Curt Doolittle

Theme: Causality

  • Belyaev Experiment. The fox breeding experiment is probably the most important a

    Belyaev Experiment. The fox breeding experiment is probably the most important addition to evolutionary knowledge of the past century. Not to diminish genetics. But the fact that we can turn a fox into a dog that quickly by selecting for one simple, easily demonstrable trait, and that the cascade effects are identical to those in human domestication, as well as the domestication of all other farm animals, puts an end to the all sorts of pretense about rates of evolution, and dependence upon mutation and adaptation. Instead, we preserve, in our genetic records, multiple potentials that we can express in response to local need. We can select for rates of maturity or the reverse. And by doing so produce the variation in the races. It turns out that civilization requires we select for the very same trait we select for in foxes and wolves. We produce neoteny and its various consequences. Because all our endocrine and cerebro-chemical functions are interdependent.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-06 09:27:00 UTC

  • THAT THING WE CALL CONSCIOUSNESS (important) The conscious mind (system 2: direc

    THAT THING WE CALL CONSCIOUSNESS

    (important)

    The conscious mind (system 2: directed search[reasoning] ) rides on the elephant of intuition (system 1: intuitionistic search), which is informed by our desire to acquire, inventory, and defend, for which we obtain rewards and punishments (emotions), which are biased by our reproductive strategy(gender distributions), which is biased by our genes(variations we call personality).

    Consciousness is the consequence of layers of very short term memory interacting with the results produced by continuous iterative searches of longer term memory, producing a continuous short term memory of change in state on the order of half of a second (sampling rate) to three seconds (persistence[echo]).

    At least in theory, it appears that increases in brain volume (and cortical layers) could continue to expand but we are limited by the ability of females to carry and birth us while still preserving the ability to run, and limited by the rate of information transfer. Ergo we could evolve far larger brains at the cost of higher energy consumption (brains are expensive organs).

    While social populations distribute SENSORY labor, instead of getting larger and larger brains evolution *suggests* that we developed language and thereby distributed COGNITIVE labor allowing for smaller less expensive brains.

    Genders specialize in certain biases, and it is through cooperation and non cooperation (that is far more valuable in productivity than non-cooperation) we ‘calculate’ the evolutionary (survival) value of our biased perceptions and ‘program’ one another to perform for (mostly) common good.

    So we divide perception, cognition, knowledge, labor, negotiation, and advocacy, in a network which we call ‘social order’ of different scales: friends, families, clans, tribes, nations.

    And we develop formal institutions and methods of recording and measurement to assist us.

    But in the end, we act on behalf of our genes. I often reduce us to acquisition-machines. All the ’emotions’ and ‘phenomenon’ are just consequences (byproducts) of the necessity to train a memory to acquire using a limited number of chemical rewards and punishments, in a network of individuals using similar information.

    It’s actually all rather simple. The only complicated bit is that amazing thing we call the cortex, and its seven layers of cells that combine stimuli into categories which due to the necessity of planning actions, and then necessity of serializing the extraordinary volume of information we process into a sequence of symbols for the purpose of communication.

    So between parallelization (searching) on one hand, and planning, and having to communicate on the other hand we produce ‘order’ from a continuous stream of memory of changes in state, into continuous streams of plans and language.

    It’s quite elegant really.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-06 05:42:00 UTC

  • Mathematics and logic make use of platonism (idealism) to a degree that is painf

    Mathematics and logic make use of platonism (idealism) to a degree that is painful, but it is translatable into scientific prose if you understand the foundations (causal relations) that constitute both math and logic.

    Now, it is one thing to move from the descriptive (scientific) to the ideal (supernormal), and quite another to move from the ideal (supernormal) to the experiential(phenomenological), and from the phenomenological to the supernatural and occult (abrahamic or religious surrender of reason).

    I mean, at some point you’re creating deception value rather than truth value. And while I we need analogy, and we can use ideal to substitute for knowledge when the ideal is demonstrable as a general rule – after that, everything starts moving from truth value, to meaning-value, into deception value.

    And I just dont’ understand why we should accept anything communicated in the realm of deception value.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-04 21:31:00 UTC

  • Poverty and the brain. Hard to judge cause. stress effects yes. but poverty is t

    Poverty and the brain.

    Hard to judge cause. stress effects yes. but poverty is the norm and the question is why are so many people not poor? Intelligence .7, and industriousness .4+ and conscientiousness .4. Prosperity in modernity requires a combination of personality traits of which intelligence is but one. And if any of those traits is inadequate the person cannot succeed in a market economy requiring the service of the needs of others FIRST in order to serve the needs of themselves SECOND. Worse, the cost of educating people at each std deviation of intelligence is dramatically higher, and if accompanied by shortages of necessary personality traits, then it only increases. If we then account for different rates of maturity based on the geography of ethnic origin necessary to fight infant mortality, we run into extremely high costs per individual with extremely low returns, and increasing chances of failure. The uncomfortable truth that we have learned over the past twenty years, is that the prosperity of any people is largely due, not to its smartest, but to the decrease in the population of the underclasses and the extraordinary burden they place on societies. The bottom is a drag on the rest so severe that most gorps of people in non-hostile climates cannot escape it.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-03 15:28:00 UTC

  • by Steve Pender What other good can exist than that which expands the only known

    by Steve Pender

    What other good can exist than that which expands the only known form of life that has power to delay/counteract entropic forces? Only intelligent life seems to be aware that life even exists.

    Some policies can be tough (require more steps) to demonstrate their higher survival value, but most don’t require being a rocket surgeon or a brain scientist. Island morality (whatever extends life on a deserted island for the most people for the long-term) looks to be a useful micropropertarian guide to develop macropropertarian policy.

    Example: 80 IQ mother of 5 can’t afford to feed her babies but wants another baby

    Dysgenic left argument typically assumes that further expansion of intelligent life in the universe isn’t necessary, that we can feed endlessly using extant food. It takes for granted a level of food/resource stability/surplus that it doesn’t contribute to.

    Eugenic right wants symbiosis, mutually beneficial trade. What do we get for feeding someone who does not contribute to our global “island’s” resource surplus? A big nothing burger for ourselves.

    We can also point to traditions that increased the survival of the people who followed them, and at least have data points that show that an anticipated good has indeed been a past outcome for a disputed policy.

    We can’t point to any cultures that normalized children being sexualized at a very early age, or encouraged to be gay, or transgender, for instance, and showing positive results. We can’t point to *any* cultures that ever existed doing so, so on that policy, we have a whole world of cultures who were, in practice, uniformly against such policies, that continue to expand in the absence of that desired policy.

    We can’t point to any culture that disarmed the bulk of their population, and successfully expanded their *own* culture afterwards.

    Some policies have been “scientifically tested” and failed. Dysgenic leftists are therefore more like alchemists and conspiracy theorists who offer no evidence for their arguments.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-03 10:19:00 UTC

  • DRIVEN BY GENES, ELEPHANT OR RIDER? False assumption. Neither a top down or bott

    DRIVEN BY GENES, ELEPHANT OR RIDER?

    False assumption.

    Neither a top down or bottom up hierarchy.

    Instead the competition between impulses, intuition(searching), and reasoning (comparing), creates a MARKET for SUCCESS that is gradually captured by genes (impulses), intuition(memory), and reason(expertise).

    Intertemporal division of cognitive labor.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-01 12:27:00 UTC

  • Observation is limited to reduce our costs. Memory is limited to reduce our cost

    Observation is limited to reduce our costs.

    Memory is limited to reduce our costs, improve our speed of recall, and maximize our storage.

    Reconstruction of experience is limited to that which is necessary for action.

    Reconstruction requires stimuli necessary to access memory – it’s fragmentary.

    Free association (imagination) is useful in searching for opportunities thereby reducing our costs.

    To say that the observed world is a fiction is very hard to agree with since we can sense and perceive pretty much the full range of the universe where actions and reactions are possible for man. It would be a wasted cost (evolutionary drag) for us to sense and perceive that which we cannot act upon.

    To say our values and judgements of that world are INCONSISTENT is evidenced by the effects of different drugs and circumstances on the interpretation of every phenomenon. To say they are false is something else it is hard to agree with. Since we readily reinterpret those perceptions when returning to normal state.

    To say that our MODELS of reality are questionable, is highly variable by individual, and that’s demonstrable in all walks of life. For some people, modeling is exceptional. To say that our imaginations are fantasy, that’s true. To say that some people’s models are but fantasy that’s true.

    To say ‘consciousness’ is an illusion is something I have to deny for the simple reason that I have a multi-decade experience with frequently losing consciousness under the right (not rare) conditions. And each stage of ‘awareness’ is relatively obvious. There is a base ‘you’ which may or may not be in the lower or mid-brain, that awakens slowly as more and more information is available to it as you return to consciousness by full use of your senses and memories, generating some semblance of a model of yourself in the world. Now, that base consciousness doesn’t do much more than wait and feel and react, but in my experience, it is definitely ‘me’ with my memories and current context, continually altering ‘me’ through various stages, which I notice are less happy and more skeptical as each stage begins to fully participate. I assume that ‘me’ is ‘womb me’. So for me, this isn’t a theory. it’s an experience I go through with painful frequency. (I have asthma and allergies and when coughing and changing body position causes me to faint if I don’t manage it. It’s called “Syncope” )

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-30 14:21:00 UTC

  • “But everything in the universe fits together!!!”— If the universe has taught

    —“But everything in the universe fits together!!!”—

    If the universe has taught us anything, it’s that it operates by the most simple rules possible.

    My money currently is on something similar to E8 which consists of different states of excitability of ‘aether’: ‘some single unnamed field’, that I presently assume somehow constitutes spacetime itself. Not that I have any reason to think so. It’s just the only solution I know of that doesn’t depend on patterns of error that we humans seem to demonstrate in every era. Hopefully we will see some revisionary progress in our lifetimes.

    Everything fits together because the universe consist most likely of just one thing in different and somewhat equilibrial states of excitement, and therefore everything is constructed from a set of four forces with eight poles, and a just a whole lotta layers of puzzle pieces using that very simple set of ‘legos’.

    Which is what one would expect. Dead simple. I mean. Look at everything we can create with the number “1”. All of mathematics. Look at what we can create with the binary number system 1/0. Look at all the universe can create with the periodic table of the elements.

    I dunno. It all seems pretty simple to me. And the math says that there are zillions of other possible arrangements of those forces that would produce very different ‘constants’ and very different universes. Although I suspect the universe can’t ‘unwind’ (expand) in any other possible arrangements.

    All that is required to produce the universe using very, very, simple processes is an aether (field) that is compressed very tightly, uncompresses, and recompresses, and that there are only so many states that this aether can uncompress in and maybe just one that it compress in (gravity?).

    The common human error is that we have a very hard time with multiple dimensions of causality and equilibria. So that is where I put my money. On a very simple set of additional dimensions of causality. And there is something ‘wrong’ with how we are approaching the standard model. And I am not gonna, at this point in my life, going to switch from natural law, to mathematical physics. And there are plenty of smarter guys than I am already working on it (I assume.)

    Why it all works as it does just seems like it is going to take a lot of work to figure out if for no other reason, than running experiments that wind up space takes far more energy than we are able to manipulate. It’s one thing to accelerate particles, and another to bend space time. Although, I suspect, if we ever figure that out, it’s gonna be freaking awesome. I mean, electricity generation means winding and unwinding space time, right? Imagine we can wind and unwind other forces in the universe besides the EMR spectrum.

    Ohh, baby. 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-29 17:43:00 UTC

  • DEEP INFANTILISM: THAT THAT LIFE IS NOT COMPLICATED DUE TO CAUSAL DENSITY AND TH

    DEEP INFANTILISM: THAT THAT LIFE IS NOT COMPLICATED DUE TO CAUSAL DENSITY AND THEREFORE MANY DECISIONS ARE UNCLEAR COMPROMISES.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-21 07:26:00 UTC

  • test of parsimony: E8. purely geometric universe. boringly so. Superposition and

    test of parsimony: E8. purely geometric universe. boringly so. Superposition and entanglement obvious effects. possibility that we cannot conduct experiments of sufficient energy to answer the non-EMR relations for millennia. forward progress in physics limited until then

    Source date (UTC): 2017-06-16 15:14:00 UTC