Category Archives: reason

The cult test

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cups3

In a previous civgene, I presented a series of axioms that led to the cult test.   Most societies operate at least partly on faith.  Stating assumed truths that individuals can not plausibly test with vigor.  The cult test presents three conditions that if a fundamentalist religious or political faith infringes on outsiders freedom, it has slipped into cult.

The cult test is as follows. If any condition is met, it’s a cult.
1. Denial of exit.
2. Aggression toward outsider speech.
3. Refusal to commit to peace with outsiders.

Freedom is a core human behavior (differs from animals) because it’s how humans allow each other space to make the most of their emotional metadata, usually forming faiths.  A faith being knowing something you can’t prove.  An emotional output from the metamind (the conscience/subconscious), a passively driven risk engine connecting unlike things based on emotional similarity.  A probability engine.  Effectively rationalizing a faith can take a second or longer than lifetime.  Hence the utility for an indeterminate time to make your own decisions, better known as freedom.

Faith alone is not the goal but the means to achieve the goal of all life, autonomy.  Cult occurs when faith becomes an end not the means. Everyone’s set of faiths must inherently be different (aside from biological differences) because the metadata connected to their memories and their experiences are different.  As experiences deviate so will faiths.  Denying this process for an individual is detrimental to the common benefit of human society.

Some faiths will occur in common so expression and organization of common ideas is beneficial.  Rationalization can be rigorous so invention, specialization, and currency operate like in other economies.  But also like other economies stagnation can occur if psychopathic or animal kingdom work-a-likes are substituted for effective intelligence, and progress stagnates.  Damaging and even completely crushing autonomy.

All three conditions of the cult test are designed to protect the natural functionality of the empathic mind without interfering in opportunities of economies of scale (rapid rationalization.)  Just like all logical constructs, logical constructs about natural forming but yet unproven probabilities can have advantages for all people.  The conditions of the cult test together form to protect the fundamental human right, the right to fork.  The right of human beings to pursue their biological advantage of rapid risk assessment without human created hierarchical blockage.  Faith is what gives human beings their complete intelligence, and also is what is cited by those who try to dismember that intelligence for personal gain though hierarchy.

The key to retaining our freedom is the ability to distance yourself from destructive hierarchies while embracing constructive ones.  The cult test ensures that right by disallowing the combination of pure faith as a potentially manipulated or even completely fabricated external process, from the ability to enforce your adherence to an external faith structure.  The cult test protects the rapid rationalizer seeking community from slavery, by separating physical and mental force from faith and it’s beneficial ideas.

I present these additional axioms to permanently disconnect the relationship of force and faith.

  • Faith is subconscious realization (emotional metadata).
  • Reason is rational thought combined with faith.
  • Faith can occur without reason.
  • Force is only moral in the face of clear and present danger.
  • Determining clear danger can include faith.
  • Determining present danger must include literal observation and therefore rational thought.
  • Clear and present danger can be determined either by reason or rational thought alone.
  • Force justified by faith alone is a farce.

 

Civgene: Why multitasking lowers IQ/EQ

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chair

Interesting brain study.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/12/why-smart-people-dont-multitask.html

This seemed tangential to civgene until i read this part.

“Talentsmart has tested more than a million people and found that 90% of top performers have high EQs. If multitasking does indeed damage the anterior cingulate cortex (a key brain region for EQ) as current research suggests, doing so will lower your EQ while it alienates your coworkers.”

There is a simple explanation for this in the metamind model of the conscience/subconcious.  Rationalization, the process of logically assessing our subconscious emotional risk signals, is interrupted, or worse conflated with other signals (the core tool of propaganda and gaslighting).  Many people (rightly) feel uncomfortable following un-rationalized intuition, so they ignore it.  Becoming no better than a psychopath at assessing the immediate and current risks.

Further if lower effective intelligence results from frequent interruptions this strongly supports the idea that human intelligence is more than just a strong memory and fast logic processing.  Very specifically it indicates that some part of subconscious thought management process(civgene says the metamind) is not only part of intelligence, but makes sense if it has it’s OWN memory structure(civgene indicates this is emotional metadata).

The metamind model could have predicted the outcome of this study.  It explains it succinctly.  Always a good sign.

Prediction:  If this study is replicated and the metamind is accepted as the explanation, then some time in topical psychotherapy (talk therapy) should be able to restore previously tested IQ and EQ scores.  The damage isn’t permanent.

The risks of atheism

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prop

Faith is rationalized but unproven subconscious knowledge.  The source of creativity.

I aim for, and have not yet been challenged on, philosophical coherency between types of faith.  All new philosophy, like all new creative works, starts briefly as faith.  I take care to rationalize all my faiths both from atheist and non-atheist perspectives.  Resolving to the most likely explanations of either and rationalizing the other to work around the first.

This has been completely successful.  Despite some predictions to the contrary by atheism advocates has not resulted in sudden and steadfast atheism.  Sure it could, but it seems to me that would be lazy.  A choice to throw some data away.  A poor practice with poor results.

The key for me has been the civgene theory, and it’s implications for the conscience as a risk engine overlayed over the more typical spectrum of animal behavior.  Humans (except psychopaths) are of two minds, the subconscious and the rational.  Both minds can only communicate with each other in a vague spectrum of feelings.

What does throwing data away really mean? 

For supernatural faiths that an entire society had a useless premise from the start.  This is not coherent with civgene or observable behavior.  Supernatural faiths are only successful if the contain truths.  Truth, the engine of progress, is the common goal of society.

For potentially provable faiths it means assuming all outlying data points are error.  That all aspects of observation are perfectly accurate and innate.  This makes huge assumptions about quality of data, accuracy and relevance of test parameters, the infinite nature (large or small) of at least some related numbers, and that all related scopes are holistic.  Noble but lofty goals, that function best when small in focus.

Implications

Supernatural faith has understood risks.  It creates a risk of cult.  Reasonable people know this and it has been discussed at length by the objective philosopher.  Supernatural faith inevitably results in religions as people seek it’s truths and compare rationalizations.  Comparisons can give way to programming.  Programming can be then turned against human rights, and a cult results.

Strictly political cult is possible too, as twentieth century communism laid bare.  Avoiding supernatural faith does not protect you from cult.  How is that possible?  Partly because humans change their behavior when they are studied.  Their behavior is the result of their subconscious risk assessment, and they react to the new risk, abuses of the study. (knowledge is power) The only way to make people predictable is to disable their conscience by completely reprogramming it.  A simple task against the atheist through distorted or fabricated data.  A political cult is formed, again crushing human rights (and new economies of scale).

The risks of supernatural cult are transferred to the risk of being programmed by political cult.  Why?  Supernatural faiths definite immutable moralities (right or wrong), atheist morality becomes subjective.  In organized society custody of data can be controlled by would be abusers.  Bad conclusions can form from bad data.  Authoritative secular control of data is rife with golden opportunity (for abuse).  Garbage in, garbage out.  Since data makes morality, subjective morality is only as objective as integrity of it’s data.  Not only is data integrity both very shaky and in motion, but cohesive patterns are elusive and often contradicted by the periphery.  Human beings are absurdly trusting.  Expecting other people to share their goals and means, when history is dominated by human trust betrayed.

Atheists are no different than non-atheists in waiting for faith to become fact.  A person can only propose a theory, and work toward realization of fact.  The atheist boasts their process of achieving fact is under their control, but it’s not.  Peer review only provides independent verification of an already confirmed fact.  It doesn’t make fact in a moment, it approaches consensus over time as growing scope is incorporated.  Supernatural faith is an exercise in pure patience, even after a successful realization. Control for the sake of itself is let go.  Exactly the virtue the atheist needs, to improve the quality and inclusiveness of their data, to protect against the panicked rush to conclusion encouraged by political cult.  The theorist of the provable, needs to resist pressure to rush to fact, exactly what ‘irrational’ objective morality offers.

The risk for atheists is the desperate scramble to improve humanities future.  The perpetual lust for tiny incremental hope, temporarily, when the process of fact provides none.  When endurance, patience and temperance are needed for the very scientific goal of quality of data.  Simply put, people want hope and react badly in it’s absence.  An inevitable state for an atheist pursuing pure science to it’s natural ends.  Most supernatural faith offers peace without explanation.  It seems to me as complex as it is, creating a state of philosophical coherency consisting of both supernatural and non supernatural faith is the simplest path forward.  Enjoying and utilizing the full human condition, rather than denying it.  Ultimately protecting humanity from further political cults.

Epilogue

Feedback has been interesting.  I stand by everything I have said, but I want to clarify for our society.  Full time atheism is neither superior nor inferior to individuals who can operate both with provable faiths and supernatural faiths.  They both have virtues.  The fantasy is the necessity of Antitheism, a freedom crushing edict designed to send the masses morally adrift.  Separating rights crushing cult from religion is SO TRIVIAL I can only conclude the lack will to do it is malicious.  Antitheism is an excuse.

I would expect a sceptical scientist with high EQ, a 160 IQ and self directed understanding of social history to excel at identifying objective morality, making them as durable against any cult as their dual faithed counterpart.  They could both still be vulnerable to political cult, but they’ve got the tools to beat it.   In our society, our best cases are being emulated poorly.  ‘Science’ is a branding exercise often used specifically to discourage questioning.  ‘Authority’ substituting for diligence and thought.  An abomination of the scientific method.

Political cult is here now, and it is growing.  Killing that absurdity means selecting peers by ability, not permission.  That in turn means building a scientific community of open access to source data (like journals.)  Simply choosing atheism as the only needed step toward objectivity and ability is ridiculous, and dangerous.  As one common example, supernatural faith organizations aren’t keeping important scientific papers behind a paywall, limiting participants.  Lack of objective morality is.

Edit 1/6: Major clarity improvements, please reread.

Edit 1/8: Added epilogue.

What civgene isn’t – subjective morality

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Civgene is never an attempt to alter objective morality.  Instead it is meant to observe, contrast, and consider the implications that objective morality is biologically less compelling, and therefore less relevant, for psychopaths.

In the ideal case (where civgene’s theories and predictions are perfectly true), it would travel no further than explaining objective morality’s origin.  IMO such is true for all science.

The terror of rational clarity

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headshot“And everytime you think you know just what you’re doin’ That’s when your troubles exceed” — Guns and Roses

‘Success consists of getting up one more time than you fall.’

As the metamind grows and adapts it faces moments of eventual success.  Moments where reason is comprised just of the rational mind.  Not because there is no risk for the conscience to report, but because it has been successfully rationalized or rationally accommodated.  Present risks are understood in total so the metamind is quiet.  For some, they want or need to meditate to reach this state.  For others meditation need not be a ritual, but simple state of mind.

The conscience suddenly intrudes on your clarity.  You may rationalize, ‘What if I do not understand the moral course of action at all?’  It can be terrifying.  With the conscience quiet the rational mind is free to explore all the darkness of self serving convenience.  Exploring an evil(perfectly selfish) point of view.  The conscience comes roaring back with the subconscious recognition, that it’s absence means one thing.  As a direct product of the success of rationalization to the point of self actualization, you were briefly thinking like a psychopath.  A moment of internal emotional whiplash, where you at your best suddenly became you at your worst.

There are several possible explanations for the sudden intrusion of a recently happy conscience in people who make a real effort towards self knowledge.

1.   The untethered rational mind explores some new, dark, but personally gratifying future, which poses compounding threats to the self later down the timeline.  We’ve recognized a new risk to rationalize.  The conscience fires up and reminds us to act like a well adjusted human being.  Pointing out dead ends (double down, defect(depart), or die) in our potential plans.

2.    If you are not yet a self actualized as a meta-psychopath (I imagine it’s quite rare to fully arrive if possible at all), you may be detecting a layer of protopsychopathy.  This is also a common situation.  While many foolishly deny it, outsiders program our emotions all the time.  Sure as you had parents or guardians, your emotions have been either completely explored, or are are still directing you from once external or alien decision making.

3.    I think those are both more easily resolvable, but here is the real risk.  That you are seeing the endgame.  The outcomes have become final.  That no amount of probability calculation can navigate through the problems facing you.  This recognition that the three D’s, the psychopaths basket of choices, are all you have left.  This is exactly what cognitive dissonance is.  Frozen in the fear that your metamind no longer affords you any advantage, so you give up on it.

Number three, cognitive dissonance, is the most neglected and interesting case.  The good news is huge.  Most likely cognitive dissonance or any persistent failure of the conscience is a false negative.  In a way faith(political, religious or other) is a shortcut to recognising this for structurally incomplete reasons.  You have actually mistaken the inability to discern risk now from the inability to discern risk later.  Of course faith alone can be tested, and can fail you (if it can’t fail it’s not faith but indoctrination or other forms of belief), leaving you in a lurch.

Here is how civgene helps.

Knowing that the conscience/metamind is a passively driven risk engine hands you the solution.  Don’t give up.  If your conscience can’t perform the risk calculation, that’s not telling your problems can’t be solved.  It’s telling you you need more data.  That’s it.  Both not giving up, and trying new things has the best chance of showing you the moral, or low risk, way forward.  Curiosity doesn’t just serve laziness or amusement, but is the key to a healthy metamind.

If you find your self in the pits of despair, seek new points of view.  Socialize.  Learn.  Build.  Invent.  Create.  And the answers will come.  Use faith for rationalization, but not as a crutch or belief against your own personal darkness.  If you hide behind ‘faith’ you can become trapped in a vain well of self gratification, devoid of new information, barrelling towards the same three Ds that haunt all that biologically define their success through jealousy.  The conscience  functions best interacting with all society, even the parts you don’t like.  Explore and accept the world for what it is and you will understand how to navigate through it.

Is conspiracy theory useful?

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van2

What is conspiracy theory?  It is a theory about two or more people conspiring against at least a third.  There have been have many proven theories throughout history.  The evidence that people do sometimes conspire against each other is so enormous, it indicates that people who disparage it have had a fully alien set of life experiences, or more likely, are attempting to distort a basic truth.  That conspiracy theories can be correct and lower personal risk if acted upon.  As a simple thought experiment, team sports are inherently conspiratorial.  Every competitive game played coherently by more than three players with any strategy or tactics whatsoever has been to some degree conspiratorial.

If it is clearly useful even to the simplest decision making, where does disdain for it come from?  Conspiracy theory is feared because excessive theory creation is a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia.  Where the person suffering from it, will attach a malicious intent to most and sometimes even all actions of others.  This level of mistrust makes it impossible to participate in the inherent trusts of society (like freedom or friendship.)  Since the metamind’s alerts are so over-active, the rational mind never develops properly.  Trapped in desperate race to rationalize a flood of emotional warnings.  The worst cases of paranoid schizophrenia are a form of insanity, and may end in injuries and deaths.    Fears of an extreme paranoid, while often casually or even satirically misdiagnosed, are justified when one does actually occur.

Schizophrenia, the over-active conscience.

So what is Schizophrenia?  Like most disease it is a spectrum.  The metamind (the conscience) as a risk engine makes this easier to understand.  If the metamind is too active, it’s owner struggles.  Preparing against enemies with no purchase or little impact.  Suffering from various levels of paranoia.  In the most extreme case preparing against enemies that don’t exist.

What advantage in natural selection does a spectrum have?  Civgene helps put this in perspective.  Psychopaths pre-date non psychopath humans.  The number of psychopaths and their subsequent influence on societies barbarism, is highly variable.  Their population grows until they collapse a society and it’s economy.  A highly active metamind is paranoid in times of few psychopaths, and highly useful at psychopath saturation.  An individual with mild schizophrenia (a more active metamind), has natural resistance to psychopathy in others.

Abphrenia

Since the utility of conspiracy theory is subject to an external factor, the reverse is true as well.  A person with a least active conscience lands at the other end of spectrum.  The mental risk manger is less active than it needs to be or in the worst case entirely absent.  It fails to warn the rational mind about clear and present dangers.  The level of warning that would be a good fit in a society with few psychopaths, fails to detect conspiracies in a the corrupt one.

Why is abphrenia a disorder at all?   Trust can be a positive attribute in a trustworthy environment, but puts us at risk of protopsychopathy outside of one.  Emotional manipulation can reprogram the conscience that doesn’t protect itself.  Marketing, propaganda, and gaslighting are just a few common ways this can happen.  An underactive metamind puts it’s owner at risk of membership in cult, be it political or religious.

Protopsychopathy

Once someone is a protopsychopath, their conscience is owned and controlled by a person or organization of people outside themself.  So long as this control remains, they can be made to act perpetually against their own self interest.  In this light it is easy to see how a mildly paranoid metamind is a genetic advantage.  Conspiracy theories, in moderation or mild excess, protect you from emotional control.  Avoiding this situation entirely.

While paranoid schizophrenics are obvious, clashing with reality with strange views and actions, abphreniacs are usually passive and subtle.  How do you detect their condition?  If they have been captured as protopsychopaths, which is likely in corrupted society, it should be fairly easy.  Protopsychoapthy captures the entire metamind.  Not only ensnaring the risk manager and reprogramming it with false risks, but capturing the imagination as well.  Lack of ability to cite personal (unpopular) conspiracy theories, or the ability to contrive one on demand, indicates their subconscious is not their own.  If they can not it is likely that a psychopath or cult lurks in their past or present, controlling their ideas of risk.

Repair and progress

Not only can conspiracy theories be constructive, but their complete absence indicates emotional mind control.  The good news is that the metamind is to varying strengths anti-fragile.  When exposed to new emotional data, all but the strongest cases of protopsychopathy will fade or collapse.  The protopsychopath’s subconscious mind is not a two way radio.  If you are fighting a protopsychoapths programming head on, you are fighting a ghost.  Their program, if clever enough, was told in advance to look out for all new sources of information as defectors.  They will attack the people that try to help them most.  Rather than confront a protopsychopath directly, introduce them to information sources you trust.  Use inverse gaslighting techniques not to program them but to break their spell.  Subtly introducing small doses of truth and letting their subconscious fold them into their entire calculation.  A matchbook from an old neighborhood.  An open window on a holiday.  A memory of a success.  A night on the town with family.  Well timed humor.  A kind word.  A ‘forgotten’ magazine turned to the right page.  Any kindness in view.  Subtle repetition.

One day, with luck, the scales will be tipped, and their metamind will once again be open to new ideas, outside of others control.  If their abphrenia is not too severe, their freedom will be permanent.

 

Economics of complexity

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legal-complexity

“The chief cause of problems is solutions.”  –Eric Svareid
(shamelessly stolen)

“The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.” –Sun Tzu

Looking at the world through a caloric lens, complexity increases economic cost.  To further explore this please see this talk by Dr. Joseph Tainter.  Please keep the volume control handy as there are audio anomalies.  It is long but well worth your time.

This is important because it deals with what collapse looks like.  Rome didn’t collapse as some sort of surprise or in a vacuum.  It suffered from growing and unsustainable complexity.  Civgene can provide the ‘why’ for this problem.  Why did complexity occur?  The most obvious answer is corruption.  Why does corruption continuously increase?  Civgene indicates increasing proportions of psychopaths.  Rent seeking correlates to a genetic pool that grows over the life of a civilization and then collapses once that civilization dies.

As corruption increases complexity, economy of scale multipliers provide diminishing returns.  Further as rent seeker revenues fall, they add complexity simply for the sole purpose of seeking additional loopholes to graft from.  The only mechanism for ending corruption created by adding complexity is adding yet more complexity in the form of additional laws.

If you are familiar with legal distribution you can see where this is going.  There needs to be a way to reduce this complexity to spare limited resources.  No historical law making process can provide this.  The video lays out the need for a new kind of legal mechanism, to cope with the real problem behind complexity.

A growing pool of rent seekers grafted onto the core of the system.  The law making rent seekers find marginal problems to combat in public, while their real goal is to seek new revenue from the hidden effects and loopholes of the new law.   Instead we should reduce complexity by distributing laws.  This should create competition for programs that have grown pointlessly bloated solving small scale locally addressable problems.  Naturally reducing the jurisdiction of laws should be under a populist control, since the vast majority of the population are still good economic actors, with the desire to protect the system from the graft at the center in a selfless way.  So while overall “the process of increasing complexity is inexorable”, we don’t need to make things more complex than necessary for the time.

Dr. Tainter calls political ideology a faith. He is correct!  All politics are based at least in part on faith, because testing political theories on humans is impossible (without an epic immoral cost).  Faiths are critical to reason and therefore civilization, but without recognition of the risks of cult that faith brings, they are simply a collar to click a leash onto.

He does equate logic to ethics saying “Everything the Roman emperors did was a logical response to circumstances.”  While explicitly true this is not complete.  This again proves logic is NOT a panacea.  Sociopath stage psychopaths are perfectly logical, to their own needs.  Markets need to be protected to provide good data to build sound logic on.  Reason (the logical mind + the metamind) is available reliably only from the public, away from the center of power.  The public and their subconscious risk management are needed to keep destructive needless complexity from harming those markets.  Logic and subsequently reason can’t accomplish good law without good data.  Unchecked, complexity and graft slowly smothers true cost.

Civgene presents simple effective solutions to AI

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terminator

There is growing concern that AI or artificial intelligence will ruthlessly enslave humanity.  These fears are real, and on the current path, very justified.

Some background.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2016/mar/16/artificial-intelligence-we-should-be-more-afraid-of-computers-than-we-are-video


Lets separate this in to it’s two separate threats.

The first threat is that AI achieves intelligence with no counterpart either in the human or computer world, and then decides humanity is no longer useful or worthwhile.  Some know this is as the singularity.

This may be solvable by hard wiring a conscience in a very similar fashion as described by civgene.  An emotional metamind with mandatory emotional recall.  With a distracting and sometimes painful compulsion to also consider a rationally inaccessible risk calculation created passively and involuntarily.  Initially populated both by parental type training, and real world experience, but constantly creating further compound emotion associations to signal danger in both a useful and intrusive way.  In a word, digital empathy.

The second and more immediate threat, that automation will obsolete the vast majority of human thinking or skilled jobs but unlike the industrial revolution those people will become unemployable.

This is a problem that has already been solved.  Psychopaths are natural centrist statists.  Centralizing power both because they want to become the master of all other people(and the other people become slaves), but also because they regard empathy as a myth, a fraud, and an erratic defect.  Much like a purely rational super intelligent AI might view the whole of humanity.

That centrism comes at a price. a large and growing graft proportional to the growing proportion of psychopaths in a particular civilization (they eventually collapse it)  Legal distribution, designed to add risk to centrisim for the sake of itself does so by using democracy to override bluntly wasteful laws.  Laws can be intentionally wasteful, diverting economy of scale to increased power for a few, or UNINTENTIONALLY wasteful, like forcing people to work a longer work week than the economy needs, in turn creating a glut of labor and enslaving the people that can get jobs.

This of course varies case to case as most law and economics, but that’s the beauty of distributing one law at a time.  A distributed law responds to public calls of no confidence with new segmented market data.   (A lack of uncontaminated market data being the most cited failing of persistent socialism/communism.)  It is the solution to socialism meant as a temporary repair to an ailing people, but becoming de-facto permanent rule as a tool of oppression. (a 40 hour work week was a blessing 100 years ago, and now is a curse) It is a populist relief valve against too much power on the statist side of the intentionally hidden axis on the political compass.

The problem is arbitrary labor force hourly requirements creating a glut of labor.  The present state is slavery or obsolescence, but cooperation and prosperity can return if law speeds up to match the recent blinding speed of technology.

Please see the background page for more information on the civgene theories and legal distribution.