Category Archives: metamind

The peril of hope.

participant

When is hope helpful? A simple explanation of hope is a wish. Wishes, ungrounded, lend to magical thinking. Magical thinking being when insight or intuition is used without attempting to apply rational knowledge and logic. More specifically hope is projection of bliss into the future.

Future bliss sounds noble. It is desirable for all humans and animals. Everybody wants bliss. While the utility of perpetual bliss is unmeasurable, it’s likelihood is not. Even in perfect systems life is subject to random events. Scarcity and suffering, to at least a small degree is inevitable. Never ending bliss is practically speaking, a fantasy.

The human conscience is a risk engine. The wider the variety of data, both positive and negative in perception, the better it is at assessing risk. Negative events do not need to be directly experienced, though, those are more powerful. Humans can learn from others negative experiences, if we have access to them. Hope is a strictly positive spectrum. It’s lens filters out negative experiences. While a person is still forming emotional prototypes, the fewer negative experiences they have, the more poorly they will handle them.

The conscience catalogues our memories as an emotional timeline. Rational recall of memories evoke emotional states and emotional states evoke memories.  Magical thinking, most typically in children, is a lack of reason. Rational thinking does not reliability examine’s the conscience’s insights. Until the ‘age of reason’ (typically 8 years old) children can not reliably process their own insights and check them for provability or even explain-ability. A lie told to a young child is a lie believed, wished and hoped.

A conscience tuned with exhaustive reasoning usually provides a moral compass for the future. Hope sidelines this process. It provides a seemingly moral workaround, but only justified by a hope coloured incomplete risk engine. As adjunct to faith (knowing something you can’t prove) it bolsters ideas that have already survived reason. Without reason and faith, hope is effectively magical thinking.

Unreasonable and reasonable hope

  • Unreasonable hope: Insight(bliss) -> logical mind -> bliss based rationalization -> more bliss
  • Reasonable hope: Insight (a blend of bliss, despair and will to action) -> logical mind -> rationalization -> faith or fact (successful reason) -> faith (facts don’t need hope) -> reasonable hope (hope that’s been through the process of reason)

Hope is self perpetuating, and inferior to reason driven and inherently sceptical faith. It may occur if no emotional rewards are provided to children for challenging magical thinking at the age of reason along with emotionally negative events. It is impossible to weigh risk without negative examples for comparison. All scenarios do not need to be personally experienced, that’s both cruel and rejects the validity of imagination and empathy, but without some personal loss, imagination has no prototypes by which to scale despair.

Hope’s legitimate utility is a stand in for faith, in those too young or innocent to reason.

Reject hope as a substitute for reason by exposure to limited experiences with pain. Ideally in small, short, doses. Such as quality parenting allows. Once your prototypes are formed, seek limited exposure and understanding to the worst humiliations of others. Not habitually, but enough to maximize the risk calculating yield of your own failures. No level of competence is above failure. Infallibility is a sign of hope substituting for faith, and that is a hope based fantasy. Periodically go to your fear. Ground your hopes in faiths both provable and unprovable. Understand the pain of carrying truth alone. Now your conscience has been seasoned with realistic risk. If you don’t, your conscience has no idea what you are in for.

EDIT: A Warning about faith.   A healthy, stable society can help steer you away from poorly rationalized faiths (via shared faiths), but that can fail.  They can be destructive too.  Faith without quality reason is a setup for witchhunts, cult, and every downside to both logic, and hope.  Only active curation of the metamind(the conscience) can result in reason, and ultimately that curator must be you.  Know yourself.  Start small and focus on the most inclusive compassion ethics and logic allow.  Think long and often, act deliberately, and face, ‘The ends don’t justify the means,’ before you act.

What causes addiction?

shotglass
Two quotes which appear to be true, together with civgene’s behavioural pairs, define the cause of addiction.

The opposite of addiction is connection” — Johann Hari JRE #1250
freedom means the absence of coercion” — Milton Friedman

Unique human behaviours pairs compare unique human partial cooperation with the strict competition in the animal kingdom.

Property – Identity of an place, item, or accomplishment belonging to a being or a group.  Honoured and understood as a provision of autonomy to a distant time.
Territory – Control of a place, item, or role by a being or group.  Enforced by violence.  Revoked by absence.

Investment – Dedication of time and calories into a being’s or a groups creative development.  Requires property and currency to realize return.
Assignment – Dedication of time and calories into another’s territory with the expectation of favour.

Freedom – A cooperative model of non interference.  The promise of non interference in exchange for a return of the same.
Treaty – A stalemate, a mutual temporary cessation of conflict to avoid over exertion.

Friendship – The expectation of continued freedom between parties despite periodic violation of it.
Alliance – A temporary teamwork towards and depending on a common goal.

Freedom means the absence of coercion.
Territory is a component of Assignment.
Coercion is a variation of Assignment.
Assignment displaces freedom

Addiction is a deficiency of connection?
(Non familial) connection is possible because of friendship.
Addiction is caused by the lack of availability of friendship
Friendship requires freedom.
At the root, addiction may be caused by a lack of freedom.

Assignment is a psychopathic work alike for Investment.
Assignment displaces Investment
Investment is displaced by the same forces that cause addiction.
Statistically, addiction and investment should be inversely correlated.

Seems obvious in hindsight, correct?  Behavioural pairs can be used to derive core human behaviours, including their rights, and the consequences if they are violated.  A somewhat common, but difficult to argue conclusion becomes much more clear.

It’s important to note that someone might condemn Hari based on the apparant implication that addicts have bad friends.  The problem is that friendship requires freedom to fully function.  Personal prisons can damage or destroy freedom beyond a friends control, no matter their qualities.  Like mental illness, abject poverty, or abusive parents not remediated by their state or society.  Sadly freedom may be a natural human right, but it’s not a guarantee.

Edit: Reworked faulty logic to different causality.

Edit 2: Improved quote source, added warning about friendship.

Who gets the benefits from the doubts?

self-mutilation(tasteful self mutilation)

If faith is rationalized knowledge you can’t prove, and forgiveness emotional resolution to avoid manipulation, who are you really doubting?

Truth telling is a regular affair. If empathy is the engine, spoken truth is the grease of civilization. Most of the time, the benefit of the doubt is not only implicit, but entirely unvisited. Analysis of every statement, every gesture, every promise would undo civilization. Investment would be exhausting and a terrible trade.

When a flash of insight presents a doubt, the temptation is to ignore it. Civilization is a big machine, and the wise human knows the gears must turn to perpetuate the economy of scale. Down time for repairs will have a non linear cost, but the conscience is first and foremost is a risk engine. The dilemma is usually treated as such, ‘is your conscience groaning more loudly about the risk of a lie, or the risk of addressing it’. This can work but introduces a new risk, gaslighting.

Gaslighting seems silly at first but can be the flat edge to a long wedge. First the lies are subtle and inconsequential to the operation of your society, with one exception, you. You learn to NOT trust your gut and ignore insight.

If a high EQ empath is faced with a single dishonest threat, the dishonest actor eventually becomes silhouetted against their more honest context. Your risk engine retunes itself with it’s flow of higher quality data, and they stand out. The problem is addressed and civilization’s machine chugs on.

There is systemic risk, the risk the conscience is poor at managing a flurry of lies. The intelligent and psychopathic defector WILL notice this golden opportunity. Instead of identifying a narrow pattern of doubt, the conscience is too noisy to be useful. Doubt is aimed inward. ‘I must be the problem.’ Without warnings of risk the conscience becomes a liability.

If you are untrained in proposing and rationalizing conspiracies, you can be taught to throw away your conscience or even program it against your own interests. Not just you. Everyone. Flooding people with enough lies to disable their conscience requires a conspiracy. Those that discourage conspiracy theory are likely in the institutional gaslighting business, better known as propaganda.

Who benefits from the doubts? The institutions people are directly involved in. The hierarchies that are riskiest to fork or otherwise defect from. Today that is their governments, their schools, their employers. Those wise to history know finding a criminal conspiracy can be as simple as asking who benefits? Cui Bono.

Doubts are yours, and no good comes from throwing them away. Rationalize them. Not because the conscience is never wrong, but if you don’t use your risk manager, you lose it. Researching, fact checking, and setting traps for the unscrupulous benefits you. Detect reality. Accept no lies, not even the small ones. Painful honesty keeps your conscience active, well tuned, and in a position to defend the economies of scale that afford us the luxury of leisure, and it’s prosperous civilization.

Your empathy, and it’s outrage, IS the machine. The top priority must be keeping the context honest. Demand people with high EQs. Always observant, tough as nails, and a zest for learning. Test their empathy. Protect the machine with vigorous curation. Reject the benefit of the doubt. Doubt people. Doubt systems. Doubt away.

Insight and Faith

Spilled milk on an old wooden floor

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.

Faith: genius vs talent

genius-vs-talent

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

A society that can’t allow faith disallows genius. Talent may be the most visible worker, but genius is the scaffolding of progress. A social mode that allows genius also allows external saviours. They are the same archetype and have the same elements.

This can be measured by a societies ability to separate accommodation from validation. If you must categorize and measure ideas to allow them, you disallow those that produce ideas from the edge of periphery. In simple terms you suffer when you can’t accommodate people who are smarter than you. I’m not saying a civilizations success is measured by seeking external saviours, that’s a setup for cult, but don’t count them out either.

Usually societies discard genius when they misunderstand faith. Faith is an insight that can’t be proven or dis-proven. It’s a game of likelihoods and successful predictions. The genius may not be able to convey their whole ideas in their lifetime, but they can apply their right ideas to the practical world of the now. This is done to build credibility, a simpler language more people and sometimes many people can understand.

Credibility of prediction is pragmatism. Pragmatism is systemically successful because it recognizes exceptional performance of prediction. While it may seem to cherry pick from disciplines, it is actually recognizing genius. Refusing to make social systems more simple than possible to protect the egos of their lower intelligence observers.

The process of the less intelligent synchronizing with genius requires acceptance based on performance. Inevitably this manifests as faith. Subconsciously acknowledging the significance of predictive performance without understanding all the details at once. Faith is not some blind allegiance, but a pathway for the conscience to drive the expensive investment of rationalization. The more understandable details of a difficult to grasp idea can be carefully vetted, the more opportunity the subconscious has to model the idea to apply it in total.

Protect high quality ideas and their vessels, insist your society be both sceptical and coherent with humility. It’s no accident genius is marked by prediction, the metamind’s (the conscience’s) speciality. Rewarding only talent is psychopathic and rejects humanities most exceptional behaviours. Behaviours that form civilization itself.

This water is hot, I’m jumping out of the pot.

 

frog

 

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.

Subconcious speed reading

books

Darwninan evolution leaves little room for debate. Genetic accidents come to dominate because of advantage.  Including people. Even the very empathy that makes you recoil from the potential horrors of the implications above.

Civgene indicates that the subconscious mind (specifically the conscience) is a risk manager.  Why?  With comparative intelligence, new risks are assessed more quickly by humans with a conscience than humans without (psychopaths).

The risk formula is programmed both by other people like our guardians, and by our own experience.  As our memories are recalled, a secondary map of emotions produces a new, involuntary, composite emotional state.  Sometimes the subsequent compound emotion is fear of a yet seen danger the rational mind could not deduct as quickly, hence the advantage.  Mandatory emotional recall is fast, as demonstrated by the laggard rationalization that follows it.  This is true only if the data is natural (self acquired or at least sincerely emparted) and good mental hygiene is practised.

Just like a caring parent can program a human child with well intentioned warnings, so can a group be controlled.  The ability for one human to program a society with a common identity is known as propaganda.  Grandfathered by Edward Bernays.  Fathered by Joseph Gobbels, mass programming of identities is a potential genocidal machine.  Turning peoples own conscience against them.  Rational minds enslaved to fabricated emotional risk warnings.

The civilized mind
Propaganda is a fabricated, subconscious, communication directed at societies, but it’s carriers originate naturally.  This is visible as secondary communication cues.  Intonation, secondary noises, linguistic lexicon shifts, lighting, temperature, smells, sounds, etc.  Any subtle cue that can be rationally remembered can have a compound emotion attached to it.  People are continuously programming each other.  Human civilization is a vast, distributed, subconscious risk, supercomputer.  Mainly throttled by the bandwidth of human interaction and attacks on it’s networks.

Karl Marx noticed this but did not understand what he is seeing.  In general I have found his observations to be outstanding, while his conclusions wither as a function of time.  Why did he get causality wrong?  No failing of his own.  He like his contemporaries simply did not understand that humanity was two distinct, separate behavioural sets.  They were simply unaware of psychopaths.

History repeated
His observations about late civilization stratification were correct.  The modern bourgeoisie have re-emerged in America and the western world.  In it’s natural form, the bourgeoisie as a class, emerges because of commonality in culture, specifically in subconscious ques.  As the psychopath population grows, the society increasingly devalues cooperation and rewards strict competition.  The bourgeoisie read the same books, attend the same operas, and go to the same parties.  The feedback loop tightens as quantifiable knowledge consumption accelerates.  The programming becomes less and less noticed, less frequently rationalized and ultimately goes completely unexamined.  Simply put the rational mind can’t keep up with the subconscious programming, and so it goes unchallenged.  The people who operate society, the bourgeoisie, eventually become completely psychopathic.

Now, in 2017 propaganda is more science than art.  Massive databases of up to the minute word associations betray our subconscious communication and the current state of shared risk.  Further the Internet has greatly increased the bandwidth for subconscious communication.  Sharing (comparatively) professionally produced videos as fast they can be consumed.  Entire libraries distributed in minutes.  Immersive video games increase the bandwidth even beyond what a carefully scripted stream of videos can aspire to.  Together they form a wall of customized emotionally calculated programming a physically present team couldn’t match.

Today the technical and financial elite are consuming same material. Racing to the treetop to be top ape in true psychopathic fashion.  Their subconscious always silently consuming faster than rational memory components.  Their rational minds can’t keep up.  Their subconscious is polluted with ease as big data guides big media.  The economic collapse, the human disaster, it’s happening again.  But this time it’s measured in days instead of decades.

But there is hope. The art, the music, the stories, the pop cultures of the past can save some of us.  If you are sceptical enough to seek and use them, and ultimately profit.

Remediation
The more bandwidth your media has, the more quickly your subconscious can be damaged.  Reading is the lowest bandwidth way to express complex information, so is the least dangerous.  It is difficult for subconcious programming to outrun the critical, rational mind with a newpaper article alone.  Listening is worse.  A podcast or radio program are more likely to reprogram you.  Video has many dimensions by which to perform the card tricks of propaganda.   Your rational mind following one path and your subconscious another.   And of course games both with their interactive 3d and reactive feedback could be weaponized at a level not yet imagined.

Slow the information down and test yourself.  Our metaminds are a database.  Care for it.

  1. Need to read something questionable?  Play loud familiar music while reading a suspect source to interrupt emotional data creation.  DOS your own emotional recall system.
  2. Do you think your emotions may have been contaminated?  Take time to meditate and focus on clearing them.  LIFO pop the stack.
  3. Noticed your feelings changed after consuming strange media?  Inventory the issues that are important to you and see if your feelings have inexplicably changed on them.  If you can’t understand the change erase it with self repetition.  Make sure to sleep on it before accepting the change.  Checksum data.  Erase corruption.  Perform a database integrity check.
  4. Exposed to something you don’t trust?  Follow questionable sources with next class up of familiar and trusted media.  Listened to a untrustworthy news story?   Then watch a favourite movie. Nightly news known to be disreputable? Don’t watch it.  But if you must, play a trusted favourite 3d video game to test and reset your own mind.  Ride a mental bicycle over your mind’s roads to see if they have been damaged or changed.  Perform a system wide antivirus scan on your metamind, as soon as you can.
  5. Want to consume something from a serial offender?  Wait.  Simply wait a few months to a few years and then consume it.  Wait until it is out of fashion.  Subconscious reprogramming is highly context sensitive.   Sure you’ll miss the water cooler talk but the older messages will be much more like noise to your subconscious.  Like running a new operating system, released after a virus (subconscious programming) is public knowledge and it’s exploits repaired or blocked.

Beat the propaganda.  The key is to slow down the face melting pace of rational learning and examine your feelings.  Remember more bandwidth means more damage.  No matter how smart you are, your conscience(if you have one) still absorbs propaganda faster than your rational mind can counter it.  Take some time to let what you consume sink in.  No matter the topic.

Reading has some risk. Listening is worse.  Watching still worse.  Games have the highest subconscious programmatic rate.  Take the time after consuming public media to practice good mental hygiene.

Reject the bourgeoisie and protect civilization.  Put your own mental hygiene ahead of accelerating competition.  The lasting standards are open source anyway, inherently an exercise in cooperation.  The currency of reputation is almost always worth more than short term victories.  Forget top branch, it’s a big forest.  It’s your mind.  Don’t loose control.

Note: For the record this page’s (probably rather confusing) computer analogies were white on white and were not meant to be subliminal, but instead hidden unless sought.  Alert me if the words subtly appear in your browser/copy.  TIA.

Edit: Added a fifth trick for keeping your subconscious clean and belonging to you.