It was directing me to agnostic, but then I noticed it was slug. I tried my login and it worked. I might reenter the community, such that it is.

Maybe. If one defines white supremacy as a system of global dominion, and white privilege as the power and prosperity enjoyed by the managerial and technocratic elites- and that which they delegate to those considered useful- it sort of brings intelligibility to much of Critical Theories and ___-studies.

@govols I look at human history, and the shape of current societies and wonder, why European culture is so reviled. Five billion humans look upon less than a billion with greed and hatred. Or is that only the narcissistic self loathing part of the less than billion pretending they care?

Evidence? The 5 billion wanting to go to European culture-societies while some in those are trying to destroy it.

@govols

It really comes down to science. Until the scientific revolution social development index scores of the East were higher or equal to that of the West. What is puzzling is that we are all born scientists. We make observations about causes and effects and test them. What may get in the way of that process being formalized is the need to suppress "reality" for social cohesion.

I often mention cryptic sexual conflict because it illustrates that the process of "lying" starts at the biological level. To be effective the liar needs to not know they are lying. For example a female will have sex with various males but her body will select which sperm is used for impregnation. It's an active not passive process that most people are unaware of. It's not a "fair" competition.

Then there are all the little lies we tell everyday. For example we say have a nice day to people we dislike. We give respect to people we do not respect if they are authority figures. We tell our wives that the new dress is fabulous when it is hideous. Many tell themselves that a vaccine is safe and effective despite the personal evidence available to them to the contrary and they often actually believe the "lie". People say they believe in God and country when they don't but rather believe in personal advantage.

The ability to create cognitive bias and deal with cognitive dissonance is a social advantage. It is very hard to spot a liar who doesn't think they are lying.

@wolfhnd Lies are the fabric of social advantage. I can't live a life completely alone - the threats are too many because all of those people seeking their personal advantage so I work to gather others around me, and that requires me 'giving' them something: care, respect, support. It is taught to us from a very early age, generally school. But we watch our parents engage in the process and learn indirectly.

Humanity seems to be join together for safety or join together for advantage. BTW, I think both are morally neutral, purpose giving them a moral position.

I learned I was exceptionally good at lying and manipulation in my early teens and felt that using that would send me on a path that wouldn't be to my long term benefit. So I made two personal rules: I could not lie to get myself out of the consequences of my actions, I had to own that; then when ever I manipulated someone, it had to be a win/win result. They had to benefit at least as much as I did.

Both have let me live with others. And I have been able to see those that did not have those rules clearly.

@tracycoyle

What amazes me is the lie that I did that myself. Humans are born pretty dumb animals. For example members of the Corvus family are able to solve problems at the 7 year old human level. Our ability to think it turns out is acquired socially. Humans have various thinking tools we call languages, including logic and mathematics. Those tools have culturally evolved for at least a million years. It's not just that no one is an island but that we are dependent on swarm intelligence. The truth is that excluding the lower end of human intelligence, intelligence is an acquired trait to a large degree. A great deal of the intelligence is in the "software" and not the "hardware". The ability to run that software is around 80 percent genetic in origin. What an individual could do on their own is fairly limited and even that is tied to the genes they received.

Just as there are a lot of things that can go wrong with genes there are a lot of things that can go wrong with swarm intelligence. Genes have a mechanism for reproductive fidelity but culture is fairly unrestrained. It's why conservatism is more rational than liberals would like to believe. Conservatism provides the reproductive fidelity.

@wolfhnd I've, I guess, learned to be a problem solver. I am actually pretty bad at logic puzzles but IRL, I can usually see the problem through the symptoms.

Swarm intelligence seems too close to the idea of the 'majority consensus', or the more derogatory term, mob rule. I DO agree that groups can function with a higher apparent intelligence and more brains on the problem, the better/faster the solutions. Except, look at the higher functioning societies vs those that remain well behind the curve. Noting there are some exceptions - what seems to separate them?

I had 5 siblings. We were all tested in school for various reasons, and the range of scores amongst us pretty much covers 95% of the possibilities. Same parents, same circumstances, same schools. Nature v nurture. I'm inclined to agree about the 80% ability to run the software. But I am more inclined to carry that through to say the outliers are more hampered by society, than helped, even if the majority are helped vs hampered.

As to reproductive fidelity - I gave mine up. I am very much an outlier. Genes?

@tracycoyle

I'm sorry this is so lengthy but I don't have a shorter explanation.

Swarm intelligence is general only applied to eusocial insects such as Honeybees. However it is a working theories in fields such as artificial intelligence. I will just use bees to explain the process.

Honey bees make decisions based on the accumulation of data. They decide where the best places to nest and find food are based on communicating the results of testing by individual bees. This "intel" that is gathered is processed collectively by the preponderances of evidence. That evidence being the relative success of individual searches. It doesn't increase the genetic intelligence of any individual bee.

Humans have a kind of artificial eusociality that we call culture and society, ultimately civilization. While honeybees have a single language that varies slightly from hive to hive humans have many languages. Among those are languages such as mathematics and logic. What you may call formalized thinking tools. They are essential to science. What most people fail to recognize is that science is just an elaborate version of the natural process of observing causes and effects and generating a hypothesis to be tested. Every animal and most plants do that. They receive information about the environment and act accordingly. In more complex animals the process is elaborated by dampening instinct or "automatic" responses. Instincts become predispositions allowing for multiple "choices". Most animals have very limited means of passing on the results of those choices. Elephants and Cetartiodactylas being note worthy exceptions. It probably applies to all social animals but to a lesser degree. The problem is that the amount of information and it's accuracy and precision is limited by direct communication. What you might call the limits of common language.

The more complex languages tools that humans have access to means more experience can be passed on more accurately. As with bees it is a collective enterprise spanning multiple generations. The multiple generational aspect allows for the evolution of even more complex thinking tools and ways of storing data such as writing. Those tools that increase fitness at the group level will be selected for. The confusing part is that it doesn't alter intelligence at the individual or genetic level accept that the ability to use those tools is selected for.

I won't go into why even in other animals thinking is also abstract other than to say it involves a simplified model of the environment. You can think of mathematics and logic as ways to reduce the complexity of the environment. Cultural evolution also provides every increasingly accurate tools for measurement and observation along with environmental manipulation.

Here is the key, take anyone of the intermediate steps out and no human could invent even something as simple as a wheel. You don't just have to realize the utility of round objects but you have to be able to manipulate the environment or say wood in a fairly complex way using tools that must already be understood how to make and use. The process doesn't make the person who knows how to make a wheel any "smarter" than the one who knows how to make a stone tool.

The confusion arises out of how we evolved to see agency everywhere.

Our instincts evolved to be fairly binary. Fight or flight, friend or foe, good or bad, smart or stupid. We see the world in terms of agency, as if all causes have an agent. When a deer hears the wind rustling in the grass it assumes a predatory and bolts taking the whole herd with it. In a natural environment this binary response increases fitness because it’s better to be wrong than eaten.

This natural tendency to see agency everywhere is why we assume that a person who has mastered culturally evolved tools is "smarter" than someone who has not. We assume that the agency is derived at the individual level. Like most things it is not black and white. High intelligence is a necessary but insufficient condition for genius. Genius involves the ability to rapidly sort through accumulated data combined with the imagination to generate mutations and test those mutations against the data. Flaws in the data or the mutations can arise at the individual or group level and go undetected because unlike genetic intelligence group intelligence has poor reproductive fidelity. That in turn is related to the abstract nature of intelligence.

The reason we are "conservative" is that we recognize that existing cultural has been selected for over tens of thousands of generations. A liberal tends to see the world through the natural lens of agency.

Counter intuitively because of the amazing success of science and it's ties to the enlightenment liberals also tend to be determinists. It's a paradoxical world view because no freewill, no agency, no agency no human dignity, no human dignity, no morality. You can't derive a morality from natural philosophy because nature is fundamentally amoral. Liberals don't intend to be "evil" but evil arises out of amorality or the determinism that is tied to misplaced agency.

What surprises me is that liberals that would agree with everything I said would still deny animals agency. Primarily because those liberals see the world in terms of difference of kind instead of degree. They believe in something called transcendent complexity or a thing is more than the sum of it's parts. I see that as a kind of intellectual dishonesty in which something like freewill can arise out of complexity and not be a property of the thing itself. My argument may seem as paradoxical as determinists seeing agency in everything and it is. You can't escape nature. You are a part of nature but is nature really deterministic? Or is determinism just a thinking tool? A simplified version of reality?

You can think of life as an escape from determinism. It temporarily reverses entropy. It gathers more energy that it expends. That is why the solutions to the global warming "crisis" are misanthropic when informed by the current deterministic perspective. The conservative may not understand the climate science but they do seem to understand cultural evolution better than liberals. Culture being a kind of organism with a life of it's own that develops largely independent of individual agency.

BTW I believe in determinism when it comes to solving problems. I just understand that it is an abstraction.

@wolfhnd First, thank you for a very useful description. I better understand where, and why, you are coming from. And the logic (!) is clear.

Society uses tradition, societal norms, the accumulated wisdom of individual testing and consequences to form a basis, a guide, an informal restriction, upon individual behavior. Informal, because circumstances change and the consequences are individual, not societal. I have written that Nature does not require the survival of an individual of a species, but does require the survival of the species. It is indifferent to the individual, which may be better/smarter/faster/stronger than another that is less/capable. But that individual may improve the next generation and if so, improves the species, improving the species survivability. Society seeks the same, but provides it's own tests of the individual demanding, or simply ignoring, traditions and societal norms.

Determinism vs free will. An argument that has persisted, and will. Those that have come to their conclusion IF they have spent time thinking seriously on the question, will be hard pressed to change it later and that position will most certainly impact their decision making process.

I'm a fan of free will, of agency. I actually think, that if God exists, Its fundamental nature is free will. God is capable of all decisions and therefore makes those it chooses to result in the Creation. Free will being constrained by the swarm intelligence derived. Because unfettered free will can destroy the species.

“But man, besides the marvelous disposition of his body, has likewise a rational soul, which eminently discriminates him from brutes. It is by this noble part of himself that he thinks, and is capable of forming just ideas of the different objects, that occur to him; of comparing them together; of inferring from known principles unknown truths; of passing a solid judgment on the mutual fitness or agreement of things, as well as on the relations they bear to us; of deliberating on what is proper or improper to be done; and of determining consequently to act one way or other. The mind recollects what is past, joins it with the present, and extends its views to futurity. It is capable of penetrating into the causes, progress, and consequences of things, and of discovering, as it were at one glance, the intire course of life, which enables it to lay in a store of such things, as are necessary for making a happy career. Besides, in all this, it is not subject to a constant series of uniform and invariable operations, but finds itself at liberty to act or not to act, to suspend its actions and motions, to direct and manage them as it thinks proper.”
The Principles of Natural and Politic Law (1748), Jean Jacques Burlamaqui, Book 1, Part 1, Chapter 1, para 3

Thought is the physical action of the brain. For a thought to occur the brain must have structure and integrity, it must have resources such as nutrients and energy, and it must have impulse such as internal or external stimulus.
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Never have our thoughts been subject to review, interpretation, interception or modification by another person. A thought is the sole property of the individual. We may choose to share them with others, we may act in ways that people can interpret as a response to a thought we have had, but the thought is ours alone forever. The owner of the thought is without question, the human in which it is formed; it can not be taken by another, it can not be restricted, or limited by another.

Thought is an expression of free will. It requires effort on the part of the individual. Whether the thought continues, whether it is expanded, restricted or discarded is the choice and responsibility of the individual.

This is freedom – the source of liberty. The absolute, unrestricted act of thought that finds its expression in every single human being. It does not find its source in government or society; by document or decree. It occurs without leave or permission from any or all. It is inherent in every human, by nature of our existence. It can not be denied or refused; it is inalienable. The absolute freedom exists as long as we exist.

If we own the thought and the action that expresses that thought then we own the consequences of those actions. You can not separate the act from its consequences any more than the action from the thought. This ownership is the essence of individuality.

And yes, tradition, societal norms, gives individuals new starting lines for each generation. We don't have to recreate the wheel. We can use it to make a watch. We don't have to recreate fire, we can use it to launch rockets. Those traditions, norms, are not bad. They are useful not as a restriction - thou MANY use it so - but as starting points.

Why does determinism seem so logical? Because if you have perfect (enough) knowledge, then within Nature, even a deviation is overall irrelevant, the path is known because the decisions, of the whole, will follow the logical path, in the end. Enough brains on the problem will even out, straighten out, the path. A swarm finds the path despite the erratic apparent nature of the individual. Free will of the individual results in actions that are beneficial, others see, copy, and it becomes part of society's intelligence.

@tracycoyle

It is pretty deep stuff.

You will always regress to a point of ignorance. Ask a physicist if the universe is deterministic and the honest ones will say they don't know. Generally they will say at large scales yes and tiny quantum scales maybe not. In the end everything becomes an epistemological problem. Once you understand that you can accept that differences are a matter of degree not kind. That everything we believe to exist is an abstraction not the think itself. By what degree the abstraction varies from the thing itself become what is worth arguing over.

@wolfhnd Fundamentally we are energy, and while it can not be destroyed, it can end. Entropy. On those time scales. I think, and I read a story considering it, that if you knew your end, and you were as intelligent and fully informed as possible, you'd argue there was no purpose worth having and dying was the end anyway, why prolong suffering or delay the inevitable. In the story, they didn't breed and just died out.

I consider my life worth living for it's own sake. My purpose what I make of it. The value, is what I decide it is, and it is both rare and unique that I get to experience it. If every thought and action I will ever make is already decided and known, then my end is perfect, for my life. Not that I want to rush it, but I am intellectually and emotionally, expectant of what it is, and what follows.

Thank you for this discussion. I very much enjoyed it.

@tracycoyle

Life has the "will" to survive. My argument is that all life is "intelligent" and "freewill" is built in.

The problem with the current popular philosophical stance is that no freewill, no human agency, no human agency no human dignity, no human dignity no morality.

All life is individualistic even when talking about social animals. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not "unnatural".

I sometimes come across as authoritarian but that is not my intent. Instincts are a from of intelligence and they are important. Without them you could not survive. The survival, health, and well being of the individual is what civilization is built on. You have adopted a good compromise between the individual and the social. You cannot love your neighbor if you do not love yourself, if you do not tend to your own soul.

In short I appreciate your intellectual development. Finding meaning in life is a process that few people want to work at.

Me to