Category Archives: HELPING OUT

Helping promote or research the civilization gene.

Insight and Faith

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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.

Website updates

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google

Finally the git/mirror code is fixed and should once again have the latest copy of the site.  Please consider helping civgene and mirroring it.    See this page for details.

In addition I have done some things to improve the sites SEO (appeasing search engines).   Including google analytics updates, more search engine hints, and a shorter main page.  If you have any trouble or if a page or feature is missing, please let me know at comments@civgene.matthewnewhall.com

Keeping your papers in order with Google is quickly becoming a full time job, but hopefully civgene can squeak by the ‘consumer orientated’ checkpoints once again.

Next up a worthy cause, enycryption (SSL.)  More civgene soon.

EDIT: SSL is done.  Whole site should be SSL and have few if any complaints about mixed mode.  Please if you find a bug I may not be aware.  Contact me.  TY.

 

Terminology error – misuse of ‘recessive’

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confusion

An error has become apparent throughout the civgene site and papers.  I have been incorrectly using the term recessive.  This stems from my high school level biological science background.  The mistake specifically was thinking that there were only two basic building blocks of genetic combinatorics.  A gross miscalculation.

In my defense I had no idea I would ever envision or peruse anything like civgene.  My rudimentary Mendelian generic understanding caused me to infer that any gene that was not dominant must be recessive. I was at the least, dated.  In fact had I been aware of the many types(and still growing) of genetic inheritance I would never have said it.  It is possible psychopathy is a combination of several genes and/or could be autosomal recessive, Autosomal dominant, (probably not X or Y linked) or a number of not commonly named patterns.  I just don’t know, but will pursue this knowledge.

My error was in not saying what I really meant, ‘Not Mendelian dominant.’ or ‘Not dominant’  This assertion is based on solid external science.  Psychopaths are officially considered to not be not curable.  This was the original tell for me that it is likely genetic.  Cases are distributed evenly between males and females.  Further, symptoms seem to begin from a very young age, one or two years old as childhood amnesia ends sooner, making postnatal epigenetics less likely.  Psychopaths can appear in families with no apparent history, but there does seem to be a higher likelihood of psychopaths being born to one or more psychopath parents.

I caught this error after some vague advice about misusing ‘recessive’ prompted me to look into the combinatorics of a civgene. I could not line up some estimates of psychopath growth with the numeracy of recessive genes.  During this process I learned that combinatorics vary wildly along with inheritance patterns.  Many alleles be part of a single gene or that genes with a single function can include large swaths of DNA.  Using combinatorics to prove genetic inheritance types without first knowing the genes involved can be difficult or impossible.  Lesson learned.

If you are a geneticist, you probably already realize this error does not effect the viability of civgene.  My thinking was correct even if my label was incorrect.  I apologise for any part in delaying recognition or visibility of civgene with this error.

The question remains of remediation.  Since the meaning was consistent, I can simply replace the word.  I have found 1 papers and 5 blog posts with the error.  I will correct ‘recessive’ with ‘not dominant’ ASAP and post the corrected links here as I find them.

Please if you find this to be further in error, please contact me with corrections ASAP.  Also if you find recessive in use, please contact me.  Thanks for you assistance.

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.

Interesting technical challenges

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coincidence

Please don’t panic, civgene is having no technical problems whatsoever.

OK that was a lie.  It was up and down for a couple of weeks but now it’s back up and stronger in

  • security
  • redundancy
  • resilience
  • speed

Specifically in

  • mirroring
  • dns
  • backups
  • web
  • email

This was not part of the plan, but that’s not to say it’s not better for it.   Civgene is now truly redundant.  Please consider becoming a mirror and bringing the site closer to becoming independently anti-fragile.

CRISPR changes everything

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Autism

Some mental illness may no longer need to be diagnosed through social tests.    While the United States busys itself with corporate protectionist legislation like the TPP to protect the major drug companies, some of the world is experimenting with the new precise, cheap and repeatable gene editing method known as CRISPR.

In the past gene editing was hit or miss.  Practiced more like chemistry, it was more like a million misses to a marginal hit.  Identifying a gene was not enough, splicing it became a major endeavor for companies like Monsanto.   Experiments on human DNA (except perhaps if you count our GMO diet) was effectively impossible.

As of 2015, the CRISPR technique, takes a precise strand of DNA and inserts it, reliably, in a larger DNA strand, precisely where it is told to insert it.   This is the holy grail of both nano scale assembly, and made to order DNA.  The mind reels.  Designer babies are eminent.  Greatly reduced aging is possible.  DNA based nanites can built to both manufacture on the table top and enhance human attributes.

These are in the future (AFAIK), but before all that, apparently we have already begun to use it verify genetic disease.  The technology is not even a year old and Chinese scientists have already implanted a suspected autism gene in monkeys, to see if their behavior varies.  It does.

The implications are huge for all illness from athletes foot to cancer, but it’s important that the first study is on behavioral disease.  If the civilization gene is correct and psychopathy is genetic, we could be close to a completely different world.  There are no suspect genes (other than the debunked warrior gene) at the moment, but it is possible to find, were the right people to take interest.  Now, a new way to verify that first study is readily available.

Conversely should some mental illnesses become officially understood to be genetic, psychopaths should  be easier to diagnose.  Psychopaths are the highest functioning mental illness.  ASPD stage psychopaths are well known for feigning other mental illnesses to evade detection.  A narrower field of patients through genetic screening for other disease means less misdiagnosis, and more understanding of the social consequences of widespread psychopathy.  That ultimately means real targeted help for the psychopaths.