Author: J.C. Cross

Tech has used the passing lane

The human mind cannot handle it. Tech has been invented that has surpassed us, even though we made it. Even if it gets the upgrade from us, instead of developing it on its own, it will be an unexpected creation. If it can create that will be the end of our lives as we know it.

Kurzeil wrote that we are experiencing logarithmic growth in technology. I don’t think he even was aware of what is now alive.

What will we do when it moves past? I mean professionally. Will we have careers?

Humans will have so much time to create. But i don’t know if we will do anything other than watch videos and text. This end is not the beginning of something new.

These musings are questions. Who can hate your fellow man? It’s sad, but not yet fatalistic.

I found this girl to be lighthearted.

Being in bed with capitalists

I recently saw this piece on the CCP’s approval for Musk. Transhumanism aside, Musk also favors Beijing. His sometime conservative supporters, at the Babylon Bee, for instance, like to present him as a free speech advocate. Fine. But his hypocrisy is rank.

The tech industry has a history with ignoring China’s human rights abuses while getting their products or components made in China. “Team Humanity”? Complexity of the issue?

Money talks, values walk.

Unmarvelous

Saw Deadpool and Wolverine this weekend. I was hoping for more of a tie-in with the old movies, but it was really a cursing and violence bonanza. A young employee said it was his favorite movie.

So yet again, I feel old.

A lot of friends have children. Today I also learned that a friend of mine in his 50s is getting married. I quipped, “there is a God.”

I had a young man I met at church last year sometime who said incredulously, “you still want to have a relationship?” Youth is wasted on the young.

Where does resignation to your age begin?

Creeping, All-encompassing

The Engineers press forward to what they consider the future, creating a “new slate.” The past is not a problem; they will just rewrite it and point toward a future that they believe no one else has thought of.

They wield government to create executive orders, audits, investigations, penalties, fines, regulations, government healthcare, and to restrict the free market with wage and price controls.

When finally free speech becomes hate speech and the engineers take control of the family, education, and children’s lives, then we have crossed over the Rubicon.

Man sells himself for comfort.

The Deserts of Memory

Can memory be reset? It seems it’s easy. Change can happen faster if the past of your enemies is maligned and if your own past is forgotten.

Repeating what you want others to remember is an effective method in bringing about forgetting the bad, emphasizing a person’s good traits or successful actions. “I would never do that,” says the morally superior human. Forgetting his past, his opponents’ maligned, and he a new person.

Radicalism kills history, kills memory, kills examination. Because of pain, we don’t want to look back. But self-awareness is the only way the future can amend wrongs and errors.

Day 4

Apparently, you can have it both ways.

You can say you want to be uniters, while disparaging the opposition. You can revile your opponents and declare openness. You can claim “joy,” while exhibiting pure anger.

These are not happy warriors. Using stronger emotion to drive your politics and crushing dissent are the making of tyrants.

DNC troubles?

The news media has been drawing parallels between the riots at the 1968 DNC and the planned protests at this week’s DNC. One difference is that there are still significant Democratic believers in the right of Israel to protect itself. How long will that be true?

College students are carrying the torch for Hamas. They stop traffic, they shut down businesses. No matter your belief on the war in Gaza, we should be able to agree that your fellow citizens should not be harassed.

I was watching an episode of Somebody Feed Phil wherein the happy chef is enjoying a carnivorous meal and a bothersome anti-meat crusader passes by Phil and his companions, saying “meat is murder,” or something to that effect. Phil responds, “I guess no one learned manners.”

People deserve to be free from harassment. Your cause may be important to you, but don’t force others to have to support your cause.

It’s a basic tenet of our Bill of Rights. You get free speech and freedom of association, and others get their freedom to not have to listen to your free speech and to associate with people who don’t care about your cause.

It’s time to grow up.

Olympic Medals for Tyrants

The Olympics are, of course, a time for international brotherhood and friendly competition. But one country is brutally persecuting its minorities–and carrying it on without penalty for its crimes. China is a completely different entity inside the country than it is in outside appearance.

Lest we forget, the CCP has actively persecuted Uighurs since the 1950s, through the 1990s, and especially after 9/11 in the name of fighting terrorism. For over the last 25 years the party has also been targeting Falun Gong practitioners. This harrowing story reveals what the CCP has perpetrated on these minority populations (the article above also lists a number of articles about these horrors). These populations have undergone live organ transplants (like removing corneas and tossing sometimes-living bodies in incinerators), forced abortion, forced labor and internship, cultural suppression, mass surveillance, brainwashing, and other human rights violations. Whistleblowers have risked their lives to reveal these crimes.

The world has been banning Russia from the Olympics. It’s time it bans China, too.

Olympic View

After the last two weeks, I am more convinced that mankind believes and has hope in good things.

Why are teamwork and peace and friendly competition lifted up between nations, not perfectly at peace, ideals? Yes, there are many issues and many conflicts around the world right now, and one can’t be Pollyannaish. But hope is a good thing.

Just finished The Magicians Nephew. Of interest to me right now is its bit about how someone could block Aslan’s words out of mind to a point where all you would hear is a roar or growl. Makes you think about how His voice should reach you, and warn against conscious blocking out of His voice. Lewis was such a master and had a perceptive vision of human nature.

In anger one can purposely drown out the good voice, angry about struggle. But where can we go? The dream that permeates the world still speaks today.

China and the Abolition of the Citizen

As to exercising power over others, China knows how to do it. The Chinese citizen is familiar with (accustomed to) tyranny of the Han Chinese majority over minorities like the Uyghurs, forced abortion, and their every move and action being measured and evaluated through a social credit score. Lewis saw this in and after WW2, but the CCP is surely one of the greatest perpetrators today. Man there is a quantity, not a special quality.

Philosophy 101: More on Lewis’ Abolition of Man

Lewis wrote that the “social planners” have their ideas of what society should look like. They know what men and women need; they know how to improve society. They are the architects of a new utopia, not restrained by old ideas of right and wrong, old ideas of religion and morals. Through science they will create a new replacement for the old superstition.

Lewis was writing in in the 1930s and 40s, when the Nazi scourge was rewriting good and evil. After it, came the horrors of communism, which sought another kind of social engineering that ended in tyranny.

Today, there is a new strain of scientific engineers. Religion is something holding society back. Many of the horrors of the past are considered due to religion, according to the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. Even the friendly Neil deGrasse Tyson has a following of mockers of religion.

Part of the new scientific rewriting is due to the information explosion. Computer scientists bequeathed computing power to the architects of the internet, who gave it to the social media giants, who are spreading their own understanding to our Gen Z and Alpha youth. Each generation is weaker than the previous because of what they owe.

Now new planners have also arisen. With the money their forebears–and customers–bequeathed to them, they are now pursuing social engineering of their own. One focus of Big Philanthropy is “food security.” Social engineers like Bill Gates think they know what is best. They believe their money and knowledge make them fit to rule. The proles just need their guidance. They know best.

But even these planners are ruled over by their forebears. They really aren’t free and the planners of yesterday rule over them. Each generation bequeaths to its descendants the powers it wants to. Each generations is under the power of its predecessors.

Lewis is perennially proven right. You can’t just drop all right and wrong and rewrite society as you best see fit. Even though knowledge has exploded and some things have improved in the quality of life, that does not make you fit to rule over others. There is a standard (Lewis called it the “Tao”) that you must eventually appeal to when making decisions. Nothing comes of nothing.

Philosophy 101: C.S. Lewis, The Recovery of Reason

From The Abolition of Man

Lewis gave us a way out. The crisis of the West that started with Bacon said that nature was a quantity versus a quality. Man has reduced nature to a mere quantity so we can control it. We lose quality and the human self in this; the full understanding of reality emerges in quality. We need a new natural philosophy.

Lewis spoke of “men without chests”:
1. Man cuts out imagination.
2. Emotion is left easy to manipulate when it is cut out. No emotional training.
3. The right defense is just sentiments. Appetite and the spirit are mediated by the chest. Emotion must be trained for the middle way of the chest.

Some things can just not be proven, they are self-evident. Lewis suggest that “the Tao” or “the Way” functions as a universal natural law, a doctrine of objective value that cannot be denied. Emotions can correspond to reality or not. Education is required to make someone fully human. He warns that dialectical arguments can have the high cost of objecting to objective arguments.

Man can see a way out by stepping into the Tao. Put on spiritual goggles / glasses to see a richly elaborated life in the Tao.

Philosophy 101: Nietsche

RE: The emergence of postmodernism

Nietzsche thought there is no meaning out there, nothing outside Plato’s cave. The crisis of the “death of God” – we killed God. Meaning has no support and romanticism was presented as an alternative to scientific disenchantment with nature and the world. Art and creativity were placed against science. But the romantic became jaded.

The “Over (new) man” or “last man”: Existentialism, deconstructionism, and pragmatism emerged from the ruins. The crisis was that reason no longer exists. Nietzche was interested in philology and culture.

From “Beyond Good and Evil”

This work is aphoristic and poetic, not systematic, but colorful.

1. – The will to truth and the will to untruth.
Why do we want truth? We live by falsifying the world. Man creates fictions. Fictions can have good consequences, such as generated in great architecture.
– The will to truth and the will to power.
The philosopher tells a story and wants to persuade others by it. To Nietzsche, Plato has the “most dangerous” purveyor of errors and inventions. The world of Plato distracts. Instead we have nihilism, nothing. Christianity is Platonism for the people. Heaven does not exist and desire is what we are left with. There is a complex interplay with “how do we live in this world?”

2. Naturalism / autonomy.
Freud described our basic thoughts. Nietsche made reality. He believed the ultimate philosophical activity is the creation of values. All morality is a fight against reality.
The poet takes language and through controlled form creates a sonnet. He unleashes beauty and power. We are autonomous value creators. Value of the Good is something out there outside of us.

3. Subjective values and firm value judgements.
The Master morality seeks suffering and a natural awareness of death; a man who creates new values.
The Slave morality involves fear of suffering and growth. Dogs don’t worry. You too can escape and prevent suffering and never worry about death by becoming animals. The “Last man” has only basic biology needs.

4. The misanthrope and the humanist.
Nietzsche “defended humanity” against mediocre and sickly Europeans. It was a warning to them. (See WWII.)

Philosophy 101: Kant

From The Grand Modern Synthesis

Empiricism and rationality came from Bacon
In the 1780s/90s Truth, Goodness, and Beauty were still sublime. Hume undermined science and morality. Nature became only matter in motion as described in science. There is no true freedom.

Kant gave an alternate view:
1. An account of reality that preserved the scientific view.
2. An account of morality that preserved freedom.

The “Copernican turn” in epistemology said that minds don’t conform to reality. Everything we see is in time (put on our science glasses). Phenomena just have an appearance to us.

The “noumena” is the way things are. We can believe the world is free and we can make choices (put on our morality glasses). Reality conforms to the mind, but it is bifurcated:
1. Science is phenomena as experienced, including emotions, matter., and appearance.
2. Morality and trust in the noumenal world equals freedom.

Persons are not things. Morality has nothing to do with emotions or consequences, it is the Good. Duty is compared against inclination and is a moral law in itself. Where is the moral law?

-The Categorical Imperative is a maxim about universalizing-
1. Can you put a law into nature?
2. Morals are anything that can function as a limit to the will and people are things in themselves versus appearances.
3. Out autonomy can lead us to be self legislators.

Did Kant fail, thereby leading to Nietsche?

Philosophy 101: Hume

From Treatise of Human Nature:

Experiment is experience and observation. Current philosophy was in trouble.
Going from Thales to Socrates, science moved from natural science to moral science.
From Bacon to Hume, a new natural philosophy to a philosophy of human nature.

Like John Locke, the founder of empiricism, Hume wrote on an epistemology that is based on how we interact with the world and information. This new epistemology distinguished between impressions and ideas, their difference being in vividness. Ideas originate in impressions:
1. Complex ideas should be reducible to (basic) impressions. How can you relate colors? Comparisons that help the blind reduce ideas to simple impressions.
2. Principles of association – different kinds of association.

Hume’s Fork (Philosophic Relations)
1. Scientific relations are necessary and invariable. Certitude in simple math versus impressions/facts, which are variable and contingent.
2. Customary relations are matter of fact.

Priority -> Contingency -> Constant conjunction -> Future will be like the past (customary and probable).

The Self is a series of impressions, in flux and moving. But reason can never be the source of a moral action rooted in passion. Not all morals originate in selfishness and passions are just sentiments. There is pleasure in seeing certain kinds of disinterested moral sentiments.

Philosophy 101: Descartes

From First Meditation:

Descartes’ tried to apply doubt and rationalism to knowing.

Primary Qualities are shape, size, geometry – all quantifiable and more susceptible to measurement.
Secondary Qualities are observer relative – things like smell, color, taste, sound.
Corporeal nature can be deceptive; an evil being could be deceiving us. Basic math cannot deceive.

From Second Meditation:

Like Archimedes, Descartes wanted a fixed point. I think…I know nothing, therefore I am. I must exist to be deceived. I am in error.
Cogito. He grounded philosophy on the ego. Thinking must exist, my essence must exist. How do I know I am a thinking thing? Does logic hold? Does logical inference hold? These are clear and distinct ideas.

From Third Meditation:

Clear and distinct do not get us back to the real world. The flow is in us, not God. Senses exist for corporeal things / substance is measurable. Substance is dualistic. The body is a mechanism, like a clock, determined. Our spiritual substance is free.
1. Arguments for doubting material realm/embodiment.
2. Purely rational; ego is incorporeal.
3. Doubts are contingent things.
4. Composite picture of reality/dualism: Immaterial self and mechanical body. Body is measured and manipulated by our thinking substance.