OURSELVES, CREATORS OF CREATION, kingdom of mind!

NOTHING MOST SHATTERINGLY NEW SINCE THERE ARE MEN, AND THEY CREATE NATURE, INCLUDING THEIR OWN!

Pure reason incorporates pure emotion. This is what most philosophical critters have missed so far. So when they talk haughtily about reason, they spurn emotions, just as if they were runners, on paper, but couldn’t possibly imagine what legs are for.

A professional philosopher claims that “ethics can’t be based on human nature, because biology tells us, there is no such a thing as human nature”. He deduces from this that everyone is an existentialist… In the sense of Sartre’s silly pronouncement that we are as we decide to be (something he proved by his own life, not to be true, as Jean-Paul as predictable as a cockroach). Not so far from things I wrote for years. However, the devil is in the detail, and I am the devil, as Nietzsche didn’t dare say (he just took himself for Jesus). Actually come to think of it, not really details.

To pretend that ethics can’t be based on nature, because evolutionary biology shows that such a thing as human nature can’t be precisely determined is as smart as saying that Quantum Mechanics couldn’t be based on momentum, because the latter can’t be precisely defined. (Both Relativity and the Quantum are based, in part, on momentum.)

Actually it’s not because something is uncertain that it can’t be determined well enough for precise computations. Quantum Mechanics is complete and well-defined a theory, in spite of the position-momentum uncertainty relationship: (uncertainty position) X (uncertainty momentum) > h. Biology is great, physics is greater. Lack of precision at some point of the logic doesn’t mean anything goes. This is case where the scientifically trained mind reveals itself vastly superior to those who croak with the centuries.

They appeared 1.9 to 1.4 million years ago. Tool use belongs to the Acheulean industry. Distinguished from Homo Erectus by its thinner skull bones. Reduced sexual dimorphism, a smaller face but a larger (700 and 850 cc) brain and was up to a gigantic 1.9m in height. Made hand axes and cleavers. Homo Georgicus (below) found in Dmanisi, Georgia in 1999 and 2001 seems to be intermediate between Homo Habilis and H. Erectus and is 1.8 million years old. It’s the oldest known hominoid in Europe and were found in association of implements and animal bones. Considering the cold climate in winter, he had to have had clothing. The species name originates from the Greek ergaster meaning Workman . This name was chosen due to the discovery of various tools such as hand-axes and cleavers near the remains of H. ergaster. Its use of advanced (rather than simple) tools was unique to this species; H. ergaster tool use belongs to the Acheulean industry. H. ergaster first began using these tools 1.6 million years ago. Charred animal bones in fossil deposits and traces of camps suggest that the species made creative use of fire. By then, tech was launched, big time!

When Sartre said “existence precedes essence” he was getting drunk, drunk on his own words. No, we can’t be just what we decide, and even if we could, most of us don’t decide what we want to decide, as the life of the highly predictable fame driven automaton called Sartre bears witness. Sartre and De Beauvoir were Nazis when it was a profitable to be so, resistant when it got safer that way, then Stalinist, anti-”colonialist”, when, that, too became the highest fashion, before meekly trying to look hip by being a “Maoist”.   

Hume distinguished ‘is’ from ‘ought’, claiming one couldn’t get from one to the other. Hume lived three centuries ago. What does he know about facts and values? What does he know about deduction/ Did he know heat was motion? Did he know nerve impulse was electricity? Could he have guessed that a value could be a fact anchored in physics?

Moore, more than a century ago, was baffled about what reality really mean. Moore wrote before Quantum Mechanics. He could never have guessed how entangled, quantum entangled, our world is.

If reason incorporates emotion, deducing morality from pure reason also means deducing it from pure emotion. Logic is not just ‘logic’. Logic is the set of all possible logics, in particular not just linear logics (as found in treatise on mathematical logic). It also incorporates topologically induced logics (as from neurohormones; in other words, emotions).

The world-wide web enables to recreate fireside conversations our ancestors had, a million years ago. It’s not really revolutionary, it’s just worldwide.

Human nature involves maximal mental creativity. In other words, maximal software innovation, from a hardware, the brain, which is greatly influence programmed. Sartre’s opinion that he was self-created, as he were Jesus/God is just arrogant and dumb. Sartre was trying to hide, with an outrageous theory, obviously wrong, to deflect attention, that he and Simone de Beauvoir, were outrageous collaborators with the Nazi invaders, something which was obviously true (for whoever knows the facts, and has the  values).

hat did Sartre know about existence? Nothing. He was the pampered child of a certain self-absorbed upper layer of the Paris coffee shop culture, famous in his aquarium, when he was not busy seducing Nazi officers with his theater. Existence is not the province of words. It is now the province of hard-core physics, and so it was in Paris, since 1923, when Prince de Broglie rolled out his matter wave theory. To think the matter wave theory has nothing to do with existence and thus values, would be cretinism.

Following human nature is following whatever goes. Just as science, or philosophies themselves. Technology is not just a human transition. Technology is the human transition. Our ancestors (Homo Ergaster) were found in the Caucasus 2 million years ago. They have got to have used technology, from weapons to clothing (the proverbial animal skins). Our ancestors (Homo Erectus, China) used fire at least already 1.3 million year ago. Human technology changed the environment, so our ancestors created not just a theory of evolution, but an evolutionary machine to evolve humanity further from.  

Biological mutation have thus been under the direction of humanity for millions of years. The next complication being of course that Quantum Physics is so smart it’s nonlocal. Hence evolution is driven by intelligence squared, human intelligence multiplied by Quantum Intelligence.

Lamarck was made fun of, excoriated, and threatened by slave master tyrant Napoleon, for suggesting that intelligence drove evolution. The true reason of the rage of the church and plutocrats was that Lamarck had established evolution by studying fossils (some under the microscope). If humanity evolved, and that had been scientifically demonstrated, shouldn’t society evolve too?

Lamarck was right, we know this better everyday. Darwin learned Lamarckism, as a student in Scotland (“evolution”t was outlawed in English universities). Darwin turned evolution into a version more compatible with plutocracy, the nebulously defined “selection of the fittest”. Hitler and the “intellectuals” who inspired those who controlled that German politician, mentally deduced that “selection of the fittest” meant extermination of those who were not the “fittest”. Hitler didn’t realize that ignorant, self-important morons like him, impregnated with their own gravitas, were not the fittest, but instead the lowest of the low. It is now surfacing that, indeed Darwin, by decerebrating Lamarck’s evolution, missed its most important point. Even Tom Wolfe has understood this (see his 2016 published “Kingdom of Speech”).

Humanity is not just the kingdom of speech, as Sartre and his followers, would have it. Humanity is the kingdom of ideas, concepts, pictures, metaphors and emotions rising above previously given nature. Humanity is the kingdom of mind.

The kingdom of mind has its own rules and ethics, never seen before. For example, far from being an aggression, critique is a gift. Criticizing helps thinking (and self-criticism, thus mental betterment).

Selection of the fittest has meant, for at least two million years, selection of the fittest ideas, and selection of those, and the moods, capable of fostering them. Genetics and epigenetics followed. Human will was involved in all this, over 100,000 generations.

The human principle: I think better, therefore I, and my descendants, became better. “Thinking better” means making neural networks in one’s mind which fit reality better in their outcomes.

Selection of the fittest thinking. Selection of the fittest moods.

Our descendants deliberately created much of what we became, and for the rest, they created us by eliminating what, or whom, was not the fittest, and by setting up an environment conducive to that.

Yes, a terrible message of hope.

We evolve, thus we hope to create ourselves in a better form.

And ever superior technology will help us to become better, because, should we not rise to the occasion, we will disappear.

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: Evolution, Existentialism, Kingdom of Mind