Reality Is Experience

 http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

A likely important article that I may return to and dig deeper into. Apparently the physical universe can be replaced with "a conscious entity" and at least this new model "still works".

As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality.

"Ontological" -- being ... what IS.  The territory "real" as opposed to the map ... those being words like virtual, representation, metaphorical. This computer analogy gives a good idea why seeing "what is the most useful to the designer, or random chance" makes more sense than the "most realistic detail".

There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. 

They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. 

Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

It's always intriguing to me that a super intelligent guy, so non-traditional he is willing to question the MOST fundamental aspects of the nature of existence, still finds "evolution " as somehow a worthy explanation for how we came to be (or maybe "not **BE** as in being physical", but rather "be" experience only) in this non-physical reality. It is always possible that the computer desktop "just evolved" after all. Actually, if you are an evolutionist, the development of the computer and the desktop metaphor is simply evolution still operating in what we have no doubt mistakenly labeled "consciousness", meaning "something special", but in evolutionary "reality",  just more evolutionary adaptive algorithms.

 (column author) But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world?

Hoffman: Here’s the striking thing about that. I can pull the W out of the model and stick a conscious agent in its place and get a circuit of conscious agents. In fact, you can have whole networks of arbitrary complexity. And that’s the world.

So a mathematic attempt to understand consciousness replaces "the world" with "a conscious agent"  and it all works ... and it doesn't give him any inking that God would fill that "conscious agent" role quite nicely?

The discoveries of quantum mechanics, the mystery of consciousness and things like the insane small amount of information that seems to be coming in through our optic nerves for us to create what we are "seeing" all point to some fundamental misconceptions about what "reality" is -- if it "is" (ontology again) at all! 

"I think, therefore I am" was always tenuous -- perhaps, a universal consciousness is reality and "I" am an illusion. Perhaps when God speaks to Moses and says "I am that I am" he was really de-referencing the THAT!  (C++ programming, the "this pointer" is the pointer to the object itself) "I'm THAT  "I am" ... the ultimate base of existence.  You (Moses) are another "I am", created in my image.

Roger Scruton has covered this philosophically quite well. 

Life Of The Party: Biography of Pamela Churchill Harriman

 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/affairs-of-state-aplenty-for-the-century-s-greatest-courtesan-1.118098

As her 2nd husband said of her, she was "the greatest courtesan of the 20th century ".

This forced me to look up "courtesan", which in modern terms is simply "whore to wealthy men ". The Wikipedia definition is enlightening ... for ages, when marriage was more for political than emotional purposes, a courtesan was a member of "the court" of a monarch, somewhat a trusted confidant and purveyor of inside gossip, and usually "eye candy" as well. 

As daughter in law of Winston Churchill, wife if Randolph Churchill, close friend of Lord Beaverbrook (wealthy newspaperman, head of aircraft production for England during the war), and mistress of Averell Harriman (US envoy for filling war material to England during the war), Pamela was a critical conduit of information, between key power players. 

After the war, she became the "world expert on rich mens ceilings", and at the end of that career married Averell Harriman, became a major Democrat fundraiser, and was appointed Ambassador to France by Bill Clinton ... no irony there! She died February 1998. 

The link gives more detail, and the book gives more detail on her "mother in absentia" role to her son Winston Churchill the younger. 

She trod (or "laid") a rather longer path to power than more current women who used their relationships to men of power for power ... Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris being current examples. 

The book gives a lot of insight into how the 1% amorally  lives, and how many actual "women of power" got their power. I would not generally recommend it, however for Churchill aficionados, it does give another perspective. 

I also "enjoyed" page 6 in the introduction; "Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that gabble of out of touch men that  botched the hearings of SCOTUS nominee Clarence Thomas". 

Biden has been "out of touch" for his whole career, and now in his waning years, he is out of touch with reality itself. An amoral nation gets the "leaders" it deserves.

BLM Founder, White Neighborhood Dacha

 https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/04/blm-founder-cashes-in.php

History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. 

The BLM co-founder has purchased a $1.4 million home in a wealthy section of LA that is 1.8% black. 

In the old USSR, the proletariat lived in ugly cinder block abodes, while the "more equal than others" party leaders lived in nice rural dachas. BLM is one of the organs of the current Wokeistan state. 

Twitter blocked the account Jason Whitlock who posted this info. 

Officially Renaming "America"

 https://americanmind.org/features/lefts-war-free-speech/end-nationalism-end-america/

The linked article opens with a nice summary of what needs to be completed to complete the transition to Wokeistan.

Twenty-First-century progressive liberalism sees the American nation as a problem. There are three core points of contention: 1) the concept of nation-state sovereignty; 2) the actual American nation itself—its culture, history, and people; and finally, 3) the prospects for constitutional republican self-government in America.

While "I told you so" can give twinge of sinful pride to humans, the profound sadness of loss of the loved is existentially painful. It is something like the loved teen you have admonished to quit their reckless driving actually being killed in a car accident. There is really no excuse for this happening, but of course but the excuses are many; loss of religion as an ultimate foundation, failure to take the time to pass the legacy of the miracle of what was America on from generation to generation, distraction by wealth, entertainment, government handouts providing false "security", loss of community, ...

The path to destruction is well paved, well travelled, and distressingly easy. 

Fifty-eight percent of “very liberal” respondents, and 44% of plain liberals, supported removing the “four white male presidents at Mount Rushmore, as they presided over the conquest of Native people and the repression of women and minorities.” Significantly, 41% of very liberals and 33% of plain liberals would “move, after an open public process, to a new name for our country that better reflects…our diversity as a people.”

"The Fascist State of Wokeistan" seems sadly appropriate for the new name. 

The linked article is a nice short summary. The list of books showing the steps we have trod to this tragedy is long. Had we maintained an educational system that schooled our young in being grateful for the miracle they had been bequeathed, we would not have reached this tragic end. 

"Why Liberalism Failed" is high on my list. "The Suicide of the West" by Jonah Goldberg is excellent, although Jonah sadly intellectually succumbed to TDR (Trump Derangement Syndrome). May he rest in obscurity. "The Stakes" is an excellent description of how we could have maintained America in a coma for at least one more election cycle, but let voter fraud pull the plug. 

Some declines to death are more painful than others. America didn't deserve to die, but the good often die young. 

Hillsdale, Faith And The University

 https://blog.hillsdale.edu/online-courses/faith-and-the-university

Excellent podcast from Good Friday on the proper role of the university in culture. I enjoyed the message on Catholics and Protestants getting along especially. 

Ashli Babbitt Memorial?

 It takes awhile to find the video if the moment that Ashli Babitt was murdered. Lots of the sites have removed it, some say it is "offensive" ... you see no blood, it is just "bang you are dead", and I could not make out the officer, although the persistent report is that he is black. 

We still don't know the name of the officer that killed this unarmed military veteran, and it sounds there will be no charges against him. I'm guessing we will never know his name or see his picture. His life will go on.

Here is a picture of Ashli, a person identified by the left media as deserving of death for not obeying a police officer -- a capital offence if you are an unarmed white female veteran with no criminal record, not even a crime at all if you are black. (even if you are armed and shooting)

Here is a link ABC news reporting that George Floyd died of a "cardiopulmonary arrest" - a heart attack. The widely spread media story is now that he died of asphyxiation due to the officers knee on his neck, which was "determined" by an expert who Floyds family contracted. Floyds family received a $27 million settlement from Minneapolis while the jury was being selected for the trial of the officer charged with murder for Floyds drug overdose death. So much for a fair "trial". 

Everyone naturally knows the name of Derek Chauvin. 

UPDATE: We now know. No charges against the officer, and it unlikely we will ever know his/her name.

In contrast to the "insurrection" at the US Capitol, the Floyd death was protested by "mostly peaceful" demonstrations. Here is a photo of the Minneapolis precinct house "peacefully" burning. 

How can you run when you know? 

Muggerich, Holocaust, Death Wish

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-great-liberal-death-wish/ 

Muggerich is yet another author who I would like to read more of. I'm pretty sure he was on "Firing Line" with William F Buckley a number of times. I was lucky enough to see at least one of those, but have no remembrance of which one. 

The link is to a lecture at Hillsdale College, yet another institution which I follow a bit as much as I can manage to find the time. It focuses on "why liberals seem to want to destroy lives"? Through time Communist and Fascist holocausts, through abortion/euthanasia, as well as the somewhat more subtle methods of consumerism, homosexuality, transgender, etc 

Let’s look again at the humane holocaust. What happened in Germany was that long before the Nazis got into power, a great propaganda was undertaken to sterilize people who were considered to be useless or a liability to society, and after that to introduce what they called “mercy killing.” This happened long before the Nazis set up their extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and was based upon the highest humanitarian considerations. You see what I’m getting at? On a basis of liberal-humanism, there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation. It’s to me quite clear that that is so, the evidence is on every hand. The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires. Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we’ve seen so many manifestations in our time—in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals. I see this process going on irresistibly, of which the holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory-farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well-being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. That’s where you land yourself. And it is in that situation that western man is increasingly finding himself.

Muggerich considers this obvious truth of life being devalued through abortion, euthanasia, etc  as a way to see in our time the truth of what Christ told us so clearly. 

... when it’s a question of choosing whether to save your soul or your body, the man who chooses to save his soul gathers strength thereby to go on living, whereas the man who chooses to save his body at the expense of his soul loses both body and soul. In other words, fulfilling exactly what our Lord said, that he who hates his life in this world shall keep his life for all eternity, as those who love their lives in this world will assuredly lose them.

As a Lutheran, we believe that it is not human choice that leads to faith, however those of us not baptized as infants do have the strong illusion of choice -- verses like Joshua  24:15 "But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

It is very worthwhile to read the whole piece -- and to look up Muggerich if you are not familiar with him. 

The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second-class hotel.

WTF Happened In 1971?

 https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

That site will show a bunch of charts that seem to indicate that going off the gold standard was a bad idea. It should be pointed out that 9 out of 10 economists disagree with that assessment.  

OTOH, a visit to "Worst Economic Predictions" will show they are far from always right. My favorite of is this quote from Keynes, the godfather of economists in 1927, who claimed to solved the problem of recessions: “We will not have any more crashes in our time.” Perhaps he meant we will just call them depressions now?

 
I think all economists would agree with Galbraith, who said "Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists." 

We ought not be too hard on them. As the baseball philosopher Yogi Berra informed us; "Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future". 

A look at this site will give you some background on the charts. 

I continue to believe that having "5%" or maybe a bit more of your wealth in metals. I prefer gold and silver coins in a safety deposit box. 

The Culture of Black Guns

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/in-defense-of-the-ar-15-cult/

Yes, "black guns" look mean. So do chopped, ape hanger, no muffler Harleys. So do lots of muscle cars. Lots of tattoos intentionally look mean. The list could go on.

As an owner of one full sized AR style gun, and one pistol style black .223, I can say that like a lot of "hot/mean" looking objects, these guns are both fun and functional. They are the most popular for a reason ... they are light, accurate, reliable, and maybe most importantly, readily customizeable. They are the "Barbie of the gun world" ... only they are real, and they really work. WELL.

The linked is worth a read.

The AR-15’s versatility and adaptability has made it the rifle of America’s militia, which is nothing more or less than America’s responsible gun owners. It is within the AR-15 cult that gun owners are likeliest to get the best education in gun safety, the best training for being a responsible gun owner at home, traveling, or on a range. It’s there that they may get the best understanding of where the gun fits into America’s tradition of republicanism. A country of determined men who have arms like the AR-15, or even significantly less-capable rifles, is almost impossible to rule without consent. Just take a look over at Afghanistan.

ARs, shotguns, and pistols are the core of America's "gun culture". In order to shoot, most serious gun owners are members of a gun club, which is a social activity. 

One of the fastest growing shooting sports is Practical Shooting, a challenging and fun activity where you will really learn how to safely handle a gun around others. 

American gun ownership is somewhat like golf ... although the adult beverages have to wait until after the shooting is done! 

The True And Only Heaven, Progress And Its Critics

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/27/books/where-has-progress-got-us.html 

The linked is a rather good review. The book pulls together MANY threads on the origins and criticisms of the secular religion of "progress". The fact that our modern conception of progress is "more, more, more ... easier, more pleasurable, more choice, etc. An attempt to even sample the underlying material would be a work of a year or more even for a dedicated rapid reader. 

The main assertion of the book is that "more, more, more" doesn't work because of limits ... specifically environmental limits. Curiously, Malthus, the secular god of limits is never mentioned. 

The book does cover the now increasingly well known fact that the destruction of the family, church, community, etc, even with lots of wealth, entertainment and sexual pleasure is a hollow life that often leads to suicide, or addictions that have the same early death effect. (see numerous rock and other "stars" who follow the creed of "Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse"). 

Having seen too many young corpses, I can attest that young corpses are not beautiful. I'm not a mortician, so I really do not know why, but my guess is that the old corpse looks much more natural, since the body was getting close to death anyway. For the young, once the radiance of youth is extinguished, the remaining husk is rendered ugly. 

I tend to disagree with Malthus and Lasch on the material limits. Human ingenuity is rather amazing, and necessity remains the mother of invention. This is covered rather well by Matt Ridley in "The Rational Optimist" which I have read, but for some reason failed to review and blog on. The linked Gilder review seems pretty accurate. I see the earthly limits of the human spirit without God to be much more troubling than material limits. Fusion, nanotech, mining asteroids, and probably much more mundane technological solutions have a way of "cropping up"  ... see Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. 

The spiritual limits are much more problematic. It seems increasingly obvious that the "God is dead, let's kill the family and community as well, and then we will be free" idea has failed rather miserably, although bad ideas are a bit like zombies ... they often stagger along on momentum long after they should be in the grave.