Shoot the Machine

Recognizing Biases

As some may know, and some may not, there have been a lot of tensions with friend and family and so my efforts at writing have been sporadic (as well as my reading), as I’ve been trying to be responsive to immediate needs of said persons,feeling largely responsible for some of the issues by having not been responsive enough and ignoring their personal  needs in the past.  But I also feel if there is any possibility of attracting a readership I have to be more responsive to that readership and create a definitive timetable for publications.  To that end if I am pressed, I have a lot of older unpublished writings that I might publish (and that might seem incongruous by relating contemporary events to the article in question which I generally attempt.  But while there are moments of immediate response , my general approach is to not attempt to analyze immediate events out of context to the historical (possibly, in relation to scientific analysis to the best of my understanding) and the relationship of the immediacy with my own long-standing biases.  

My Bias #1

If any have been following my writings, they may be aware of those biases. First of all, while I use labels as much as the next person because labeling is, unfortunately, a manner of description that enables communication.  If I say “left”  or “right” it is descriptive, but I find such terminology undescriptive to me and I often quotate it and then try to define the context I am using.  On the other hand, labeling people is such an offense I hate using the term. But because of the malaise that such labeling presents many situations of both the historical and contemporary discussion that cannot be spoken about simply as “humanity”and must be referenced by the false labels of skin color, sexual orientation, etc.  My preference is to ignore the labels. My bias is to think most of the malaise is due to the labels, and therefore to ignore such language would mis explain the problems that such labeling has created.  The real labeling, in my estimation, is done by those with a need to define, and the need to define is created by those with a need to create false classifications to support their own claims of superiority to enlist followers.  The need to enlist followers, I believe, (to say I believe is to declare a bias on my part, and not to say what I believe is of necessity the definitive belief and that others can only believe what I believe and should be “followed” as definitive), is a need that comes from a lack present in the person wanting to be followed.

If there is any truth to others in what I may write, it is not because I am correct and they are wrong, but a challenge to enlist consensual belief on general principles, but recognizing there might be found common directions and feelings that can bring others to common desires to correct the overall malaises that have been misdirected by those seeking followers to only their perspective, without admitting their need to seek followers is, of itself, an unadmitted bias.

To admit I am not right when I suggest what I believe is not to mean I am insecure about my concepts, but to suggest that the only way to move forward is not about being correct or incorrect in my ideology, but to suggest that others’ ideas are as valid as my own and that together we might possibly find a more consensual understanding.  

I am not impressed by what the majority desire, I am impressed by attempts to create a consensual discussion that allows for the development of what the majority desire, unaffiliated with what some have attempted to tell the majority they should desire.

For this reason, I am a strong proponent of democracy as the only method of governance.  But I am not overly convinced that “representative” democracy can create a consensus, and in many instances creates followships rather than consensus, and lacking the  developing a consensus seldom has the capacity to represent the entirety of what any might desire.

An example could be what we call the welfare system.  I refuse to call this system “entitlements” for they are anything but.  They are scraps to some that may help in supplying the personal minimum needs to those whose minimums are not being met in terms of food, housing, educational resources, et. al., but do nothing at all for the more important need (beyond survivability) of creating an environment of personal importance of respect to the individuals.  Contrarily, they confine the recipient who receives scraps to being delegated by both those who think they are being magnanimous by granting such a right to survive with scraps, and those who say granting such scraps are somehow taking away those same scraps from others as somehow “unfair”. Of course, they do not mean that, what they mean is “unfare”.  A fair is, of course, a time in which masked or disguised people are allowed to mingle on an equal basis contrary to their normally defined social roles.  But when we are speaking of equality in economic terms where socially defined roles are maintained, but in some way an attempt at leveling the economic burdens we are speaking of “fareness.” which is the economic cost of participating in the society.

And so if such grants to others are remainders, they do not create a plan towards fairness but maintain a stratified fareness that denies all dignity and relegates the recipients to never being treated fairly and only minimally farely, reinforcing a conflict of fareness, that no matter whether the intentions are charitable or exhortations against the need for such charity; the result is to deny dignity and freedom to the recipient and to declare to those that are given scraps that their personal worth to the society, is that of being “scraps of humanity.” Thus welfare is  better than nothing, but insufficient to the human needs; and denies human freedom that comes only when individual importance grants individual worth.

To conclude this subject I would like to present some reflections of Bertrand Russell:

If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs, I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet. Aristotle, however, was less cautious. Ancient and medieval authors knew all about unicorns and salamanders; not one of them thought it necessary to avoid dogmatic statements about them because he had never seen one of them.

If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. 

My Bias #2

It is probably obvious to anyone who reads anything that I have written that I have very little tolerance for anyone who believes in the superiority of one over another. Once again, the issue is about the definition of an entitlement and the obfuscation of its meaning.  To say that someone is “entitled” to food, shelter, or the means to acquire such via a job or a grant is an entitlement is an aberration of what an entitlement is.  To say that one is entitled to survival (or not), is,  to rephrase Russell, to say what one knows nothing about.  One is not entitled to survival.  One lives because he survives and one doesn’t if he doesn’t.  A communal species survives communally and when one is “entitled” it is to have the means to control who can survive.  Entitlements come from authorities not as grants to enable survivability of the community, but as grants to some to control the resources of community and entitles those entitled to determine singly the fate of the survivability of the community and subject said community’s ability to survive by providing sustenance to the person who has been so entitled and the lives of the community have worth only insofar as the entitled person survives that often becomes detrimental to the community’s survival, and the meaningless of the individuals within the community to individually survive who are not so entitled.

From my perspective this creates the insecurities that lead to all levels of classifying people into groups where all need to be in control or be superior to another that maintains the delusions necessary to splinter communities from seeking consensus and develop followships.   

This more or less comes from the recapitulation theory that evolution proceeds towards “higher species” that somehow become better suited for survival (which ignores “lower species” like bacteria or say, insects, remain dominant, and will survive beyond many higher species.) This idea leads to humanity as being the highest of all species, and certain humans being more highly developed than others.  Perhaps the worst example of the expression of the recapitulation concept, as illustrated by pop scientist Carl Sagan (and I really feel Sagan had practically no comprehension of science) can be found in Sagan’s book Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science.  Certainly it is a romance about superiorities and evolutionary recapitulation, but had never truly been sanctioned by evolutionists, including Darwin who thought it was a total miscomprehension of his concepts, but by the time that Sagan published his tomb; totally abandoned by evolutionists as science.  Recapitulation is to evolution as alchemy is to chemistry.  Some good developed by both that scientists were able to explore but both were romances of science, not science.  The 19th and 20th century ideas with which recapitulation theory evolved suggested somewhat teleologically that tissues, organs and individual animals gradually modified their forms through the process of natural selection over millions of years in order to adapt to changing environments, food sources and predators. This theory, however, was opposed not only by the Church, but also by scientists, including Von Baer, due to unexplained gaps in the evolutionary process. Even Darwin admitted that a gradual evolutionary process did not correspond well to the rarity of intermediate forms, or missing links. Stephen J. Gould, however, sealed the fate, or should have, of recapitulation, and opened the door to modern evolution’s complete refutation of gradualism in evolution, which I’ve written about to a great extent in these columns.

Still the ideology persists amongst nearly all other “genres” of expertise; and is still controversial and unsettling (to me) in physicists seeking alien life that has “advanced” to our level of intelligence, or beyond.

So my bias is shaped by evolutionary discoveries that evolution is not towards “higher or lesser” forms of species, or within species,  but towards the necessity of diverse forms, and the expectation of certain higher species (namely, the sapien species) to somehow be superiorly developed by nature to be beyond the reach of nature’s punctuated need for maintaining a diverse balance of species will punctuate itself completely out of existence.  Likewise, if those seeing themselves superior to others continue to attempt to eliminate diversity in the human community by misdirecting human diversity to mean human ethnicity they will destroy the ability for (possibly) the entire species to survive.

My Bias #3

I am not biased, as often accused, against technology.  But I am biased against technological development used as a means to further certain means of continuance of recapitulation, even furthering its extent that somehow the machines developed by man are somehow superior to man who has developed the technology.

First let’s disabuse ourselves that man is the only species that does use tools, or that has the ability to develop or fashion tools.  What may possibly be true is that man may be the only species that develops tools to control the means of others of its own species from surviving (as well as to control other species and the nature of its environments.) 

Technology is neutral of itself, but if it is used to further the control of the few, or to further misdirect some to believe others who can invent technology, or might have greater capacities to use technologies, are somehow superior to others and thus entitle themselves to continue to maintain control through obfuscation that technology  might present to further divide people into cults of opposition, then I become opposed to the means to which technology is used to maintain its control of a few to minimize and divide the remainder of the community to submission to their followships; and continues to distort the value of life of all the members of the community.  For instance, the invention of the gun did not ever give man a greater ability to hunt for food.  It did make the hunt for food into a suppression, and sometimes an elimination, of other species to assert control over the environment.  But mostly it allowed followships to wantonly destroy other followships that had been misdirected by those seeking followships to limit other followships and assume greater control by those dictating how their followers were somehow superior—and the proof was in the pudding, so to speak, by maintaining their own authority to divide followers into false camps of divide.  

Which is why we all loved The Terminator—we all understood how technology has been utilized to inferiorize us to those in control of the technology.  But the false fear that comes from machines themselves having been used to eliminate us from our jobs and to minimize our necessity to the community, and the proposed fear that they can somehow be developed into a species superior to ourselves is just that, a created fear.  Artificial intelligence is human intelligence programmed into the machine and proposed as somehow being superior in intelligence to ourselves.  No computer is more intelligent than any man, it is only a compilation of human intelligence and it can be approached as a useful tool to increase the singular man’s accessibleness to knowledge or it can be used to eliminate the accessibleness to that knowledge if it can be used to create the impression it somehow contains knowledge man himself does not possess.  

To come: In the following week I will be posting two formerly published writings that reached a zero audience threshold. One will be about how Henry Ford was able to recraft human needs to become human wants and the rise of possessions that had always been available to only the upper echelons of wealth to be able to be possessed by more that had never had such opportunities to possess stuff; and the economic consequences that resulted.  First, though I am going to write about my personal experiences in conjunction with the VietNam War, and why I believe the war created a new ism of educationalism,  that was once held in high respect, and now became a contentiousness that led to an increased desire to become cultified into ideologies contrary to accepted educationalistic  ideologies.  In between, I am planning to post the introductory chapter to my latest projected book devoted to the concept of freedom of religion.  If there is interest in the article, which lays out the premises and the outline of what I plan to discuss, then I might post other excerpts from the book (still in progress.)  I intend to go back to my thrice weekly Tue-Thur-Sat  posts in this column and to introduce a Monday post on environment  which I have compiled an extensive dossier on since I encountered Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a young teen. My take on the environment is similar to my expressed biases and not concentrated on a one-cause of the crisis; or on a simple cure that leads to a business as usual solution.  

I also  hope to began regular articles on my other column Weird Thoughts & Logical Conclusions on Mon-Wed-Fri-Sun. The weird thoughts are mine and the logical conclusions are common approaches to contemporary issues that I think need to be much more radically variant from the normal common approach to said issue; in order to lead to effective counter approaches to manly-caused societal disruptions.

Thank you for reading.  If you feel any commonality with anything I write, please share and invite others to read these columns. I would also like to open this forum to anyone who would like to post their own analysis of my concepts, or to refute those concepts if they can present cogent counter arguments.  As I stated earlier, I don’t believe I am more right than others and we will develop consensus by developing a communication on ideas we have in common. So please share my column with others, and share your responses freely.  If you would like to respond with a full article, send to me at the email address at the byline of this column, or simply send via the reply button as you would to any email.