One cannot reason without logic.
One cannot describe cause and consequence without narrative.
One cannot create record and transport knowledge without writing.
One cannot count and compare units without numbers,
One cannot compare spaces without measurement
One cannot cooperate without property
One cannot plan production, without prices.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-26 03:11:00 UTC
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/deletion_of_any_single_gene_provokes_mutations_elsewhere_in_the_genomeCausal Relationship Between Genes
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-14 03:12:00 UTC
PLATONISM sigh. There’s no ‘there’, ‘there’. Don’t confuse forecasting and remembering with existing. Existence is action in time, and the use of memory to experience the change. The rest of it’s just entertainment.
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-11 16:33:00 UTC
THE ‘SCIENCES’ UNDER NATURALISM AND ACTION
1) structure of reality
2) structure of calculation
3) structure of status
4) structure of reproduction
5) structure of production
6) structure of cooperation
No one will probably understand, but I think that is the set of necessary first principles.
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-11 05:26:00 UTC
Um. No.
EcoNOMICS is CAUSATION.
EconoMETRICS is CORRELATION.
Big… Really Big. Difference. OK?
You perform RESEARCH with Econometrics so that you can identify and test the INCENTIVES, using PRAXEOLOGY, of individuals who must perform the ACTIONS required to create causal relationships between states. Those tested incentives and their corresponding actions constitute the CAUSATION necessary to determine that you have indeed identified that thing we call ‘Economics’ – instead of some sort of chaotic periodicity without meaning.
Please. We get really tired of correcting you. It’s … painful.
Correlation is a form of obfuscation. If you cannot reduce an economic phenomenon to actions subject to praxeological testing, then you have not yet determined anything.
(SIgh)
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-25 15:41:00 UTC
Is there something to the fact that less intelligent people are more likely to consistently believe in magic (intentional causes)? That smart but ignorant people overestimate our capacity. And more intelligent people who are knowledgeable are afraid of HUBRIS?
I mean, does the ‘smart fraction’ theory simply mean that liberals are ignorant, and willfully ignorant, and libertarians are not? Or are liberals less intelligent (probably).
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-25 15:15:00 UTC
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/infectious-behaviorBRILLIANT: GETTING CLOSER : INFECTION AND THE MIND
The dopamine theory of evolution has always seemed the most plausible to me. Partly because our adaptation to Malaria seems somehow related to intelligence. Partly because the relationship between dopamine and histamine. And partly because of the relationship between allergies, depression and ARTISTIC (not autistic) behavior. And the relatively recent work that suggests that depression and schizophrenia are points on a spectrum disorder that seems to have some impact on weakening white matte, and inflammation that breaks the blood brain barrier.
There is a little part of me that thinks that the dopamine related process of adaptation was not quite as successful as other selection processes, and we’ve been asymmetrically able to repair it over time because of geography and population density.
Anyway, I’m hopeful that we will get very close to understanding just what it is that gives us this inflammation in our systems, and causes many of these autoimmune diseases that attack or as a byproduct, destroy our nervous systems.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-18 11:53:00 UTC
SCIENCE AS RELIGION : THE CIVIC SOCIETY : THE CONTRAST OF BUDDHISM
Science helps us understand causality:
(a) incentives.
(b) repetition.
(c) emergent behavior
(d) unintended consequences.
I complain about most mystical religions for the same reason. Buddhism is the least bad of the bad.
A friend just posted excerpts from the Dali Lama’s book. And while I find practitioners non-threatening, the argument troubles me. The argument that we should unite science and religion. Because the tradition in buddhist thought is that we explore the self. But, it is much less the process of exploration than it is the process of manufacture. The mind is emergent, not existent.
If we look at the incentives it is a less political religion, because it is a more personal philosophy. We tend to attribute to buddhism less harm, because it is a personal, rather than political philosophy: a reformation of hinduism from the political to the personal.
But there is no need to reconcile religion and science. We have. History as mythology. Heroes as gods. Politics as ritual. Science as personal philosophy. The participatory civil society so unique to the west. The civil society that our government, like the Chinese government, has actively destroyed by exporting responsibility for society to the bureaucracy.
Now, it may be that this pagan religion of history, science and reason is focused on the group rather than the self. And it may be that this pagan religion is non-platonic. And it may be that this pagan religion is less INTUITIVE, but equally EMERGENT, and produces superior EXTERNALITIES by focusing human thought on cooperation, rather than introspection.
It may be that this pagan religion is an aristocratic religion and that the buddhism, like most other religions, must be allegorical because it is not possible for all humans to grasp science and reason.
It may be that the aristocratic political, and the commoner-introspective, are compatible. But I do not think that the civil society can tolerate it. And I this one of the reasons that buddhism feels more acceptable today to us – we have surrendered the civil society to the state, and become subjects, and can NO LONGER FIND SATISFACTION by participating in the civil society.
Buddhism is escapism. Powerlessness. Acceptance of the world as it is. It masks the ease of intuitive internal obsession as the excuse not to engage in the difficulty of unintuitive, contemplation. It is so because the individual is indeed POWERLESS in the imperial bureaucratic society. Just as he is POWERFUL in the civil, participatory, society.
Western man seeks to transform the world to his will. Eastern to accept and conform to the world. This is the fundamental difference between our cultures. They submit. We participate.
The emergent mind in the practice of science produces the Flynn effect of making us all constantly smarter. And wealthier. And more healthy.
The reason we are in conflict is that we are both scientifically AND we have surrendered the CIVIL SOCIETY to the BUREAUCRATIC STATE, and as such we seek a new religion, because our real religion CIVIC PARTICIPATION has been taken from us, in order to create worship of the state.
The state did not kill christianity. Christianity was just ritual. The state killed our civic society.
If you grasp this the will understand the interrelatedness of our mental models of the world, and the trivial simplicity of the organized religions compared to the CIVIL SOCIETY of the west, which, operating as city states of extended families, created the high trust society, and all the prosperity that came from it.
– Curt Doolittle. Kiev.
NOTE
Allegorical language is the language of deception. It may be the language of self-deception. It may be the language of political deception. But it is the vehicle for deception. Science speaks in operational language so that we cannot so easily engage in deception under the guise of inarticulate language.
Operational language
Historical Language
Allegorical Langauge
Mystical Language
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-18 04:25:00 UTC
ASPIE-NESS
(biology)
“Some researchers have argued that ASDs are not primarily caused by genes, but also by environmental factors. The theory is that a person is born with a vulnerability to an ASD, but the ASD develops only if that person is exposed to a specific environmental trigger.”
Some suggested environmental triggers include:
1) the mother having a viral or bacterial infection during pregnancy.
There is evidence to support the first three factors listed above.
Women exposed to a rubella infection during pregnancy are estimated to have a 7% risk of giving birth to a child with an ASD.
(I had rubella and whooping cough before age 4.)
2) The mother smoking during pregnancy
Women who smoke daily throughout early pregnancy are 40% more likely to give birth to a child with an ASD.
(My mother smoked during pregnancy.)
3) The age of the father”
“New fathers who are older than 40 are estimated to be six times more likely to father a child with an ASD than fathers under 40. This is possibly because a man’s genetic material is more at risk of developing mutations as he gets older.”
(the behavior runs in my family, but my father was 25. All of my kids have the behavior too.)
( – from N.I.H.)
OTHERS
4) There is some relationship between gut bacteria and brain development that we don’t understand. Some of us seem to be deficient in it.
5) I am still suspicious of the salts of glutamate in western diets given that we know they’re neurotoxic.
OBSERVATION
6) It is absolutely CRIMINAL to put girls and boys in the same classrooms at the same age and expect the same behavior and it causes damage to male brain development.
REFERENCES
The article summary below can be translated and interpreted as: it takes a lot longer to develop a male brain, possibly because in-utero male development is achieved by delaying or impeding the development of amygdalar and hippocampal regions. Over the first few years of life this delta is seen in female early maturity and male later maturity. IN this sense, the construction of ‘male’, which is what ‘aspieness’ is an exaggeration of, is accomplished not by DIFFERENT structures, but by the emergent difference of a brain the develops at a different STAGE in development.
1) “Knowledge of amygdalar and hippocampal development as they pertain to sex differences and laterality would help to understand not only brain development but also the relationship between brain volume and brain functions. However, few studies investigated development of these two regions, especially during infancy. The purpose of this study was to examine typical volumetric trajectories of amygdala and hippocampus from infancy to early adulthood by predicting sexual dimorphism and laterality. We performed a cross-sectional morphometric MRI study of amygdalar and hippocampal growth from 1 month to 25 years old, using 109 healthy individuals. The findings indicated significant non-linear age-related volume changes, especially during the first few years of life, in both the amygdala and hippocampus regardless of sex. The peak ages of amygdalar and hippocampal volumes came at the timing of preadolescence (9–11 years old). The female amygdala reached its peak age about one year and a half earlier than the male amygdala did. In addition, its rate of growth change decreased earlier in the females. Furthermore, both females and males displayed rightward laterality in the hippocampus, but only the males in the amygdala. The robust growth of the amygdala and hippocampus during infancy highlight the importance of this period for neural and functional development. The sex differences and laterality during development of these two regions suggest that sex-related factors such as sex hormones and functional laterality might affect brain development.”
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-17 09:50:00 UTC
CAUSAL AXIS OF MORAL BIASES
(update)
This weekend I spent working on the connection between COOPERATION and morality. Now I have to tie cooperation to REPRODUCTION and reproduction to morality. This really is pretty simple. It’s there between Boehm, Ridley and Haidt. Once I do that I have the full chain from memory, to thought, to reproduction, to cooperation, to extended cooperation, which yields the axial dimensions of ‘calculation’ and ‘reproduction’ and ‘cooperation’ and ‘population’. With those axis, I can demonstrate most (all) of human moral behavior.
I actually get pretty bored with just copying down citations. I know that’s good academic practice and labor, but it’s justificationism to me. Either something has explanatory power or not. Whether it’s justified isn’t something that usually troubles me. 🙂 A descriptive ethic does not need much justification. It’s purely explanatory. A prescriptive (normative) ethic, requires justification.
Not sure if many people get what that means. But it doesn’t say much for the chance we’d ever come up with a prescriptive set of ethics that wasn’t nonsense. 🙂
Although only my fellow critical rationalists will really grasp that.
My objective here, will be to articulate moral biases the way that we articulate cognitive biases. I think, if I can reduce all of the moral biases, via Haidt, to just that, it’ becomes pretty easy to articulate them. And if it’s easy to articulate them, and in turn, show that they are claims against property, then it will mean that I have converted all moral discourse into propertarian language.
And I am pretty sure then, that I can prove, that most political language is an attempt to use obscurantism to steal.
And that’s pretty interesting.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-14 11:46:00 UTC