Normal

Reality is continuously negotiated. It has to be negotiated, not to make it perfectly consistent (which is impossible) but to mutually sustain subjectivity, the confabulation of Self. The process of negotiation itself is the aim, which is the realisation of Self by mutual mirroring, and the external reality is an unstable byproduct.

Common beliefs define reality, and there can only be one consistent reality. All religions, cultures and ideologies want total conceptual domination, without realising that this would destroy them; if reality were cemented, definitive, no longer creatively challenged and negotiated, consciousness could not sustain itself.

This is possibly the key to understanding religion. Authenticity of religious scripture no longer matters, insofar as the question of authenticity does not have the capacity to affect the experience of the believer. The reality structured on the basis of belief is capable of sustaining itself, via the community of believers, and this reality is authentically experienced, which makes the belief necessarily authentic in that reality, insofar as it supports reality. I recall this segment from Mircea Eliade: “In general it can be said that myth, as experienced by archaic societies, (1) constitutes the History of the acts of the Supernaturals; (2) that this History is considered to be absolutely true (because it is concerned with realities) and sacred (because it is the work of the Supernaturals; (3) that myth is always related to a ‘creation,’ it tells how something came into existence, or how a pattern of behaviour, an institution, a manner of working were established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all significant human acts; (4) that by knowing the myth one knows the ‘origin’ of thing and hence can control and manipulate them at will; this is not an ‘external,’ ‘abstract’ knowledge but a knowledge that one ‘experiences’ ritually, either by ceremonially recounting the myth or by performing the ritual for which it is the justification; (5) that in one way or another one ‘lives’ the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.” (Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. Harper & Row, 1963, 18-19)

A thought-exercise for those who believe the Bible is literally the word of God. How would it affect your faith if one day someone proved that the Bible is a forgery. For example, by discovering that every seventh letter of every seventh paragraph, assembled into a sequence, produces a confession of this forgery, with a further, more complex key given to decode a secondary confirmation, so it would be something that could not happen without intentional design. Would you reject your faith, or would it make no difference, and why?

Society expects us to be offended on account of false accusations. Society gets offended if we are not offended by false accusations. I do not feel that way, nor do I expect justice from the system. Society has a guilty mind.

If you did nothing wrong, you have nothing to be offended about. Being offended is a defensive reaction of a guilty mind.

There is no such thing as the law of Australia, or USA, or Russia, or China. There is The Law, the same for every conscious being, and everything else that purports to be ‘the law of the land’ is contrary to it: monkey law.

The war is not meant to be won. The aim of war is to balance the destructive forces of human nature, to the extent and for as long as humanity cannot transcend its destructive nature.

“It will do your work and free up your time” 😂

Many people will kill one another, each convicted they are right, while others watch.

Orwell’s 1984 was not a portrayal of a hypothetical future, but of the present. It was intended for the captives of the existing system who believed themselves to be free, and where every public institution, every moral and political authority, was the opposite of what it claimed to be.

People often ask what is the alternative to democracy. They should ask ‘what is the alternative to having no possibility of a legitimate government’ since there was never such a thing, and democracy is certainly not a source of ‘legitimate’, objective authority.

Before agriculture was the norm, we are told that Stone Age tribes spent most of the day sitting around chewing roots. The indigenous lifestyle is still glorified for its leisure content. Before the widespread ownership of automobiles, a cart driver was expected to spend the whole day transporting bulk goods 50km away by horse. Now, the same distance is covered in less than an hour, with 50 times the cargo, and the pressure to be on time, to the minute, and performance monitoring is greater than ever. Now consider an average worker in software development. The new AI agent the company introduces allows an average software engineer (or any engineer) to produce 20x as much code per hour as before. Every company introduces a similar agent, so competition forces productivity expectation across the entire industry. Do you think a company will now pay their workers the same wage for 1/20th of their time, or pay them 20 times the old wage? Cannot happen, or they would be out of business in one month. But they will surely use AI agent to tighten the screw on work-focus and project-enthusiasm monitoring. Technology disruption is not for you, it never was; it was always for them. The rest is marketing and public relations.

Technological innovation does not (and never has) free up time for leisure. The only thing that changes for the worker is the expected level of productivity. AI will keep you working just as hard or harder, just as long or longer, but you will be expected to produce 20 times the pre-AI output.

When a company introduces a biometric ID protocol, it cannot verify the initial scan of biometric information as matching the correct person because it has no prior record of biometric information that matches the person. The entire process of biometric ID hinges on the unverified assumption that the initial scan is of the right person, and therefore has zero evidential value. The assertion that the purpose of this procedure is ‘identity verification’ does not make sense; the apparent purpose is to relieve the company of their liability for incorrect identification, which is the opposite of what is claimed.

There are only two modes in politics: bullshit and terrorism. The bullshit mode is possible only after becoming a feared power, called ‘State’, which is accomplished though decades of terrorism. The voting part is the bullshit mode.

I doing know why people fuss about “shortage of housing”. It’s all just bricks and mud really, and bricks are made of mud. Plenty of mud everywhere.

The meaning of number 1 may be defined as ‘irreducible representation of conceptual unity, where any attempt to further reduce it breaks the unity of the concept, its oneness, into a multiplicity’. Number 1 is the conceptual limit of reducibility.

When the Gov says “We must keep a strong banking sector” they mean “we must allow the banks to steal more of your money by means of inflation so that we don’t have to print the same money in public interest because it would cause the same inflation, less the interest for which you are liable too.”

Hypothesis: There is no ‘conflict’ in Ukraine, but a collaborative effort between NATO and Russia to de-nationalise and re-engineer the food-basket of Europe.