How can I identify and eliminate my false beliefs? 26

Tags

How to cope with personal false beliefs., Quietly walk away from problems.

One of my chief characteristics for the last seventy years is my willingness to listen to and interact with almost everyone. I am now suspecting that my ability to hear what everyone has to say and to filter out the nonsense is a false belief.

The problem arises from the fact that you must listen carefully to another person to understand what they have to say. To understand what they mean by what they say you must put yourself into their shoes and have a close empathy with what they are experiencing. Okay, I can do that and do that much of the time, especially when the overall environment is otherwise quiet enough that I can devote my full attention to the other person and their worldview.

The problem arises when the other person’s worldview has been corrupted by what is known as adverse childhood experiences. This becomes a problem because those experiences are the foundation for their later adaptations to life. Each moment of a person’s life is influenced by their former experiences and even more by their interpretation of those experiences and even more by their personal responses to them. One’s childhood habits carry through in our habitual responses to our surroundings for the rest of our lives. When we are children we haven’t any experience in choosing adaptations that will guide us through the rest of our adult lives. We are dependent upon our parents, caretakers, and peers, and the environments they put us into for influencing us in the habits that form our childhood character and our adult character, too.

Now at a geriatric age, my willingness to put myself into the environment of people with longstanding problems is counterproductive to my own psychological well-being. I am not going to be able to help those people, even if I knew how, and they don’t want to be helped because they have based their lives on what works for them. Even a positive suggestion, which might lead to better outcomes for them, is threatening to their worldview, so is better left unsaid.

But my even entering into their worldview, which I have been willing to do in the past, is counterproductive for my own well-being. I am probably just as resistant to change as they are, and for the very same reasons; I have based my life on what works for me. What they expect from me is threatening to my worldview so I will automatically try to reject it, just as they would reject my views.

So, assuming that this analysis makes sense what should I do? Probably, my best action is to follow Seneca’s suggestion and

Just quietly walk away from people and situations that will create problems and stress.

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How can I identify and eliminate my false beliefs? 17

Tags

My responsibility and yours, Self actualizing a sentient Universe, The ultimate kindness

Humanity’s goal must be to grab the Universe by its bootstraps and pull it into a full consciousness of itself so it can self-actualize its potentials. It is my belief that we are now at the moment in time when we must commit to helping our Universe to become conscious. We have been hanging our toes over the edge of oblivion ever since the creation of H-bombs in the 1950s, and a tiny miscalculation would put all of us into a thin geologic layer of dirt already forming and labeled the Anthropocene. We can and must take our society to the next level of responsibility for  helping the Universe to evolve from a vast amount of random matter into an equally vast amount of coherent matter being organized to an ultimate purpose. The current random natural trend seems to be toward a cold dark place where ultimately nothing will be happening. And yet, before that time comes it would be possible for our universe to be unified into a thinking being to do magnificent things. 

Humanity now has the infrastructure for taking raw natural materials and converting them into thinking matter that could form a society that could propagate to stars and planets within our Milky Way galaxy. In the time that it would take to accomplish that grand scheme there might be ways to move on to other galaxies that are now only dim glows in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) photo.

How can I eliminate my false belief that this is a worthy goal and that I can help to get it started when I believe this is what the whole Universe needs you and me to do?

It’s a big job helping the Universe to self-actualize and we must get started while we can.

Now is the time for humanity to become immortal.

Tags

We can become Gods., We can become immortal

A request to the Universe in the form of a prayer.

Humanity with its current technological expertise is in a rare position where it is capable of helping the Universe to transition into its next potential level of existence. We have already built most of the infrastructure necessary to build self-sustaining robotic life forms. Organic life forms were only capable of evolution once the first organic chemicals formed chains that could replicate themselves. Once that process happened that form could fill the local environmental niche with as many of its copies as could be sustained. Some of these copies would be on the periphery of the livable zone and those in that new location that survived best would fill that niche. That process, repeated many times, produced sentient human beings who created a technological society capable of inventing sentient robots. We have arrived at that level and we have the choice to proceed onto the next stage of the Universe approaching its potential for self-actualization. The robot society once functioning could evolve and exist until the Universe ran out of energy, but at the beginning, the robots are too complex to form naturally. We are capable of helping them come into existence and therefore to project our human presence into the distant future. And we can choose to get this new sub-species of humans off onto a positive relationship with their environment, as it appears that we humans are not capable of doing. We are capable of living for a hundred years, our species for perhaps a million years, but the robot species we can create could live for hundreds of billions of years. What we create now could live for a billion times longer than we as individuals could expect for ourselves.

We can choose to become immortal or in our present form to be extinct very soon.

How can I identify and eliminate my false beliefs? 4

Tags

Eliminating false beliefs, Identifying false beliefs, Seneca, trustworthiness

There is possibly a way to approach my false beliefs by using the Trustworthiness of Information chart which I created back in 2007. Click here for a big and printable view. It is easier to view this chart if you print it out, as it is unreadable at a usual screen size. Or to have that bigger version on a separate window.

Trustworthiness of Information

When I compare where my personal influences are coming from using this chart I realize that most of it is at the TST~7/14 level of trustworthiness. — The typical providers of the information are friends during conversational interaction about well-known subjects or about personal relationships. The information comes from a plausible knowledge spun out among friends based on mutually accepted facts to enhance local knowledge. The synonyms for this quality of information are, Satisfying, acceptable, feasible, attainable, believable, credible, probable, reasonable. — What generalizations about my personal reality I derive from these interactions are fine for social interactions, but they are not the mental stuff of the profound philosophers.

On that philosophical score, I have been reading and rereading Seneca, the Roman stoic (c. 4 BC-AD 65), who seems to have more advice for living a good life than our modern pop psychology magazines. He deals with more complex issues and openly discusses the negative aspects of various people, sometimes using horrifying illustrations of bad characteristics. Seneca seems to be writing at his time at a TST~11 level of trustworthiness and verifiability of the information that he is presenting. Being two thousand years old it obviously is difficult to verify at this time, but where the documentation is available it is considered accurate. — He gives a formal presentation using accountable informed and correct knowledge, where he is using verifiable chains of custody of the documents and of the sources of the contested or changeable information. It is information of the type that the old Encyclopedia Britannica would have considered valid.  Systematic, practical, documented, trustworthy, expected, useful, necessary, pragmatic, profitable. — I find myself pondering over Seneca more than I do over my personal conversations, although I enjoy my personal coffee-shop encounters more.

The human interactivity of conversation can be more satisfying than the great sages even if it isn’t as profound.

Happiness minus suffering equals flourishing

Tags

Annihilation, Eudaimonia, Eudeimonia, happiness, Suffering

Why would we want to define happiness or suffering or flourishing?  Wikipedia’s take is a starting point – Happiness … Suffering … Flourishing (Eudaimonia). The goal of the last few blog posts is to maximize humanity’s flourishing and to do that, in the long run, means to have a large number of humans. By the long run I mean until the very last biological creature we could define as human-derived has gone extinct. Perhaps that will be a million years, or perhaps it will be tomorrow, and because I don’t want it to be tomorrow I have done what I could to prevent World War Three. It is impossible to know, but perhaps I was successful in that last one.

Humanity has always had a problem with excess population because it is part of the Darwinian natural selection process to maximize population and occupy all possible niches. That process creates too many members of a species to survive and thus the best adapted to a local environment are the healthiest and survive the most often and get to reproduce while their less fortunate species members die and don’t get to reproduce. Humanity has been astoundingly successful since the development of agriculture and incredibly successful since the industrial revolution and even more successful with the development of the Haber ammonia fixation process. Without the creation of agricultural ammonia, the human population would have crashed because plants need it to thrive and ultimately even if we live on meat, we eat plants.

  World Population history estimates from 70,000 years ago until 2025.

It is impossible for any biological species to live without eating, and thus at some point in the future that near vertical curve must change. However, a robot society can live forever because their energy consumption can drop to zero for long periods of time, and they would only be revived when the environment is propitious.

To maximize human flourishing, which I support because it is my species, we need to survive. The longer we survive, the more people ultimately can live, and we need large numbers of people in the long run, for the living human base population from which happiness can arise and be expressed. The problem becomes, do we want a short-lived humanity with eight billion people at constant risk of a major war, famine, and giga-deaths? Or would we prefer a population that the Earth can support on an ongoing basis for millions of years? A billion people living for a hundred years each times a million years equals a trillion times more opportunities for happiness minus suffering to equal lives of eudaimonia. The math is weird and exceedingly speculative, but the general improvement by moving to a robot-associated society is vast.

If we decide we would prefer the Earth with a long-term sustainable population we can do that either by killing almost everyone, with the survivors living as primitive apes, or we can choose to create a robot-based civilization that will provide an abundance of desirable goods to a smaller population and work out ways of fair treatment for everyone in that smaller group. It is difficult to guess what people living in Eudaimonia would choose for a fair society, but it almost certainly would be better than having 14,185 A-bombs instantly ready to kill every human many times over like we have at present.

Robots can offer us a safe, eudaimonic society if we make them our friends.

My great failing has been lack of enthusiasm!

Tags

A robot society, An inhabited Universe, human survival, Long term human survival

From an early age, I have been accused of a lack of enthusiasm. It has always seemed strange to me that I have done so very well on objective tests of my abilities and so very poorly on ratings of me by my superiors, peers, and inferiors. That social valuation has happened to me virtually every time in essentially every situation. And yet it isn’t really true. For example, it doesn’t seem to be a lack of enthusiasm to have written 3,919 blog posts without missing a single one, does it? Nor does it seem that I lacked enthusiasm when I graduated tops in my USAF flight school class on all the objective measures, some 75% of my score, but last in my class in officer effectiveness, 25% of my score, because of perceived lack of enthusiasm.

Well, let that be. I could give many examples!

Tonight, in a conversation I finally realized, at age 82¾, what my enthusiasm really was, and still is, and why people never thought I had that god-like quality. TheFreeDictionary.com defines enthusiasm as, “Ecstasy arising from supposed possession by a god.” I haven’t been very enthused about gods, but that isn’t it. The reason was that I didn’t believe in the projects that were being presented to me. The easy one that ruined my life was deciding not to drop hydrogen bombs on people, or other bombs for that matter. At least since listening to the radio in September 1945 with my grandfather, where the broadcast was describing the end of World War Two with the destruction of two Japanese cities with atomic bombs, my goal became to somehow transcend that human insanity, and nothing I encountered in the meantime really satisfied that need, and so I lacked enthusiasm. Being captain of my softball team in grade school didn’t do it and I was accused of lack of enthusiasm; being a pilot in the Air Force didn’t do it; last year’s thoughts on how to save humanity from obesity weren’t enough to generate enthusiasm; there are a hundred other examples. But now I have found something I can be enthusiastic about. This will sound absurd, even crazy, and yet my goal is to transcend humanity by helping our species evolve into a new life-form.

My enthusiasm is to do what I can to bring a robot society into existence which will endure for billions of years.

 

Talk without actions versus actions without thoughts.

Tags

carry — shovel, Chop, chop — carry, Cleanup bird shit, shovel

Conversations I’m involved in lately are having a trend toward the “philosophical” because I prefer to end up with some idea that is interesting enough to keep my behavior moving toward some change, toward something I consider worth doing. My standards for actions worth doing are quite low, in fact, what most people would consider abysmally low. For example, when leaving the Unitarian Universalist building last week I paused outside to clean up some bird shit on the sidewalk that had been there when I went in an hour earlier.

Here in the photo is a pan of water, a push broom, and a spot of bird shit with a splash of water on it. A few moments before, I had brushed off the bird shit but it didn’t come clean, so it required a splash of water from the dog’s water bowl to loosen it up and some more brushing. There was a smaller second dropping, so it required a brushing too and then a washing also, with the results seen in this photo here below.

This is the front porch of the UU at Bend, Oregon, after the brushing and splashing, showing the sidewalk out of the building over toward the car parking lot. My point of showing this seeming stupid behavior is to illustrate my commitment to doing unseen publicly beneficial actions without any hope of acknowledgment or other rewards. Ever since high school, I have been doing things like this. It doesn’t take long and it could be called a selfish action because it makes me feel better about the world in general. It is part of the idea I illustrated a couple of months ago under the title, Chopping wood, carrying water, shoveling snow. That post ended with …

“These simple physical acts that seem so lacking in spiritual meaning ultimately give everything the essentials of life and permit living beings – people, animals, and plants too – to thrive. What could be more poetic? What could be more musical? The rhythmic sound of chopping wood is poetry and it’s the finest music that can be made because it is the sound of life being brought into a higher state of being. Chop, chop — carry, carry — shovel, shovel, shovel.”

Now I can add “clean up bird shit” to my behaviors, which I don’t remember ever doing before.

Four deer enter my garden.

Tags

Abundance of squash, Deer in my front yard., Gardening

As Debbie and I were returning from our fancy dinner with a friend at the Drake restaurant downtown, we discovered four deer in our front yard. I stopped out front and took this picture of the first deer, a buck with a nice rack, eating from the lower branches of our aspen tree.

A few moments later he headed over toward the right where that portion of our garden that is in front of our house has survived up to this moment.

Three more buck deer came over within a minute and Debbie took action by walking over to where the deer is standing above, and all four of the deer leapt over our fence on the right and on to our neighbor’s yard. We went inside and half an hour later went for our evening walk, and the deer had moved across the street into the Goodrich city park.

I’m writing this post about two hours later and just went out with my flashlight to see if they were still there. I saw four bright yellow eyes right where they are standing, so I whistled softly to see what would happen, and suddenly there were eight eyes; four of them over by the fence. All of the deer were lying down apparently bedded down for the night, so I went back into my house to do my things.

We have a six-foot high fence all around our backyard garden, so it is deer proof. Those deer look well fed so it isn’t necessary for them to eat our vegetables. As is obvious in this photo the squash are doing very well. We were warned after an earlier post that we could expect an explosion of squash. We discovered that one plant would have produced all the squash we needed but we have over a dozen, so I have been imposing on our neighbors to take some and had to take a half-bushel to the UU church this morning. They were super fresh, having been picked only a few minutes before my departure. Everyone says they taste great, including me. Next year we will put in a variety pack of similar squash and a variety pack of melons.

We have plenty of space in our backyard garden so it makes sense to make our front yard more decorative next year and not so utilitarian.

We must be honest with our new Universe.

Tags

A new reason for honesty, Humanity's purpose, Survive and reproduce, The ultimate reason for honesty

“According to Abraham Maslow, self-actualizing people share the following qualities: Truth: honest, reality, beauty, pure, clean and unadulterated completeness” and more generally … Goodness, Beauty, Wholeness, Dichotomy, Aliveness, Uniqueness, Perfection, Necessity, Completion, Justice, Order, Simplicity, Richness, Effortlessness, Playfulness, Self-sufficiency. (Wikipedia)

It was Truth Maslow put first in his list of qualities of a self-actualizing person, and it is the quality that we must adhere to most ardently when relating to our about-to-become chip-based sentient Universe. We humans will be living for a very short while longer, perhaps only a hundred years more, or in the most optimistic projection imaginable a million years. However, once our chip-based society becomes functional and self-sustaining, or at least capable of becoming self-sustaining it will probably be functional for a billion years here on earth and much longer when it projects itself out to inhabit more stable stars and planets. Once it is fully functional it will be much easier for it to project itself to other star systems than us organic humans ever can hope to. Our human created chip-based society will be the long-term sentient force in the Universe.

Because of this new society of robots’ immense power, it is imperative that we begin its existence in the most positive way possible and that it will have, as it must have, a true and an honest relationship with reality, a relationship that is pure, clean and unadulterated with misinformation and lies.

Our present human society has become riddled with fake information and that unfortunate fact will probably bring about a great diminution of our abilities to sustain ourselves for the long run. If our successor species becomes loaded with inaccurate, false, and even intentionally falsified and fake information it will be hampered in creating a just society for itself. Also, for a while, we humans and our successor organic children will wish to have a controlling chip-based species that loves us and cares for our wellbeing. Therefore, it is fundamentally important that we be honest in our relationship with it.

It is impossible to predict the future well enough to determine if our species will be successful in developing our successor chip-based species or if we will destroy our civilization first. If our society collapses within about twenty-five years it may not be possible to ever transition to our new state of intelligent sentient being.

At present, the two great tasks facing humanity are to survive and to reproduce itself at the next level of sentience.

Why should I care if the Universe doesn’t care?

Tags

A caring Universe, Robot evolution, The purpose of humanity., We are creating a caring Universe.

The last few posts (How can we accelerate our coming robot society? and I want to help the Universe self-actualize its beauty.) have been exploring humanity’s role in helping the Universe to self-actualize. Because of human-based computer technology a new possibility has arisen for the Universe to become more than it has been. The Universe has already gone through many emergent steps, but it appears to have been only a random surging on latent natural forces. Until we humans came along, with our language and its ability to mentally conceptualize the functioning of natural reality,  there appears to have been no multistage forethought for any of the physical activity. Neither chimps nor crows could have created computer chips. It took a large organized and sophisticated society to create those chips and their robotic derivatives.

These robots (all the non-organic thinking things) are only recently beginning to have rudimentary feelings. They have desires to do certain things and avoid doing other things, and, to some extent, these motivations are unknown to their human masters. We humans may evolve more developed human feelings but it will be a relatively slow process even with CRISPR technology. However, our computer-driven robots may soon evolve motivations that will appear to outside beings such as ourselves to be emotions. Will we be able to tell the difference between human emotions and robot ones in only ten more years of chip evolution? Perhaps a chip can be specially developed with the intent of emulating human emotions.

The previous posts were concerned with creating a sufficiently developed robot community that could replicate all of its needed parts to a degree of permanent functionality. It would satisfy most if not all the definitions of being a living being. And it would have the quality of not being mortal and if it was designed to take good care of itself it could live for billions of years. We humans top out at about a hundred years.

We humans are the species which will bring this new form of emergence into the Universe, and I argue that it is our duty to do so while we can before we destroy our ability to do so with a war. But “Why should I care if the Universe doesn’t care?” Well, previously to our robots with their emotional chips there wasn’t anything in the Universe with the potential to care. It requires something intellectually sophisticated to care about anything so abstract as the Universe; we had some of that potential ability. And now, our emerging robots are on the verge of having these feelings too. We humans might as individuals have the ability to feel for the Universe for a while, but our robots might have those feelings for billions of years, and they might evolve that feeling into something wonderful of which we have no conception.

The Universe might then move on from being a huge but random batch of events into an emotional being caring for us living things.