On Ego and Roles (Thoughts)

When I am working and ask if I can help and the customer responds automatically with "No, I'm fine." When really what they want is for someone to help them find the thing they are looking for but they don't want anyone to think that they are helpless, weak, or can't find it on their own. Inevitably, within a few seconds, they raise my attention with, "Actually, where is the so and so?" 

Sometimes I smile when I filled with a sense of ego. When I accomplish something difficult or figure something out that is meaningful, or when someone says that I did a good job. I am consumed by a sense of pride and confidence. I smile and look inward to congratulate myself. "What a good job I have done!" "They like me!" Then I am struck by another thought and I smile to myself and I accept my pride and release the feeling of ego and move on with life. If I allow myself to live in the past accomplishments I will have a harder time recognizing the current experience and become distracted from those around me who rely on my judgment and expertise. If I forget those around me in pursuit of prolonging my sense of self-worth then I forget to treat people as I would prefer to be treated. I prefer to those around me to acknowledge my existence and be present around me. I want to be a part of their world, not a ghost adjacent. 

My longing to be perfect is a reflection of my dysfunctional ego. An ego that will not be satisfied with anything less than perfection creates an endless cycle of failure. Instead of being satisfied with improvement with an upward trajectory, an inflated ego demands a level of expertise that is only afforded to those that are practiced, educated, and experienced, and only to varying degrees regardless of said experience. 

I get nervous before I stream myself live, offer my opinions to superiors, or try to impress loved ones. I want to control the perception of others in a way that makes me think that they think that I am awesome. That I am wise, courageous, strong, funny, healthy, sexy, and all other archetypes of awesomeness. When I am nervous I forget to be in the moment and I forget to focus on the task at hand. In the back of my mind, I am imagining those that are watching me and attempting to will them into seeing me in a positive light. 

This is illogical for many reasons. Firstly, I am incapable of accurately predicting the thoughts of others. Secondly, I have no control over and shouldn't require control over the thoughts of others. Thirdly, I have to accept that not all people will like me, hate me, love me, think about me, forget me, know me and in fact, most people will never think about me at all. Even those who have met me will rarely think of me twice. And my best friends, family members, and lovers will only think of me occasionally and with only a small fragment of an accurate impression of myself. 

My ego allows me to spite others for not caring enough about me. When I choose not to call a friend and use the excuse that they haven't called me in "who knows how long" or when I say to myself, "if they wanted to talk to me they would call me." My ego tells me that in order to be my friend you have to put in the same amount of effort I put in so when my friends don't put in the effort it is simply a reflection of my effort. My ego tells me that if I text them first then I am the weak one. 

My ego makes me want to show how amazing I am by working harder than anyone else, even though I am lazier than I could be, waste plenty of time, and only marginally work toward bettering myself. When I judge others as being lazy because they don't answer a phone I don't want to answer. When I look around at everyone and think "these lazy fucks!".    

I am full of shit. 

Any desire that is born simply for the need to impress others is shallow and elusive. To understand what others want one would have to constantly be probing and questioning those around them to gain insight into what might impress others. To make your parents proud you have to constantly be assessing their pride in your deeds, or lack of deeds. Maybe your parents are elusive as well. They disguise their pride and your ego becomes lost and confused. 

Roles: 

The ego is an expression of the collective idealism you create around the perception of yourself. The ideal self is postulated within the mind and over time it evolves. Whenever you contemplate yourself as being in alignment with your perceived ideal self your ego is satisfied. 

Be wary of the ideal self as this is generated with others in mind. We generate and develop our conception of ourselves by comparing ourselves to those around us. We impersonate, mimic, and react to the world and we are shaped by its actions. We are told who we are by witnessing the world. We know we are human because other humans look the same and identify as humans. Are parents and siblings become role models and we become like them. Adapting and surviving. But we are not them and so we take different paths and soon we learn of the paths of many others. Through stories, we learn about the lives of others and we incorporate those archetypes into our bank of lives to emulate. "I like that person. I don't like that person." We identify allies and enemies by taking sides in stories and justifying actions. We place ourselves into the story and take on the roles of its characters. We imagine living the lives of these characters and 

These stories are ancient but in the age of information, the stories are overwhelming. From before we are alive we are inflicted with stories. Many of them that are purposely unrealistic in a way that clouds the mind with counterfactuals and contrivances. (This has been an attempt to get the word contrivances into a sentence.)

We can't trust the news to tell us what is really going on. 

Politicians attempt to convince others that they are the hero in a virtue story. A story about how people should act. A story about how people should try to help others. A story about service and chastity. A story about trust and courage. These are just stories. They are not real. Politicians are professional administrators with jobs related to spending the public's money. They determine their own salaries, bonuses, and benefits. 

There are no roles. Your life is not a story. You are an ape on Earth, on your way to death while witnessing the deaths of those around you. You didn't choose to be born and you will most likely remain ignorant to anything deeply true in the universe. You will only tenuously grasp reality and mostly fumble along getting by on sheer momentum, determination, and luck.  

Luck is another word for ignorance. Luck is not knowing the causal link from an outcome to its salient cause. Luck is seeing a result without seeing the effort put into it. It is assigning positive or negative value based on its relative benefit to the individual. 

NOT Conscious

The hardest thing to do is convince someone you're not conscious. People see consciousness everywhere. They apply it to wind and rain. Mountains and rodents. We can personify anything including the universe and god and gods and vegetables. We tell stories of eggs that fall off of castles and bunnies that have tea parties. Everything is a metaphor for ourselves and we are everyone.

This is partly because humans aren't the only things that are conscious. That being said I also do not believe that rocks are conscious. The jury is out on plants and fungi which are mysteriously intelligent. I believe that consciousness exists on a spectrum but only after a few criteria are met. In order to be conscious one must be living. There has to be something more than mere mineral.

Maybe being in nature is soothing because it allows you to change the state of the consciousness that you are in. You can go to the desert to be truly alone. Alone with your thoughts. Alone but not alone in your environment. Out there somewhere there are creatures.

You can go to the forest and surround yourself with ancient trees and listen to the wind. I'd believe trees are conscious before I believed the wind is conscious.

I am not sure where the absolute line is for myself in regards to consciousness. I am not sure there needs to be a clear demarcation when it comes to consciousness. I do not think that people require a clearly formed understanding of consciousness to have empathy for other things, including plants and animals, and even inanimate things such as wind or mountains. Personifying things around us is very natural. When we are born it is very important that a child starts creating mental models of the people around them. By creating models the baby can start to predict what their parents might do and try to understand how to communicate with them. By modeling the environment and generating the concept of agency a baby can start to predict the interactions between agents and objects. A baby immediately starts to differentiate between the significant agents around them and the relatively predictable objects such as tables and binkys.

Agents are party identified by their ability to create change either in their physical location or by changing the physical location of something else. When a person picks up a glass of water they are changing the physical location of the glass and the water and now can be identified as an agent. A mover of things. An actor. Agents act upon other things and cause change to occur.  The day that the glass picks up the person then we might call the glass an agent and suspect that it is conscious.

A trait that should be looked for when determining if an entity is conscious or not is to ask, "is the entity capable of agency?". Can it make alterations to its environment? Nearly all animals are agents in that they act upon the world and cause change. The wind does this so then why wouldn't a gust of wind be considered an agent?

Maybe agency is not enough to call something conscious? Maybe it is and maybe by a very loose definition, the wind could be considered an agent in a non-personified way. Maybe the only concepts we have about agency come from a personal and human perspective. If so then the only model we have of agency is of humans, first by observing parents and then by observing the self. We then apply this concept to other things even if it doesn't apply or is only slightly accurate.

Maybe the wind isn't an agent and it is certainly not conscious because my concept of consciousness is rooted in the belief that consciousness emerges from organized biological material such as neurons, muscles, blood, and hormones. Maybe neurons are the most important element in the formation of consciousness but I'm not sure that that is the case.

Maybe each cell is conscious and with complex networks of communication among cells, consciousness is at the apex of that increase in complexity. As an organism evolves toward more complex forms of assembly and more specialization and diversification of cell types along with the bilingual nature that must occur when cells communicate with necessary bacteria and other microbiomes.

In fact, there are more bacterial cells in your body than human cells. There are roughly 40 trillion bacterial cells in your body and only 30 trillion human cells."
-https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/gut-microbiome-and-health

Maybe the communication network of biological structures is necessary for consciousness. It is the unintended output of trillions of cells and trillions of bacteria trying to communicate with each other. In order to maintain the megastructure that is the human body creates.

Maybe the difference in humans is that the cells and bacteria in humans have a far more efficient way of communicating than other creatures. Encoded in our DNA and in the DNA of the bacteria there exists a unique instruction or schematic that fundamentally alters the megastructure and allows for an ultra-efficient communication system. One that is so efficient that it produces more than required to survive. Maybe the extra energy that is conserved from this efficiency can be utilized to improve the structure. It can be diverted to the brain and to creating systems that lead to successful gene transfer and multiplication.

Is it the cell's job to multiply? Is the whole system a mechanism of experimentation? Is resource allocation something that can be applied to the body? Or is it just a metaphor taken from the financial world?

Are bacteria small enough that they perceive cells and other microscopic biological structures in an unrelatable way?

Or is consciousness just an epiphenomenon? Just a ghost in the machine? An inert, neutral, unaffecting, wisp of entropy? The waste product of an overactive mind.

Of course, it is another example of the personification of entities that I relate the biological structures to the architectural and electrical systems I see in my life. The macro-environment that I occupy is a system that I have an elaborate model that is generalizable to other systems. I have a more or less organized set of beliefs about what a social system looks like so I can apply those interactions to the complex interactions occurring inside of the body. The idea that it is social is one of personification. Another act of projecting my own perspective onto something else.

While cells are molecular machines and do use molecules to communicate there is no evidence that they communicate in a similar way to what humans do. Proteins do not have mouths, lungs, or lips to make sounds and they do not have legs or arms to gesticulate their thoughts.

The cause and effects chains are highly complex in biological structures.

But what about plants?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvBlSFVmoaw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpwW9Lw2Ku4

Plants have very similar cellular structures to humans. The structures of plants are also complex and even if there are no neurons in plants there are definitely communication systems.

Is consciousness a form of communication? If it is then it isn't necessary to have neurons to communicate and therefore it isn't necessary for consciousness. But is it sufficient to have consciousness?

Is all communication a form of consciousness?

What is communication? Communication is the output of information that is then interpreted and comprehended by an input location. Things that communicate are required to be able to take in information and to output information.

If consciousness requires communication then that would mean that the wind is not conscious because any message interpreted by a human would never be falsifiable. There is no way to prove that the output information was comprehended accurately. This is why God does not exist as anyone claiming to be in communication with God can not be falsified. It may be true but by that standard, anything may be true. If the goal is to arrive at the truth then one must be able to rule out impossibilities.

So...

How would a person convince another person they were not conscious? Other than passing out.

Two men enter a room and sit down opposite to each other. The room is well lit but not too bright. There is a table in between the men and there is a small spread of cheese snacks. Each man has their own water bottle and one man's job is to convince the other man that they are not conscious.

The second the other man starts to talk the first man will automatically assume they are conscious. The second the other man reaches for food the first man will assume he is conscious. He will assume that the similarity in physical appearance would necessitate a similarity in mental capacities. As they are both human the first man will project his humanity onto the second man who is not doing a good job of convincing the first man that he is not conscious.

I suppose the second man could never communicate with the first man. Even if the first man yells at him. By never acknowledging them and not moving at all then the person would have little to base their assumptions about the man. At some point, a real human would become fatigued with time and at some point would falter which would give away information to the first man who would start to assume the second man is in fact a person.

This dumb scenario illustrates how agency is connected to consciousness. Out notion that consciousness exists is linked to the ability to act.

If this is true then a brain in a vat can not be conscious. I am not sure this is true. Is a brain in a vat able to make changes to its own brain? Can thoughts cause a change in neural structures? If so then a brain is capable of engaging in the only actions it can. Thought. If it can think about its own existence in an accurate enough way then maybe it can adapt to its surroundings. If a scientist were to measure the brain every day and track its changes and determine that the changes were not random but were in some way positively adaptative then the scientist could say that the brain in the vat is potentially conscious. Because it cannot communicate to the outside world it can not be fully determined whether it was conscious or not.

I think that for there to be certainty regarding the assignment of consciousness to an entity the entity has to be able to communicate with the outside world. This may be false but I'm not sure how else one would ascribe consciousness to something else.

One of the primary ways that consciousness is accepted is by the simple declaration of its existence from an individual. People say they are conscious but is that evidence? I am not sure it is. If just exclaiming things was proof then the justice system would be very easy to administrate.

How would I prove that you were conscious? How would you prove you were conscious?

Do we know of consciousness only by appealing to the similarities in descriptions of subjective experiences? As in it is only through communicating concepts that are comprehended by others does one identify the nature of consciousness. Therefore consciousness only exists with some form of communication. Whether it is internal communication or external communication there has to be some form of information transfer in order to assign consciousness.

This means that the brain in the vat may be conscious as it is possible to be internally communicative and not externally but it isn't possible to communicate your own internal experiences without externally communicating. The brain in the vat needs to come up with a way to project thoughts outward.

What about the role of intention in consciousness? Do we assume we are conscious because we have intentions that we work toward making happen? Maybe we misattribute success to our intentions when it is actually a coincidence and we are not in control of ourselves at all and any success is just a necessary outcome of determined pre-causes.

I would imagine that most people do not go around contemplating the nature of consciousness and this article would be of no value to them. Its value is not important anyway as this article is an exercise in thinking about a topic.

Brief Thoughts on the Ontological Argument

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The ontological argument...

Anselm defined God as "a being that which no greater can be conceived", and argued that this being must exist in the mind, even in the mind of the person who denies the existence of God. He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality because if it exists only in the mind, then an even greater being must be possible—one which exists both in the mind and in reality. Therefore, this greatest possible being must exist in reality. 

---- From Wikipedia

The first issue I have with this argument is the use of the word "being". Is a being a conscious creature? Is a being a sentient thing? Is a being a type of person? Is a being an alien? Anyway...

The use of the term "greater" is an issue as well. The term greater makes no sense by itself. Greater than what? Greater just means bigger or better or more, which all require context. There has to be a standard to refer to. Maybe Anselm created this context in his works and defined a standard "being" in which to compare his notion of a greater being and then went so far as to infinitely extend the idea until he just ended with the word God. As in the same God that is the vague term used to describe any unknown or unknowable thing personified as an agent. 

Essentially the argument is...

If I can think about something it can exist outside the mind if I  just ad the word "better" to it. With the word better I can argue that it is better to exist outside the mind and therefore if a thing I think about is the best of its category (for example a "being") then it must exist because it would be better to have that thing in existence outside the mind than limited to just inside the mind. 

This argument is shit. It allows for existence to arise from thoughts alone and for anything thought of to exist in reality. 

Example: If I can think of the best guitar and it exists in my brain then the best guitar must exist in reality because the best guitar is only made the best by existing outside the brain. Because it is better to exist then to simply be imagined. But the concept of better and the concept of existence have little to do with each other. 

Something can exist without being better than anything else. Being better only occurs when comparing two things and not all things require comparison to understand. It can simply have a purpose or a relationship with other things or it might be something that simply exists with no discernable interaction with anything you understand. Maybe you see a cloud a few miles away. It makes no difference to you in any practical way but you see it and it exists. It is not better or worse than anything. It's just a noteworthy cloud. 

Any argument that puts human consciousness as the basis for reality seems needlessly vain. The idea that nothing would exist without humans is ridiculously presumptuous because it presumes that before humans existed there was nothing. This is stupid. Before you existed plenty of things existed. Unless you don't believe that things exist outside of your mind. If you think that the only existence that exists is the existence of thoughts and that you have a singular existential experience and that is what matters seems too insular. The history of life is the history of interaction. From when single cells began to combine with each other all biology has been an interconnected network of communication, metabolism, and other ecological concepts. To distill all of existence to what exists in human minds seems limited. 

Humans attempt to describe reality based on their sensory and communicative capabilities. Because humans observe reality and have the ability to see themselves as a part of that reality they can describe themselves in the same way they describe other things. Just because you exist and your brain exists doesn't mean that something you thought of exists outside your synapses. I would imagine that it would be easier to think of things that don't exist rather than think of things that do exist. Even if you had a complete list of things that actually exist in the universe you could still think of combinations or exaggerations of those things that would exponentially increase the things you can think about. Most of those things would not exist. 

For example: If I know of all the animals that exist I can imagine each of those animals with a chair growing out of their back and I just doubled the amount of bullshit in my head but that doesn't mean that each animal exists with a chair growing out of its back in reality. It makes no sense. Being able to think about something or imagine something has almost no relation to what actually exists in the world. 

It seems like ontological arguments are actually just arguments designed to satisfy an already-held view. It puts too much value on cognitive capacities and conjures up reality out of thin air which is not scientific or rational. If one wants to justify their irrational beliefs one can use the ontological argument.

I'm reminded of the argument, "I think, therefore I am." The problem with this is that in isolation you can't really determine that you exist scientifically. There is nothing to test against. You need others to verify a hypothesis and engaging in experiments. I think that if others think you exist and you can interact with external objects then you probably exist. Or at least exist in some context.

The concept of God exists but that doesn't mean that there is a perfect "being" running around doing things.  

Philosophical Zombies? (On Consciousness and Concepts)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsYUWtLQBS0

Zombies aren't real so any reference to them as a legitimate metaphor for a being that acts like a human but has no internal conscious experience is nonsensical. The reason this metaphor is confusing and mostly useless is two-fold.

The first issue is the use of the term "zombie". Zombies are not real and appealing to them as a way to create clarity is a contradiction. It's like trying to understand horses by appealing to unicorns. Unicorns do not have a consistent definition and any definition must contain some amount of supernatural or unreal elements. Because unicorns are not real one can ascribe any characteristic they would like. This makes the concept of "unicorn" open-ended and in no way analogous to anything real, like a real horse. Using something fake to understand something real seems counterproductive.

The concept of "zombie" is similarly vague and inconsistent as the term "unicorn". Some definitions have zombies being able to do different things in different ways. Some zombies can run and some can solve simple problems. Sometimes there are zombie animals. All zombies represent the animal instinct of feeding and violence. All zombies represent something to be feared and one is always justified in destroying them. Zombies tend to represent the evil lurking inside of humanity and in my estimation, they do not offer a useful analogy to anything resembling the average person and offer nothing in relation to understanding consciousness.

The Second thing:

Now, when someone like David Chalmers uses the term "philosophical zombies" they are attempting to offer a juxtaposition between the human that has subjective experiences and the human that does not have subjective experiences. This type of "zombie" is not evil, necessarily, or violent or stupid but is, on its face, indistinguishable to a normal person. If you interact with one of these "zombies" you would say that they were conscious and they would say that they had thoughts and feelings but they would be lying or simply saying things that they think you want to hear. A robot seems like a more obvious metaphor in that we understand that a robot can do things just based on response algorithms as opposed to interacting with its own internal decision-making process, where they debate against themself the options and consequences of actions like people seem to do.

I think that it is actually impossible to imagine and understand something that has all of the same properties and characteristics as a human except this one aspect, subjective experience. It is similar to having a substantive understanding of the concept of nothing or infinity. While we can use these terms to express specific concepts in math or as metaphors for a lack of understanding it is impossible to have a realistic representation in your mind of these terms. When you think about what the term "nothing" means you might think of blackness or the vacuum of space of the number zero or the stillness that comes from meditation or ultimate quietness but none of those things you are thinking about are actually nothing. "Nothing" does not contain any concepts, words, thoughts, analogies, substances or thoughts. Actual nothingness is not a concept that contains anything and we lack the capability of understanding it fully. It is the same with the term infinity and in the concept of the philosophical zombie.

Any contemplation of an entity that acts exactly like a person but somehow isn't a person is a contradiction of how we identify people. We only need the term "subjective experience" because we communicate with others. If a person were never to interact with others then the concept of subjective experience would not have any use and the person would never need to contemplate the concept. The person might have consciousness but the identification of these things would be useless and could never be proven. If the person looked inward and was able to communicate to themself that they were conscious they would have no way to test this theory. Also, the idea that a person would spontaneously come up with language or abstract theories without interaction with others is nonsensical. Some thought experiments are so unrealistic they are actually a waste of time.

On consciousness:

If consciousness is derived from physical processes then there is no reason to hold it as a human-only phenomenon. If consciousness is somehow separate from physical processes then one can say anything they want about it and it would never be provable or disprovable. If something can not be scientifically examined then there is no reason to apply scientific standards. If consciousness is emergent from physical networks or is fundamental within physics then there is no reason to think that robots or zombies couldn't be conscious. Just because we don't have a direct physical explanation of consciousness at the moment doesn't mean that consciousness is something metaphysically special.


So what would it be like to be a zombie or a philosophical zombie? This is similar to contemplating what it is like to be a bat or anything other than a human. Just because we can come up with the sentence doesn't mean it is meaningful. Thinking that it is "like" something to be some other entity puts a lot of value in the human imagination. Human creativity and imagination is an amazing tool but it is not an all-knowing power and is rarely accurate scientifically. It is certainly fun and can help to push past certain obstacles of understanding but it isn't a form of divinity that supersede or replace scientific rigor and logic. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean anything important. The human mind can combine and exaggerate concepts to no end but none of these imaginings should be used as doctrine. Just because I have a dream about something doesn't mean I should act on that imagining.

I'm not sure it "is like" something to be me. My experience of myself is not reducible to a likeness or analogy. If someone were to ask me "what is it like to be you," I could try to answer in many ways. I could say, "well it is the same as anyone else. I wake up. I eat. I sleep. I have thoughts and feelings. I get anxious and experience happiness at times," but is this what it's "like" to be myself or is it just some language that I think the other person might relate to so that I don't seem like a robot or psycho to them? Any attempt to reduce the human experience to what it is "like" to be them is necessarily lacking in detail. Also, all this is "likeness" talk is dependant on language and language may not be capable of describing an accurate model of experience and so there will always be a lack of understanding as we try to map non-linguistic information (feelings) onto language.

This is not to say that language is not useful or helpful it just isn't the entire story when it comes to human experience and consciousness. Consciousness and language are inexorably linked in our communication of consciousness. Our ability to communicate allows for concepts in general and the concept of consciousness seems to be limited by our ability to use communication tools. Language is just one way to communicate so maybe what it is like to be something is better communicated by some other artform. Maybe what it is like to be someone would be communicated better by creating a multimedia artwork that involves all the senses including emotional senses induced by drugs. Maybe what it's like to a bat is closer to what it's like to be on cocaine all the time. I'm not sure how to test this theory.



Also, I'm not sure if consciousness is the only germane factor in ethical considerations. A person in a coma still retains some ethical considerations even if they may never get out of their coma. Using the desire to understand consciousness as justification for ethics doesn't seem to be a sufficient reason. Justice isn't an entirely logical endeavor and relies on emotional intuitions many times. Our sense of justice is often invoked by feelings.



Top-down versus bottom-up.

 I like bottom-up explanations so, to me, looking at consciousness as a top-down phenomenon is difficult to understand. You have to take consciousness as given and I don't know why one would do that. We think that consciousness is a certainty but if the history of science shows us anything it is that skepticism is more useful than certainty. Taking consciousness as a given allows one to move past the problem of what creates it and allows one to think of what the effects of consciousness are. This is useful to solve other problems but taking consciousness for granted is not a way to understand what consciousness is on a fundamental level. It is the same as quantum physics. Taking quantum physics for granted allows people to understand its consequences but it doesn't lead any to understand what underlies its existence.

An Educational Miss

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If kids can vote at 18 and everyone thinks they should vote then why is there essentially no formal education related to political philosophy? They should also be practiced in evaluating candidates and understanding the process and its consequences.

There seems to be a gap between whose role it is to teach life skills and job skills. Formal education was originally a supplemental experience that would prepare one with a means to know how to do something valuable. Something that would ensure they get a skill-based job. I'm sure that it all originated with apprenticeships and other on the job training and then, in time, turned into more and more of an institutionally based endeavor. Education, it seems, has become bastardized by laziness, bureaucracy,  and politics. (Yet another example of how the government corrupts a good idea.)

More and more people started sending their children to school. This allowed them to get a head start on reading, writing, and math, which was becoming more and more of a necessity in industrialized nations. As occupations went away from farming, parents spent less and less time at home and needed somewhere for their children to be during the day. Soon, and with the help of the efficiency born of the factory, schools started taking up more and more of the role that parents once held.

Life skills were traditionally taught by parents by both modeling and direct teaching. Parents would teach their children about household duties, sex, religion, politics, and all the things that are involved in navigating once's culture. It was the role of the parent to truly prepare their children for the outside world and it was the role of the school to prepare their mind for fundamental cognitive abilities that would become financially viable.

Throughout much of American history, mothers stayed home and took care of household maintenance and fathers went off to work somewhere for most of the day. As women started joining the workforce and the government decreased the value of money through inflation in an effort to increase tax revenue children became more and more neglected. Now we have a situation where the vast majority of citizens live in the working class, which means that they typically need a two household income in order to pay bills. This means that there is less time to teach their children life skills and with schools teaching nearly everything under the sun, parents don't know what their children are missing. Also, because they were never formally taught modern life skills they assume that their children will learn as they did, just by doing it.

I think that we would all be better off defining the roles of both parents and educational systems. I think that the government's "free" schools should either provide life skills or not. If they are going to take on the role of educating the youth to create effective, successful and productive adults then they should teach the things necessary to accomplish this. This includes teaching skills such as sex education, finances, political philosophy, cooking, health, computers, typing, etc. If this was the case then this would be on the top of the goals list of teaching children job skills as well, such as math, science, geography, English and the like. This is a lot of work for the government and it seems that they are already in charge of much of this and yet don't seem to have a clear goal in mind. If you are going to take on the task of educating the future entirely then you should do it well.

If the government is not the right choice for the job of educating children in life skills then it would fall to either the parents or a private agency such as a private school. The nuclear family seems to be falling apart and one thing that is helpful about the nuclear family is it relieves the parents of some of the burden and allows for a more stable, nurturing and ultimately healthy environment for the development of a child's capacities. As single-parent households rise parents are more stressed, less attentive and more absent in their children's lives, leaving less room to teach life skills. Also, because the parent is struggling it does not provide a hopeful example for the child either. Why would a child listen to the advice of someone who is barely making it? They won't. They will go somewhere else.

Where do children go to learn life skills? Now, it's the internet. If they want to learn about sex they look it up online. Not just porn but articles about how to be in relationships. Or they just watch porn. Only the more intelligent look deeply into their own potential and seek out experts. Many just do as others do and will end up just like their parents even though they despise them. They look to celebrities and emulate their personalities in a naive attempt to become someone important instead of becoming themselves.

The world is becoming more and more complicated and young people have more possibilities ahead of them than ever. Even if parents take the time to teach their children they are most likely unaware of the current considerations that young people should be made aware of. Every year there are new technologies, industries, laws, and cultural mores that parents can't keep up with and therefore cannot educate their children in a way that will be relevant for them in the future. The government takes so long to update their curriculum and continually changes their standards that they cannot educate the youth in a way that prepares them for our complex and rapidly changing world. It makes sense that so many young adults (and many not so young adults) find themselves scrambling to understand the world that they are thrust into when they turn 18.

Waiting for people to "figure it out" on their own is terribly inefficient and wastes so much potential. Well before someone graduates, they should be immersed in the real economic world. Diverse and extensive job experiences before the age of 18 would help transition the young into the world that they are already a part of but are separated from partly out of necessity and partly out of fear. People learn from doing and so if you want people to understand the world they must experience it. For children, this is facilitated by adults and for teens, mentors can help transition them into the world. If parents don't take the time to mentor and educate their children then there will exist a gap between the real world and the insulated world of children. On the other hand, some children are thrust into the real world too early and are forced to engage in adult activities before they understand them.

Maybe companies like Youtube, Kahn Academy, Udemy and others will bridge the gap that exists but children don't know what they don't know and if they don't actively engage in educating themselves then they will go through the growing pains that most of us deal with when we have to fend for ourselves. While people make due and some will be very successful and some will fail miserably with the majority somewhere in between the world could be improved by taking education more seriously, not for the sake of the state but for the sake of humanity and freedom.

Pretending Entertainment

I used to work for a large video game store. One where you might Stop to buy Games. I mostly sold bullshit. Grown men coming up and saying "I wanna pretend I'm driving a car. Is there a game for that?" Pretending and having imaginary friends was once relegated to children but now, it seems, that children do not grow up. Looking for any excuse to feel accomplishment in virtual worlds to distract from the reality of a failure to accomplish personal goals is the purview of men who've been neglected by their parents and devalued by society. Getting self-esteem from simulated successes creates a fog of delusion that, if cleared away, reveals an inflated ego ready to burst. 

Finding camaraderie in a chat box and slaying imaginary enemies feels good but when the electricity turns off and the mind is still what is left?

I am not immune to such imaginings but I am skeptical of my attachment to the medium. As I have aged I find myself getting less and less fulfillment out of video games. At times in my life I would spend 2-4 hours a day, 7 days a week immersed in sculpting the imaginary life of a digital avatar but lately, I find that this pursuit has much less appeal. While, even now, I spend some time each week playing Dark Souls 3 or some other engrossing game, it is significantly less than in the past.  I'm finding now that if I spend more then a few hours a week playing a game I feel guilty.

I do watch television a lot but there seems to be a disconnect between an interactive medium and the one-sided nature of non-interactive art forms such as film and TV. When you are a passive observer it is harder to get wrapped up in the accomplishments of others. These forms rely on the empathy of the viewer to relate with the emotion on the screen where video games place you in an active role giving you a sense of control and the ability to manipulate outcomes and solve problems.

As much as I feel that video games can be a huge distraction, it is certainly not the worst activity and I shouldn't give myself too hard of a time about something that I get enjoyment out of and a sense of identity to some degree. Being a "gamer" isn't a bad thing but for some reason, I am not committed to the "cause", whatever that means. With such an easy life and so much abundant wealth, it is no wonder that so many are able to have such enticing and satisfying experiences in the safety of their own homes. No longer does one need to venture out into the world for glory and heroics. They can do it from their couch.

The Walking Dead: Ranting (Spoilers)

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I stopped watching The Walking Dead before the last couple of episodes of season 6. I became bored, apathetic and uninterested so I stopped watching. Recently the entire show through season 8 is on Netflix and I decided to re-watch it and see how far I get this time.

After watching it again I both appreciate it more and hate it more. And I realized that I actually love to hate it. I like the way that it engages my mind in critical thinking and scrutiny over how these people deal with their circumstances.

The following should clarify my hatred for this show but it also reveals my love.


SPEARS!

Why the fuck don't they utilize spears? Or at least more swords, machetes, and other less loud options? If the walkers smell then how were they able to hide under the busses in season two when all the herd walks by? It doesn't make sense that they can only smell themselves which is why putting their stench on you makes you invisible to them. If sounds attract walkers then why you would ever just start shooting them? Just walk the fuck away or around them as they are slow as fuck. They can not run so if you go at a steady jogging pace you should be fairly safe. Or you could quickly kill them by thrusting a sharp spear into their heads one at a time.

It is not hard to learn how to use a spear and a sword for simple purposes and is manageable by even the simpler humans. But no, they go off and start shooting just for fun, wasting precious bullets. I imagine that in a world where the majority of the population is no longer capable of owning property that with a moderate amount of searching you could find all the melee weapons imaginable. Even if 10% of the population has a decent melee weapon in their house and most of the houses are already raided you would find something longer than a knife to kill the easily killed walkers.

Also, there are dozens and dozens of stores and building with ready-made melee weapons or opportunities to fashion makeshift weapons with ease. Also, why don't they manufacture body protection for bites? A little armor for the arms and neck and such would ensure less of a chance for a fatal encounter with a walker.  This can not be that hard to come up with on the fly. A thick enough leather coat would at least help the situation but during all their downtime and salvaging runs they can't figure this out?

What about trenches? Why not reinforce an area by manipulating the environment to your advantage? Such as digging fucking trenches for the walkers to fall into. Or make the trenches wide enough and fill it partially with water. Or take down trees around the fort and lay them down as obstacles.

What about motherfucking distractions? They learn nearly immediately that walkers are attracted by noise so why not always carry about little noise making devices? Kids toys, electronics that still work, firecrackers would be the best or just use a fucking rock and hide. Walkers are really fucking stupid and if you could combine this tactic with getting their stench on you more regularly you would never have to deal with walkers.

Why not train everyone in your tribe to utilize all the weapons? And train them in basic medical and walker specific medical practices. And train them to avoid and defeat walkers.

How is it that after a month or two people would still be soft? After a month or two of being without a citie's transportation, communication, electrical and emergency infrastructure would render most people dead just from starvation so to have lived for that long subsisting off the leftovers and land and fighting walkers and dealing with desperate people and witnessing horrific deaths and transformations you would be either dead or hard as fuck. At least hard enough not to whimper, whine and cry when a walker came at you.

Carl died because be tried to use a knife instead of a fucking spear! Why get close when you have long sticks all around you to stab walkers with.

It is probably deliberate but there are nearly no cultural references about the past. People would talk more or less the same as they did and they would randomly bring up references and metaphors.

I realize that this show is a drama first and realistic last. It does a great job of creating suspense and drama and the action is a lot of fun. I just can't help myself from criticizing the logic and pragmatics. It reminds of Sons of Anarchy because it is a soap opera geared toward the male audience and it does a good job of getting you hooked on the characters, no matter how flawed and annoying they can be.  It is a fun exercise to think about what I might do in such situations and pretend that I might do well.

I decided to write a couple of fan fiction stories. Check out the links below and let me know what you think about them.

https://joesnotesblog.com/blog/2018/10/7/30-days-of-fiction-day-25

https://joesnotesblog.com/blog/30-days-of-fiction-day-26

Some Questions about the Justice System

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If someone kills my son by running them over and it would have been morally and legally justified to have shot them before they ran over my son then why can't I simply walk up to them anytime after they killed my son and shoot him in the head? Why can I shoot someone who breaks into my house tonight but I can't go to their house and kill them tomorrow? 

What changes between the initial interaction; for example, someone is in a shootout with the police and therefore the police officers are justified in killing the attacker and catching them later in a hotel where the person is taken into custody? Why not shoot them right there? 

Is it due to an uncertainty rule? Because at the moment you are certain who to fire at but in the future, you may not need to fire at them. The police, under the guidance of the rule of law, are instructed to inflict the minimum necessary force to enact peace. Also, they have an incentive to de-escalate any interaction. Any time someone is enforcing rules on another person there is a potential for reactive violence. By escalating an interaction an officer increases the likelihood that they will become injured or killed. 

Or is it due to a hierarchical rule? As in, the lower level enforcers are only allowed so much power. Whereas the real power to sentence is in the judge's hands. The elite group of, hopefully, intelligent people who have the power to kill. (If the state has a death sentence.)

I believe that in the past the rule of law was much less adhered to, not that it is overly adhered to today. Also, enforcers of the rules would have more leeway and flexibility to enforce and enact justice as they saw fit. They might just hang someone on the spot. Kill them without any words spoken. So long as the sentence was carried out it didn't matter so much how. 

Is it a way to appease the masses? By creating a large hierarchical structure that dictates procedures and rules the burden of power is diminished. Having judges, juries, and law enforcement agencies all involved with enacting justice any mistakes can be recognized and corrected as opposed to a dictatorship, where one person is in charge of all acts of justice and therefore is either allowed to continue their reign or they are ousted, one way or another.

If people are allowed to enact justice on their own like vigilantes and a mistake is made the person may never be found, which satisfies no one, or, even if they are caught, we may never know the truth as the other person is dead and can not defend themselves.

Back to uncertainty, if someone watches someone murdered there is a good chance that within a short period of time they might be able to recognize them as the attacker but the lesson from so many inaccurate eyewitness testimonies is that one can't always trust their own recollections. So the uncertainty principle should be accounted for in the personal case as well. 

So how can we determine certainty? What if you are certain that you know the killer's face so you find them and kill them just to find out that the person you killed is the twin of the actual killer. This is a rare case and one would have to be convinced that the killer had a twin and that is plausible that you killed the wrong one. In a normal case, we have evidence, argumentation, and consensus to take on the task of providing relative certainty.  

DNA and other forensic sciences have made a great deal of progress in the pursuit of certainty scientists are not perfect. Cameras and other recording devices have done some work here as well even though they can be doctored. Lawyers attempt to plead the case of each party and we trust reason through argumentation to win the day. We trust that judges know the law and will consider the case objectively, without prior judgments or prejudices. (Not perfect either.)

Are juries a good idea? If it is a truly random set of people who end up on a jury then the odds of getting someone with a below average IQ is very high. The odds that the jurors will not have some prejudice against the defendant or prosecutor is slim to none. Most people have a rudimentary understanding of the law at best. Many people have a hard time paying attention. People are vindictive, jealous, overly agreeable, easily confused and distracted by sex. But when a jury convicts someone we can blame them and since they all agreed there is a consensus. They represent the public and act as a kind of intellectual microcosm of the society's "will".

One solution is to mix the jury concept with the judge concept and create a random selection of three judges to oversee all cases above a certain level. Less significant cases would be overseen by a single judge where appeals would allow for second opinions and oversight. In more significant cases, especially violent ones, the three-judge panel would decide the case and appeals would be taken straight to the federal level where three judges would oversee the appeal. For this system to work there would have to be either more judges, less litigation, or a combination of both. 

*

The system can't be perfect but how do we minimize its flaws?

How many people are we willing to wrongfully punish and how many people will we let go who should be punished? How many people are rightfully accused and rightfully punished? How many are rightfully accused but wrongfully punished? The justice system is a reflection of society's attempts to answer these questions. Throw in some corruption, ignorance, and prejudice and you have the idiosyncratic character of a society's justice system. 

The American system seems to have become bloated and mismanaged and has created corruption of certain aspects of the justice system. Namely, too many laws creating too much wasted litigation and punishment. Crimes are invented and rarely discarded but when a law is discarded the real victims are those who were rightfully imprisoned at the time but who are now suffering the consequences of the punishment for a crime that is no longer deemed wrong.

Thoughts on Celebrities and Outrage

One reason there is so much outrage when celebrities, or famous people in general, are caught engaging in corrupt acts is due to the fact that people project their own sense of moral superiority and self-righteousness onto them. The regular, every day, media consumer thinks of themselves as a good person and so they look at celebrities and assume that the reason they are able to amass such wealth, attention, and power must be because celebrities are also good people.

"I'm good and I like this actor, so they must be good?" One might think. Or, "They are popular and successful. They must be good people."

Because they project themselves onto others when the other fails they see themselves as failing. They identified with the other long enough to feel empathy subconsciously for them. But no matter how much empathy they have for their failed celebrity they must distance themselves from them socially. They rebuke them and signal their allegiance to decency based on the current ethics they adhere to and make their position known to others so that they will not be found out to be just as weak, and corrupt as their favorite famous person.

The question to ask when a person is revealed to be an immoral person, after amassing so much of what we all covet, is how did others allow this to happen? Who supported this corrupt individual throughout their career? Should we blame it on all of the consumers that paid for their success or was it their friends, family members and coworkers that allowed them to flourish while inside they were a blight on decency and a disgrace to those that have the moral bravery to do the right thing?

Famous people should be scrutinized in the same manner as everyone else. We should remain objective about others and not make wild assumptions about who they are based on their appearances in popular media. Also, because politicians are famous people they should be scrutinized just like everybody else as well and laws should apply to all equally. It seems that the rich and powerful sometimes skirt the justice system creating another reason for people to see them as superior. This difference generates more jealousy, resentment, and outrage.

No one should be surprised that someone they don't know, at all, turns out to be a "bad person." There are a lot of "bad" people out there and in the case of politics, I can see why a bad person might be drawn to the power there or born into the corrupting nature of power.

Also, we tend to value money and we assume famous people have money. People wish they could be rich, famous and popular so they look at those who have accomplished such things as if they were them. They put themselves into the shoes of their favorite celebrities and imagine that they are them. They want to relate to and become friends with their celebrities. So, when they find out that their favorite famous person did something socially, legally or morally reprehensible they are taken aback because the venire of their idealism has been stripped away.

Maybe others wish they could be as free and powerful as celebrities and they both envy them and resent them and so they display confused and inconsistent stances on celebrity behavior.

Maybe people covet what celebrities have and so they jump on any opportunity to spite and shame them due to their own jealous nature.

Maybe public outrage is just another mechanism to feel included and socially accepted.

I'm not saying people shouldn't be outraged about immoral celebrities but I don't think they should be more outraged about them than anyone else. We should be outraged at anyone that commits terrible crimes or engages in immoral actions. Also, I don't think we should be surprised when someone we don't know is not the person we assumed they were. Maybe it is just easy to jump on the bandwagon of celebrity outrage because the subject of the outrage is well known. I think it important not to deify others and not to pay so much mind to things that have no real effect on you. There are enough things to worry about going on in my neighborhood and around the people I care about that to worry about what Bill Cosby did doesn't seem that important to me.

Maybe we need these famous baddies to teach us a lesson about making assumptions or elevating people due to their status. Maybe we use these public shamings to teach others that no one is safe from scrutiny. Maybe we jump on the famous case of impropriety to showcase our virtue in a way that resounds throughout the land and reinforces our values. Maybe it's just another case of "first world problems" and entertainment. Maybe we revel in any opportunity to display our moral superiority and regain power over the powerful. Maybe the media leeches onto the famous to capitalize on their fame. Maybe pointing out the failures of others distracts us from our own weaknesses and failures.