-NATURE-
-NATURE-
Index
The Feminization of Mankind
Kosmos
Nature
»Natural Selection »Animals »Plants
⁕Nurturing »Baggage ›Domestication »Taming »Breeding
⁕Natural/Artificial »Obsolescence via Success ›Austerity/Abundance »Equilibrium
⁕Need>Appetite<Pleasure »Herbivores/Omnivores/Carnivores ›Hunger »Thirst ›Suffering/Pain
⁕Free-Will ›Symbiosis ›Strength »Power
⁕Communication ›Non-Human Communication »Animal Communication »Plant Communication
∞
»Natural Selection »Animals »Plants
⁕Nurturing »Baggage ›Domestication »Taming »Breeding
⁕Natural/Artificial »Obsolescence via Success ›Austerity/Abundance »Equilibrium
⁕Need>Appetite<Pleasure »Herbivores/Omnivores/Carnivores ›Hunger »Thirst ›Suffering/Pain
⁕Free-Will ›Symbiosis ›Strength »Power
⁕Communication ›Non-Human Communication »Animal Communication »Plant Communication
∞
Re: -NATURE-
[ MANifesto: Migrations & Isolations – Galactic]
◙Living ◙Non-Living
◙Living ◙Non-Living
Cosmos: All that is. All that is, is all that is (inter)active = Dynamic.
What displays some order, some pattern of repetitive consistency, is perceived by a biological mind, evolved to order and to seek order all around it. To such a mind the world is in order, and harmonious, since what parts of reality the biological brain can perceive are the ones who have some degree of it. An organism evolved to perceive and deal with organizations. Organizations of patterns, forming relatively ‘perfect’ cohesive, harmonious unities, or tending towards their perfection.
Harmony is what the mind calls mental models, abstractions, constructed by collecting these patterns and integrating them in a cohesive world-view = ideas/concepts.
Harmony is what the mind calls the perception of phenomena that fit into its abstractions, without contradicting them.
Φ
Cosmos, from the Greek κόσμος, derived from the word κόσμημα, meaning jewel, adornment – ergo, cosmetics. Artefact that adorns and accentuates beauty. Φ
Life is a level of order(ing) (Becoming) which in relation to the average (the other; the background) is trying to freeze itself (attain eternity), make of itself an absolute (Being) in a reality which lacks it, and prevents it from finalizing. Of course, this happens on a visceral level and only in relation to a mind which can think in terms of order/disorder projections (dualities, binary logic). Life, in its most rudimentary form is simply self-replicating ordering in (re)action to increasing disordering.
Φ
I exist because I act; I act because I exist. Everything I call existing is active, whether I can immediately perceive this activity, or not. To ask for a some-thing which is active/acting is to succumb to the methodology the mind uses to interpret existence, demanding that it be reflected outside of the mind which is interpreting/constructing it. There is no-thing which is being active; there is activity, exhibiting differentiations in frequency, which is simplified into a thing. Thingness is how this dynamic activity is apprehended; solidity (matter) is how the rate is interpreted. More detailed explanation her: [ MANifesto: Interactinos & Interpretations]Activity IS existence.
Φ
Time is the Becoming bleeding into reality, continuously trying to stop the hemorrhage by finally reaching that point in space/time it calls by various names but which always represents a projected state of its own absent Being – projection of its own noetic self; self-knowledge abstracted. Even the perception of one’s own self and one’s own physical form, is a partial and simplified projection of an abstracted state which has already ceased to be, immediately upon its symbolic conception – the idea(l) slips away leaving a distance… a chasm, a void – the absent. Many try to gain a better and more complete perception of themselves by accepting another’s perception as probable – either adding it to their own, or completely substituting it, in an act of self-hatred.
How self-aware a mind has managed to become determines how much this other’s opinion will matter, either because it shocks it with a perspective it fails to acknowledge, totally contradicting its own appreciation, or because it suddenly realizes how its nature is affecting an-Other, though it might not be able, or wish, to be anything other than what it is.
When I look upon myself what do I see, but my Will striving to self-realize and failing to do so, consuming and being consumed, fatiguing and needing rest, caring and desiring, seeking and finding ways to avoid its predicament.
Has not this modern world stripped us of so much self-consciousness that the very term now is associated with the opinion of others?
Have we not become reflective mirrors reflecting and being reflected back, wanting to be seen as beautiful, or good, or noble, in the eyes of others because we cannot fully see ourselves, and of what we do see we cannot fully accept as our essence?
When this inheritance, this natural history, has been stripped away, philosophically if not actually, what is left to the mind but material masks and things to hide its nakedness? Now the other has become so dominant in our psyche that when we seek enlightenment it is in the other’s culture, the other’s religion, the other’s tradition, that we do so. [ MANifesto: Spirituality – Immutable Past – Insufferable Distances]
Our own is not good enough – it hits too close to the bone. We need that shield of otherness to hide it behind, so as to deny its presence, or to protect it from exposure because we feel vulnerable otherwise.
Φ
Existence: (inter)activity, dynamic – Flux. [ MANifesto: Interactinos & Interpretations]Φ
Existence is a term used to describe constant dynamic (inter)activity, characterized by patterned and non-patterned energies, experienced & interpreted as abstraction, and/or noumenon = simplification/generalization of phenomena. Interpretation of sensual data, is the translation of (inter)activity, using a priori methods into a form, a biological code, which can then be processed and stored as memory, genes being an example of stored experiences. Φ
The creative brilliance of many philosophers, and sophists, can be witnessed in their ingenious solutions to the problem of reconnecting the thought with the thinker, once an initial disconnection has developed; integrating a hypothetical Being with an immediately perceived and constant Becoming into one cohesive model, harmonizing the active with the presupposed, and nowhere in evidence, theoretical static, and multiplicity with a fabricated unity, considered from the vantage point ‘outside space/time’ – in other words: outside reality itself.I would say that much of philosophy, as we know it, has been preoccupied with the problem of creating novel ways to preserve that which is absent but necessary for human understanding and, I dare say, for human sanity.
Φ
To simply assume that existence and activity are part of the presumed thing’s nature, and that beneath appearances Kant’s thing-in-itself lurks unnoticed, or the Buddhist’s emptiness, or a scientist’s immutable indivisible particle lies awaiting discovery, is an easy way of avoiding the problem of their necessity, while taking it for granted that the ‘thing’ exists, despite the fact that it is nowhere in evidence except as a human projection and a static metaphor wanting to stop the ongoing process so as to make it comprehensible. The seductive power of this presupposition hinges on the fact that without a stable ground, a necessity for a starting premise, experience is impossible. As such everyone, from Schopenhauer to Spinoza, has gone to great lengths to harmonize the abstraction with what is experienced, bridging the gap between the noumenon/phenomenon, the ideal and the real. [ MANifesto: History – Education – Experts – Philosophy]Φ
It is because life is a perpetual self-ordering, self-replicating itself from the excess of its own accumulating energies (feeding, consuming), that makes sex so fundamental in the psyche of an organism. An individual organism’s primary function of self-maintenance turns to procreation, and then to creation, from the leftover energies it gathers from this primary function. Reproduction becomes a secondary function. Both the primary and the secondary functions are (re)actions to mortality: the inherent lack of existence, sensed as need/suffering by one and all conscious life forms. Φ
The concepts of ‘fullness’, and/or ‘emptiness’, of ‘overflowing’, and/or of ‘lacking’, are nonsensical outside the human mind. They represent a construct attempting to make sense of the mysterious by placing it within noetic boundaries. These boundaries are human in origin, producing dualism, representing the separation of the noumenon from the phenomenon, the ideal from the real, the subject from the object. More than just human these boundaries are essential to organic life, as we see them in something as fundamental as skin, or a membrane, attempting a necessary distancing rom environment = world. All we can say about reality is that it is dynamic, escaping all human artifices trying to encapsulate it into a static whole, and that man relates to it with a sense of disquiet, feeling this dynamism as a perpetual falling away, experienced as need/suffering, and the forever mysterious. In relation to life the world is lacking, creating the stress of push/pull, repulsion/attraction, and man’s insatiable appetites and anxieties.
What is lacking is ‘order’, which is continuously fragmenting, creating ‘randomness’ in the process. Even the most adamant liberal, and devout Nihilist, is for order in that he favors the boundaries which permit him to have a choice, because this push/pull of agon is disordering confronting ordering which is essential to life, and to the latter’s continuous struggle to maintain its order and to adjust it to the continuously altering circumstances. Outside of this (inter)action between a subjective, conscious, life, and an objective, unconscious, world – this conflict between a self-caring organism, and an indifferent universe – there is no fullness or emptiness, no perfection and imperfection, no abundance and no absence; there is only dynamic fluctuations exhibiting temporary patters of predictability, slowly deteriorating to more complex patters which, in the process create randomness due to this constant (inter)activity and the frictions produced.
Ω
Living
[ MANifesto: Interactions & Interpretations]
▲
Life relates to the world in a negative, antagonistic way, because it struggles to maintain, or revert, an unstoppable process of fragmentation and increasing randomness. ▲
Φ
Life = Congruity of patterns (order), developing the ability to store (inter)actions (memory) Φ
The differentiation of life from non-life is memory, and mind, or the projection of body (past), in space/time. Φ
From simple (unsophisticated) life-forms (plants), with a two-dimensional synthesis of mind/body, towards more sophisticated life-forms that develops a synthesis between mind/body = nervous system. Φ
My MANifesto will be entirely dedicated to the analysis and exploration of living organisms, and more specifically with the behaviour of homo sapiens – a sub-category of life.For the living, life is of great concern.
Ω
Non-Living
[ MANifesto: Interactions & Interpretations]
▲
Non-life can be divided into patterned (order), and non-patterned (chaos) (inter)actions. ▲
Φ
Cosmos is unconscious (inter)activity (Flux), out of which life emerges.Life is the cosmos becoming aware of itself – becoming self-conscious.
Ω
↑
↑
Re: -NATURE-
The best way to define nature is as the sum of all nurturing. Essentially, it is another term for the past.
Nurturing is the term given to the cultivation and/or the (inter)action of this past (nature) with the immediate environment. In such a case what we call ‘nature’ establishes the limits of an organism’s potential, and ‘nurture’ are the conditions which determine how much, or how little, of it will be realized.
Φ
The word nature is most often used in reference to organisms and to life, when it can also be used to describe the totality of processes within which organic life emerges. Confusion follows when the word is used one way, or the other, in the course of a dialogue. This confusion often resorts to simplification, creating a noetic tautology between two disparate concepts, and in the process reducing an understanding of both. One thing to keep in mind is that the Modern usually uses all words, including this one, as it relates to his personal self-interests, and so nature, when used by such a man, will most certainly refer to life, in the same way the word world when used by Moderns most often refers to the world of men, and less often to the world at large, within which man creates his own realities.
Φ
Nature is another word for the past. The desire to intervene upon nature is a desire to change the elements that manifest in what we call the present. The present is no more than a shorter, more immediate, past. Those who live in the moment, in the present, are essentially living within the premises of a shallower past. To build an identity, self-esteem, in this way, is to surrender to the perceived, without understanding it in depth; it is to be taken by the current.
Φ
Reality, being that it is dynamic (Flux), ever-changing, (inter)acting, need not be persuaded to change, for it is change. Change happens whether we want it, or not. Adopting Heidegger's image, we are ‘thrown into reality,’ and change, or whatever name/symbol we give to this Flux, is what we must deal with and cope with.
The antagonistic essence of life is indicated by this dealing/coping with perpetual change, requiring no effort to come about and to continue, unless we place this effort, this force (energy = impulse, momentum), in some imagined divine entity, or we call it Will, as in will to power and/or will to life, or adopting the ancient Greek terminology we call it Ananke and/or Eros.
Life resists change, as part of self-organizing within the disorganizing; as part of self-maintenance within the dynamic fluidity; as part of self-ordering within perpetual disordering.
Life is about preserving the status quo, and if the idea is pushed to its absolute ideal, it leads to God: theoretical/noetic state of absolute, immortal, Order. The opposite, to this pole, and part of a binary system of conceptualizing existence, is to abandon one's self to change, to Flux, to the complexity of (inter)acting order/randomness, patterned/non-patterned energies: chaos. It is a death-wish, a need to disappear, to be assimilated into something ‘greater’; to disintegrate and dissolve, to stop resisting, and avoid feeling the need/suffering this resistance produces.
Φ
→Nature is the sum of all nurturing. As such, no single lifetime of nurturing can overcome generations upon generations of nature and centuries of naturally selected physical/mental traits/behaviours. What is being selected are past experiences, knowledge, nurturing, as these (inter)act with the immediate environment, at any given time period. If they are proven sufficient, through this process, then they are passed-on to the next generation, as inherited experiences, encoded nurturing.
Resistance to time, an overcoming of the limitations of mortality, become a measure of fitness, within environments not manufactured and maintained by human wills that intervene upon nature (past) to adjust the rules to ideals.
→Nature can also be called ‘history,’ when it is encoded in text, or passed-on, via the encoding of languages, oral traditions, narratives. But, since the past is unchangeable, and cannot be experienced directly, this narrative of the past can be manipulated. Essentially, the past, or our sense of self, or our sense of nature, can be controlled and warped. Still, the past is accessible in the present, in the form of its ongoing appearances.
The apparent is a manifestation of the past. To overcome this perpetual appearance of past, as presence, appearance is mostly slandered, degraded, and described/defined as nothing more than illusion, leading to evil and/or suffering. Because the past is accessible to all, through its presence as appearance – though deciphering this appearance is not equal in all – the majority must be made to ignore it... or to dismiss it. Something they gladly surrender to, because what is revealed is not always pleasing, and/or flattering, and the majority cannot endure its presence, as a constant re-minder of who and what they are.
→Identity is knowing self = Know Thyself, which implies a knowledge, and acceptance of past/nature. The past is not flattering, or positive, to the individual discovering it, but it is always a burden the individual must accept as being part of what makes him possible and what determines his/her potentials. Knowing yourself, is knowing your past: implying that you know your nature, even though you may not always understand it.
Others terms ascribed to this self-knowledge/understanding are: spirit & soul.
→Artificial versus Natural: The noetic category of artificial is meant to designate a construct brought about not by natural means but through a wilful intervention upon the environment and natural processes. Since all organism's intervene upon the environment, to a degree, because they are manifestations of the past, interacting with others and, therefore, altering the future with these (inter)actions, the intervention upon environment is measured in degree, influencing the organism intervening upon it. For example, a beaver intervenes upon its water-environment to increase its survivability, but this intervention is not severe enough to affect it to a greater degree than the environment which was intervened upon. There is no disconnection from the past (from nature), as this intervention is part of how previous organisms, of its kind, have always intervened upon the environment, and has become embedded in a shared behaviour. Only one organism that we know-of can intervene upon the natural environment on a level that the interventions affect it to a greater degree than the environment intervened upon: mankind being this organism. Definition of ‘Artificial’ as it relates to ‘Natural’ environments: Man is the only organism which can intervene upon the environment, the present, to such a degree that the intervention itself, affects him to a greater degree than the environment intervened upon.
Another way of looking at it like this: Man is the only organism that can challenge the past, by rejecting, realigning and contradicting it, and in this way constructing an artificial reality, an artificial environment, but also forcing him to deal with the repercussions of this anti-nature, anti-past disharmony.
Yet, man baptises this intervention a ‘correction,’ or as being more natural than nature itself, or more real than reality, or more harmonious than being in harmony with nature. This means the Nihilistic reversal of judgements.
Such a man, out of harmony with nature, detached from his past, in opposition to it, redefines harmony as that which is in-line with his own preferences – his own ideals, his own artifices, and the corrections he's imposed upon his environment.
→For man to accomplish this incredible feat of will, while at the same time existing within world where past cannot be ignored nor avoided, man must change the reference points with which he judges and evaluates what is ‘real’ and what is not. He, therefore, dismisses the sensual as a fake, a testing phase, an artifice, an illusion, and replaces it with his own mental constructs, his own noumena. Because human mental models are malleable, unlike nature (past cannot be changed), man prefers his own abstractions, particularly when he is sheltered from nature, using technologies and cocooning, and he ephemerally, and partially, avoids having to face the consequences of his ignorance.
A system can therefore teach a version of nature (past, including history), which suits its needs (education) – while at the same time secretly and often selectively acknowledging the past (nature), for without it the system fails and manipulating the minds of the ones it depends upon, is not successful. We get two versions of reality, of nature: the one used, pragmatically, by a few select experts, and the one sold to the masses of laymen who are to be kept happy in ignorance, loyal, discipline and tame.
We witness this in psychology and marketing and politics, where propaganda and psychology and knowledge of human nature and husbandry are used consistently and effectively, while selling the idea, to the many, that man is too complex, has no measurable nature, and that certain aspects of psychology are debunked, non-applicable to the homo sapient specie.
Once the majority are sufficiently trained into believing that they are already free, that appearances do not matter, that they are pure mind, they become easily manipulated by those who know better, and who know ways of seducing and manipulating the mind.
Φ
It is a living organism that can take advantage, enhance, preserve, avoid, escape, the past, and so it is life, and the living, where nurturing (farming, husbandry) takes on a more severe character. For man the term ‘nature’ simply denotes the sum of all that preceded, and still continues to have an impact – is still relevant. Therefore the term ‘nature’ can be used to describe all phenomena that are the product of forces outside the wilful control of man, or that are not consequences of man’s wilful interventions, or of his unwilled (inter)actions with environment.
When we speak of the nature of man we speak of man outside his own ideological cultivation of himself: ideals. These preferences, now idealized, can be considered the germination of man’s self-nurturing.
Φ
Nature, as it pertains to living organisms, is characterized by self-preservation. The organism is obsessed with feeding, with protecting itself from predation, with defending itself against attacks. Once this primary need to self-maintain is managed what excess energies remain are dedicated towards self-growth; this last evolves into the procreative impulse. It is only in this latter case when nature evolves methods to redirect the organism’s activities from those of perpetual feeding towards those of perpetual mating.
Powerful, inebriating, chemicals are employed to ‘possess the mind’ with a new obsession. This sexual drive eventually morphs into a parental instinct; the frenzied desire to mate turning into a more subdued desire to preserve self in an-other – the ‘other’ being the by-product of copulation.
The relationship between feeding and copulating become apparent. The relationship between mating and parenting is also revealed.
This primary drive for self-preservation and self-maintenance results in the behavioural phenomena, risking life & limb, exposing self to high risk situations. Taken-over by sexual frenzy, and later the more subdued parental instincts.
With man it goes further. It is only man that can take his own life (suicide).
The magnifying effects of imagination instil upon man the capacity to bridge time & space to such an extent as to expose the mind to a degree of need/suffering no other organism can share in. Though a beast might be driven by blind automated instincts, man can project himself in space/time, can identify with otherness, to the point where his self-consciousness becomes intertwined with that of an abstracted otherness. At such a stage a man may sacrifice the corporeal, immediate, self so as to preserve, maintain, the abstracted, projected, Self.
Φ
Nature/Life is nothing more than the sum of all previous nurturing as these have manifested in a presence. We live in an age where nurture takes precedence over nature, for obvious socioeconomic reasons.
Modern man insists on believing in the myth of absolute free-will, and that he is already a master of himself and of his own domain, now that he’s cast off the superstition of God and his dictatorship in the sky. It is this delusion that makes him more susceptible to manipulation.
Having been convinced that he is already free, that he is no longer determined by anything preceding his birth, he is cast-off into the void, at least psychologically, with no anchor and no sails to draw energy from and to find a direction.
Wallowing away, for a time, he then rushes to grab upon the first life-jacket that is cast his way, by an unseen hand with unknown motives; then worshipping it, as God-given, becoming emotionally attached to its saving grace, converting himself into a loyal follower of its floating ways.
It’s funny how in the absence of an authority most men become enamoured with something as basic and simple as a floatation device; turning it into something mysteriously sacred, so it does not expose their feeble, human devices and motives. The old Greek saying is appropriate: “A drowning man grabs, and pulls on his own hair”.
Φ
That the past has been denied relevance in modern systems can best be understood as a method of population control. It constitutes a detachment from nature, from our very identity, so as to facilitate a reintegration into abstract concepts, such as nation, ideology, country, economy. Modernity might declare a love of nature, as being a part of its advancement towards a pristine, cleansed, idealistically sanitized natural world, but in fact it deplores nature, and all that this connects to. Nature represents, for them, a burden they would sooner forget and/or deny than accept and be forced to deal with.
Dissatisfaction with world/reality is inherent, but more so there is a hidden, underlying self-hatred expressed as an undying, blind, passionate love for otherness. This love, like their kind of love, is the idealistically driven kind; the kind which goes on a whim, an intuitive sensation, changes when the winds change direction and has the reliability, and trustworthiness of a child, or a woman.
The past is always overcome, and/or engaged-in from the comfortable and fearless distances of books, graphs, art, and fences. Anything that gives them that desirable distance of space, making the stranger this idealized object d’art, best appreciated from afar but quickly is revealed as being ‘ugly’ as you approach it, discovering the techniques of its apparent perfection. These renaissance men tear-down the walls because it is remoteness that is their barricade; the more open they become to this idealized otherness all the more they take a step back, away from it, to appreciate it better.
The Modern man visits wilderness in parks, or when it is chained and caged; he does no different when it comes to history. He indulges his curiosity about the past, through text, with the cold aloofness of a man who is not touched by the subject, choosing to learn how the ancients bathed, or what languages they used to communicate, or how they wiped their bottoms after defecating, but he never really cares about it, as none of it pertains to his lifestyle and it changes nothing about his already made choices. A quaint little vacation from his ‘reality’, which is nothing other than an artificiality he has never been outside of.
He loves going places but not really happy about the mosquitoes, or the smells, or the heat, or those pesky locals that try to pull that piece of coinage from his well-crafted portfolio. He loves the meat, but prefers to keep the killing part out of his mind, because it might disturb his enjoyment of the dish.
The real is flipped on its head. The fabrication becomes the natural, forgotten for a long time when man tumbled into barbarity; the counterfeit becomes the ‘authentic’, where nobody can quite remember what the original looked like, or smelled like, or sounded like; the shark swimming behind the thick glass is now inside whereas he, the sophisticated man, is residing and walking about adventures occurring outside the enclosure, always free to return to his own little fish-bowl any times he chooses to – when he’s had enough and can endure no more.
Φ
Inexorably caught adrift, between dialectical symbols, which are really projections of one and the same, man stands against it all, distinguishing one from the other, on the basis of his own binary logic and psychological dispositions, slowly awakening to the closeness of death and calling life the tenuous rejection of both, final ends.Ω
Last edited by Dæmon on Wed Mar 13 2019, 19:12; edited 2 times in total
Re: -NATURE-
Natural Selection
Wikipedia wrote:Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype; it is a key mechanism of evolution. The term ‘natural selection’ as popularised by Charles Darwin, who intended it to be compared with artificial selection, now more commonly referred to as selective breeding.
Variation exists within all populations of organisms. This occurs partly because random mutations arise in the genome of an individual organism, and these mutations can be passed to offspring.
Throughout the individuals’ lives, their genomes interact with their environments to cause variations in traits. (The environment of a genome includes the molecular biology in the cell, other cells, other individuals, populations, species, as well as the abiotic environment.) Individuals with certain variants of the trait may survive and reproduce more than individuals with other, less successful, variants. Therefore, the population evolves. Factors that affect reproductive success are also important, an issue that Darwin developed in his ideas on sexual selection, which was redefined as being included in natural selection in the 1930s when biologists considered it not to be very important, and fecundity selection, for example.
Natural selection acts on the phenotype, or the observable characteristics of an organism, but the genetic (heritable) basis of any phenotype that gives a reproductive advantage may become more common in a population (see allele frequency). Over time, this process can result in populations that specialize for particular ecological niches (microevolution) and may eventually result in the emergence of new species (macroevolution). In other words, natural selection is an important process (though not the only process) by which evolution takes place within a population of organisms. Natural selection can be contrasted with artificial selection, in which humans intentionally choose specific traits (although they may not always get what they want).
In natural selection there is no intentional choice. In other words, artificial selection is teleological and natural selection is not teleological. Natural selection is one of the cornerstones of modern biology.
The concept was published by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in a joint presentation of papers in 1858, and set out in Darwin's influential 1859 book On the Origin of Species, in which natural selection was described as analogous to artificial selection, a process by which animals and plants with traits considered desirable by human breeders are systematically favored for reproduction. The concept of natural selection was originally developed in the absence of a valid theory of heredity; at the time of Darwin's writing, nothing was known of modern genetics. The union of traditional Darwinian evolution with subsequent discoveries in classical and molecular genetics is termed the modern evolutionary synthesis.
Natural selection remains the primary explanation for adaptive evolution.
What is selected is what is more reproductively successful within natural environments. ‘Natural’, meaning environments independent from wilful interventions and maintenance, which would fall into the category of farming/husbandry which is the control of environment to exclude the undesirable and cultivate the desirable – undesirable/desirable referring to what is in the interests of the mind imposing itself upon natural processes.
Φ
Natural Selection indicates an unconscious causal mechanism for selecting which traits will be propagated, ensuring their future effect – trial and error.Each generation suffers the same test, contradicting human systems, reflecting nature’s methods, such as Capitalism, but forgoing this generational burden.
Conscious selection may contradict environmental circumstances, adding an intervention with collateral effects that demand continuous interventions to support them within an indifferent nature.
Φ
Environment determines the value of what is selected – objective reality.The subjective, interpreting organism, selects and faces the consequences of its judgment, in relation to environment. To be in-tune, or out-of-tune with reality, is to be in a state of disharmony with world, resulting in stress, and the anxiety it produces in the organism that seeks to alleviate its stress.
Stress is the sensation of being in conflict with world (agon), or with the sum of all (inter)acting patterned and non-patterned energies. An organism, being a self-ordering, self-perpetuating, aggregate of patterns in congruity is always in conflict with the world’s ongoing (inter)activity producing increasing complexity (fragmentation) and chaos, loss of order(ing). This perpetual state of continuous distress, increasing and decreasing in degree, and in relation to the organism’s aggregate energies and its ability to cope, is what we understand as the human condition: Dionysian/Apollonian is how the idea(l), interpreted abstraction, relates to the real, of indifferent fluctuating, (inter)active, dynamics.
Noumenon relating to phenomenon creating the subjective/objective divide.
Φ
Natural Selection in Practice – OngoingCanine vocalizations. [ Vid: Natural Selection – Canine Vocalizations]
After thousands of years of coexistence and human breeding, we witness evolution in practice. Dogs are now attempting to imitate human behavior, using their canine genetic traits.
Dogs do not understand what they are doing. They are repeating/imitating a behavior that receives a specific reaction from those it wishes to please.
Sounds are child-like. Simple to produce... like 'mama', or 'no'.
Parallels with how Moderns repeat ideas they do not comprehend and cannot justify but only learn to repeat because of a reaction they've received from the ones they want to please. Sharing internal data, sensations, using vocalizations received a particular positive feedback, a reaction the organism associated with the sound produced, establishing a causal connection. Constant repetition establishes the vocalization, or any behavior, genetically by passing it on as a useful or ‘positive’ activity – how rudimentary oral language evolved.
Φ
Natural selection means the gradual elimination and/or development of potentials, traits, indicated by manifested appearance. What is apparent is the end result of generations of trial & error: traits/behaviors cultivated, within particular conditions. Φ
r/K SelectionInspired by a book, written by an anonymous ‘conservative’ author titled:Wikipedia wrote:In r/K selection theory, selective pressures are hypothesised to drive evolution in one of two generalized directions: r- or K-selection. These terms, r and K, are drawn from standard ecological algebra as illustrated in the simplified Verhulst model of population dynamics: where r is the maximum growth rate of the population (N), K is the carrying capacity of its local environmental setting, and the notation dN/dt stands for the derivative of N with respect to t (time). Thus, the equation relates the rate of change of the population N to the current population size and expresses the effect of the two parameters.
In the etymology of the Verhulst equation, r comes from rate while K comes from carrying capacity.
In German, the word for capacity is Kapazität and K stands for the ‘Kapazitätsgrenze’ (capacity limit).
r-selection
As the name implies, r-selected species are those that place an emphasis on a high growth rate, and, typically exploit less-crowded ecological niches, and produce many offspring, each of which has a relatively low probability of surviving to adulthood (i.e., high r, low K). A typical r species is the dandelion Taraxacum genus.
In unstable or unpredictable environments, r-selection predominates as the ability to reproduce quickly is crucial.
There is little advantage in adaptations that permit successful competition with other organisms, because the environment is likely to change again. Among the traits that are thought to characterize r-selection are high fecundity, small body size, early maturity onset, short generation time, and the ability to disperse offspring widely.
Organisms whose life history is subject to r-selection are often referred to as r-strategists or r-selected. Organisms that exhibit r-selected traits can range from bacteria and diatoms, to insects and grasses, to various semelparous cephalopods and mammals, particularly small rodents.
K-selection
By contrast, K-selected species display traits associated with living at densities close to carrying capacity, and typically are strong competitors in such crowded niches that invest more heavily in fewer offspring, each of which has a relatively high probability of surviving to adulthood (i.e., low r, high K). In scientific literature, r-selected species are occasionally referred to as ‘opportunistic’ whereas K-selected species are described as ‘equilibrium’.
A typical k reproducer is the orchid, or members of the Orchis genus.
In stable or predictable environments, K-selection predominates as the ability to compete successfully for limited resources is crucial and populations of K-selected organisms typically are very constant in number and close to the maximum that the environment can bear (unlike r-selected populations, where population sizes can change much more rapidly).
Traits that are thought to be characteristic of K-selection include large body size, long life expectancy, and the production of fewer offspring, which often require extensive parental care until they mature. Organisms whose life history is subject to K-selection are often referred to as K-strategists or K-selected.
Organisms with K-selected traits include large organisms such as elephants, humans and whales, but also smaller, long-lived organisms such as Arctic terns.
Continuous spectrum
Although some organisms are identified as primarily r- or K-strategists, the majority of organisms do not follow this pattern. For instance, trees have traits such as longevity and strong competitiveness that characterise them as K-strategists.
In reproduction, however, trees typically produce thousands of offspring and disperse them widely, traits characteristic of r-strategists. Similarly, reptiles such as sea turtles display both r- and K-traits: although sea turtles are large organisms with long lifespans (provided they reach adulthood), they produce large numbers of unnurtured offspring.
The r/K dichotomy can be re-expressed as a continuous spectrum using the economic concept of discounted future returns, with r-selection corresponding to large discount rates and K-selection corresponding to small discount rates.
The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics. [ Doc: The Evolutionary Psychology behind Politics]
It supports the ideas I’ve been exploring in this MANifesto.
Right/Left, Conservatism/Liberalism, correspond to the r/K selection strategies.
When resources are in abundance, such as for herbivores, for whom, finding nutrition is relatively easy, the preferred reproductive strategy is the r-selection; when resources are scarce, or difficult to come by, such as for carnivores, the preferred strategy is K-selection. When environmental conditions shift, sometimes towards times of superfluity, and other times towards austerity, along with this environmental change the r/K distinctions shift, sometimes towards the r-strategy, sometimes towards the K-strategy. These refer to parental investments in their own offspring. We can find an economic angle in it.
Basic characteristics of both groups:
r-Selection [Herbivores]: Promiscuity, no in/out group identity, low inter-group competition, low, to no, investment in child-care.
Anonymous wrote:The r-strategy entails five main psychological traits. Each trait is designed to help an organism out-compete peers in the r-selected environment of free resource availability. This psychology also exhibits a tolerance for, or embrace of, promiscuity, low-investment single-parenting, and early onset sexual behaviour among offspring. It will also tend to not exhibit any group-centric urges, such as loyalty to in-group, or hostility to out-group.
Of these five traits, (competition aversion, promiscuity, single parenting, early on set sexuality, and aversion to group-centrism /ethnocentrism), political leftists exhibits a tolerance of, or an embrace of, all five.
We see the correlation between this genetic tactic and the political/moral/social ideals it produces: emphasis on production, on quantities, on all inclusive, on detachment from in-groups and from nature/past, promotion of hedonism, increase in cynicism, shallowness, non-discrimination, passivity, individuality... and so on.
K-Selection [Carnivores]: Monogamy, severe in/out group identity, high inter-group competition, high investment in child care.
We already see how Modern systems of safety, abundance, promote r/selection. There is no reason to be careful with your actions when the cost is low, or non-existent.Anonymous wrote:The K-strategy entails an embrace of five opposite psychological traits.
K-selection favours an aggressive embrace of competition and the competitive environment, where some individuals succeed, and others fail, based on their inherent abilities and merits.
It tends to reject promiscuity in favour of sexual selectivity and monogamy, and it will strongly favour high-investment, two-parent offspring-rearing.
The K-strategy also favours delaying sexual activity among offspring until later in life, when maximally fit.
Finally, in its most evolved form, K-selection will tend to imbue individuals with a fierce loyalty to their in-group, to facilitate success in group-competitions. Danger, shortage and conflict are the evolutionary origins of the pack mentality, and they are ever present in the extreme K-selected environment.
Austere, demanding environments, or specialized survival, such as carnivorous strategies, necessitate care, and risk management.
Large brained species are always omnivorous, or exclusively carnivorous. One reason is the high energy demands of the organ we call brain, and the high cognitive demands of these types of survival strategies.
The brain evolved to manage needs, so as to not become suffering, but to make that cognitive leap towards higher intelligence, such as a brain which can be empathetic, can foresee and prepare, can solve complex problems, what is necessary is the factor of stress: challenges stressing the organism psychically/mentally produced by environmental austerity must be coupled with nutrition that can supply the development of an organ with high-energy demands, such as the brain.
Hedonism, liberalism, the laiser faire, ideologies of Utopianism are idea(l)s evolved in times of abundance, and relative safety and ease. In these environmental conditions minds need not connect-with (face, engage) the world outside the premises that support the safety and abundance they require to dream, to indulge, with carefree abandonment, to splurge energies, with no focus, with no care, to play, to experiment... reflected also in the art, and the sexual behaviours produced during such times.
The Left has always been about ideologies freed from any worldly realities (naïve) – ideals born of affluence, comfort, and leisure. [ MANifesto: Right<>Left – Liberals – Naïve Ideaslism]
Their words, symbolizing concepts, need not connect to anything real; their noumena need not refer to anything phenomenal/apparent, but can remain noetic, pure abstractions, referring only to other brains that share these idea(l)s = ideology. Individuals reverts to a child-like state, where (s)he is at constant play, is exploring/discovering his/her body and what it can do, how it feels; sensations, emotions, dreams. Ensuing ennui is then forced to seek relief in artificial, contrived excitement: artificial stress, such as sports, movies, adrenaline producing activities, and so on.
In these times higher brains will turn towards creativity/innovation, rather than procreative activities and these forms of contrived excitement, leaving the lower types to seek out distractions, narcotics to deal with their abundant, and easily accumulated energies – distractions to deal with their boredom.
Prolonged application of these forms of ‘relief’ produce internal turmoil, restlessness, born of over-indulgence, and accumulated libidinal energies requiring an alternate method to release themselves outwards.
Philosophies evolved, during such times, will reflect this over-abundance, expressing it as a universal overflowing, and/or a perfection (alluding to utopian concepts), an order already present, manifesting in ignorance of perfection, requiring enlightenment, a change of attitude etc.
Austere, severe, demanding environments have a different effect on the organism evolving within them, or on organisms which have specialized in a type of survival characterized by long periods of austerity and short periods of abundance.
The higher cost of nutrition acquisition, in energy and risk, imposes a higher awareness, a more careful disposition (strategic, thoughtful).
Violence becomes an important option, because, unlike with the r/selection types, nutrients cannot be accessed elsewhere with ease. A more creative, lucid, brain evolves from this stress-induced necessity – one which eventually becomes artistic when times of affluence return, and with them restlessness returns, as well, because the brain evolved to deal with survival and the problems it inflicts upon the organism and when it is released from these cares it needs outlets to purge itself.
If the brain is entirely preoccupied by the circumstantial environmental demands it has no time to think of imaginary utopias, and how things ought to be, but is busy trying to outperform competitors, and devising strategies to out-think its prey. Libido is directed towards pro-creativity & creativity, with a specific focus – it cannot afford to waste energies.
The selection process is that of the superior dominating the inferior, and not like with the r-types where superfluity easily produces large numbers (quantities, of median/uniform qualities) which are then weeded-out (selected) by environment over time – r/Types produce prey, K/Types produce predators: a cycle of natural balance between quantities & qualities.
In our Modern times of relative abundance, victim-hood has become the norm, which is idealized; the strategy of uncontrolled breeding dominates, allowing the environment to weed out weakness over time (extended, indeterminately, because of sheltering); hedonism is rampant, sexual promiscuity the rule (both physical and emotional infidelity qualifies); everything is about pleasure with no focus, or concern for the outcome, or the costs, or the reasons; words detach from their references in world and become toys to play and dream with; to explore and experiment – creating fantastic realms populated by minds seeing endless possibilities, as there is no reality, no natural order, to limit them; identity, also detached from nature/past, becomes another fashion statement (trend), with no us & them, but a rainbow colored We.
Returning this description to the feminization contexts: times of abundance reduce the population to a state of adolescence, or the feminine, whereas times of austerity, when the world demands to be reckoned with, and problems are real, rather than surreal, emotional, trivial, produce masculine attitudes.
Φ
Converting a naturally evolved K-type to an r-type would require strict control over the environment, such as on a farm, or zoo, and it would necessitate the artificial introduction of abundant resources, such as would not be found in the environment naturally. The imbalance is the impact of artificial upon natural. The artificial environment, a product of continual and consistence interventions, must appropriate energies from other environments, severely depleting them locally, resulting in mass extinctions, so as to construct and maintain superfluity within this controlled environment.
Life is, now, out of sync with the world that made it possible – this is how I've defined artificial, in relation to natural.
The cocooned, sheltered time/space (farm, zoo), the willfully ordered environment the organism inserts itself within, eventually forgetting there is an outside world (subjectivity denying objective standards), begins impacting the organism in proportion to the organism's impact on the environment it intervened upon – cyclical.
From naturally oscillating r/K selecting strategies, the controlled environment favours the r-type (Feminization); r-types are more manageable, less resistant to external manipulation.
Ease in resource acquisition makes the r-type simpler of mind. It need not prepare, predict, or care much. Cynicism increases, because the individual feels no concern, being protected from the worse consequences for its every choice, its every action.
All it must be able to do is physically determined: work, run, groom etc. Its mind is minimally engaged: reversion/regression to adolescence.
No ‘care’ means the mind can play, knowing nothing can harm it, nothing severe will happen to it, no matter what it does. Severity of choice is reduced, and with it the need to be aware, to discern patterns, to judge and perceive details, to distinguish and discriminate decreases – dumbing-down.
Like children play, knowing the parent is watching over them, the Modern only wants to play, to experiment, to explore, without a care in the world: unreserved, uninhibited, fearless.
In nature there is still the predator to watch-out for so with manmade environment the artificiality manufactures a worse kind of r-type – the manmade r-type tends towards an extreme: self-absorption (subjectivity); pleasure seeking to deal with ennui (hedonism with no price – a win-win scenario); impressionability (lack of clarity, naiveté); cynicism (skepticism towards all outside of the self – the noetic/abstract, and those that support personal needs/ideals); complacency (the "It ain't so bad" attitude, which must be dealt with by introducing controlled stress, fake stress, to keep the rats running); indifference (the "Who gives a shit?" cynicism of Modernity, laughing it all away); the nothing matters outside current human systems/communities and their relationships their compromises and agreements (inter-Subjective communal solipsism, and Nihilism of Modernity – meme usurps the gene).
Φ
From simpler to more complex... r/ to K/. Simple because low investment in quality is compensated for by volume, in production of quantities. Obsession over numbers and popularity is a by-product.
The first method would have been r-selection, given that it is the simplest and the easiest method to have evolved; K-selection needs more complexity to specialize, and would have to evolve larger brains, or more niche oriented tactics.
Bacteria are r-selected: large reproductive capacity needing low expenditure of energy – no gestation and/or parental care, using chance to deal with environmental shifts, and therefore the development of larger, complex, energy consuming brains would be excessive, if not detrimental to this strategy.
In the Quantity-or-Quality risk-management dilemma r/selection bets on quantity, and K/selection on quality. Competition between populations of K-selected Types is fierce. Rules that apply internally, inside the group, do not in relation to the other group.
The r-types emerge within the K-selected Types due to their success: natural balance manifesting process of quality/quantity, ascent/descent cycle.
Φ
Communism, like Christianity, uses a hybrid system of selection. It is K-Type, to compete, with a strong in/out group psychology, but proposes a world where no out groups exist, in a Communist Utopia, converting all to the desirable r-type. [ MANifesto: Politics – Communism]
We might call this an omnivorous appetite. Identity disconnected from nature is reinvented into the socioeconomic status of class, erasing, in theory, all other identifiers.
In Christianity Utopia is the ‘beyond,’ and the identifier for the in-group is ‘believer,’ the ones who have faith. Christianity has a strong collective K-Type selectivity, with its idea(l) r-selection projected in an after-life: their esoteric psyche is r/type, but tis exoteric God is a K/type – mind/body dissonance.
Both Communism & Christianity, being Nihilistic memes, desire a world with no conflict, no earthly opposition, unlike the Pagan K-Types which thrives on enemies, and endless conflict, agon, war.
Φ
r/K selection Theory offers unexpected support for my positions on energy appropriation, accumulation and libidinal pressures, needing to explode, expand outwards. When the environment offers abundance, with minimal effort (low cost relative to benefit) hedonism and promiscuity increases, because the organism can satisfy its self-maintenance needs easily, and then it can accumulate excess energies, with minimal risks/costs, which then pressure it to continuously, and carelessly discharge them. The arts flourish, exploring surreal, the un-real; philosophical discourse expands to include the absurd, the purely theoretical (noumena with no contact with phenomena); human activities enter the area of superfluity, the impractical is made more practical, the inefficient is not so risqué; the excessive is not considered decadent, but is pleasing, relieving. Libidinal energies amass continuously and with ease, and discharging them seeks innovative and convenient, ways to do so.
The human condition is overflowing with possibilities, with potentials: the inherited limits can be stretched with the flood of internal power, directed by a Will, which is overwhelmed by this excess. Like a child who inherits his father's wealth, the r-type grows in a culture of plenty, of relative ease, of abundance.
What energies it accumulates it does not value as much as he would have if he had to struggle to accumulate them. His psychology becomes spoiled, demanding new, better, ways, more novel ways to direct energies that constantly replenish, as if by magic, as if the universe was providing of its bounty.
Boredom is the bane of such minds. Obsession over novelty, with more intense experiences of pleasures, is a Modern phenomenon. Modernity, as we know it, is the cultivation of r-selected types. For them, all is about pleasure, the next fix.
They know not what austerity is, having only experienced a world of easily attained resources; resources they only have to earn access to.
The world is experienced as a world of plenitude, of overflowing, of infinite possibilities – a child's dream world: Never-Never Land.
What's there to do in Never-Never Land other than play, other than soar, confronting bad guys, kill-joys, and constantly win? There is no ‘never’ in Never-Land. The contradiction can be laughed away with a child’s twinkle.
Do your homework, listen to mommy and daddy, clean your room, and the food is on the table, the blanket on the bed, waiting to warm your dreams and melt away your fears.
A subsidiary of the Walt Disney dream factory boys and girls dream of staying young forever. Their only allegiance is to their hopes, and dreams, their addiction to magical realms and beautiful landscapes, brimming with spectacular possibilities. A lifetime of having fun, of playing, of not taking any of it seriously, because to be severe is to break the spell: remain naïve, child-like, impressionable, and full of joy and unbridled energies, is the only way to ‘earn’ your stay in Never-Ever-Land.
Ω
Re: -NATURE-
Animals
Self-propelling, self-propagating, self-sustaining self-organizing congruity of aggregate patterns/energies.
Φ
In between animal & plant a variety of intermediating forms of life, proceeding from the less towards the more sophisticated… the more complex; the more dissimilar congruent patterns, creating a more efficient, synergistic unity, more effective in relation to other such patterned organizations. Φ
The central differentiation of animal and plant is the central nervous system, with the brain being the connector (nexus), the point of ambiguous combination in an abstraction (idea), between internal (esoteric, mystical) and external (exoteric, empirical) sources of data collection, eventually resulting in the consciousness/self-consciousness divide (mind/body), producing the I/Other, or 1/0, or subjective/objective discrepancies of dualism and, the linguistic expression of it being binary logic, and the subsequent paradoxes this produces (Bicameral Mind).As with science and its ambitious, unifying M-Theory, this divide is to be synthesized through spiritualism, and/or the metaphor = art.
Φ
First degree of separation from soil, from the earth. Organism does not feed directly on solar energies gathered from the earth (plants), but feeds on the ‘work’ of other organisms who collect solar energy and convert/process it to a more dense form (herbivores). Specialized organisms (carnivores) then appropriate this more dense solar energy for their own use.
Φ
We use metaphors that are most agreeable to those we wish to approach. We call our rejection of the multitudes ‘wolf-spirit,’ wanting our more discriminating social instincts to be accepted into a smaller, more intimate group. I, too, wear wolf skins, covered in lamb wool, so that if I am peeled free of my pretences, something tolerable will be revealed.
The bear's solitary strength, no single wolf could match, has to be reduced down to its small, button eyes, and its fluffy girth and roundness – it must be called Teddy, in harmony with its cuddly mass, and its rounded softness.
When trying to present our independence it is the wolf we use as our symbol, when it is the bear's ambiguous spirit, we cannot relate to, that frightens us the most.
Ω
Plants
Non-self-propelling, self-propagating, self-sustaining self-organizing congruities of aggregate patterns/energies.
Φ
The basic difference between plants and animals is the central nervous system, culminating in a processing hub, we call brain. The organism we call plant lacking a centralized processing hub, spreads the (re)activity across its physical becoming – each part of it is independently (re)active to external stimuli. You see how compartmentalization, and schizophrenia, are exposed as reversions to a more primitive state of relating to world – a more base form of rudimentary consciousness. Φ
The plant, unlike the more sophisticated animal – with such organism as amoeba, bacteria, being intermediate states of development – need not process stimuli in a central hub, a brain lording over the entire structure; a brain abstracting energies, data, to funnel the organism’s aggregate energies towards an objective. Each and every part of the plant is independent, governed by automated, unconscious, (re)actions to stimulation; free from an authoritarian imposing brain, to impose will and discipline their (inter)activities to a communal goal. The plant is an example of uncontrolled, visceral, and genetic (re)activity to phenomena, with no meme, no disciplining, repressing, agency to direct each part, making synergy even more effective. A plant is the most primitive example of patterns in congruence, (inter)acting and establishing a cooperative, aggregate unity of energies, in relation to world.
Φ
With a base form of a nervous system and no central directing hub, a plant is entirely (re)active to environmental phenomena; every part of it independently so.Different to a virus in that it does need to insert itself into a host, but only awaits its natural dissimulation, harvesting its patterns/pieces.
Φ
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von wrote:Here where I am confounded with a great variety of plants, my hypothesis that it might be possible to derive all plant forms from one original plant becomes clear to me and more exciting. Only when we have accepted this idea will it be possible to determine genera and species exactly. So far this has, I believe, been done in a very arbitrary way. At this state of my botanical philosophy, I have reached an impasse, and I do not see how to get out of it. The whole subject seems to me to be profound and of far-reaching consequence.’(Padua Botanical Gardens, September 27, 1786)
‘…Seeing such a variety of new and renewed forms, my old fancy suddenly came back to mind: among this multitude might I not discover the Primal Plant [Urpflanze]? There certainly must be one. Otherwise, how could I recognize that this or that form was a plant if all were not built on the same basic model?"’(Botanical Gardens, Palermo, Sicily, April 17, 1797)
‘… The Primal Plant is going to be the strangest creature in the world, which Nature herself shall envy me. With this model and the key to it, it will be possible to go on forever inventing plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could, for they are not the shadow phantoms of vain imagination, but possess an inner necessity and truth.’ (Naples, May 17, 1787)
‘While walking in the Public Gardens of Palermo, it came to me in a flash that in the organ of the plant which we are accustomed to call the leaf lies the true Proteus who can hide or reveal himself in vegetal forms. From first to last, the plant is nothing but leaf, which is so inseparable from the future germ that one cannot think of one without the other.’(Rome, July 31, 1787)
Φ
Tendrils seeking solar energies – interaction of sun and earth. Emergence of life, on earth, is still a mystery. How solar energies sparks attraction/repulsion to produce the building blocks of life can only be assumed to be a result of quickening: turmoil of heat, from within and without, accelerating (inter)activity, adjusting attraction/repulsion to extreme conditions where unusual combinations can take place. Ω
↑
↑
Re: -NATURE-
Nurturing
Cultivation
↓Baggage
Cultivation
↓Baggage
If by the word nature we mean the sum of all nurturing, then nurture is the ongoing (inter)action between what has been determined, and what is being determined; it is the past aggregating.
Φ
Taking our cue from our first definition of ‘nature’, we can define ‘nurture’ as the immediate past, differing from nature in that it can be intervened upon by the organism. The basic difference between nature & nurture is one of an event-horizon: conceptual horizon indicating a field of possible (inter)activity.Nurture reflects a shallower event-horizon and one which the Will can affect by directing the organism (choice) – it is another term for experiential influences upon the development of an organism, and, therefore, it is an ongoing process.
This immediacy, and relative malleability of nurturing, makes it a more seductive concept to a mind attracted to order and infected by the need for its own self-preservation.
Nurturing offers the illusion of absolute free-will, and preserves the notion of self-determination. The immutability of a past which cannot be altered becomes synonymous with a cruel or indifferent Deity imposing its will upon a human life.
Φ
Nurture is the exaggeration of the mind’s appreciation of its own possibilities. Ego inflates its own power to determine its fate.
Φ
Nurturing is a term referring to how the distant (inherited) past (nature) (inter)acts with the immediate (experienced) past, in the ceaseless continuum of existence. Φ
Nurturing (immediate past) now dominates political and social discourse. From a small aspect of an organism’s nature it has climbed in importance, claiming the top spot or, settling for a 50/50 participation in its evaluation of what is determining an organism’s choices and behaviors. Millions of years of nurturing is counter-balanced, or even supplanted, by a lifetime of proper training/education – a very ambitious, self-serving, judgement-call. Nurturing is the word they use now, instead of eugenics, or propaganda, or brain-washing.
The small fraction nurturing, lucid wilful, choices, participate in the fate of an organism are inflated to usurp natural selected processes, or to counter-balance them.
Φ
If nature determines the limits of human potential then nurturing determines to what degree these potentials will be realized and how much these limits will be challenged. Nurturing always refers to a cultivation of possibilities by a Will; either the Will of the organism itself, or an external Will, which (re)directs the organism’s development with a specific object/objective in mind.
This application of Will takes advantage of the force of synergy and is most often referred to as free-will.
Free-will is, of course, a self-contradicting term, since what is dependent cannot be also independent, and an organism wills what it needs, or what it is lacking in itself, ergo it strives towards what it lacks and so is dependent upon this projected object/objective; it is by no means independent. Nevertheless, the term free-will can be a useful one when it is used to define this focus of energies with the multiplying effect of synergy which gives the organism the possibility to overcome its already determined limits and potentials, even if to a slight degree.
The power of free-will is minimal but incremental: each choice determines future choices; every upgrade of awareness incrementally multiplies the perception of options, and establishes a relation of self with them, which increases the potential to circumvent or reject them.
Φ
The idea that the sum of all past nurturing can be washed away with the effects of immediate nurturing is the proposition which decided, for no reason at all, that nurturing is more important for the development of an individual’s behavior and potentials than nature is. Without being aware of it the nurturers have declared natural selection debunked and all its products a ‘primitiveness’ they can easily correct. If they are correct, this would make species, types of any kind, and empiricism, in general, a big mistake we are just only realizing. In this they would find themselves in good company amongst the Christians and the, Muslims, to name but two degradations reliant on emotion ‘reasoning’. Φ
The battle between nature/nurture is a battle between those who believe the past (nature), is more important/decisive, versus those that believe environment is more important/decisive in producing character and potential. Nurturers wish to preserve this idea of free-will, yet all they are doing is casting themselves ‘free’ from a past that grounds them upon reality, exposing them to any form of exploitation.
The terror of ‘freedom,’ though it may be delusional, is what Sartre knew well. When drowning in a sea of constant change, desperation compels you to grab onto the first thing which offers ant amount of stability. This is what the system counts-on, stepping in, once it has severed the individual away from all anchoring heritage, offering him an idealistic lifejacket of modernity and conformity.
Though the concept of free-will is self-contradictory the individual, nevertheless, finds it appealing; particularly when his past, his inheritance and the world as it is, has proven to be unwelcoming and unforgiving to him and his expectations.
The idea of freedom is presupposed, requiring no effort to be earned; feeling relieved, by casting-off that burden, he soon finds himself floating in air with no place to stand.
At this point, at least in the west, materialism is offered to weigh him down and ground him, because he lacks any substance in himself. Instead, he sinks into the abyss, and feels relief floating in the memory of amniotic fluid.
Φ
If the world cannot conform to our desires then what better way to conform to its demands than by reinventing ourselves anew? Nothing follows us from our past. No gossip, no reputation, no determining limitations, nothing but a story we can casually share knowing that it only affects us emotionally but in no other way.
All that nasty baggage is thrown out the window and we can purchase new clothes at the shop down the street for a few metal coins and paper notes.
Then, wearing our new fashionable skins, we can exit into the same Old Street a brand new man, with a swanky new hide and identity, concealed behind shiny new social symbols; refined materials perfectly fitted over all that unforgiving flesh and bone, swaying in the winds of time like a ship’s sails; all of it tailor made to accentuate and distract.
Take away a modern woman’s lipstick, her push-up bra, her high heels and hair extensions and see how long it takes her to leave the house.
Yes, I think if there is one thing a well-groomed Modern man, nurtured in the right ways by the right mentors, is not, then he most certainly is not honest.
I think honest is the last thing he can ever be.
Φ
Modern man is taken by the immediate, and will have nurturing always win out in any competition against nature. At most he may offer a stalemate, not willing to concede inferiority, but not totally convinced of his own faked certainty. No man born in an inferior position, or feeling himself holding the short-end of the genetic and/or social stick, will ever be willing to accept the overwhelming burden of his inescapable, unchangeable, past. For him nurture is another word for hope.
Φ
Nurturing: organism affected by environment, associated with the idea(l) state of infancy when organism was sheltered from the majority of environmental stresses, allowing it to develop to a more mature state when it was ready to endure environmental stresses. Φ
Nurturing is the Modern man’s saving grace, his universal eraser. Sometimes coming in the guise of healing ‘love’, sometimes as the great equalizer of ’education’, other times as the comforting blinding spirit of ‘subjectivity,’ it promises salvation from the ‘sins’ of the past; ‘forgiveness’ as a rebirth out of forgetfulness. Ω
Baggage
Baggage is what modern minds have been trained to call all experiences, all knowledge, which hinders communal peace and avoids conflict.
It is a way of rendering the mind stupid before the need to belong and to be docile and tolerant towards others – a way of shaming certain kinds of knowledge and experiences so as to be forgotten, as if they never happened: dumbing-down.
The only conflict allowed, at this stage, is the indirect, passive-aggressive, feminine kind. They will associate it with all experiences which burden the mind so that it cannot function ‘normally’. But this is a description of all emotions, experiences, knowledge which affect the mind and overwhelm its judgements, restricting its options; all, including love, compassion, tolerance, dependence, and all those concepts they would consider ‘positive’.
The selective usage of the shaming term ‘baggage’ is meant to dissuade certain kinds of memories, excluding them from consideration and not allowing them to enter the ongoing (inter)actions and what judgments emerge out of their contemplation.
Φ
We modern westerners know, at least in theory, that the brain is a physical organ and that the mind is a manifestation of it, making the mind/body duality a superstition best left behind, yet very few actually take it to heart, or apply it pragmatically.Still, to this day, Cartesian dualism reigns supreme among the majority of otherwise rational civilized human beings. They know it is ‘hogwash,’ in theory and consciously, but it still infects their judgments in areas where reasoning it away might expose them to the injustices of nature.
Φ
A man passing through life with no luggage is like a homeless person rummaging through a city’s refuse to find something to re-consume… something to keep him still to settle his restlessness, something thrown away to re-masticate on. With no sorrows, no bitterness, no regrets, he is empty of all care, except for the mundane, the recyclable refuse of human civilization; a charmless, drifter, lacking all memories, all substance, all sense of self; nothing to bring him down upon the earth, with gravitas. Φ
In the ongoing debate concerning nature versus nurture, modernistic views tend to lean towards nurture, sometimes going as far as arguing that culture is the deciding factor and biology is irrelevant. The idea of a human nature is dismissed as a fabrication that implies an uncomfortable determinism. We see this more clearly when dealing with sexual matters, and how sex has been turned into a cultural product with no other connection to reality other than offering man a hedonistic identification with the sublime benevolence of the universal godhead.
According to Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate – the Modern Denial of Human Nature the three “sacred doctrines” governing modern western scientific and cultural ideologies of the past century are: the Blank Slate, proposed originally by Locke – claiming that the mind emerges into the world with no predispositions, or prearranged reactions to stimuli, forever malleable and awaiting to be written upon; the Noble Savage , the proposition advanced by Rousseau – reinventing primitive man as some kind of innocent child that is then corrupted by the evils of civilization and technologies (mirroring the Biblical tale), absolving man from all those elements we prefer to call ‘bad’ in our schizophrenic world, obsessed with romance and self-denial; the Ghost in the Machine, attributed primarily to Descartes – implying, through many positions dealing with sociology and psychology, the duality of mind/body, where mind is some sort of mystical force that haunts the physical form but is forever separate from the ambiguous ‘I’ in the statement “I think, therefore I am” which presents the activity of thinking as a characteristic of the thinker who is presumed but remains unknown. [ MANifesto: Science]
With this triad of liberal absurdity most current ideas are imbued with an artificial sense of authenticity, cleansed from all the woes of the past that promises to heal mankind from all its ailments, and mental dissonance, returning our species to its ‘pristine purity’. If there was ever a more obvious expression of a continuance between Judeo-Christianity and Humanism then I do not know if it.
Φ
For the life-hating, degenerate, the past can be left behind, thrown in the garbage, forgotten like old socks in the corners of his psyche. He thinks that the past is like a souvenir shop where one buys gaudy little trinkets only to have them collecting dust on a bookshelf, only recalled into memory when a visitor comes over, as an example of his worldliness, his cosmopolitan travels, or are thrown away when they go out of fashion, or when they crack, being so cheap and fragile, or are connected with a bad vacation memory. ‘Growing up,’ ‘progress,’ ‘enlightenment,’ is, for such a well-traveled creature, the learned ability to pick & choose what parts of the past are to be recollected, and recycled, over and over again.
Φ
Baggage: A westerner’s metaphor for bad karma, memories he wants to deny entrance into his consciousness; reputation escaped with amnesia. [ MANifesto: Sex – Reputation]When luggage is lost on a trip where nobody knows you, the opportunity to purchase new ones turns the inconvenience into an exciting rebirth. The make-over is completed.
Man escapes himself through a shopping adventure. All he needs is a plausible excuse. A justification that will hide the true motive.
Φ
Baggage, as metaphor, implies that one can live with no social artifices, no stable public character, with nothing on, nothing covering the body, the personæ. Genes without memetic symbols, actions without words.
Denying personæ, erases the past, but the restrictions of a socially imposed character remain. A gifted actor wants to play different roles, experiencing the gamut of human pretentiousness; avoiding being type-cast, and stuck in one role.
Ω
Re: -NATURE-
Domestication
Twisting Nature
↓Taming ↓Breeding
◙Overpopulation ◙Demographic Winter
Twisting Nature
↓Taming ↓Breeding
◙Overpopulation ◙Demographic Winter
To ‘tame nature’ means nothing more than to make it friendlier towards human requirements; calming the threatening aspects of a cultivated, immutable, past.
An attempt to intervene and adjust this past to present, or future, requirements – idealization.
There is no mystical, sublime, meaning to tameness; no ‘goodness’ being coaxed out of wilderness, except the one in relation to human tastes and human desires.
To tame is to humanize; to harmonize otherness with human interests, governed by a particular human idea(l): projected, desirable, object/objective.
Φ
Domestication: intervention upon naturally selecting processes, imposing a preferences – selecting according to desire: associated with a rudimentary, indirect and/or unconscious, form of eugenics. Φ
The issue is not why individuals existing in the same world, raised in similar cultures, with generally the same level of intelligence agree on the common sense fundamentals, but why, given the similarities, they do not agree. Gene <> Meme offers my explanation. [ MANifesto: Politics – Word War – Meme & Gene Dynamics]
And if we delve further into the past we will find a fundamental agreement in basic things, like the indubitable fact that appearances mean something, and that males and females are not the same, and they are not the same both in physical and in mental potentials, and that race is a fundamental part of evolution… and so on.
Peoples isolated geographically came to similar conclusions, using different metaphors, symbols, but agreeing on the basics, thy reached the same conclusions, the same destinations, having traversed different paths and coming upon the same realizations from different directions... but as we come forward into Modernity this common-sense agreement is not a given, other than the agreement to disagree.
We are now at a point of disagreeing with our own body, our own past, with ourselves... claiming to be other-than what we appear, or claiming to be females trapped in male bodies, and we are confused about the meaning of basic words like 'value', 'sex', 'human', and so on.
Moderns assume, taking it for granted that there is no shared, objective reality, that all agreement is a result of some kind of coercion, helping them validate their starting position. But the opposite is the case, in an inverted pseudo-realism, called Nihilism.
How can it be that individuals of the same species, existing in the same world, fail to agree on basic facts?
You will not find other species debating the validity of their own sensual perceptions. You will not find them questioning their sex, or the differences between breeds within the same species. Only homo sapient is schizophrenic.
Only man can look into world and dismiss his own senses as superficial, his own symbols as insufficient, reality as unsatisfactory, or ‘too much’ to bear, choosing an alternate one.
The only explanation is self-domestication. Taming of man, by man = Feminization. Domestication involving social selection, social engineering, eugenics:
1- Quarantine – separation of environment from nature, from the wild – ignorance and/or denial of objective world – reality beyond the walls/fences.
2- Selection according to specific production value, not genetic qualities – rearranging values and judging standards.
3- Cultivation of docility, amicability, tolerance within confined controlled environments – taming.
4- An inability to return to the wild – dependence on quarantined environment.
5- Regimentation – Specific periods and places for eating, defecating, playing, working, copulating, waking/sleeping; not following circadian rhythms, or planetary cycles – detachment from natural cycles – training.
Φ
Farming is what we call the practice, and husbandry is what we call the science of domesticating wilderness to suit human needs, or to accord with human ideologies.Wikipedia wrote:Domestication (from Latin domesticus) is the process where by a population of animals or plants is changed at the genetic level through a process of selection, in order to accentuate traits that benefit humans. It differs from taming in that a change in the phenotypical expression and genotype of the animal occurs, whereas taming is simply the process by which animals become accustomed to human presence.
In the Convention on Biological Diversity, a domesticated species is defined as a ‘species in which the evolutionary process has been influenced by humans to meet their needs.’ Therefore, a defining characteristic of domestication is artificial selection by humans. Humans have brought these populations under their control and care for a wide range of reasons: to produce food or valuable commodities (such as wool, cotton, or silk), for types of work (such as transportation, protection, and warfare), scientific research, or simply to enjoy as companions or ornaments.
The first thing man did, with his growing awareness of otherness, of the alien, is find ways to impose his will upon it. This is called ‘taming’. Then man developed the know-how to impose his will upon the other on a very fundamental level, shaping it into something no natural environment would produce on its own.
Φ
The basic motive for domestication, of any sort, is production, and the control of it. Guiding, and enhancing, the productivity of others is what farming/husbandry is about: balancing between cost and benefits, in order to achieve the highest yield possible.
Increasing knowledge into animal psychology, including humans, has resulted in more sophisticated methodologies.
Violence is no longer considered efficient in bringing about the highest yield. The organism can be placed in a totally artificial environment, raised to know nothing else, and treated in a manner that will not overly stress it. If persistent, the farmer can select and mate individual animals that will possess the desired combination of productivity and demeanor, which will result in the best results.
With humans this is not feasible. Forced mating will be an intrusion upon the human conception of free-will and so will result in the opposite of the desired effect. With humans a more subtle approach is essential; one which requires longer time-periods and more insidious practices; with humans the necessity of making the choice seem free cannot be avoided, therefore coercion will not work as well as seduction and manipulating the human before (s)he can develop the awareness to resist.
If intervened upon early enough a child can be raised to judge and value in accordance with a prescribed standard, resulting in the desired outcome.
Difficulties may persist in a few, where the spirit of self is stronger and has emerged spontaneously from genetic combinations… perhaps reinforced by some contaminating contact with an undesired idea(l). Human husbandry is also more difficult when the desirable outcome comes into conflict with primal, naturally selected, predispositions.
Φ
Humans shape the world around them, to meet their needs. Then they shape themselves, to first insert themselves within this reshaped world, and then to control other humans, as they would any other animal. ‘Institutionalized,’ is what we call the domesticated human; ‘Feminized,’ is the behavioral result. If this shaping of the world, this willful intervention, continues long enough and is successful, then we have what we call an artificial environment.
Φ
Domesticating humans is not as easy as with other known species. More complex humans require a memetic manipulation to accompany the genetic one.Gene/Meme synthesis offers a more challenging combination.
Φ
Domestication: Turning wolves into dogs, by altering their identifiers.Preservation of puppy-like demeanor (retardation) without losing select wolf-like behaviours (pretentiousness). Institutionalization of species.
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Domestication is the retardation of an organism, maintaining it is a state of perpetual immaturity: dependent, friendly, easily controlled/trainable, returning to the physical characteristics of immaturity, or a female: roundness of features, pleasantness of demeanour, naiveté, openness, sociability. Φ
Domestication – domicileTo convert other to something appropriate for one's own home – engineering of the social, or personal kind. Ironic when considering how Moderns accuse anything that threatens them of being a product of social engineering – gender, race etc. The reverse, in fact, is the case. It is the absence of them, or their reduction in significance, a collective blindness, that is being socially engineered.
Reduction of stress seems to be a factor in what we call domestication.
Taming wildness, from plant to animal, by reducing the amount of environmental stress, and promoting latent genetic expressions, after we've stunted the process of maturation – maintaining the species in a state of immaturity so as to then intervene upon its development.
It is well-known that children learn faster than adults because the brain develops without focus, neural clusters multiplying with stimulation, until, later in age, they begin atrophying, permitting those that continue to be stimulated to dominate as those not used atrophy and disappear.
The same factor seems to be the cause of gene expression.
Genetic codes are all on equal footing, early-on in development, until environment determines which ones will be cultivated, and permitted to express themselves fully, and which ones will be forced to atrophy, or not permitted to express their full potential. [ Doc: Animal Evolution During Domestication – The Domesticated Fox as Model]
Reduction of stress permits latent mutations to emerge and be established. Many generations cause a permanent shift, expressed in appearance as coloration, droopy ears, in canines, vocalizations used in the wild only by immature members of the group to draw attention and trigger parental instincts.
Human female ‘roundness’, child-like appearance is due to the female's increased reliance on group dynamics; openness to others, playfulness, and a submissive demeanour, are all aspects of domestication.
Stunting of maturation so as to permit latent genes to emerge and be cultivated. Each organism allows its particular mutations to come forth. Explaining the present-day emphasis on individuality, as well as increasing sexual dysfunctions when reproduction is no longer a factor.
Sex becomes a manifestation of one's unique mutations, permitted to develop themselves in a world protecting all mutations from the costs of unfitness – such as colouration being less significant when camouflage is not a survival factor.
Ω
Re: -NATURE-
Taming
The famous Siberian Silver Fox Domestication Project, conducted by the Russian scientist and academic Dmitry Konstantinovich Belyaev.
Selecting for non-aggression, submissiveness, results in lower adrenaline levels, which then permit dormant genes to reawaken producing a variety of physical traits.Wikipedia wrote:The experiment was initiated by scientists who were interested in the topic of domestication and the process by which wolves became tame domesticated dogs. They saw some retention of juvenile traits by adult dogs, both morphological ones, such as skulls that were unusually broad for their length, and behavioural ones, such as whining, barking, and submission. In a time when Lysenkoism was an official state doctrine, Belyaev's commitment to classical genetics had cost him his job as head of the Department of Fur Animal Breeding at the Central Research Laboratory of Fur Breeding in Moscow in 1948. During the 1950s, he continued to conduct genetic research under the guise of studying animal physiology.
Belyaev believed that the key factor selected for in the domestication of dogs was not size or reproduction, but behaviour; specifically, tameability. Since behaviour is rooted in biology, selecting for tameness and against aggression, means selecting for physiological changes in the systems that govern the body's hormones and neurochemicals. Belyaev decided to test his theory by domesticating foxes; in particular, the silver fox, a dark colour form of the red fox. He placed a population of them under strong selection pressure for inherent tameness.
As Lyudmilla Trut says in her 1999 American Scientist article,Belyaev and Trut believe that selecting for tameness mimics the natural selection that must have occurred in the ancestral past of dogs, and more than any other quality, must have determined how well an animal would adapt to life among humans.Trut, Lyudmilla wrote:The least domesticated foxes, those that flee from experimenters or bite when stroked or handled, are assigned to Class III. Foxes in Class II let themselves be petted and handled but show no emotionally friendly response to experimenters. Foxes in Class I are friendly toward experimenters, wagging their tails and whining. In the sixth generation bred for tameness we had to add an even higher-scoring category. Members of Class IE, the ‘domesticated elite,’ are eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs.
They start displaying this kind of behaviour before they are one month old. By the tenth generation, 18 percent of fox pups were elite; by the 20th, the figure had reached 35 percent. Today elite foxes make up 70 to 80 percent of our experimentally selected population.
The result is that Russian scientists now have a number of domesticated foxes that are fundamentally different in temperament and behaviour from their wild forbearers. Some important changes in physiology and morphology are now visible, such as mottled or spotted colored fur.
Many scientists believe that these changes related to selection for tameness are caused by lower adrenaline production in the new breed, causing physiological changes in very few generations and thus yielding genetic combinations not present in the original species. This indicates that selection for tameness (i.e. low flight distance) produces changes that are also influential on the emergence of other ‘dog-like’ traits, such as raised tail and coming into heat every six months rather than annually.
The project also investigated breeding vicious foxes to study aggressive behavior. These foxes snap at humans and otherwise show no fear.
Domestication essentially entails the retardation of maturity, and the retention of the selected adolescent traits.
Dogs show similar traits in comparison to their wild ancestors the grey wolves: color variations not found in wolves, floppy ears, curly tail... an infantile demeanor, a careless curiosity often exhibited by immature organisms during the early years of their development. Now apply this to the domesticated human and you have an outline of the Modern human, the so-called ‘cultivated man’.
The female's form evolved to take advantage of a naturally occurring social behaviour towards adolescent features; the parental instinct of nurturing, meant to ensure that the adult organism will care for the helpless infant until it matures enough to fend for itself, is triggered sensually.
Females must endure long periods of dependence during gestation and afterwards when they raise the human child to maturity. The development of the adolescent, immature look & attitude is part of the evolutionary strategy ensuring that the male, and/or other females, will be inclined to care for, or to be nurturing towards her and her offspring.
Subsequent experiments with pure-bred grey wolves, raised in similar environments as dogs, resulted in the conclusion that domestication becomes ingrained in the organism.
Wolf pups raised in exactly the same homes, by the same people, in the exact same way did not display the same demeanor as dog pups did after a certain age. Other than lower levels of adrenaline, the variations of coat colours, the floppy ears and curly tail, the accompanying submissiveness, timidity, what domestication cultivated was infantile dependence. Wolf pups began losing interest in their handlers, becoming more free-spirited, independent, unwilling to please.
Domestication requires more than one generation focused breeding to gradually eliminate the evolved ‘wildness’ of a species. [ Vid: Domestication – Dmitry Belyaev and Fox Experiment]
Φ
When you tame an organism you, essentially, take away its capacity to survive on its own. You select the attributes that make it timid, productive, and totally dependent upon you, or a protective environment. You may even humanize it, by picking and choosing what attributes it possesses which are most conducive to human cooperative living. Φ
Domestication is social selection (eugenics). Genes to Memes.Path-of-least-Resistance manipulated to produce dependence.
Φ
Domestication is the cultivation of the same traits that enable a female to carry out her sexual role. It is emasculation, or a form of mental castration, or stunting of potentials – socialized retardation. [ Vid: Domestication – Russian Domesticated Foxes]Φ
Taming means to humanize the alien, converting other to a form satisfying human needs. To tame is to habituate the alien to a form that is intimate. It is based on self-awareness, transferred/projected upon another. Ω
Re: -NATURE-
Breeding
Nothing pronounces the process of evolution than man’s intervention upon the genetics of other species. The slow process of natural selection is sped-up with human technological/technical interventions, offering us a glimpse into how through trial and error certain traits are promoted and others repressed.
In the place of environmental conditioning, we have a wilful, human conditioning, selecting traits according to desired outcome.
What is called ‘taming’ is nothing more than the selection of traits that turn the species being intervened upon, less hostile to human needs.
Φ
Dog BreedingThe most extreme example of how human interventions, upon natural processes can produce extremes, are dogs, and dog breeds. Man nurtures particular mutations so as to pronounce certain traits he desires. This, in nature, would take centuries of genetic isolation, and environmental conditioning. Man accomplishes it in a few generation of controlled breeding. The result is a multiplicity of types which are alien to each other, in appearance, yet remain part of the same species because they can still, in theory, reproduce with each other. Only in nature would this result in a reduction of cross-reproduction. [ Pics: Nature/Domestication/Breeding – Dogs]
The history of dog-breeding teaches us that man’s interventions upon natural reproduction may produce desirable, pleasing outcomes, to him, but it also produces pollutants, such as genetic pollutants: mutations that render certain breeds unfit to survive outside human environments, or that burden them with ailments that are by-products of in-breeding (extreme genetic isolation).
We can witness how these same effects can find an equivalent in humans, because the first species to be domesticated by humans are humans themselves.
Φ
Canine breeding shows the effectiveness of human interventions upon nature.Knowledge, accumulated over centuries of cultivation, is applied to humans and is called social engineering, and indoctrination, and institutionalization, and… yes, Feminization.
Man streamlines evolutionary processes by replacing environment with his own ideological objectives, selecting accordingly what traits to breed into the organism and what traits to breed out of it.
Φ
Breeding refers to human will substituting for the indifference of natural selection. Will, directing reproduction using an idealized outcome.Social eugenics is renamed ‘cultivation’, guided by a central meme.
Genes being re-shaped by memes. The memes can be more, or less, contrary to the environmental conditions they interfere with.
Ω
Re: -NATURE-
Overpopulation
It is only with domesticated species, reinforced and sheltered and mutated, who are permitted to spread, like vermin, suffocating other organisms.
In regards to an experiment (Behavioural Sink) involving rats allowed to overpopulate a controlled & contained environment, John B. Calhoun says this:
How current does this sound?
Overpopulation does more than that, it also makes dogmas, ideals/ideas, teaching self-degradation, deference, surrender to authority, submissiveness, dependence on otherness, and it makes them… reasonable, given the circumstances.
What does anxiety/stress do to an organism? It makes it obsess about relief, seeking in numbing, escapism, fleeing, or fighting, an end to its torment.
The psychosomatic effects of constant, low-level stress/anxiety is obvious in Modern systems. Impressionability, a desire to please, and susceptibility to suggestion, are some symptoms.
Urbanization, idealistic containment, sheltering, emotional, and economic dependence, all manufacture a noetic box, within which minds trap themselves, resulting in consequences an actual containment box would produce.
Spaces may still be out there, but all but a few can or choose to live in them. Instead man stuffs himself into small city spaces, living on top of one other, in literal boxes.
A man can starve to death beside an abundance of nutrients in this Modern paradigm, just as he can feel isolated and alone while surrounded by myriads of strangers.
Decreasing spaces, absence of accessible frontiers, forces those contained within this limited space/time to adjust psychologically.
▲
Overpopulation refers to a relationship between environment and individuals of a particular specie. It implies an imbalance, produced by excess. Φ
Nature has its ways of preventing the dominance of a single species. It’s called ‘culling’: predation, disease, female sexual filtering. It is only with domesticated species, reinforced and sheltered and mutated, who are permitted to spread, like vermin, suffocating other organisms.
In regards to an experiment (Behavioural Sink) involving rats allowed to overpopulate a controlled & contained environment, John B. Calhoun says this:
[ Vid: Overpopulation – Mouse Utopia Experiment]Calhoun, John B. wrote:The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioural sink.
The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained.
As many as 60 of the 80 rats in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations.
[...] In the experiments in which the behavioral sink developed, infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent among the most disoriented groups in the population.
How current does this sound?
Overpopulation does more than that, it also makes dogmas, ideals/ideas, teaching self-degradation, deference, surrender to authority, submissiveness, dependence on otherness, and it makes them… reasonable, given the circumstances.
Φ
The fear of overpopulation is an additional factor being used to manufacture popular consent. Although the possibility of populations exceeding the earth’s capacity to feed is a real one, just as the Global Warming threat is, the possibility is often exaggerated, becoming one more fear-factor used to maintain western populations in a state of perpetual anxiety. What does anxiety/stress do to an organism? It makes it obsess about relief, seeking in numbing, escapism, fleeing, or fighting, an end to its torment.
The psychosomatic effects of constant, low-level stress/anxiety is obvious in Modern systems. Impressionability, a desire to please, and susceptibility to suggestion, are some symptoms.
Φ
The same conditions replicated in the Behavioral Sink experiment can be similarly replicated in real life.Urbanization, idealistic containment, sheltering, emotional, and economic dependence, all manufacture a noetic box, within which minds trap themselves, resulting in consequences an actual containment box would produce.
Spaces may still be out there, but all but a few can or choose to live in them. Instead man stuffs himself into small city spaces, living on top of one other, in literal boxes.
Φ
Some believe that overpopulation is a myth, and that the planet can support greater numbers of humans than are alive today, but if you factor in control over resources, and the absence of accessible frontiers, then the concept of overpopulation becomes a political and economic one. A man can starve to death beside an abundance of nutrients in this Modern paradigm, just as he can feel isolated and alone while surrounded by myriads of strangers.
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The problem of overpopulation is a spatial issue, more than a resource one. Resources can be increased with more efficient technologies/techniques, but space is limited because new frontiers are restricted or not accessible. Decreasing spaces, absence of accessible frontiers, forces those contained within this limited space/time to adjust psychologically.
Φ
The environment’s self-correcting, self-balancing, processes are replaced by human techniques/technologies, perpetuating the imbalance and necessitating further ‘technological interventions’. [ MANifesto: Economics – Techniques]Ω
Re: -NATURE-
Demographic Winter
At a certain point, in the future, the amount of individuals participating in the work force will not be enough to support and supply the social welfare system and the social safety-net.
Lower birth-rates can also be reinforced by socioeconomic, cultural ideals which inhibit the balances that make heterosexual reproduction possible.
Modern man’s association of happiness and well-being with a Capitalist/Marxist paradigm and the constant increase of available resources and wealth (called ‘progress’), creates regional impoverishment, tending towards a total obliteration, rape, of one geographic location to maintain the illusion of superfluous abundance, and consumer options, in another; destroying the ecosystem in one area, producing a desert of the real, so as to preserve the illusion of luscious health in another, only postpones the inevitable.
Techniques/Technologies add to the effect by multiplying yields and by exploiting efficiency, freeing-up resources to be used as evidence of surplus.
This is true of all aspects of human intervention, from materials, to sexual reproduction, and from identity politics to ideologies promising Utopian futures.
Frequency of promiscuity is adjusted accordingly – larger investments necessitating more cooperation, in turn necessitating bonding, loyalty, over longer periods of time.
▲
A new threat on the horizon: declining birthrates, broken families, disinterest in reproduction, the cultivation of adolescent thinking and behaviour, increasing homosexual mutations, and other forms of paraphilia, feminism… all contribute to the breakup of the reproductive unity we call family. At a certain point, in the future, the amount of individuals participating in the work force will not be enough to support and supply the social welfare system and the social safety-net.
Jacoby, Jeff Jacoby wrote:In 1965, the population of Italy was 52 million, of which 4.6 million, or just under 9 percent, were children younger than 5. A decade later, that age group had shrunk to 4.3 million - about 7.8 percent of Italians. By 1985, it was down to 3 million and 5.3 percent. Today, the figures are 2.5 million and 4.2 percent.
Young children are disappearing from Italian society, and the end isn't in sight. According to one estimate by the UN's Population Division, their numbers will drop to fewer than 1.6 million in 2020, and to 1.3 million by 2050. At that point, they will account for a mere 2.8 percent of the Italian nation.
Italy isn't alone. There are 1.7 million fewer young children in Poland today than there were in 1960, a 50 percent drop. In Spain 30 years ago, there were nearly 3.3 million young children; there are just 2.2 million today.
Across Europe, there were more than 57 million children under 5 in 1960; today, that age group has plummeted to 35 million, a decline of 38 percent.
The world's population is still growing, thanks to rising longevity. But fertility rates – the average number of children born per woman - are falling nearly everywhere. More and more adults are deciding to have fewer and fewer children. Worldwide, reports the UN, there are 6 million fewer babies and young children today than there were in 1990.
By 2015, according to one calculation, there will be 83 million fewer. By 2025, 127 million fewer. By 2050, the world's supply of the youngest children may have plunged by a quarter of a billion, and will amount to less than 5 percent of the human family. The reasons for this birth dearth are many. Among them: As the number of women in the workforce has soared, many have delayed marriage and childbearing, or decided against them altogether. The Sexual Revolution, by making sex readily available without marriage, removed what for many men had been a powerful motive to marry. Skyrocketing rates of divorce have made women less likely to have as many children as in generations past. Years of indoctrination about the perils of "overpopulation" have led many couples to embrace childlessness as a virtue.
Result: a dramatic and inexorable aging of society. In the years ahead, the ranks of the elderly are going to swell to unprecedented levels, while the number of young people continues to dwindle. The working-age population will shrink, first in relation to the population of retirees, then in absolute terms. [Boston Globe | June 22, 2008]
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Nature, self-correcting against human interventions, is called Demographic Winter – esoteric impulse produced by culture, stunting evolved impulses. Φ
Although a decrease in population is a desirable outcome of Demographic Winter, one must consider the transition periods involved as these relate to social and political conditions. Another aspect to consider is Dysgenics and how the effects of a demographic crisis begin from particular populations, with specific genetic qualities and potentials. [ MANifesto: Society – Dysgenics] Φ
Demographic Winter is nature self-correcting. Absence of frontiers, accessible spaces, resulting in resource stresses, leads to a lowering of reproduction. Lower birth-rates can also be reinforced by socioeconomic, cultural ideals which inhibit the balances that make heterosexual reproduction possible.
Φ
Man intervenes upon nature’s self-balancing, and by using his techniques/technologies attempts to correct the coming demographic catastrophe by exploiting regional differentiations to transfer wealth – energy transference promoting uniformity. Modern man’s association of happiness and well-being with a Capitalist/Marxist paradigm and the constant increase of available resources and wealth (called ‘progress’), creates regional impoverishment, tending towards a total obliteration, rape, of one geographic location to maintain the illusion of superfluous abundance, and consumer options, in another; destroying the ecosystem in one area, producing a desert of the real, so as to preserve the illusion of luscious health in another, only postpones the inevitable.
Techniques/Technologies add to the effect by multiplying yields and by exploiting efficiency, freeing-up resources to be used as evidence of surplus.
This is true of all aspects of human intervention, from materials, to sexual reproduction, and from identity politics to ideologies promising Utopian futures.
Φ
K-Type selection invests more resources on smaller broods, enabling the evolution of larger brains which due to the size of the brain, has to be birthed still immature, gestating the foetus externally. Therefore, larger brains coincide with lower reproductive rates, longer gestation and weaning cycles, or gestation and weening are externalized. Frequency of promiscuity is adjusted accordingly – larger investments necessitating more cooperation, in turn necessitating bonding, loyalty, over longer periods of time.
Ω
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Re: -NATURE-
Natural/Artificial
Human Interventions
↓Obsolescence via Success
Human Interventions
↓Obsolescence via Success
Natural = what emerges spontaneously through the (inter)activity of conscious and unconscious forces (phenomena).
Artificial = what emerges intentionally or as a collateral by-product of a willful intervention upon the ‘natural’.
Φ
Indubitably, what is in existence can only be called natural, as it is a consequence of all that preceded it and is always active and (inter)active. All that manifest in nature is, by definition, natural. This is the starting point. What then is designated by the word ‘artificial’? The intervention of an external will to divert what has preceded, is immediately apparent.
When, for example, we speak of artificial intelligence we are speaking of a form of intelligence which would not have emerged without an external will… in this case the will of a human being.
But, let us be more specific and define what we mean by the term ‘artificial’ when we use it in relation to environments.
Man is, definitely, natural; he is a natural agency, what then can we use the word artificial to signify, if we are to use it at all?
If we are to take language, and the ideas it refers to, as ways of distinguishing and understanding reality (clarifying), then we can conclude that the term ‘artificial’ can only be used as a way of categorizing a portion of nature so as to better understand it and what it is participating within.
I would say that the word ‘artificial’ can only be used to define and delineate human activities as these pertain to humanity as a whole. Therefore, when we speak about an artificial environment or an artificial reality or an artificial construct we mean to define a phenomenon totally dependent upon human intervention; an intervention upon what preceded his emergence and upon what made the evolution of the human species possible.
Subsequently, we designate the term ‘artificial’, as this pertains to environments and environmental conditions, to represent the set of circumstances brought about due to human meddling; ‘meddling’ which can then affect the one who meddles in a proportion higher to the circumstances that preceded this meddling and which had no part in the evolution of the one who ‘meddles’.
The point might seem ambiguous and convoluted, as it should be when dealing with fluid environments and imprecise human conceptions, but the point is necessary to determine how much and at what point, in space/time, did man (the ‘meddler’ extraordinaire) begin to have an effect upon himself to a degree greater than what preceded his interventions. It is a way of gauging how human activities begin supplanting naturally occurring environments so as to understand to what degree and at what point do human activities begin to replace environmental conditions that made them possible.
Φ
All organisms with a Will (even plants on some primitive level) affect the environment they are born into, one way or another, but no other known organism, except man, can affect the environment to a degree that this affect begins to influence his own development, often in opposition to the environment that made him possible. We might say that man is a quintessentially nihilistic organism once his intelligence gains the upper-hand and he overcomes most, if not all, of the natural culling and correcting mechanisms.
Φ
Man has intervened upon his environment to such a degree that now his destiny is almost completely dependent upon his activities and their repercussions. Man acts upon his environment, and then he must deal with the consequences of this activity – in time, he must deal with the consequences of the corrective actions to his original interventions upon the environment. Gradually his energies are drained by having to maintain the original intervention and the cascading repercussions.
The environment he intervened upon is pushed further and further back, both in memory and in fact. His horizons are now dominated by his constructs, and all they truly are, are representations of representations of representations of the original. He no longer reflects upon reality but he recycles symbols of symbols that have lost all meaning to him because he cannot connect them to anything other than his own imagery. Buried, as he now is, man becomes disillusioned, feeling like something is missing but unable to explain it. He begins to feel like he is the ruler of his own world, creator of his own reality, and that he can reinvent himself at will, putting on the symbols he constructed to represent what he has forgotten and which now have fade into the temporal distance of his perceptions.
He is not only immersed in artificiality but he cannot identify with anything besides his own immediate abstractions.
Φ
Sublimation of genetic codes into memetic forms begins the process of artificiality, or the process of establishing alternative realities within reality, with their own internal logic and evaluating systems. Starting from the natural survival tactic of herding, schooling, herd dynamics evolve gradually into a separation of internal hierarchies from external forces – a kind of cognitive cocooning.
Φ
The body is the manifestation of hundreds of thousands of years of experiences (interactions) and wisdom (insight into these interactions). It reacts honestly, purely, openly, often without the consent of the brain/mind. The brain can either accentuate this knowledge, multiply it with understanding, or it can stand in its way with deceit and self-denial.
Herein lies the danger: like with all lies repetition, conviction, can make them seem true. That they began as deception is, in time, forgotten.
This is how from genes we get memes, which, in turn, selectively cultivate genes, distinguishing natural from artificial.
In the gradual transition from natural to artificial man experiences his duality of mind/body; characterized by contradictions, resulting in internal, psychosomatic, schisms.
The body speaks, communicating its accumulated wisdom to the brain, but does the brain notice, or can it understand? An dominating idea(l) can make it deaf & dumb, unable to comprehend (illiterate) the physical code’s communications.
Φ
The distinction between natural/artificial, as I’ve defined the words, corresponds to the division of objective/real & subjective/idea(l).Φ
Artificial is differentiated from natural as the intentional rearrangement of what arises spontaneously, creating combinations that would not emerged without an intervening will guided by an idea(l). Ω
Re: -NATURE-
Obsolescence via Success
▲
The evolution of burdening mutations, particularly among the male members of a species, indicates the reality of what Evolution truly is, and how it uses individuals to propagate a species within a particular environment. The male will certainly live a shorter life, compared to a female, but in the meantime it attempts to impress enough with the degree of an intentionally accepted handicap it can then endure, displaying genetic fitness.
Perhaps among human males intelligence, or awareness, is such a handicap, comparable to those of other species (deer antlers, peacock tails etc.), starting-off as an advantage but then, exceeding its pragmatic utility (sexual competition), becoming detrimental to survival. Part of the effect is due to environment shifts.
Man builds a structure which then makes the very traits that built it obsolete, or dangerous to the builder, establishing an artificial environment which then weeds out the traits that made it possible – substituting them with techniques & technologies. The builder, using his gifts, builds structures which make him, and his gifts, obsolete.
Φ
Increasing internal ordering reduces the, once, independent organism to a replaceable copy – reproduction, using natural selection of particular traits, ceases to matter when all can be cloned, resulting in varying degrees of ‘perfection’ in relation to a systemic idea(l). Decreasing variations reduces the importance of reproduction, making the traits that manufactured this internal state of order, redundant.
Specialization, exploiting synergy, distributes these traits evenly across groups, now dedicated to that work – specialists.
Internal disparity, caused by this distribution of particular traits, leads to internal friction, necessitating further intervention – SuperOrganism emerges.
Organisms, in their original form, have become obsolete.
Φ
Superiority attracts unintentionally, what is inferior to it. To intend, to reach, is to display dependence, weakness. [ MANifesto: History – Identity – Structure of Self – Master/Slave]. The paradox of power: to remain indifferent to what you dominate.
Φ
Strength creates the conditions of its own fading – cycles of life. Path-of-least-Resistance results in atrophying. Resistance, experienced as stress (need/suffering) is the precondition for the increase of strength.
Strength needs resistance, to maintain itself; power needs a contradiction, to remain.
Φ
The peacock male indicates nature’s indifference towards individual life, and to the particular individual’s longevity. The passing on of fit genes is carried out through the exaggeration of an inherited disability displaying healthy genes, soon to result in the carrier’s demise. Male expendability, as the Modern MRA repeats, is part of natural selection, just as hypergamy is part of the female’s sexual disposition.
[ MANifesto: Society – MRA][ MANifesto: Sex – Hypergamy]
Φ
Rome fell when due to her power she exterminated all challengers that kept her virile. The Empire declines into decadence and fatigue.Φ
Superiority cultivates the conditions for atrophying and gradual decline to inferiority, restarting the process, renewing the participants. The cycle of time, of existence. Nothing is permanent, all must be continuously reaffirmed, revalidated, reasserted – slave tests master, master must prove himself worthy of his place.
Same applies in female/male relationships. The female is continuously testing the male’s virility, his value.
Ω
Re: -NATURE-
Austerity/Abundance
Half-Full or Half-Empty
↓Equilibrium
Half-Full or Half-Empty
↓Equilibrium
Relating to environmental austerity/abundance, correlating to r/K reproduction strategies, I defer to the book The Evolutionary Psychology behind Politics…
[ Doc: The Evolutionary Psychology behind Politics]
Φ
The forgiving, altruistic, generosity of those born and raised in superfluous systems, overflowing with resources, fails to hide how quickly it would become relentless, penurious, and openly selfish if this manmade and maintained abundance were to revert to the natural state of austerity.Φ
Without any great cost to the benefit of pleasure; with no price, no risk, to a potential positive outcome, the result is atrophy. When pleasure is easy and certain, the human mind, evolved in more austere conditions and a product of need/suffering, cannot resist what is provided with ease; when it has evolved to strive for it, as something rare and difficult to attain.
The organism's shift, adjusting to this new, artificially produced and maintained, state of affairs. It becomes arrogant, thinking its pleasures are a product of its own strengths; it becomes entitled, believing the certainty of the outcome is deserved and therefore guaranteed; it becomes dull, as ennui increases and stress proportionally decreases – bored with the circumstances it had no hand in bringing about, but contributes to its maintenance by remaining submissive; It becomes ungrateful, because it cannot appreciate the pain and suffering required to produce abundance, splurging what is given and not earned with work but through servility, excessively generous with what it had no part in making.
Artificial conditions produce excess energies that must be released, or placated, numbed down to a level of tolerance. Moderns are characterized by the careless activity of casual expunging, and overindulgence.
Words, as representations of nervous energy, are thrown about, purging the mind of what it accumulated within guaranteed pleasures, and easy victories.
Φ
To simply declare life a product of overabundance, superfluity, is to totally ignore the very experience of living. Nothing in nature or in any living experience hints at abundance. If anything, nature is characterized, outside human constructs and human interventions, by a distinct austerity; austerity human environments tend to correct. Overflowing abundance remains inaccessible to human needs/desires. We might say that the emergence of human environments is in reaction to the severity man evolved within.
Φ
I do not know of what they speak of, when they speak of need; all I know is that they, whoever they might be, know nothing, or very little, of what it means to need and to suffer when they speak of it as trivial or as some add-on to the human experience which can and should be overcome.What I do know of need & suffering makes me certain that what these spoiled brats think they know has no collaboration to what is actually the fact; they, fuckin’, have no clue, being brought up, as they are, within a world that takes care never to let them endure too much of what they have little experience with and want no part of.
These douche-bags, these spoiled, over-educated, pampered, nit-wits, are to blame for whatever is happening and for whatever will happen in this human world. Why? Because their world, whatever they may think, is a fabricated, fake, and pretentious world, only they, and those like them, can deal with without having to also deal with this overwhelming need to vomit.
Artificiality has a way of generating vertigo. It’s the sort of vertigo produced when the overlapping picture manufactured is a bit-off (noetic dissonance), compared to the apparent; noticeable when juxtaposed in an effort to cover it up. The eye is momentarily confounded, unable to focus completely on two visions not totally in alignment: ideal & real, in conflict. Nausea follows.
Φ
The ritual of renaming is put into practice here. Having no way to deal with reality the world is reborn with a simple change in moniker. Being “born again” cannot be the invention of the modern Christian.
Its logic is founded on the power of language and how it can be used to control and direct human thought.
Austerity & lack is renamed overflowing; God is renamed Substance, One or Thing (in whatever form one can envision it); ever-presence is renamed ‘immanence’; ‘Nihilism’ is renamed ‘progressiveness’ and/or ‘enlightenment’; ‘death’ is renamed ‘after-life’; ‘non-existence’ is renamed ‘unity’, ‘emptiness,’ or ‘uniformity,’ acquiring the added sub-title of ‘equality’.
Man loves the idea of absolving himself of all that ails him with a simple rebirthing ritual. He dunks his head under water, or some other element symbolizing the fluidity of existence, and then emerges from it a theoretical ‘new man,’ a new soul, giving himself a new name to commemorate the event.
How much more efficient it is to just rename existence and make of himself the guilty party? Efficient, but is it effective?
Φ
You can no more compare knowledge with understanding than you can compare pleasure with contentment.Φ
A clarification: If by ‘abundance’ we mean ‘energies,’ or the (inter)activity of existence, then, most certainly, there is no end to it. We might say that energy is increasing as chaos (randomness) increases, tending (moving, momentum) towards near-absolute randomness.
If by abundance we mean the presence of ordered (inter)activity, or activity exhibiting dynamic patterns which we interpret as different types of matter, energies etc. then we are on the right path. Then increasing austerity is a more appropriate description for the current state we know as existence. In both cases possibility (space) never ends, but falls away.
As space-time expands (possibilities expanding) possibilities become increasingly uniform, to the point where we can no longer speak of probabilities because all probabilities become almost equally probable.
Life (animated matter) what we call substances/energies, and so on, are patterns of order; increased levels of probability. Life needs ordering, and so is attracted to it so as to sustain itself within the disordering – appreciating it as ‘beautiful’, aesthetically pleasing. But disordering, entropy, increasing randomness is understood as the decrease of probability and/or of patterns of predictable, ordering. For this reason abundance is decreasing in relation to life, or an ordering process we call living organisms. The energies overflowing are increasingly becoming inaccessible to an ordering organism; they are becoming random.
Φ
Only for an organism in constant need would austerity result in temporary superfluity. Growth, creativity, procreativity, is a result of accumulated energies produced by need, displaying a successful strategy of acquisition and assimilation.
Once self-maintenance is taken care of the excess energies can be directed towards other endeavors.
Φ
The artificial maintenance of localized abundance is called domestication.Man converting uncertain, unknown nature, into a knowable, habit, it is intimate with: a domicile.
Conversion from K/selection to r/selection, when an external sheltering force decreases the energies required to maintain self within its boundaries (noetic walls)– reversion/retardation.
The K/selective organism adopts r/selection, remaining in a perpetual state of immaturity, when the costs for self-maintenance drop below the point of care, while the benefits persist uninterrupted, or are multiplied, resulting in temporary/localized abundance, through the exploitation of distant localities (in space/time), funneling them towards the desirable local, at a desirable time.
Ω
Re: -NATURE-
Equilibrium
Natural order tends towards balance. When the pendulum shifts too much in one direction, a correction follows, of equal proportions.
Φ
Equilibrium, balance is an entirely manmade concept. There is, nor can there ever be, a perfect point of balance, but only a constant balancing, in relation to fluctuating conditions and (inter)activity. It describes a perpetuation of the given where energy requirements and energy deficits find temporary congruence resulting in no perceptible loss and no gain. Balance is a conservative concept which if placed within a world in Flux, tending towards entropy, acquires fluidity, and a constantly adapting principle which can be associated with progress. Balance, in regards to life, is a reference to adaptation where the organism retains a mutually beneficial relationship with the environment.
Φ
All unities, including organic ones, tend towards a state of equilibrium, but never completely attain it. Equilibrium is always a reference to the desirable balance between the particular emergent concord’s combined energies at a particular instance in relation to those it is (inter)acting with during the same period – environmental conditions. The fact that these energies are continuously fluctuating makes this desirable state of balance an ongoing process where the anticipated is always approximated but never attained.Only organic unities unbalance themselves willfully, in proportion to their will’s projections of an absolute state of absolute equilibrium – a theoretical idea(l) state.
Procreation, and all forms of creativity are such projections of idealized stability. With each and every birth a new possibility arises, as the new unity possesses different proportions of renewed strengths and weaknesses.
This wilful disequilibrium constitutes free-will as it goes against the individual unity’s desired tendency towards stability and so it is usually a product of excess energies or an excessive assessment of individual energies – sexual madness usually causes an over-estimation of these energies. In the advent of civilizations, it has been the control and direction of these sexual impulses that has been essential to their internal harmony. We can gauge the balance, or lack of, of every age and every civilization, by the quality and amplification of the projections it produces in its art, its political ideologies, and in its spiritual symbols.
Inflated projections reveal the level of the ongoing state of imbalance in the minds that produce them, because the embellishment of the projection is inversely proportional to the mind’s actual state; it is the desired in relation to the actual.
Therefore when extreme danger becomes fashionable, this would suggest that the environmental conditions are extremely comfortable; when extreme comfort becomes fashionable this would suggest that the conditions are those of extreme discomfort.
In our own time the popularity of extreme sports, the glorification of danger, the ubiquity of extreme imagery in the arts, overall risky and irrational behaviour among males, sexual promiscuity and hyperbole in all areas of public discourse exposes an underlying state of boredom and a sheltering which is taken for granted, resulting in ennui and disenfranchisement.
Where danger is avoided in natural environments, unless the individual is caught up in the frenzy of sexual madness, in our time unnecessary peril is sought after, particularly by those who feel less threatened by a world they’ve been protected from, and who have never experienced the severity of their actions to any degree approaching the tolerable.
It is time we return the world to its more brutal past, silencing the adolescent braggart and ending the impulsive fool’s dancing taunts; it is time to return sensuality to the world; it is time to find graciousness again.
Φ
Balance is a concept which presupposes a whole. Without it, its implication of a center is moot.[ MANifesto: Art – Surfing] If we are to ascribe to balance and/or equilibrium, meaning, it is within a theoretical emergent unity, such as an organism, where the ‘whole’ is a work in progress, and finding a balance is a difficult prospect. Perhaps the best way to justify the concept of ‘balance’ is to use it as an indication of controlled energies (order) and how they relate to uncontrolled energies (chaos). The issue, then, becomes one of Will in relation to environment.
The individual organism can be considered balanced, or in a state of relative equilibrium, when the energies at its disposal are sufficient enough to maintain its cohesion, contributing to its control, increasing in a manner which does not exceed its reach and does not place it in a state of imbalance.
Φ
Balance is not in relation to an absolute, static, point in time/space. There is no such ‘point’. It is the perpetual adjustment to a shifting reality – Flux. It never ends and it is not always defined by the same quantities. Φ
All knowledge is an ordering of experience. The stronger the ordering the more resistant to time it becomes. All convergence is a product of, or leads to, uniformity... or some ambiguous degree of it.When my ordering, my Becoming, comes into contact with another's, there is an exchange of data, knowledge, experience (this is what I consider interaction), interpreted by both sides in different ways, or on different levels – determined by the level of ordering present in each and, therefore, also the level of chaos present in each. Therefore, a higher ordered state will have less in common with a lower level of order and it will take from the experience less, perhaps losing from it, given that the other has less to offer (less to teach or supply, exchange).
The higher state (superior) of order will experience the interaction differently from the lower state (inferior), and the degree of disparity, between the two, will determine the ‘balance’ of the relationship, or of the interacting.
A German reading the Vedas will understand it by referring it to what he knows and so will experience it along the lines of similarity between Eddas and Vedas.
Where there is difference the higher wisdom will overpower or remain misunderstood or it will not be perceived at all.
There will be no point of contact, of convergence for the lower wisdom to draw understanding from in order to connect with the higher wisdom.
The more memes are analogous to one another, the less temporal distance lies between them. The course their respective divergences took establishes what differentiation followed: one leading to a higher, the other regressing to a lower state.
Change simply denotes an ordering in relation to the constant disordering and the temporal attrition this produces. The level of ordering present, and the level of disordering experienced by it as resistance, is always different and this produces divergence in all things, both genes & memes. If there is no contact, no interaction, no sharing then the disparity increases in time.
Of course, part of the possibility of (inter)acting, or what is also implied by sharing, is called assimilation. The higher, stronger, might consume the lower, weaker, breaking it apart, foraging the useful elements and discarding the unused as excrement. The utility of the other, the weaker (or stronger), is determined by what is lacking in the Becoming, ordering. This is the point where interaction commences and is maintained as long as the exchange continues – feeding.
As long as the need remains unfulfilled and both parties consume, or exchange with one another, a balanced relationship is established which leads to increasing uniformity.
For example, a human can relate to a dog, or an ape, whereas the dog, or the ape, cannot relate to the human as much. The animal's reference points are of a lower grade than the humans and the humans are so superior that he cannot gain much from this interactions with these creatures.
For a relationship to be established between two disparities like these, a common bond of need must be found. The human, in particular, must find, in the lower grade otherness of an animal, a source of fulfilment no other accessible source can satisfy with the same level of ease. The animal acts as a stand-in for what is missing by being as similar, to what is missing, as possible. The ease with which the (inter)action, the exchange, occurs is also part of the attractive element.
Φ
Equilibrium: the attainment and the maintenance of balance upon the churning, tumult of fluctuating (inter)activity. The act can best be related to the sport and/or hobby of surfing: The metaphor is the ocean. [ MANifesto: Entertainment – Sports – Sport INDEX] Ocean = World (Flux). Wave = (Inter)activity/Reality.
Abyss = Metaphysics (past/nature). Surface = Physics (present/presence, appearance) – Wave.
Air = Ideals (future). Surfer = Presence/Appearance/Ego – Genes (Brain) = ego, Body= self, Nervous System = Synthesis.
Free-Will = adjustment of the body, by the nervous system using the mind. Board = Meme. If the board had a sail it would be the Ideology governing the meme, its guiding principle. The sails, ones ideology, must be in tune with atmospheric currents, to cope with the surface currents, produced by abysmal currents.
The entire system is fluid. Nothing is static.
Chaos, randomness, manifests in the complexity of the interacting water molecules, which makes them incomprehensible or unable to be predicted.
Everything appears ordered because randomness cannot produce observable phenomena, but can only affect order, manifesting as observable phenomena. The surfer can only perceive the movement/momentum of the surf, not the infinitesimally tiny (inter)actions occurring... as space/time expands, chaos increases, and the 'tiny' becomes increasingly smaller. Dimension fragmenting... like the Forces of Nature.
What turmoil occurs under the surface (metaphysics), must correspond to an observable turmoil on the surface (physics), and one's ideals must correspond to the turmoil in the atmospheres, playing with the surf – affecting and being affected by it = (inter)acting. The atmosphere limits what ideologies can be useful.
Human 'Natural Laws' will have to adjust, in time, for this fragmentation, if they ever achieve an approach to the real. The real is warmed by the sun (energy – ενεργεια = momentum/movement), causing an infinitesimally small decrease in volume, which then falls back down, in a cycle.
Φ
Equilibrium implies an unrealizable idea(l) – a state of perfect balance between esoteric energies counterbalancing exoteric forces.The cosmos being in Flux, translates this into an ever shifting point in space-time, struggling to maintain whatever degree of equilibrium it has attained, inevitably surrendering to the Flux.
Φ
Equilibrium, represented in the ancient-Greek Delphic Maxim, {ΠΑΝ ΜΕΤΡΟΝ ΑΡΙΣΤΟΝ} as a ‘balance’, indicates a relationship between a fluctuating organic unity, with tis fluctuating environment. [ MANifesto: Hyperboreans – Delphic Maxims] Ω
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