Astrology Revisited

OK. I think I understand the main thrust of what you're saying now. Probably I missed it before because my reading was sloppy, not because you didn't explain it well. I think your description explains the situation better than the one I gave, so thanks for taking the time to try one more time.

I think that some magical systems will work better than others because they're by their nature more effective. By way of analogy, rules of mathematics can be made up any way we like, but some combinations can accomplish things that others can't. This isn't to disagree with what you're saying though.

Some things emerge naturally from such effective systems. For example, I don't believe in any right or wrong imposed by an external God, or otherwise imposed on nature. However, some principles akin to the 'golden rule' arise naturally in almost any system capable of supporting life. If you play in the NBA, and you don't want your career ended by a foul intentionally designed to injure, then you're probably going to adhere to an honor code of not doing that to other players. This 'morality', insofar as this type of selfishness can be considered morality, arises naturally from the situation without being imposed by 'society', or legislation, or whatever. Bring in other factors like feeling, and the capacity to feel what someone else feels, and other principles arise that might be considered moral.

I dislike some systems of magic because they're overtly amoral, and not compatible with an environment that I would like to live in. I don't subscribe to the authoritarian morality of most religions though, which seem to me to have as much to do with control as with sincerity or compassion. Obviously any moral ways of thinking, including my own, are limiting, often in unhealthy ways. So I guess as with anything else there's an advantage to growing into more general, flexible, subtle ways of thinking which yield the same benefits without the downsides. In the past I've blown off chaos magic without really looking into it, because of its indirect association with Crowley, who's thinking I am unimpressed with. But possibly that hasn't been a fair characterization. It reminds me of the first time I saw an I Ching, I was maybe 17, I flipped through it briefly in a used bookstore and decided it was bullshit. Then someone else introduced me to it several years later and I thought it was great. I still think the aspect that I thought was bullshit really is bullshit - reality can't be explained very well by a system of five elements and a bunch of hexagrams. But as an oracle it really does work, and I think I've learned a few things from it.

I think a complication to what you describe is our ways of thinking interact with other people's. No man is entirely an island, even in his personal meditations. But this really isn't a disagreement either.

I think you've raised some important supplemental points.

For instance, I can't remember the specific term but when two species evolve very similar traits from very different origins it reveals how there are no set rules in evolution but there are certain methods which tend to be more successful, at least in particular environments. In this same way a certain type of morality has emerged across the planet. I think dogmatic, absolutist religions and their objective sense of morality don't even come close to reveal the positive benefits of morality as revealed by story-telling and literature.

For instance in literature there is a protagonist and antagonist, and they usually have opposing methods of behavior. This can be as cliche as defending the innocent vs unadulterated selfishness but it can get as intricate as loyalty to the family vs loyalty to society. And what we see play out in these stories are representations of the consequences of our actions. In this sense I think human story-telling does a profoundly better job at teaching humanity morality than dogmatic religion does.

I'm into David Hume and evolutionary ethics, myself, so I see morality as behavior that is successful or not successful, but I see success as an incredibly intricate subject. For instance there is certainly a level of success when you steal from someone, you successfully gained something. But morality is about statistical advantage, not specific advantage, and theft is not a statistically advantageous behavior for a society to reinforce because it causes more distrust and less unity. Generally speaking, behavior which enables more unity is good for survival, larger and more organized groups do better than more segregated groups. In fact you could trace most morals reinforced by our stories to their evolutionary advantage, but there are also many subtle ones you can't trace. There are many things which feel wrong even if we don't know why and they don't make logical sense. This is because our genetics have had a lot more practice learning what functional behavior is than our cognitive minds. And because of this, I feel like we overrate our cognitive minds and ought to trust our intuition more, but that's another subject entirely.

In essence I think morality will evolve naturally and amoral behavior will wipe itself out because it's not beneficial to society. I mean amoral people will continue to exist, just as light peppered moths continue to exist despite the lack of lichen on their trees. They will continue to exist and continue to be easier prey for the birds. But they have to continue to exist because maybe the lichen will grow back and suddenly their mutation will make them better survivors than the dark peppered moths. I'm not saying one day our environment will make amorality more advantageous, I'm saying nature does not judge, and all sorts of mutations continue to pop out because diversity is the surest way to anticipate change.

So that's what I have to say about morality and evolution. I want to tie it back into Magic but I think we've about summed it up. There are no particular rules regarding how magic works but there are methods which are more functional than others, and likewise, there are methods which are more dangerous than others. For instance anyone getting into Chaos Magic has probably learned that there's a substantial risk of insanity. I've personally been warned a dozen times by the various websites I've researched and people I've talked to who are into it. When you realize you have power over your out landscape through the purposeful cultivation of your inner landscape, it's not uncommon to begin all sorts of strange practices, and it's important to establish boundaries and rules because one runs the risk of intense destabilization where they will no longer no what rules are. But I was not really interested in those details when this discussion began, I was a lot more interested in Magical Theory.

Hi. Here are a couple of other relevant points about natural selection that I think are important:

As far as I'm aware, the current consensus among biologists is that there is almost no selection between groups, it gets trumped by selection among individuals. It can seem like there should be group selection, since when a group fails all the individuals within it fail. However, the selection process is blind, and the more individually successful behavior within the group defeats the less individually successful behavior, even where that behavior will ultimately destroy the group. Models and experiments consistently show that pure altruism can not extend much further than first cousins, insofar as it is supported by natural selection. Only altruism of the tit-for-tat variety that is selected for individually is supported between non-relatives.

One illustration of this is in the modern high tech corporate world, where a company that had a strong culture of customer focused teamwork could (from what I see) easily and decisively out-compete other companies. What happens instead is that honestly collaborative individuals in all large companies get out-maneuvered by self-serving weasels, who ultimately dominate the company culture. The competition between companies doesn't select for cultural virtue because all competing companies are undermined by the same internal corruption. So the companies that come out on top had other advantages, such as anti-competitive collusion with existing monopolies (Microsoft), or market vision (Apple), or successful strategies such as controlling their own manufacturing instead of outsourcing it (Intel). But these companies are tremendously ineffective compared to what would be possible with a more moral culture. And when a company finally sinks under the weight of its own corruption (HP getting closer), individuals and their offspring move to other companies rather than going down with it. So there still isn't much selection at the group level. This dynamic works with other populations also, since animals and people can move between social and breeding groups.

As I see it, what saves virtue is that random mutation and natural selection are not the only forces that determine what exists. Survival is a requirement that has to be satisfied, but it doesn't drive all change. In other words, the system described by scientists is under-determined, with considerable room for choice that is orthogonal to the negatively selective process. So for instance, I might be equally successful by being a superficially friendly, passive-aggressive person who colludes with other dishonest people, vs an honest person who aggravates others by not facilitating or bending over for their abusive behavior. Maybe in the second case I even have to accept a smaller house or other hardships, but if I can still survive and give my children a good shot at survival, the strategy still works. Moreover, as you know, the rules that scientists believe govern the selective process are not fixed. An honest attitude can un-knot my own mind a little bit and give me access to intuition and luck from outside of the scientifically recognized reality. Or I can allow myself to fail, dying without viable offspring, because I know the spirit I'm a part of can manipulate sexual selection and other physical dynamics to give another almost-me an opportunity to come back. Or maybe we can go elsewhere. There is a lot of room for freedom, moral choices that are not compelled. It seems to me that natural selection is often a pretext for existing behavior, or even a bogeyman that people are scared of. Scientists emphasize it and emphasize random mutation because these are dynamics that their tools show them exist, but they're not actually as all-determining as they appear to be from that perspective.

I'm not optimistic about amorality weeding itself out. I think that the trajectory we're on can lead in a big cycle back to something like what we have now (hence where our world came from), or to something that is much worse. In my life's experience, dishonest people have tended to do quite well for themselves, and more sincere people have struggled. But its not all about biological selection. At some point, an individual can be faced with the harm they directly and indirectly do to others (factory farms, abuse of poor foreign workers by companies we invest in, etc.) and just decide that they don't want to be that way any more. Not because doing the right thing works better, but just because the wrong thing is ugly, wrong. Cruelty and compassion both require empathy, but one is more inherently beautiful by its own internal standard, whether its more competitively expedient or not. We've still got to pay our dues to natural selection - it doesn't work to be overly compassionate to the people who would dig themselves into a deeper hole or harm others with the help we try to give them. But we choose whether or not we make it king.

I think you're mistaking the concept of altruism. No one ever does anything for anyone other than themselves, at the end of the day. If you'd like to debate that, go ahead, but that's the claim I'm making.

Furthermore, while it's true that natural selection is individually selective, it's also true that groups do better than individuals so individuals that join groups increase their odds at being individually selected. Behavior which supports cohesion is selected more than behavior which does not. While competition exists within the group, there is still an overwhelming drive to keep the group functional so it can defend itself against other groups. Because humanity lacks a strong, cohesive structure, it is ripe for exploitation by smaller groups within it, and the means through which they exploit humanity can be considered amoral. But we reside in one paradigm, and what's true now will not always be so, one commonality in nature is unity continues happening but is typically motivated by competition. That doesn't mean to unite, humanity must find another species to go to war with. We have plenty of cancerous systems within our folds to unite against.

This isn't a perfect system. Part of the reason Silverback Gorillas are unable to recover in population is because whenever an alpha male is defeated, the new alpha male will go around killing all the old alpha male's young in order to get the women ovulating again.

We consider infanticide to be a bad thing, just as we consider dishonesty to be a bad thing, but natural methods do not develop by accident, they emerged because they're functional. This is why we need stories, because it appears to us, through the exploits of companies like microsoft, that theft is more functional than honor. Stories remind us what the purpose of honor is. It does not exist for no reason. It promotes a type of cohesion microsoft could not achieve. Like I said, our cognitive awareness is not so wide we can always foresee what the statistically advantageous behavior is. Instead what we tend to see are the cheaters that rise to the top. But that's why I say morals don't exist for nothing, they promote something with a larger perspective than the success microsoft achieved. When it comes to the bigger picture, cheaters don't typically win. And our stories remind us of this when the corporate weasel looks back at his life and realizes he has accomplished nothing. He may have accumulated enough money to guarantee his genetic legacy for eons, but genes are only one facet of evolution and what he failed to do was arm his dynasty or his society with the proper ethos to survive.

Now you seem to be saying that natural selection isn't all there is to it, well let me put it a different way. Ultimately we are all 100% uncertain what the future will bring. No matter what type of action we present, the outcome belongs to God, so to speak. The outcome is a product of infinite potential, our actions are merely an influence but our outcomes are never strictly caused by our actions alone, just like how nothing is 100% how you expect it to be.

With this in mind, even the most traditional type of people are still experimenting with a method of behavior which is completely unique to them. In this way, all our methods of behavior are slight mutations compared to each other because no two are exactly the same. That doesn't mean we didn't decide how we would like to behave, and it doesn't mean everyone is acting randomly, some people choose to take a scientific approach, or a dogmatic approach, or a completely experimental approach, and everything in between. Some of these methods will be more successful than others, in the long run. Because of that reason, they are naturally selected. That doesn't mean there's an objective type of success nor that evolution is limited to genetics. The universe was also naturally selected, with physical laws emerging arbitrarily out of an innate requirement of functionality. Everything is natural selection. There is no higher, transcendental, or permanent sort of law except that what can be will while it can, and what can't be will not when it can't. Other than that, all parameters are set arbitrarily by an innate requirement of functionality.

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Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

I think you're mistaking the concept of altruism. No one ever does anything for anyone other than themselves, at the end of the day. If you'd like to debate that, go ahead, but that's the claim I'm making.

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OK, I'm game for that. Afterwards I have some new thoughts on astrology and magic, but I'll put those in a separate post.

Identify some example action that appears to you to be in your self interest. Are you then absolutely compelled to perform that action, or can you do choose to do something else contrary to it instead, just for the hell of it?

If you choose to do something else, does that mean that the first choice was not actually in your self interest, but only appeared to be, and that the second one is really in your self interest? What if you just make a mistake, thinking something is in your self interest when its not? If its possible to make a mistake against your self-interest, then can you make a 'mistake' on purpose?

How about a situation where you have two alternatives that as far as you can discern are equally in your self interest, but one is harmful to another person and the other is not. Can you choose between them?

In the narrowly scientific view, the situation can be decomposed into random chance and causal compulsion, so that any choice you seem to have is really accident, or else the result of some unknown necessity. But I thought we agreed that way of thinking, while useful, is incomplete.

As another thought experiment, identify an action that helps someone else to your detriment. Certainly such potential actions exist. For example, if the opportunity presents itself, sacrifice your life for someone you dislike. Is it within your power to choose that? I'm pretty sure its within my power to choose that.

As someone who doesn't like to be told what they can and can not do by other people's gods, I would have guessed that you would have claimed that power also, even if you choose not to exercise it.

Now if your thesis is that people are usually acting from selfish motives when they're pretending that they're acting unselfishly, and that they're usually not introspective enough to notice, I agree with that.

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Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

There is no higher, transcendental, or permanent sort of law except that what can be will while it can, and what can't be will not when it can't. Other than that, all parameters are set arbitrarily by an innate requirement of functionality.

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I agree this law is unalterable, and I'll accept the idea that there is no 'higher' law. But within the realm of what is allowed by innate requirements of functionality, there is tremendous freedom. How can you presume to know that what happens within that area of freedom is utterly arbitrary? That is the conceit of modern science, that if we don't understand a causal reason for something, then it is in principle random. I thought you were arguing earlier that other coherent views are possible, that there are other ways to think besides what you call 'Newtonian' causality with statistically ideal randomness.

As an example, flip a coin. We both agree, apparently, that the outcome is not entirely a result of mechanical cause and effect. There is freedom then in the way it can turn up. Can you, using magic, willingly observe it to come up in a way that benefits someone else, or does your spirit compel you to only do that to benefit yourself? And to throw an additional wrench into the logic....it seems to me that my own identity contains the identities of others in microcosm, and vice versa. Even when I'm doing something for myself I'm at least in some sense doing it for others, if ineptly and with a poor outcome, and even when I do something for them I'm doing it for myself. In this context the statement that all action is selfish doesn't seem to say much. It seems to me to be an artifact of a type of subject/object cause/effect way of thinking. (By the way, Einstein's theories share the properties you refer to using the 'Newtonian' label, and quantum mechanics can also be formulated in a way that's completely causal. This is part of why I originally misinterpreted your point about magic.)

For someone who sees value in chaos, the assertion that there is no other law but 'do what thou can' seems to me to be rather limiting and narrow. It seems like a declaration of faith. I don't see why a freedom loving person would choose to live inside that unless they understood that it was compelled by natural law. But I don't see how you could understand it to be compelled. My scientific understanding, which I think is relatively good, is what tells me that its not compelled. All of that randomness and/or magic is a lot of extra room to play with.

Being selfish doesn't mean you have to be opportunistic or cruel or anything else. The game is a lot more intricate than that. As I explained earlier, we're all technically experimenting, and every method is a little unique. A lot of actions do not appear to favor the organism, but the ultimate intention is still for the favor of the organism. It's not even really that simple, because it's not like the organism chooses to help itself out. Organisms that do help themselves out simply function better than the ones that don't.

And I'm not saying that there can't be other aims people hold true for themselves, I'm simply saying they're subjective. I'm saying existence comes before essence. What you hold to be true and what you hold to be law is subjective. Objective truth and absolute law are beyond our understanding, just as death is beyond our understanding. And like death, it cannot be considered worse than life. From the vantage point of death, nothing is favored and nothing is law. So when you think about how behind every noise, there is still a silence, you can also realize behind every thing, there remains no-thing. And there is no higher good here, it is merely a stage. Whatever emerges as a law does not retain its status in the eyes of the void. To the void, there is something, or there is not.

What the crux of my argument is that morality is determined by evolutionary benefit. As I argued, behavior which supports the greater good, even at the expense of the individual, is reinforced by individual selection, not by some imaginary sort of selection on a larger scale.

Backing up a bit....I guess you're saying that astrology is in some sense a system of magic. That makes sense to me. As such its a deeper system than some book selling nonsense that someone cooked up within the last hundred years. Its shared by enough of the world's spirit that there are both biological and astronomical results that follow from it, some of which predate the appearance of man. Occult ideas about 'energy' and chakras would be magical in a similar sense. They're so deep that we all share them to some extent, almost like how we share a genome. But they're not fundamental in some absolute sense. This helps answer some of my confusion about sex, which of course is closely connected to "energy". Its natural that a biological system would have a way of exchanging biological information, and its natural for that mechanism to be pervasive and compelling enough that it inevitably gets hijacked by lots of other magical systems. In some eastern theologies "energy" is fundamental and it is biology that has hijacked it. So to attain liberation one's inner light has to be freed from the slavery of the body. Now it looks to me like that's sort of backwards. Its all magic, so to speak, on different scales.

From this standpoint, science is also a system of magic, though I'm extending the word magic almost to something like physics. Modern science, an essential part of "white man's strong medicine", has been so effective, ravaging so many other systems, in part because its tied in so consistently with the larger natural system that we live in. In other words, its substantially true at a level that matters a lot to our competitive survival.

From what I see, most systems contain lies which are geared towards whatever the designer wants the system to do. Scientology would be an example of this. Or any other religion. A thing of course with lies is once you've been drawn into the system, you can't tell any more what it really does. That's what the lies are for. Is it possible to construct a system without a part of oneself getting drawn into it? I doubt it. But there are systems within which it is difficult to tell that it matters.

I doubt that there is an ultimate true 'underlying' reality that these sub-realities are spun out of. There is the vastly complex reality that we are in, whether it is possible for us to see what it is or not, but it doesn't really have an outside. I guess I don't know that though, my statement seems similar in ambition to your statement that survival is the whole of the law, even though the motivation for it might be slightly different.

OK. My point is that behavior doesn't have to be reinforced by natural selection in order to exist, it can also exist if it is orthogonal to natural selection.

We're using the word 'morality' for two different things. Yours is by definition compelled. Mine is by definition not compelled. I guess its clear that I'm not denying that your morality is real.

It seems likely to me that you're arguing for the exclusive reality of your morality because that is a result you want. But I'm only guessing. The reason I say this is I could make some word substitutions and make the exact same argument that magic isn't real, or that will isn't real. But it seems you do believe in will.

The morality I refer to does have objective results, though those will by definition appear to be random to someone who does not see where they spring from. The motive itself may be subjective in the sense that it is difficult to infer from the effects. But a motive to act for self interest is every bit as subjective.

For you to know that my morality is unreal, it seems to me you would have to know that nothing is orthogonal to necessity, or that you know my whole mind. Both of those propositions I think are easily falsified.

To know that it is real you can create it in your mind, or read my mind. It seems to me that you should be able to do either if you want to.

Actually I don't believe in will but I wasn't trying to open that can of worms too quickly. I also don't believe in magic so much as an infinite array of results set only by the arbitrary parameters of reality taking the form of communicated information between various systems of information to influence and shape each other.

I'm also not trying to argue that natural selection only exists genetically. As I mentioned, the parameters of the universe are arbitrary, in so far that the moment nothing became something, there was also nothing to direct it. Something appeared randomly, without cause behind it because nothing could not give it a cause. The only innate quality of the void is infinite potential and it is that quality where something first sprouted from. Again, not to imply I believe something that I don't (as I accidentally did with will) this doesn't mean the universe had a starting point. The illusion of time is built into our language so to make this argument understandable I must utilize time to describe it.

But what I am essentially saying is that beyond everything, there is still void. Every single reason, every single essential mechanism resides as another object within the stage known as the void. From this standpoint, functionality is the only law, and it's not even law in the sense of something to be strictly followed, or something desirable in any way. The simple matter is functional things keep going, dysfunctional things do not. From that point, there may be circumstances beyond my awareness which drive our ethos beyond mere functionality but you'll have to explain what that is rather than alluding to some vague, orthogonal force. Because to me, it's all just more intricate levels of functionality. Even if there was some sort of heavenly judgment, it would have been created for a functional mechanism. This doesn't have to be sustainability for the sake of it. There may be some goal of prosperity in mind for all incarnates on this plane and the planes these incarnates recycle into. But in the end that's just one of infinite realms, and it's still merely an experiment to see which strategies are truly most functional.

A possible point of clarification: My thought of will or conscious freedom doesn't depend on anything else outside of the semi-chaotic experiment of existence. No God, no heaven, no plan, no other 'force' that I'm aware of. Its a property that arises from within the system, just as natural selection is a property that arises within the system.

It seems then that for now you're content with the vision and understanding of reality that you have, that you're not seeking to extend it by exploring other ideas? I'm not sure that I can explain my idea of will better than what I already said, but I'll take one more shot at it.

Natural selection has a sort of crisp logic to it: something exists while it can, otherwise it doesn't. That's pretty easy to understand, for some of us anyway. Will seems to me to be both easier and harder. Its easier in that you don't have to understand it, you just choose to uphold it, and you do it. That's what most people do, apparently. But its harder because if you try to pin it down by decomposing and micro-analyzing your mind, it doesn't seem to be in any of the pieces. Mentally I represent my self, which is largely subconscious, as a sort of black box with certain capabilities in relation to my environment. Will is one of those capabilities. But its part of a model, and I realize it doesn't accurately reflect what's going on inside the box. If I examine more closely, digging into the box and moving the imagined boundary between 'self' and 'environment', I can't pin down any of these properties, its like chasing the end of the rainbow. So I could conclude that its not real, much as how scientists decide that nothing is real unless it can be definitively measured. One reason I don't conclude that, is I went through a similar process with astral projection, and decided that I wasn't actually going out of my body, that I was just manipulating images. I believed that for years, but then after I started having other experiences with apparently impossible physical results, it became clear that something was going on besides mental model manipulation, even though I don't understand what exactly. I trust there is something there even though I don't understand it, because I see results that aren't accounted for by what I do understand. So then I trust my intuitions about it more, because I do have those, and that's how I develop it and strengthen my awareness of it to the point where I can understand it better. That's not the thought process I went through with will, but I see it would be similarly applicable, and it must have reinforced it.

One reason I didn't doubt my will is years ago I met someone who disbelieved in will, and was paralyzed by that disbelief. He thought it was freeing because it meant he wasn't responsible for anything. But he'd wallow around in disfunctional behavior, arguing that he couldn't do anything about it because stuff just happens and all we do is witness it. At that same time, I knew someone else who believed his model of will was absolutely 'real', and so was unable to make adjustments when he was wrong about what was within his power. Opposite extremes of the same kind of faith I guess. I figured, why would I want to do that to myself? I've even heard of people who don't believe they're conscious, because they can't explain consciousness or prove that they are conscious. At some point it just gets absurd.

Maybe another reason I didn't disbelieve in will, is I went to a lot of trouble to cultivate my capacity to feel. Will is almost the flip side of the same thing. So the strength and awareness of feeling that I developed made it more real to me. Also, I'd already learned that if I cultivate something by having confidence in my initially vague sense of it, I can develop it into something more objectively understandable. Its like the 'form a hypothesis' part of the scientific method. You've got to hang with your hypothesis for long enough to see what comes of it. Will was never really a hypothesis for me though, not within the scope of my life anyway. Its an aspect of spirit. Life without spirit is like fatou dust, try to measure it and there's nothing there. It would be like if an atom was a point, without the richness of ambiguity. There wouldn't even be chemistry. Maybe I just don't understand how a person can be alive and not believe in themselves. It would be like having a child and not loving them. It also seems sad to me to be unable to recognize it when somebody actually goes out of their way to try to help you. Not for the feeling it gives them, or so that you do better so that they can use you for something later, or for some other hoped for advantage. But just because they can, and it appears to them that it might have a chance to help you.

I agree that it doesn't make sense to pretend to believe in something that seems unreal to you. But always there is something at the edge of your awareness, before you become aware of it. It seems to me that so long as a person wants to continue to grow they have to start with it somehow.

Another aspect of how this developed for me, is life increasingly drove me into doing things that everyone else says are necessary and good, but which are no longer acceptable to me. By what standard do I reject these things? I didn't believe in God, because I could not find God, and I'm not willing to kiss a god's ass in any case. By all the arguments of necessity and natural selection I should do those things. But I will not. Why not? I could wave my hands and explain my behavior by concocting a story about my genes and how people evolved under conditions on the savannah so blah blah blah. But I've lived enough and watched enough bad science documentaries to see how contrived this sort of thing is, this pretend enslaving of ourselves to a history that people only barely understand. I choose a particular path because it is what I will, that is enough, I don't need any other reason. I guess some people get pushed to a similar point by drug addiction, where they have a choice between failure and finding another part of themselves they didn't know before, or a 'higher power'.

I don't really hope to convince you with any of this. These are just the best thoughts I have off the cuff. In any case, if will interests you, probably the best avenue is to cultivate the ability to think with feeling. In other words, think about subjects that you can only make sense of by feeling them, because the nature of their content is felt. Then later will is sort of the active side of that capacity.

In any case, thanks for the thought about magic. That was a piece I needed, or at least a useful clarification of a piece that I've been working at. Best wishes.

You're acting like you're speaking to a stubborn old man now. If I truly believed there was nothing else to learn why would I even bother making threads like these? Honestly, I believe the mystery recedes the further you explore it. This concept that we have some sort of complete understanding causes religious inquisitions and impedes the scientific community.

However as far as will goes, I'm forced to express my opinion that it blows my mind that your friend that allowed himself to be dysfunctional because "he's" not responsible for his actions. To me will is the process of removing or reconciling cognitive dissonance in the mind. It does not exist in a specific place, its is a gestalt of the entire "self" because the duty of the "will" is to make the entire system work harmoniously with itself.

(I use quotations when I describing a word for the sake of argument but do not believe the word's connotation lends itself much accuracy toward what it is describing)

I created this thread to explore the concept in greater detail: http://www.dreamviews.com/f22/illusi...ontrol-132822/

The argument I made in it will hopefully suffice to explain that I do not believe considering yourself a result of your environment excuses you from proper action. To reiterate this arugment, I do not believe that "me" doesn't exist, I simply think it's an inaccurate way to describe the system, and a more accurate way to describe it would be "us." Us is collected into a singular "me" because it enforces a sort of agreement in the entire system, allowing it to function in a more unified manner. However, there is still a limit to where this serves us usefully. I call this limit the line where the judger meets the watcher. There's no reason for the judger not to feel in charge of his life, as though he's not willing it forward. It is the duty of the judger to consider everything and choose an action. My argument is that this is not the same job that the watcher has. The watcher's job is the communicate information to the judger. The watcher does not have the job of judging this information, only of taking it in. In this way, I am not arguing that we are not conscious, nor arguing that we have no control and are not responsible for our actions. I'm arguing that the watcher has no control, and need not fret over the objects the judger must deal with. The watcher can observe the judger from a step back, and relinquish control over the rest of the colony known as "me."

This seems like the optimal sort of balance because it provides the watcher with freedom without enabling the judger to give up on life and avoid action. I find that your friend's judger decided it had no control. The watcher is not free in this regard because the watcher becomes free when it stops deciding anything. The watcher need not believe it has no control, it merely needs to believe that the organism's control over the environment will continue even when the watcher stops taking part in it.

And I was never attempting to imply that natural selection means we have no choice over our actions, either. I only argued that we are selecting experiments because we are dealing with a future that ultimately belongs to chaos. This means even if we cognitively select what we want, the outcome is naturally selected. That doesn't mean the choice is naturally selected, at least as far the judger need believe.

And this goes back to the Garden of Eden. What did man do when he ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil? What does that mean? Man moved from natural or passive selection to active selection, deciding to impose his will upon nature and influence the outcome toward what was good for some things and bad for others. While this doesn't mean man's new will over nature was driven purely by selfishness, he could justify his actions any way he wanted. It only meant outcomes continued to be selected based on their functionality. Man navigates his actions, but his actions are still technically experiments because the outcomes are uncertain. Natural selection still controls the outcomes and therefore underlies the direction of man's will even though the action is selected by something other than natural selection. The individual action of any organism is not technically naturally selected, only the actions of the species of a whole are naturally selected because they serve functionality.

Before this event, man never pretended to know what was best, such like we do today. An example of this is pulling weeds from your lawn and mowing the grass before it goes to seed. You are choosing to do good for the grass and evil for the weeds. Another example is protecting a fly from a spider, causing the spider to starve. By choosing one life over another, you are essentially choosing between good and evil, because your actions causes good for the fly and evil for the spider. Farming imposes your will upon what can grow in your land. Nature doesn't have this same sense of good and evil, hence why in nature everything is naturally selected or passively selected, because without a larger will such as a god imposing itself, there is no sense of good and evil, only functionality.

Now the question is of course, which is better? Is the man who controls his environment with farming better than the man who hunts and gathers and doesn't pretend to know the difference between good and evil? Based on what you said about your friend giving up responsibility over his actions, I would wager you believed the former is better. But I believe the latter is better. Just because early man allowed his environment to be a product of natural selection doesn't mean he did nothing and let himself starve. That is sort of where your friend's philosophy blows my mind. My nature will continue to function even if I don't believe I control it. It will still act toward goals, these goals are simply decided by my "judger" rather than my "watcher," giving my watcher the freedom to observe without being limited by an opinion. The only difference is that I don't believe mankind is smart enough to find the best outcome, but that nature will flow automatically toward the best outcome. It is the very fact that nature does not have a will that allows it do so, just has how a river finds the path of least resistance by considering all obstacles before it equanimously and automatically building pressure against the weakest obstacle. In this way, the river is guided by gravity and finds the best path down, wiggly as this path may be. Mankind, with its addiction to control, cannot possibly consider its environment with the equanimity of nature, and is therefore always slightly off target.

Omnis Dei,

Replacing 'me' with 'we' is reasonable to me. I experience myself as more of a 'we'. Partitioning judging and witnessing into two separate roles seems like a useful idea also, and not one that I had thought of in quite that manner. (Though the zodiac I'm most familiar with associates judging with reason and witnessing more with conscious identity.) One of my more remarkable personal experiences involved having the 'judging' part mostly off for a couple of hours, with just the witnessing left.

With hindsight I would have left the guy-who-doesn't-believe-he-has-choice anecdote out, or at least qualified it a lot differently. I didn't imagine you to be like that guy, or think that not believing in will would generally make a person like that guy. I included it as one of several personal reasons I never dismissed the reality of choice the way I have other mental phenomena. But I didn't mean it as a major part of what I was trying to say, which is why I only gave it one short paragraph out of several long posts. I do think that its true in general though that intellectual and introspectively inclined people tend to try to comprehensively explain their minds with models, and then are limited by those models. I'd certainly count myself in that group. I was reminded of this again this week when talking to a coworker about body/mind related puzzles that seem like a big problem if your background is classical western philosophy, but which don't even come up otherwise, at least not in the same form.

You've made a few fairly sweeping statements which circumscribe what might be real, for instance "There is no higher, transcendental, or permanent sort of law except that what can be will while it can...." which I quoted earlier. That thought appears to preclude the thought I was trying to point to, and must unavoidably make it seem 'vague', even apart from my inept elucidation of it. You also said a couple of things that I might take as encouragement to continue trying anyway, but those weren't stated in as direct a manner. I generally avoid declaring that things that are outside of my current way of looking at things are unreal, because I don't want to close myself off from becoming aware of other things. Your statements seemed to do that though, so I was just responding to what I seemed to be hearing, while being aware that I could be mishearing, hence my question mark when I suggested you were content with the vision that you stated. As you must have noticed, a high percentage of people who come to message boards are here to show off what they think they know, and are almost impossible to communicate anything to. The majority of the discussions I've had of this type over the last 20 years have been almost utterly futile, and from what I read that pattern holds for a lot of other people also. So I apologize for seeming to speak down to you, or for misunderstanding where you're coming from. I'm doing the best I can and trying to make adjustments as I go along. (My first post was an exception, in that I was more concerned with trying to get at where tsiouz was coming from, and my response to you was subsidiary to that effort. I regretted that immediately.)

I'm actually far more of a hunting-gathering type of person than a farming type of person, but its more of a temperament/instinct sort of thing than a belief system.

I think the Adam and Eve story has several different meanings, which is why its successful as a myth. If you like the story you might check out the Adam and Eve in "Lost Books of the Bible and Forgotten Books of Eden" if you haven't seen that already. It has a lot more information than the version in the Bible. Or you might find it boring, I'm not necessarily recommending it. Its available for free online. It also contains Odes of Solomon, which is interesting.

A fairly large portion of what I am aware of results from parts of myself that were asleep or suppressed or not born yet "waking up". Some of what I say isn't intended as a logical argument so much as an attempt to speak to those parts in the other person, to trigger a response from within them which they can then look to for what I was trying to say. A problem with this of course is that thoughts trigger quite different responses in different kinds of people, so I might wind up communicating very little that's constructive. Rather than focusing on things I've said that seem in need of fixing, such as my anecdote about two disfunctional friends, you might try focusing on anyting I've said that seems in any way fresh or new or interesting, and I can run more with that.

One reason I haven't responded with more interest to your thought about natural selection, is what I'm understanding from it is fairly similar to thoughts I've had also. I'm looking more for thoughts that are new that I can add to my collection, such as the thought that astrology is a system of magic for example, even if those thoughts may be of less interest to you. The reason I tried to share about will wasn't because I thought it was critically important, but because it seemed at least partially outside of your way of looking at things.

Gotta go.

Maybe this all comes down to a miscommunication....OK, as far as we know, there is no other law besides survival. But that law does not absolutely compel every detail of existence besides what is 'random'. Given a choice between a change that makes us fit enough, and a choice that makes us more fit, we don't have to choose the one that makes us more fit. If others who we are in sufficiently direct competition with choose the one that's more fit, then that's the choice that wins. But if nobody makes that choice, then we go in some other direction. Collectively, we don't have to turn ourselves into a race of vampires if we don't want to, even if vampirism is a more fit strategy. Every species is a scourge to some other species, or precludes the existence of some other species. Spiritually we don't have to pick a particular one and push that to its most competitive extreme. Our magic doesn't have to create the most robust parasite possible in the name of the survival of the parasite. That's all I've been trying to say, that we have considerable ability to make real, substantive choices with objectively real consequences that don't ultimately come down to winning a competitive struggle. This is consistent though with the idea that survival is the only law.

First of all I agree people become limited by their models, and the most "complete" looking models are often the most difficult prisons to escape from. Eventually one starts filtering everything through their model. I would call this phenomenon "specialization" because I've watched it happen to so many of my college friends. When we first met freshmen year, it was easy to talk to them on a wide range of subjects. Now that we've all graduated and are pursuing masters and careers, it's become increasingly difficult to talk to them. I understand in a way, I've specialized as well. I picked philosophy and literature, which gave me the broadest sweeping sort of specialization of my friends but being so generalized means I lack the particular perception that, for example, my mathematician friend or anthropologist friend has. Conversely, they've also achieved a sort of arrogance about reality which is very apparent to me. Everything they observe can only justify what they believe, and therefore justify the falseness of everything they do not believe. I wouldn't say my interest in epistemology has saved me from this problem, it's just changed the shade of arrogance I have. My attitude also lacks complete consonance because I juggle so many conflicting ideas. It is my nature to attempt to reconcile conflicting concepts and remove dualistic notions of reality whenever possible, which makes me a little difficult to understand at times. Especially because I often accidentally imply many things I don't mean to for the sake of sufficiently explaining a claim in a comprehensible manner without trying to disclose every little detail of life I've examined and find myself trying to make too many claims to keep track of them all. The problem, for me, is that I feel most people take for granted a lot of their beliefs about reality without deeply inspecting them, and because I've dealt with that so much, my dispositional mode for discussion often orbits around broad statements meant to provoke such introspection. In other words I didn't develop the model of reality I developed by scoffing "prove it" at every new idea that came my way, I did so by asking myself "What if?" and working with the idea long enough it often became self-evident. The burden of proof is on the one making the claim, but sometimes it's not really clear who's making a claim and who isn't. I suppose that's the heart of validation and falsification.

Anyways now back to evolution. I wouldn't say that survival is the law, I would say that experiments which survive better tend to last longer than experiments that do not survive as well, especially when these multiple experiments are in competition, which they are regarding the heart of reality. There are many possible futures but only one present. That which becomes the present competes with all possible futures for a sort of dominance. I would also embody the very arrogance I despise by claiming that man should pursue survival. I was only trying to claim that because mechanisms which survive tend to succeed over others that don't, we have accumulated a genetic, ethological and memeological history of conditioning which directs us toward survival and because of that, we can trace the roots of our human behavior in general toward its competitive edge. I argued that this includes morality. I believe, despite the fact that I don't know what it is, there's something related to a very subtle, but statistical competitive advantage that causes us to make honorable characters into role models rather than traitorous parasites. I'm not stating this has to be the case, and I can't prove what it is, but my reasoning skills tell me that survival is at the heart of our moral beliefs.

And in fact, while genetically speaking we are individually selected, there are other systems at work. A society is an organism in its own right which develops its own method for survival. Its survival also hinges on individually selecting all the separate organisms that will help ensure its survival at large, meaning there's a relationship between the survival of society and survival of the individual, and the two act synergistically.

Now on to the other point you made, which is that there's a difference between being good enough and being the best possible. I agree, as long as you find a niche you can survive. That's also why I believe parasites continue even if they're not as advantageous as symbiotes. The niche still exists, so it still survives, but our stories tell us to be symbiotes rather than parasties because when push comes to shove, symbiosis tends to be more advantageous. As game theory suggest, the most advantageous model of transaction is 90% tit-for-tat, 10% forgiveness. This means that generally speaking behavior which is bent on screwing people over does not benefit as well as behavior bent on a mutual relationship. These are general guiding factors continuing to influence the development of humanity, and I believe given enough time they will become more and more prevalent. However, being good enough is still good enough, and in fact as evolution reveal as long as a species is good enough, it does not really continue to grow into something even better, instead it tends to diversify into a broader and broader range of variants. So for example you couldn't trace sagging pants or other fashion statements to their competitive edge. They are an act of diversification. Diversification is not always directed toward advantage, most of the time it doesn't help or hinder anything. Sometimes, such as the peppered moths, the mutants are at a great disadvantage compared to the norm of the species but mutants continue to be born, and as soon as the pollution kills the lichen on the trees, the roles are switched and the mutants take over the species with the old norm claiming the disadvantage. Experimenting without directing these experiments precisely at what you believe is most advantageous based on what you see in front of you is not as functional as just experimenting in whatever random way you choose. The fact is, we're just not smart enough to know what the most advantageous method is. Only complete, chaotic randomness can most successfully anticipate what the future will bring.

When an environmental factor comes along which some or most of the species is not equipped to handle, the variation bottle necks toward the most functional behavior. I believe that because these environmental factors are inevitable given enough time, we will see a bottle necking. Furthermore I do not believe that the opportunistic parasites will represent the center of the bottle-neck. I believe we'll see strong group tactics emerge as the most superior method.

Not to disagree for the most part, but here are a couple of additional points.

The 90% tit for tat, 10% forgiveness is the best strategy only within a particular simplified set of rules. Change the rules and other mixes apply. Generally speaking, it seems to me that a superior strategy to 90% tit for tat, 10% forgiveness would be 90% tit for tat, 10% forgiveness, and utter treachery in any circumstance where one can be certain of escaping detection. In other words, evil mimicking sincerity always beats sincerity, when one can pull it off. It reaps all the benfits of sincerity, but has one more tool in the box for when it can use it. The "when it can pull it off" clause is a pretty big qualification of course, because there are inherent limitations to that, but the point is that most of the game theory models assume more transparency than is consistently present in reality. Which is why transparency is important of course.

Group tactics have obviously been important for a long time, but they tend to used 'nicely' primarily within the group, and much more brutally against members of outside groups. That's natural of course, since the survival advantages to the group come primarily at the expense of other groups. Examples would be the honorable culture of the American south which supported slavery, or of the American west which exterminated native peoples. I experience this sort of thing to a lesser extent in relation to PhD's, who tend to be quite liberal and decent among their peers, and in outward appearances, but are passive-aggressive bastards where they benefit from exploiting graduate students and stonewalling potential competitors. As with the racial examples, it usually works in part by diminishing the value of the victim so that the behavior seems justified, and by pretending to be following an impersonal set of societal conventions that they have no control over.

Technology and increasing intelligence adds things to both sides of the scale. I expect the future will have less overt violence than the past did, but there are still slow, oppressive, generations long patterns that eventually have much the same effects as violence. You don't have to murder the natives or the lower castes if you can slowly squeeze them into smaller and smaller land and wealth boxes instead.

In any case, we seem to agree on my main point, which is that there is some freedom to not to always tack the 'treachery wherever you can get away with it' clause on to the end to every other viable strategy. That freedom was what I cared about.

I think we've actually got to choose to do something positive with that freedom, that it doesn't just happen automatically. If enough people keep making the "if I don't take advantage of it someone else will" excuse for their behavior, humanity will act and maybe even look like horror movie aliens in a few hundred million years. But if your view is closer to the truth, that would be great.

Again, thanks for the thoughts. I'm definitely getting something out of this. One of my life's challenges is how to reconcile my moral vision with what everyone else's, and this is giving me a better understanding of how to do that. This is also closely connected with my problem of how to be psychically open to other people without getting confused about who I am, which I seem to be making some progress with also.

Badass of the Week: Anthony Omari

This is a story about Anthony Omari. It made me cry. Not because I felt sorry for him, I cried when I heard how much money his orphanage received in donations after his story went viral.

Chris Abani, who has one of the best TED talks about all time, relates a story about the only time he ever saw his mother cry. After surviving genocide and famine and all sorts of tragedy, his mother and his siblings were in a train station or somewhere and a dutch women walked by and noticed his mother's clothes were so thin they were see through. The woman asked his mother what happened and his mother told her the story and so the woman opened her bag and began giving his mother all her clothes, then she began giving her children's clothes to Chris and his siblings, as well as their toys (which didn't make the woman's children very happy).

Chris's mother began to cry openly and when Chris asked his mother why she was crying she said "You can steel your heart from the worst atrocities, but against compassion there is no defense."

And I find it to be true, not just when someone shows me compassion but when I see and hear stories where people act compassionately, I well up as though part of me is tuning into a very spiritual feeling. The thing is, I believe this feeling wouldn't exist if it didn't serve a function. I believe if pretending to show empathy rather than actually having empathy were truly advantageous then more than 1% of the population would be psychopaths. I believe even if psychopaths do make up a large percentage of corporate executives and politicians, as it is theorized, that doesn't actually mean the behavior is more functional than compassion. I believe we have strong, genetic motivation toward compassion that reaches beyond the mere choice one can make to have a moral system. I believe the overwhelmingly powerful attraction people have toward honor is not a choice, and while it is a choice to actually be honorable, evolution favors honor and compassion or else these concepts would not be so intuitively, profoundly attractive to us. Because of that, these things that create these warm, fuzzy feelings are the most functional, even if we can't explain how they're more functional. Even if it appears evidence from our very narrow perceptions that greed is more functional, I don't believe it is. I believe if greed were truly more functional we'd by writing songs about how greedy our heroes were rather than honorable and compassionate they were.

Greedy, exploitative, parasitic people may find their niche, and that niche might even have a little ladder that goes right to the top of the food chain, but they cannot represent a majority. The majority of people on earth are basically good (in a general moralistic sense), and this is for the same reason the majority of peppered moths are dark. A very small minority of people are not good (in a general moralistic sense) and they exist for the same reason light peppered moths still exist. There must always be mutation born out infinite possibility, because that's the sort of diversity that can best anticipate a future of infinite possibilities. But when the bottle-necking comes, these mutations will be removed as quickly as any other unhealthy behavior.

Omnis Dei,

I'm with you about the power of compassion, and this is undoubtedly something I should remember and practice more. I think the second part of your argument misses something important though.

As I pointed out earlier, abuse is most effective by far when it is covert. That means not seeing the abuse within one's own faction and recognizing it elsewhere. This accounts for the perceived virtue of a hero within his own in group. OJ Simpson and Andrew Jackson would be two examples of this. The overwhelming majority of people can't deal with the psychological stress of seeing the wrong on both sides of the power struggle they are a part of, because it undermines their side, and isolates them. This is why virtue is celebrated. People celebrate vice too, but they're more sly about it. As one example, a typical Mel Gibson movie contains a virtuous hero who is wronged in a way that justifies a murderous rampage, which generally includes a significant element of cruelty. Would the movie sell just with the virtue and without the murderous rampage?

According to wikipedia, about 20% of girls are molested. That's a bit of a slippery statistic of course, since it covers a wide range of behavior, some of which shouldn't be lumped together. Likewise with comparable rape statistics for adults. But its true in my experience that a large percentage of women have been raped, they just don't talk about it with people they don't trust. Likewise a fairly high percentage of men I've known in life and talked to on tech sites don't even understand or agree that molesting girls is wrong. And of the remainder, much of their moral stance is clearly about control, where they wish to protect their own wives and daughters but aren't bothered by it otherwise. These are really high numbers, not just a marginal 1%. That it seems smaller to most people is accounted for by the advantage of hiding it, of making it look like its not there. Can these statistics be squared with the idea that most people are basically good? Most of these girls are victimized by members of their own families. Consider how much higher the numbers would be if people could get away with this sort of thing in relation to strangers. Speaking for myself, I'm definitely not basically good. I'm a mix of good and bad. But from what I can see I'm not worse than other people, the main difference is that I'm not trying to hide anything. Hiding one's faults is almost a first rule of competitive success, and that often starts with hiding them from oneself.

As it must be clear, the reason I care about this is not because I'm trying to justify bad behavior as being 'natural'. Its because this kind of thing isn't going to stop until people admit how pervasive it is, as a first step. If you're born into a successful family you don't see how bad it is because its not happening to you. But like I've been trying to say, that's how it works, people are strongly disinclined to see the whole picture, things look good to them as long as they seem to be part of the group that's winning. Try to point this stuff out and people think you're being negative, that you're trying to drag what they love down into the gutter. My point is that its already in the gutter, and I want people to see what's really going on so that we can do something about that.

I know I already said this two or three times, but thanks again for the thought on magic, I'm seeing applications for it in all kinds of areas.