criticises them all. Just zoom out and see for yourself that our value system has come to a halt.

Burkini

So some males wrap females in fabric to gain control. From which some migrate to new places. In the new places, the females insist on wrapping themselves in a carpet. Say in 30 degrees, this time to make political statements. See, she is the only one not having a mat under. Cause she prefers it around. Armed cops rush in to the scene to address the “public concern”. But how can she untell a statement? By uncovering the fabric of course! Meanwhile bystanders are chilling by the beach and judging the scene in one way or another… And sitting on their own mats by the way, instead of wearing them! Everyone has their own strong opinion. No one knows what they are doing or why. Confused state.

Now add a truck that drives over the whole absurd scenery. Our world has already become surreal… #nice #france #world #wonderland

PS. Now Facebook wants me to tag 6 people in there. And I was on the exact same beach just two days ago, so I probably could!

Robots Take Over

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
– Stephen Hawking

“I am in the camp that is concerned about superintelligence.”
– Bill Gates

“If I were to guess what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably artficial intelligence.”
– Elon Musk

“I would have made you my bitch, if I were smarter than you!”
– Søren