2017-03-03: Maps of Meaning #6

topic

discussion notes

  • Lecture 6 34:00 - competitors (all entities, including stars etc) make the world chaotic - as such the outside system is always changing to the systems we know << probably why people desire a heaven in a fantasy finite world of their making, or desire the end of the world to reduce complexity

    • Instead of suicide for overwhelming complexity, fantasies for changing the world to reduce complexity - prophecies, doomsdays, heavens

      • Noah’s ark

      • Heaven

      • Mayan end of world prophecy

      • Religious mass suicides

  • Ecology awareness and chaos awareness

    • Climate change, human awareness

      • Until we encounter an event that may challenge our framework, we take things outside our framework for granted

        • for instance, when we eat, we do not consider the economical and ecological process of the food, its infrastructure, transport, growing, farming, processing, filtering, the employees, their managers, their management software, their factories, the factory equipment, the employees at the factories, the systems in place for the internet to work and to provide electricity, the stable political climate for fuel exchanges between countries so that we have fuel for the transport trucks, etc

        • Cowspiracy: The Facts contains some interesting notes about how we can take the ecological cost of food for granted

          • 1 hamburger = 2 months of showering
        • Jeremy Jackson: How we wrecked the ocean for fish caught by trawling

      • However, easy to forget the balance

        • If we go all the way one way - steppe nomad, or tribe in papa new guinea - completely environmental lifestyle but zero opportunity for improving the status quo

        • If we go all the way the other way - could also be problematic

        • Driving With Elon Musk | Forbes

    • Nature worship vs human worship / Nature is not benevolent, it is apathetic, and tries to kills us as it competes with us

    • A lot of what we like about nature, is due to human intervention, human’s control/taming of the chaos of nature/lion

      • Man man islands, shores, forests, etc
    • Electricity, internet, heating - all things here that society is built and maintains (millions of people) - to provide what we consider trivial things that we don’t have to think about, until they break, and then they become incredibly complex

    • Army protects us and we don’t even need to think about this

    • Beach bums that resent society forget that society protects them from the chaos, with the nurture to be a beach bum - army to protect, infrastructure for surfboard + wax + rashy + internet + iphone + food etc - all things that because they work, they are low resolution (but no less important) allowing them to focus at a high resolution on hedonistic pursuits

  • 1:00:00 - facts rarely matter, as people’s inherit ethics makes them select from the infinite amount of facts those that are relevant to you - Quora Question

  • Left wing (people are irresponsible, we must regulate them) vs Right wing (people are capable, we should empower them)

    • Tech industry

      • High openness and creativity - recently high agreeableness as women enter - very SJW world
    • Gender

      • Contraception did for women what the light bulb did for men

        • Light bulb allowed men to work into the night

        • Contraception allowed women to work instead of pregnant

        • Completely unforeseen consequence of a great liberation movement

      • Women voting meant now motherly values reflected in politics - rise of socialism/feminism in policy

        • Completely unforeseen consequence of a great liberation movement
      • Women getting degrees and going to uni means less mates attractive to them

        • Women mate same social status or up - so the more educated the female, the less available mates

        • Maternal ages can cause regret

        • Completely unforeseen consequence of a great liberation movement

    • Diversity of ideas vs diversity of values/identity

    • Politics

      • Ants by pixar criticises communism

      • Wall-e by pixar criticizes capitalism

  • 36:00 - what we are doing with practice, is building new specialised machines in our brain, just like programming - our conscious is continuously programming our unconscious - the purpose of consciousness is to make us functional unconsciously - if you are good at something, you hardly have to be conscious of it at all - so consciousness is something like a error recognition and correction system

    • Very similar to programming, in programming we use our cognition to understand and problem properly and find a solution, and then automate the solution so we don’t have to think about it anymore

    • Our mind is building cities with our thoughts, and the thoughts that we practice, our city workers strengthen to build freeways, changing the matter of our brain, and our perceptions

  • Conservatives/victorian era vs modern day islam

    • Left-wing islam enforces conservative ideals on the population with severe punishments

    • Right-wing conservatism empowers individuals to grow (and fail) at reaching the ideals

  • Nature and moral ideals

    • Clothes vs naked

      • In europe no clothes is problematic due to STIs and weather, as such the game of life does not reward those without clothes, so religion and ethics and societal standards are made that reinforce the moral duty of clothes wearing

      • In early encounters with island savages no clothes was not a problem, as no STIs (due to isolation) and warm all year round, so no need for the moral institution and shame practices of clothes wearing

      • Settles come to Australia, and nature will not reward their clothes wearing as it is too hot, as such they must change their expectations of decency or perish to the game of Australia’s heat

    • Daniel Defoe - A Treatise of Marriage

      • Page 4. “Nature and religion having introduced decency.” Decency must mean a standard of acting for one’s and society’s benefit, which the aversion would introduce shame as the knowledge of the necessity for the standard removes the act from innocence.

      • “Modesty is the guard of virtue”. Modesty must be the living within known and accepted constraints of decency from the laws of god/nature throws on us for the benefit of oneself and society.

      • Modesty is the first defence of virtue, when absent it is up to the law of men, then the command of religion, then the power of reason, to protect one from indecency, its consequences to oneself and society, from the mercy of nature. So many defences to protect us from the immense power of vice (man’s shortcomings) and the passions of men (men as in mankind).

      • Virtue is the actions that make for profitable interactions under nature’s laws. Decency is the state of abiding by those actions for divine benefit. Modesty is the desire to abide to avoid undue harm.

      • Divine benefit is the reward from nature’s inherent ways and man’s inherent ways. Divinity is a representation or understanding of those ways.

  • 42:00 - when you know what you are doing, you want to be operating in high resolution - that is filtering out everything unnecessary to make the necessary super detailed - low resolution is when your focus is broad but blurry (scattered attention vs prolonged focus attention - at times, attention has to recharge and switch, to make sure it can still see the forest from the trees)

    • Live Debate w/ Trans Activist good example of this

      • If you can argue your point without any “facts”, then you know the high resolution reasons of why that argument/tradition/practice/concern/etc makes sense

      • If you your entire argument depends on disperse collections of “facts” all without any depth, then it is low resolution thinking

        • Daniel Defoe in the earlier mention book mentions this as a chimera, my notes:

          • Page 3. A chimera is a concept taking several things and putting them together in hopes that it is true but unlikely isn’t. In modernity it is pseudoscience. It was used to describe the necessity for clothes from nature’s harms and that those who use nakedness to communicate innocence over shame are wishful thinkers.
    • Quora Answer by Peterson on 2015-11-27 - this quora answer by peterson also stresses the importance of not arguing over fact collections, but over the inherent structures of arguments

      • 1:00:00 - facts rarely matter, as people’s inherit ethics makes them select from the infinite amount of facts those that are relevant to you
    • However such debates are important, and temperament isn’t everything, if someone is willing to discuss, you may be able to plant seeds, and if something happens in their life, a catastrophe, that causes their current framework of operations to fail, then their cognitive error correction kicks in, and may use those seeds to create an updated framework version - unless one’s framework fails, there is no necessity to change it

      • peterson

        • <43:30 - a framework specifies; the current condition, the desired condition, and the behavioural manifestations that are necessary to make the transformation

        • <44:00 - motivations are the mechanisms that makes the world manifest themselves to you in keeping with your goals - they determine what is high resolution and what is low resolution, they determine the input you take onboard and the input you discard

        • 45:00 - a tool is a meaningful pattern

        • 47:00 - you can’t derive ethics from facts, because there are an infinite size of facts, so which facts do you use? - by discriminating facts, you already are using an ethic, a process that is not based in facts

        • <49:00 - we see and describe the world in tools - meaningful patterns - knowledge can also be tools

      • Liberal (I’ll do whatever I want, as long as it doesn’t hurt someone) to conservative (I’ll do what is best for society, even at the sacrifice of my own wants) to centrist (I’ll find the right balance between the cost of society and what is right for me)