CIvgene can be complex and confusing, but if you’ve got an hour, I lay out the basics in a simple way. Good way to get started.
Video intro to Civgene
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Category Archives: imagination
Insight and Faith
I have erred. I have been conflating two important definitions, which in turn, made the civilization gene more confusing and abrasive to peoples unrelated personal politics. I was conflating faith and insight into one role. My view of the concepts remain but it should be easier to explain new ideas now.
Here are the new definitions.
- Metamind – The conscience and the subconscious as one. Organizes unlike things via emotional content. A risk engine. The source of the imagination. A passively driven relational database that groups memories by emotional likeness. Produces insights on matches. The mental structure psychopaths lack.
- Insight – A flash of information from the metamind. Sometimes a risk warning. Not always correct, but faster than rational thought. Can be supernatural or provable.
- Rational thought – A traceable waking thought process. Typically thought of as a provable thought process, but rarely including enough variables to live up to that. The rational thought process can be used to prove, disprove, or carry insights.
- Rationalization – Rationally discerning the logical meaning of an emotional signal from the metamind. Determining if insight is correct, incorrect, or currently un-knowable. Searchable via complex emotions
- Faith – A carried insight. A failure to rationalize. Knowing something you can not prove. It can be supernatural (unprovable) or plausibly provable.
- Reason – How empaths (non-psychopaths) think. The combination of insights, faiths and rational thoughts.
- Belief – Wishing something is true. Possibly an unchallenged (un-rationalized) insight, possibly a rationally contrived fantasy. A common, inferior, substitute for reason.
Here is a simple explanation of how a faith is created from insight.
- Metamind signals an [insight].
- The rational mind works the insight over and decides true/untrue/unknown. [rationalization]
- The human decides the insight is unknown. [faith creation]
- Then depending on if they ‘know their self’ and ‘trust their instincts’ They may store the faith and consider it in future decisions. [incorporation]
I have a long road ahead updating all articles discussing faith with the new terminology. I will be proceeding from newest to oldest. I’ll drop another post when the work is done. Please refer to the Glossary in the menu bar as authoritative, and then articles from newest to oldest.
If you find this or any error please let me know. All assistance and feedback is appreciated.
Edit 12/29/18: Added in an explanation of how faiths are created.
Edit 1/4/18: Improved definitions. Less muddy.
This water is hot, I’m jumping out of the pot.
I have just spent six months on Facebook. It has been painful, but I’m stubborn. Now I understand why it makes people fight. It’s simple. You are shown ‘friends’ ‘likes’ against your will. Problem is. Sometimes I ‘like’ posts I disagree with. Encouragement and giving space to grow are attributes of actual (not simulated) friendship. Facebook’s ‘Share’ is pointless. Further you can’t respect or even note another’s point of interest without endorsing it to random friends who in turn may be hurt.
To less of a degree the same derisive formula applies to comments in your stream. This is better because at least the words are the authors, but the framework of those comments is broken into tiny chunks at best. Both a bibliographic and emotionally contextual nightmare of distortion.
How does this relate to Civgene? Social nuance is destroyed. It turns people’s empathy against them. Making them regret kindnesses, curiosity and sharing their feelings. That is prejudice inspiring insanity and I don’t respect or endorse it. By detaching sincerity from each individuals context, growth is damaged, then retarded, then reversed.
If you understand both software and marketing you’d understand how deliberate this must be. Other social media only shares ‘shared’ media by default. Further it is trivial for software authors add a checkbox to block others ‘likes’ or comments from your feed. There used to be such a feature on Facebook and it was removed. Requests to reinstate it were ignored. The result? Facebook is dividing people and making them fight, and they must be doing it intentionally. I think this level of incompetence is impossible.
https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10202806006764439
If for some reason your extended family or a group of trusted friends is expecting you to participate in facebook I recommend spending some time studying narcissistic psychopaths. Once the conscience is masked by facebooks technology, they lose access to subtlety of emotional expression. At first this impacts facebook relationships, reducing legitimate friendships to the lowest common denominator. The subconscious mind is like a muscle so eventually it will atrophy. Animal work alikes for human conscionable behaviours begin. Essentially persistant visitors will become more psychopathic. For sure more so than you would be on the level stable ground of consistent emotional context.
The good news is your conscience isn’t optional. You have one or you don’t. Since it is antifragile exercising it on other platforms should help you to spring back from being psychopathic. Abit in a 2d, low bandwidth text format saved from constant unintentional inference by emoticons and memes. Anything based in text is still a narrow pipe. Emote often.
From now on I’ll be treating Facebook how it treats others, a resource to be cultivated. A contacts library of allies. I have a group to tend to, and I’ll check for private messages from my contacts. Folks who know me understand this is not just some anecdote. One day I would be proud to play a role in replacing that pile of junk with something to free the people trapped there. It’s destructive, and it makes me a little angry.
Here is how I will be handling it. Limited contact. A familiar phrase to anyone who has coped with psychopaths. Here is what meatspace friends should expect from my facebook facade.
- I treat all received emotion on Facebook like drunken babble
- I will only post material sourced from external sites.
- I will be posting primarily as a promotional tool.
- Don’t expect any interaction from me. I reject their blinders to emotional nuance.
- Assume I will read nothing there. I may look at, like or share something against my better judgement. It’s random and means nothing to our relationship. Very possibly a calculated marketing action.
- Any ‘friends’ I have may not be someone I know or actually trust.
- I will now have ‘friends’ unknown to me. This poses technical risks, as friends of friends have privileges. They could be robots, super villains, law enforcement, wants stage psychopaths(aka:ASPD the ones that end up in jail for attempted murder), whatever.
- Please unfriend me if you don’t want all your candour public. You have a day. I won’t be offended. Facebook owns the worst use of the word ‘friend’ ever.
- Check my links for other social media to interact. I’ll keep it up to date.
- ‘Message’ me your private contact info (email, etc) if you think I don’t have it and want me to.
- Even if they did fix this, their intentions are suspect. This can’t be idiocy. It is very doubtful I would revert relaxation and revelry.
I recommend everyone treat facebook this way for their well being. Please feel free to use this article to let your friends know, how and why you are treating facebook differently. That you appreciate them more than facebook will let you. That you will interact with them somewhere else, but not there.
I look forward to spending time with all my friends back in the real world.
Civgene can provide objective morality
Video explaining how you can derive objective morality from civgene.
You can use behaviours unique to empaths to derive objective morality from science itself. Non-psychopathic behaviours are like atoms which in turn can be used to build rights, much like molecules.
More to come.
Edit 3/25: Updated video. Clearer and more concise edits with clips.
The risks of atheism
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.
The terror of rational clarity
“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?
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.
Open source and the complexity horizon
Open source really embodies three changes from typical hierarchical human social systems. Gift culture, the right to fork, and perpetually increasing levels of complexity. But these pieces are not all new, what changed to make open source happen? What problem is it actually solving?
Gift culture is not new. It is as old as currency. Currency predated coinage as barter and skills and tasks. So why did open source happen if not for gift culture? What did change? GPL. A new kind of copyright license establishing the right to fork. That’s how Linux, the trial of a hard right to fork based in law, succeeded.
The right to fork is not new. Clearly established by the Christian reformation, and enabled by Gutenberg, the right to fork, until the 1980s was only established against ultimate authorities by war. Civil rights in the freest countries acknowledged it and derived their rights from it, but did not explicitly establish as a basic rule of engagement and existence. In politics threats of an ultimate fork were often sufficient to deter one.
What is new? Complexity at modern levels is completely new. Where is the complexity? Not in tasks or problems to solve. They are still simple to explain. In communication. In language. What does language indicate? Respect for stature and respect for others time. Not always based in the currencies of accomplishment and skill, but as a product of many parallel societies. A focus on the importance of social structure undermines ideas, there for innovation, and ultimately investment. The social structure becomes impassible and no problems or tasks are solved.
Repairing social structure becomes a second level trap. Meetings are held. Seminars attended. No, a fork is needed. The problem needs to be solved in order to be assigned sufficient language to solve it. The language to solve the problems have no parallel and therefore no linguistic identifiers for needed concepts. The industry tries to solve this by pumping out new names and acronyms, but they are often the property of someone and useless for general progress. This is a distraction. Undeveloped ideas are slowed by the work needed to name them. In the computerized, Internet connected world, the source code is language of progress.
The complexity horizon is reached when the task is so complex that less efficient top down problem solving can no longer function. No amount of time spent can solve the problem from the top. ‘Leader’ understanding doesn’t scale language fast enough. The client can solve the problem better if administration doesn’t block him. No right to fork means the client no longer invests. Trust (predictability of future trends) is lost because their personal experience is impassible. Future investment is diminished.
The perception that the ability to understand a problem and articulate it are always equal is a lie. Therefore the complexity horizon occurs when comprehension of tasks outrun articulation of it. False cooperation becomes apparent (bogus reciprocity) and destroys trust. How can understanding outrun articulation? The subconscious must participate in solving the toughest problems. That is imagination. Rationalization of conceptualization is being outstripped. The metamind is doing the work but the rational mind and the mouth can’t keep up. If a fork can be had, the solution can employ more minds at the task of articulation. If it can’t the relationship between solver and the client grinds on failing to economize and destroying the trust needed for investment from both.
This would have been impossible to decipher without first exploring Civgene’s explanation of the metamind and it’s subconscious roles. Based in fundamental behavioral contrasts between humanity and the animal kingdom, and the implications for economics. Please explore those ideas at your leisure.
To help grasp this here are some practical applications of open source and roughly when their complexity horizons were reached. Note that the open source alternatives begin to gain momentum at the complexity horizon but are not accepted as inevitable until some time later.
Linux: 1993-1995
The original, complete, experiment. Operating systems are a software layer between varying hardware and the programs people are really trying to run. Commercial operating systems were plagued with bugs and suffered from declining stability. The cause was the non linear growth in variety of hardware a computer could be built with. Communicating in code eliminated grafted societies and their cumbersome verbal language.
Bitcoin: 2008-2010
Currency looses it’s value to a client as quality of transactions become less visible. The increasing non linear complexity of derivatives makes understanding any market impossible, ultimately damaging trade. By solving they Byzantine generals problem the complexity of language is eliminated. A small collaboration of solvers can write code to track and transfer currency for clients at a global scale in a transparent way.
Devops: 2013-2016
Internet applications are a way to handle reliability and scalability problems. The non linear expansion of global cyberwarfare, and the non linear expansion of the internet of things (ultimately internet connected computers in all equipment) requires management of operating system functions at the network level or a systemic scale. This seems to be the first multi-factor complexity horizon. Devops holds another distinction as well. It is a new system. Not drawing on errors from past attempts to breach the horizon.
3d printers: Soon, perhaps some breaches now.
An epic confluence of complicating factors defy description and add complexity for manufacturing in on demand customization, trade, natural resources, security, and in the race to the atomic scale. 3d printers are likely the first multi-factor complexity horizon with more than two vectors of complexity. We have likely passed some of the factors already.