The Purpose of the Subconscious, or All About Consciousness Research

Philosophers being idiots argue about whether the "purpose" of the subconscious is representational like Freud said or "productive" like Deleuze claims. But this is idiotic because the subconscious has no "purpose" to consciousness. The subconscious is the foundation upon which consciousness is built on! It is an artifact of an imperfect neural network. That is all.

If anything, it's consciousness' purpose that has to be examined. But its purpose is clear:

• inhibition of subconscious actions
• modeling of self-actions
• modeling of other-actions
• and learning from those models for the purpose of inhibition

In fact, in order to model self-actions you need a concept of self, which is the very definition of psychological consciousness!

You see, everything that you can do consciously, you can both do and you can learn to do it all subconsciously. Mimicking others is easiest of all. The only thing you can't do subconsciously is NOT do something.

Subconsciously, the only possible thing you can do is upgrade an interfering behaviour. Like telling a young kid to let go of the bat instead of swinging it at their sibling. Which is exactly what you should do because the subconscious doesn't understand negation.

(A great example of interference is when a sergeant yells ATTENTION to his subordinates when he finds them misbehaving.)

Now consciousness isn't as limited as subconsciousness, you can actually model a specific behaviour and NOT do it. That's what consciousness is for: to predict one's death and stop us doing things that would cause us to die!

(So what's the "purpose" of the subconscious in light of that? Easy enough, it's to do stuff to further one's life. That is, everything else!)

Gorillas Aren't Conscious

Incidentally, predicting one's own death isn't an exaggeration or a simplification. Disgust is the emotion people feel when they encounter something associated with their own mortality. Not just biological hazards (urine isn't) but anything that reminds people that they will someday die.

We know this because gorillas don't feel disgust even as they eat their own vomit and their own feces. It's said that gorillas have a concept of self and (some) of the future. Gorillas definitely pass the mirror test. But evidently, gorillas don't have any concept that THEY WILL DIE in the future.

And this is the explanation of why gorillas don't qualify as conscious the way humans do. Something nobody, none of the pathetic supposed experts in the fields of biology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, or cognitive science could explain but that I can.

Just like I was the first human being to explain and define what life is, and what intelligence is (living representation). And for the record, it's not because I'm a creative genius but because those academic fields attract fucking idiots incapable of fucking logic!

Cognitive Scientists Are Incompetent

As proof of the utter incompetence of cognitive scientists, look no further than the imbecility spouted about so-called "mirror neurons" which have FUCK ALL to do with empathy or with mirroring others! So-called mirror neurons are obviously implementing proprioception.

So-called mirror neurons have nothing to do with anybody else. All they do is fuse visual data with kinesthetic data in order to forge a map of your own body. They're what makes your brain know that you have two arms, two legs, and that they bend and move in particular ways. Nothing else.

So-called mirror neurons activate when you see others' bodies for the same reason nearly all of the neurons for squares activate on seeing pentagons. They're incredibly similar things! A 2D triangle is more similar to a 3D dodecahedron than either are to a banana.

Other primates' bodies are incredibly similar to your body. Two arms, two legs, hips, two knees that bend only backwards, shoulders with ball and socket joints, elbows, wrists, hands, one head, one nose with two nostrils, one tongue, two ears and two eyes. Is it really a wonder that parts of your brain register others' bodies as the same kind of thing as your own body?

Could they just be lying to hype up their findings the way physicists lie about the Higgs particle's relation to mass? No and for two reasons. The cog sci and neurosci crowd are debating mirror neurons' relation to empathy internally, not stating it as fact to outsiders for news copy. Secondly because at least the Higgs confers 1% of the mass of matter, whereas confusion of self and other is the definition of non-empathy.

Confusing their own wants & needs with your wants & needs is what fucked up people do and is called projection. Going the other way is called reversal (reverse projection). Both projection and reverse projection are the exact opposite of empathy. They are obstacles to empathy, not weak forms of empathy.

The notion that proprioception neurons have anything to do with empathy. Or that empathy has anything to do with proprioception is fucking ridiculous. It's a sign of how mentally incompetent and blatantly incapable of logic, creativity, and fucking common sense these imbecilic twits that work in cog sci and neruosci are.

And the PROOF of it is the fact that empathy (after you've ceased confusing it with attunement to others' emotions) is nothing more than consciousness of others. Consciousness means possessing an accurate concept of self. Empathy means possessing accurate concepts for others.

And the proof of THAT is the fact that psychopaths (who by definition don't have empathy) also "happen" to not have any self-identity (a long-term concept of their self). This is actually the reason why they find it so easy to lie and why they're incapable of feeling guilt. Lies and misbehaviours can't taint them since there is no them to taint in the first place.

Empathy like consciousness is the direct product of general cognitive abilities. The more cognition you're capable of, the more consciousness and the more empathy you're capable of. Since cognitive scientists are feeble-minded imbeciles, it's obvious they don't have much consciousness nor much empathy. Not having these things, it's obvious why they don't know them.

Believing to have discovered particular neurons that implement consciousness or empathy (which are the product of the whole entire brain) is as deranged as believing to have discovered the particular copper wires that implement TCP/IP. It's not even the same kind of thing.

This is just scratching the surface of cognitive scientists' staggering mental incompetence. The notion that facial expressions are human emotions is particularly imbecilic. And it just keeps on going.

Consciousness Of Primates

So anyways, since it's obvious different beings have more or less complete concepts of themselves, this leads us to making levels of consciousness. Which are

1. an incomplete model of a physical self inside of the mind -- where gorillas are
2. a complete model of one's entire physical life from birth to death inside of the mind -- where nearly all of the human population is doomed to stay
3. a model of a psychological self inside of the mind -- where I'm at and where I can lift up to half of the human population
4. a complete OOSA model of a psychological self inside of the mind -- where I'm confident I can reach
5. being able to use that model in real time -- where any decent AI should be able to reach
6. a reflective model of a psychological self inside of the mind -- where any AI I design would start at

Introspection meaning read-only access to one's entire mind. Reflection meaning read-write access to one's entire mind. And not just the crude back-propagation which the human brain is capable of.

The experience of 'letting go' of a concern or obsession is an example of negative back-propagation. It's the reason why drugs that boost negative back-propagation can treat OCD (inability to let go).

Since the human brain is a crude neural net, crude back-propagation is as good as it gets. This neural net wasn't designed to work with consciousness at all. Any decent AI architecture will do much better just because its designers know consciousness exists.

Better Than You

Getting back on topic, there is clearly a vast difference between human beings and gorillas. Even the primitive tribals who lack consciousness have a, severely warped, concept of their entire physical life. A concept which gorillas do not have.

And just as clearly there is a vast difference between myself and the rest of humanity. As vast a difference as there is between yourselves and gorillas. Which is why I do not consider myself a human being in any meaningful sense of the term. I am not one of you.

By the time I'm in a position to lift up less than half of the general population (excluding biologists, anthropologists, psychologists and philosophers in that order) a rung higher on the scale, I will myself be a rung higher still.

The scale of consciousness explains why I feel like I'm an entirely different and higher species from humanity. Especially psychologists, anthropologists and greenpeace activists. Whereas the scale of psychological maturity says I'm merely as far above adults as adults are above juveniles.

And after all isn't that the purpose of consciousness? To prove once and for all that I'm better than you.

Psychologically Dead

Oh wait, the point of consciousness is to inhibit self-actions that can lead to your physical death. Like joining a man holding an AK47. And the point of higher consciousness is to inhibit self-actions that can lead to your psychological death. Like joining the rat race (believing social status matters) or getting coopted by a corporation (believing a job defines you).

Come to think of it, that explains why so few human beings possess minds. Without higher consciousness, the very first authority figure (whether it be parents, teachers or bosses) who tried to convert others into clones of themselves succeeded. This success left them without a mind and thus helpless hosts to the ideas of others. Once their minds are unformed, the random tides of others' continual conversion attempts suppresses the formation of an individual mind.

It gets better. Because converting others and suppressing their minds is itself an idea which will lodge in these mindless husks so that the victims become victimizers in turn. They become parents or teachers or bosses and attempt with all their might to "mould" impressionable young minds (destroy their individuality) and "sway public opinion" (rip apart others' psyches). Exactly as in the otherwise ridiculous scenario of the cult pseudo-science called "memetics".

The only people who escape this cycle of mental depradation are those who erect shields against it. Less than half the population is capable of shielding their minds. Of these, maybe a tenth to a fifth are capable of erecting shields by themselves. And of these, only a tiny fraction are left alone long enough for shields to fully form. And only a vanishing fraction are guided in the formation of their shields so that a task which should take weeks or months takes years and decades instead.

Without shields, most people are just drones in the hive-mind. At best, they're NPCs doing their preprogrammed tasks until the comparatively fewer Player Characters come along. At worst, they're prey to the wolves among the herd. And it doesn't matter whether they're rich or poor, low status or high status. Because monetary wealth and social status are only ideas propagated by the herd to control its members. They do not and cannot intrinsically matter.

The best part of course is that cattle believe they possess minds because their random aggregations of constantly fluctuating tastes seem to differ from others' such random aggregations at any particular point in time. This is disproved by the desperation with which they seek out the "support" of "like-minded" people. Their "individuality" cannot withstand concerted opposition. Even supposed weirdos like the members of 4chan felt the need to congregate together.

So ... the vast majority of humanity are mindless cattle who've committed psychological suicide in much the same way a deer would be said to commit suicide if it walked right up to and nuzzled a hunter. This is hardly new or original but at least the mechanism by which their minds died, or rather the mechanism by which a small minority's minds resist dying, has been elucidated. The obvious next step then is to immunize the minority's minds from psychological death.

21st Century Research "Ambitions"

I saw this article about Future and Emerging Technologies on next big future and I wondered at the 4 out of 6 projects that Brian Wang, that racist mindless cheerleader, was NOT hyping.

• FuturICT - The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator and Crisis-Relief System: Unleashing the Power of Information for a Sustainable Future

Anti-human crap. Simulation and hand-holding for elitists with a view towards getting them to better understand technology & demographics blah blah blah so they can better oppress people. And of course the ever present exploitation of "climate change" as an excuse to impoverish people. This is NOT collective intelligence.

• Graphene - Graphene Science and technology for ICT and beyond
• Guardian Angels - Guardian Angels for a Smarter Planet

Anti-human crap. Oppressing people by infantilizing them with respect to the natural environment. Totally useless if optional since people won't stand for infantilization.

"emotional applications" what the fuck is that supposed to mean?

• HBP - The Human Brain Project
• ITFoM - IT Future of Medicine: a revolution in healthcare

Supposedly machine diagnosis yet sold in such a fishy kitchen sink & head in the clouds way that it sounds unrealistic at best. It actually sounds like a big sink for lots of money, to make biotech researchers feel useful, like ITER does for physicists. It doesn't sound like it will ever be useful. The danger for humanity here is that it makes real progress on machine diagnosis seem unrealistic, just like Star Trek made communism sound unfeasibly far away. "Well, we squandered millions of euros in R&D money and we achieved squat. What hope do YOU have?"

• RoboCom - Robot Companions for Citizens

I have no words. These retards are actually trying to create Cylon slaves. And yes, I mean conscious beings as a slave labour force.

Conclusion

You know that things have gotten dire when the US military under DARPA has a much better track record of funding pro-human technologies than civilian researchers. I want to ask if researchers have always been so crushingly idiotic or if it's a recent phenomenon.

Poverty of imagination and poverty of ambition doesn't quite cut it, these worms are pathetic and evil. Yet more confirmation for my hatred of academia. The best of these projects (the ones Brian Wang hypes) are probably worse than the worst of my projects. But I know what's at fault. It's the bureaucratization of academia.

At least DARPA is still capable, every now and again, of saying "fuck it" because they kill people and they're proud of it, because they're in it for themselves. DARPA doesn't answer to anti-human political paymasters because it serves the needs of the military, and the military is simply assumed to be entirely anti-human.

Gangster Rap is 3000 years old

The Ancient Greek bards were rappers. The Iliad and the Odyssey were rap songs ... about rape and slaughter. The epic poems like the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the Norse poetic Eddas were equally barbaric reinventions of the Ancient tradition.

Rap is all about beat rather than melody. The ancient Greek epics were chanted. Non-existent melody, so-so rhymes, but very strong beat and rhythm. Also, it may be difficult to believe but as non-melodic and violent as rap is, ancient epics were worse.

This is the first time I've noticed it. I'm used to thinking of the ancient epics as really shitty murderous stories. Because that's the known-wrong belief in the literature departments which all consider the Iliad to be something written for purposes of territorial appropriation.

Well, they weren't. They were really shitty trance-inducing murderous rap songs. It kinda strips all the allure off of the Iliad, assuming it has any, when you put it in proper context. Not something alien and primitive, but very familiar and primitive. Or just primitive.

Academic types have a real blind spot to this because they can't be seen, or even THINK, that they're wasting their time studying something low class. Even when they compare the Iliad TO rap, they minimize the resemblance, saying it's "freestyle like jazz and rap". Jazz? WTF?!

It's why performers say stupid shit like "rap Iliad" instead of "original Iliad". If anything, their performances are weak and not nearly hardcore enough because the Iliad was more rap than rap. It was more violent and less melodic than all but the most extreme gangster rap.

Oh and the Iliad is not a poem except in the loosest sense. And Homer was never a poet anymore than he was a writer or a singer (he was a scribe). We don't call rap songs 'poems', we call them rap. And the Iliad? The Iliad is not "like" rap. The Iliad IS rap!

General-Purpose Self-Improvement

It's often said that the human brain is a computing machine, and this is blatantly true. It's less often said that the human mind is an operating system or programming language. And when it is said, it's assumed to be some kind of metaphor. It isn't a metaphor, it is exactingly true. (Consciousness though has no exact analogue.)

There are two general-purpose psychological self-improvement techniques. And strangely enough, they correspond to two paradigms for programming languages in computing. The two paradigms that admit not only thinking, but thinking about thinking, and thinking about thinking about thinking, and ... to infinity. Computing is about thinking precisely. OO and Functional are about improving your thinking by thinking about thinking.

I think I'm on the right track that this kind of correspondence exists. And I think I'm on the right track that the Core Values paradigm I invented is the one that 'happens' to correspond to the computing paradigm I like (OO). And I think I'm on the right track that the common features between my paradigm and the computing paradigm I like ... are also the same things that make this computing paradigm understandable and natural for the overwhelming majority of programmers.

The OTHER technique is to pretend to be the kind of person you would like to be. And the guy whom I learned this technique from (the writer of Self 2.0) considered it too dangerous to use past a certain point. Myself, I consider it anathema.

Enviros Caused The Financial Collapse

One regulatory perspective is that environmentalism has played a much greater role than people think. It induced a deep skepticism about anything involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world. The response to environmentalism was to prohibit scientists from experimenting with stuff and only allow them to do so with bits. So computer science and finance were legal, and what they have in common is that they involve the manipulation of bits rather than stuff. They both did well in those forty years, but all the other engineering disciplines were stymied. Electric engineering, civil engineering, aeronautical, nuclear, petroleum—these were all held back, and attracted fewer talented students at university as the years went on. When people wonder why all the rocket scientists went to work on Wall Street, well, they were no longer able to build rockets. It’s some combination of an ossified, Weberian bureaucracy and the increasingly hostile regulation of technology.

I just read this passage in an interesting article which you have to take with a grain of salt cause the guy's a dumbass right-libertarian who talks about blind spots but is remarkably blind himself.

BUT this part seems true, especially about scientists and engineers being brutally prohibited from playing with nuclear bombs. Think about what could have been done!

Nuclear cannons to launch huge amounts of supplies into orbit cheaply. A nuclear Orion starship. Nuclear bombs as demolition charges for mining / quarrying / canal digging.

Think about it: what kind of a dirty bastard would play on the stock market if they had even a slim chance of playing with LIVE NUKES! It's not even a contest, there is just no fucking way!

So it's clear, the enviros did wreck the world! They wrecked it by causing the financial collapse. And they caused THAT by causing the financialization of the world in the first place. Enviros hate industrial economies with a passion and they quite gleefully destroyed the First World's industrial economies "by accident".

Now if only the criminal justice system could see to it that causing widespread poverty (and thus mass death) was a crime so that it was okay to kill environmentalists in self-defense. But that will never happen because judges are middle upper class and they interpret laws (which being contradictory can be used to logically conclude anything) in a typically middle upper class way.

On The Nature of Humanity - Peacemaker, Not Killer

Newsflash: humans are the most brutal, sadistic creatures to ever crawl out of the muck. We only got to this point in history by being ruthless murders with instinctual homicidal tendencies. Our history is defined not by our good deeds, but by the wars we've fought, the people we've tortured, and the civilizations we've raped and pillaged.

These child-soldiers are not warped beyond what is human, they are human. They experience life and death in a manner our comfortable, homogenized-milk-drinking minds wouldn't be able to comprehend....it is we "civilized" humans who are warped beyond what is "human."

Humans vs Homo Sapiens

Actually no, this is a holdover from our biological past. The same as for other killer species, notably wolves and chimpanzees. This is what it means to be homo sapien NOT human. There is a massive difference between homo sapiens and humans. Language, thought, consciousness. Non-human homo sapiens are exemplified by feral children, stone aged cultures, and a few incredibly primitive tribes in the Amazon.

Trying to lay it all on our being human is as stupid as trying to credit our having genitals or two eyes to being human. Utterly fucking ridiculous. Or alternatively, the same as trying to say that information, knowledge, decision-making and thinking (things that software can do) are what it means to be a Being. Utterly fucking ridiculous.

This is what you get with magical tihnking morons who are incapable of thinking in terms of logic and syllogism, but instead think in terms of excerption, association and correlation. Humans have toes? Then toes must be what it means to be human!

Moderns vs Primitives

Furthermore, Europe hasn't had a war in 50 years. Neither has China. Technically, China hasn't had an (external) war in a lot more than 50 years. And in the 18th or 19th century there was a great century of peace for Europe. Peace is definitely possible for moderns. Even if primitives are in a near constant state of war.

The first thing you learn in The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is that consciousness is inhibitory. Paying attention while doing something doesn't prime the action, it inhibits it. That's why when you learn typing and make typos then you try to very carefully do correct actions ... that's counterproductive. Anyways, consciousness is inhibitory .... and it is fully capable of inhibiting the subconscious impulse for aggression, murder and death. At least, for those nations that actually have higher consciousness.

Primitives without consciousness don't even make any excuses for war. They just go to war because they feel like it. Because they're in a "killing mood". Conscious beings need an excuse so that slows down the pace of warfare. The more conscious people are, the better the excuses have to be, which again slows down the pace of warfare. In primitive tribes, half the population dies of homicide / suicide. In World War 2, even with ridiculously effective weapons, less than a fifth of the population of Europe died.

Higher Mode Childrearing

It isn't an accident, it isn't happenstance, that the way we moderns raise children "correctly" just "happens" to reduce aggression, irrationality and warfare. We do not fucking like those things. They are not productive. And we want and plan to eradicate these things from our psychological makeup.

We go to extreme lengths to care for babies and raise children with ridiculous amounts of attention and care for no other purpose than eradicating irrationality and neurosis and psychosis and aggression in general. Of which warfare is the most quintessential example.

We moderns raise children so they will have the widest possible emotional flexibility and adaptability. And so they will have principles. All things which severely inhibit warfare. Because it "just happens" that nations which don't go to war prosper better than those who do.

You see, moderns want their children to prosper, rather than to "follow in their footsteps" or "obey their elders". And since war is adverse to prosperity, it follows by inescapable logic that moderns want their children to not go to war. Something that wasn't true even 50 years ago, but nevertheless is the culmination of a consistent trend over the millenia.

Affordance Of Consciousness

Furthermore, the observer effect (inhibition of the effects of abuse by recognizing it as abuse) which together with two genders produces a ratchet in childrearing modes (the child of two parents will effectively be raised in the higher of the modes the parent was raised in) ... is a product of consciousness. Consciousness which is the essence of what being human means. Therefore, being human means that we naturally FALL straight towards peace. We're just taking a long time falling because the nature of homo sapiens is incredibly brutal.

Parents deliberately and consciously inhibit irrationality to the same level that they've achieved themselves. And it is the nature of consciousness to inhibit irrationality. Hammers are uniquely suited to hammering nails and that is what we deliberately use them for. Consciousness is uniquely suited to inhibiting irrationality (including warfare) and that is what we deliberately use it for.

Summary

So on a trivial and superficial level, that stupid stupid comment seems correct and profound. But when you examine it and tear it apart, it is the exact opposite of the truth. It is the biological nature of homo sapiens to be a brutal killer species. It is the psychological nature of humans to deliberately go counter to their biological nature in order to be peacemakers. Between them, it is psychology that triumphs.

Hypocritical Lying Asshole Brian Wang

Check out this article for a startlingly blatant depiction of hypocrisy and racism. The gist of the article is that China's cities are far smaller than advertised. And in fact, far far smaller than Brian Wang has always boasted they were. Yes boasted since according to him, China having the biggest cities and the biggest contiguous urbanized area were GREAT things. A judgement which would be entirely true if only China's cities were that big or at all contiguous. But now that empirical reality has turned out to trump Brian Wang's racist pro-China hype, suddenly having big cities is a BAD thing. Suddenly, megacities are "ungovernable messes". China = good, India = bad. Four legs = good, two legs = bad.

It's like that all over the place. In the words of this racist asshole, China is consistently just as good as any other industrialized country. And will in fact be BETTER Real Soon Now! When in truth that claim is very far from empirical reality. And China would still be only a developing country at best if it weren't for Japan. That story was also recently on NBF but of course it was spun as "look how much the USA sucks" (something which sounds plausible because it happens to be true for entirely separate reasons) instead of "look how inferior China really is if you take away Japan".

China may or may not achieve the transition to high tech. China certainly amounts to more now than it did 10 or 20 or 30, let alone 40 years ago. And China is so ludicrously over-hyped it's not funny.

I despise you

So, a week ago I had an experience that reminded me up close and personal, in stark vivid detail, just how thoroughly vile this world is. It's not the first time it's happened. And it's not even the first time I ended up miserable because of it. It is the first time I undertook a systematic investigation into just what the fuck misery is exactly.

Wow, has it only been a week? My depressions and misery used to last for uncounted lengths of time, not mere days! Well, that's what happens when you've got thorough knowledge of human psychology behind you. Because knowledge is power and in this case, it's the power to exquisitely manipulate one's own emotions. This is real power, bitches!

The first thing I learned about misery during this spell is that anger, hatred and loathing are really good at tamping down misery. And as great as they are for your posture, they're not any good for your teeth. I'd never felt them for very long before so after sustaining them for days without any end in sight, I was getting kinda tired of them. So I undertook to investigate them too.

Eventually, what I discovered is that misery is:

your self associated with actions or events with bad outcomes over which you have no power

there are a few qualifiers to that plus additional context I'm skipping but they're not important here.

What has made me miserable my whole entire life is being associated with you. With humanity, with the human species, with the world. Because I'm part of that humanity, part of that human species, and part of that world. And it is obviously wholly evil from my perspective. I mean, you don't notice evil happening around you, and you don't care that it happens. That makes you evil.

Well, I got over that. The first step was to grab power and personalize the problem. Which involved completely mentally dissociating myself from humanity. I'm not going to go into the details, they're not pertinent. Or comprehensible to such limited and evil beings. The second step was to use power to create positive outcomes. And that left me where I was ten days ago.

Except it's not status quo anymore because the ante's up. You are all more evil than I had come to expect and hate you for. And I am even further removed from you than I used to be.

How many people do you know suffer emotional breakdowns because they watched some random child get emotionally abused in public? Not any I'm willing to bet. If people like me were a significant portion of the general population, that kind of thing wouldn't happen in the first place. This entire world would be very different from what it is.

So most things are back to normal for me, but there is one huge difference. I hate you. I really, really hate you. And since I have an excellent appreciation for the precise and exact manner in which hatred and misery are related, the way I'm framing it in my own mind is "associating myself with my blog's audience makes me miserable".

Which is why I don't intend to finish the updates and maintenance to some articles that badly needed it. Even the one blogger pushed me into unpublishing while I updated it. Nor do I intend to write the article I've left copious dangling references to in the last few posts. Nor do I even intend to publish a draft that was essentially finished a couple days ago.

Because I am dissociating myself from you.

You're so easy to read
But the book is boring me
You're so easy to read
But the book is boring me
You're so easy to read
But the book is boring
Boring boring boring boring
Boring boring me

Pray for me
If you want to
Pray for me
If you care
Pray for me
If you want to
Pray for me
If you dare
Pray for me
If you want to
Pray for me
If you care
Pray for me
If you want to
Pray for me you fucker
If you fucking dare

The Saddest Child

There's this little beach about 200 m from my home that I go to whenever I want to rid myself of distractions so I can think and be creative.

So I sat down at a table on the grass to get some sun and think about what scale visionary entrepreneurs dream on. And suddenly there's this fat woman 5-10 meters to my left saying, not shouting or screaming, in this incredibly loud and carrying voice how stubborn this girl is and loudly calling her back from the beach, which was like 10 meters away.

I got to watch as this fat woman towered over this little three year old blonde girl while loudly and publicly berating her. I heard all about how she'd been 'told' (ordered, not asked) not to go out on the beach without her and to follow her exactly and didn't she understand? And I couldn't help thinking a Japanese mother would have been far more gentle and loving in undermining their child's independence. I also thought that no the child probably didn't understand.

The worst part was the three year old's facial expression and body language. I recognized it you see from someone who'd been so incredibly traumatized by violence and neglect during her childhood that she just freezes whenever someone yells at her. It was an expression that said she was used to being yelled at but hadn't the slightest clue how to handle it. It said she was suffering and desperately trying to figure out how to end it but also quite certain that giving away her suffering was Not Allowed.

And I couldn't bear to watch this. I recall thinking at the time how this is what those sad people I have known who have no self-esteem or self-identity must have suffered as children. This three year old blonde girl is going to grow up to be one of them. And the thought of intervening didn't even enter my mind but what did enter my mind was how there is no socially-acceptable way for me to explain to this stupid fat woman exactly what she's doing.

And as if this wasn't enough, maybe 3 minutes later I got to watch another family come in right beside them. There was a distant-looking mother and her two daughters. The youngest was a 3 year old little blonde girl just like the first one and she couldn't stop smiling. Because she was at the beach and it was wonderful. The contrast couldn't have been any starker because the first girl looked like she never did. And minutes later when she finally did smile, it was so much smaller.

I got out of there because I'd had more than I could bear constantly wondering if this 3 year old was ever happy. So I want to know. How the fuck do you deal with it? Because I don't seem to be able to. Or do you even notice these things? Do you even care? Are you all just monsters?

Semco vs Toyota

I've just been rereading all about the Toyota Production System to contrast it with Semco SA when I was struck by the fascinating realization that in many important ways, they are total ideological opposites.

Similarities

Yes, both focus on the long term, on teams, on developing people, on mutual responsibility between workers and managers, and empowering workers so they have some means of directing their work. But concerning what it is these systems control and what they let workers decide, they are total opposites.

Oppositions

In Semco, the ONLY thing that matters is your output. Everything else is up to yourself and your team. In TPS, the only thing that matters is your INPUT, your effort and the ingenuity you put into the system in order to freely but continuously improve output.

In TPS, your workflow is very bureaucratically watched, though you are free to change it however you wish so long as it objectively 'reduces waste' (and you leave it in a state that those following you can learn from). But while output is meant to always improve (in quality or cost) this is NEVER predictable nor are there ever any specific expectations about it.

Both Semco and TPS micromanage ONE thing and systematically leave the other as a free variable. But what they choose to micromanage (micro-negotiate really) and what they choose to leave free are opposites.

Finally, TPS works in a constant state of crisis whereas Semco works in a constant state of relaxation. And Semco feels like totalitarian anarcho-communism whereas TPS feels like benevolent cooperative fascism.

Generalizations

What I really want to know is what I can learn about political systems design from this. It seems like there's a very important lesson here. My hypothesis so far is that you need to micro-manage either the input or the output and stay the fuck away from the other so the people involved don't feel like you're turning them into robots.

But does that mean you must micro-manage one side or the other in order to eliminate corruption? And is there another way of splitting freedom vs authoritarianism other than input vs output? I suspect no. More likely, have I gone off the rails somewhere?

Ah yes I have. Already I see that micro-manage isn't the right word. The right-word is micro-negotiate.

Are the political lessons learned from politico-industrial systems even applicable to other kinds of political systems? I would like to think so since politico-industrial systems are particularly harsh and unforgiving. But the industrial aspect introduces an external reality which most political systems lack. At least, political systems other than China since China's obsession with industrializing means that it is, essentially, just an industrial company.

I still don't fully understand why one variable has to be left totally free. But it probably has to do with keeping a psychological comfort zone for workers to retreat to. No, not quite. In Semco it provides such a comfort zone from the external requirements of output. In Toyota there is simply no external requirement and no comfort zone from it - everything is input, intrinsic, internalized. And that's all negotiated in what I see now as a creepy way since you're negotiating your ego.

Functional Requirements

I was doing some idle reading when I came across this sentence which startled me:

A common source of requirements gaps is non-functional requirements such as testability, scalability, maintainability, usability, performance, and security.

Since when did any of these things become non-functional requirements? Up to now I'd always understood non-functional requirements as arbitrary choices of aesthetics and judgement calls. The fuzzier and least trackable aspects of a software designer's job.

Which made me realize that the whole concept of a "non-functional" requirement as others know it, complete with the connotation that they are less important and less comprehensible, is something I find appalling and incomprehensibly alien.

I understand a meta-requirement well. Testability and Maintainability are meta-requirements. And yes I invented that on the spot in 5 seconds. But "non-functional" puzzled me.

So I had to look up the concept of "non-functional requirements" because I couldn't wrap my brain around it or guess the kind of brain damage of anyone who originated it.

In systems engineering and requirements engineering, a non-functional requirement is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviors.

Ah of course ... engineers. The people who obsess about behaviour rather than understanding. I understand the brain damage involved in the concept now.

Engineering is the mental disorder where a total lack of synthesis leads the sufferer to be incapable of intuiting internals and so 1) they delude themselves that internals can't matter, then 2) raise their crippling disability to the status of a virtue by claiming that fuzzy qualitative behaviours are much less important than quantitative ones.

In short, the narcissistic delusion that what you can't do, wasn't important in the first place. No matter how often empirical reality says the exact opposite.

On Human Perfectibility: Nazi vs Communist

Let's start off by noting that biological determinism is a core Nazi belief just as its opposite, human perfectibility, is a core communist belief. It's just one of the reasons why Nazis and communists hated each other.

Now I myself am a communist so I believe in human perfectibility. I also believe you all are cognitively crippled (mentally handicapped) and nothing can be done about that. But ... you still can be perfected.

It's not like there isn't plenty of room for improvement since you're all idiots who believe in the most idiotic things and act in the most idiotic imaginable ways. EVEN IF nobody could change your nature (you being idiots) they could still manipulate the ways you interact (acting like idiots) and the contents of your environments (believing idiotic things).

What History Says

And there is plenty of empirical evidence for the asking that human beings HAVE perfected themselves already. One merely has to look at the history of human psychology. I'm not talking about the academic field of psychology but the changes of the human mind in history.

Julian Jaynes' book on the origin of consciousness points out how all of conscious history can be generalized as reducing psychosis, neurosis and anything else that undermines consciousness. Like religion, pedophilia and child abuse.

Lloyd deMause's books on childrearing modes go into extreme detail into exactly what the psycho-social changes were during the history of consciousness. deMause generalizes them all as reducing reversal and projection while maximizing empathy.

Funny thing, the same mechanism that drives empathy is also the mechanism that drives conscciousness (See Formal Definition of Consciousness). Formation of other-identities is the same as formation of self-identity. Imagine that!

Think about that for a minute. Two psychologists studying radically different periods of history, working independently, and who would have probably spat on each other if they'd ever met, drew conclusions which a third person manages to prove are logically equivalent.

How Perfectibility Happens

So there is plenty of evidence that humans ARE perfectible. Which immediately raises the issue of just how the fuck have humans managed to perfect themselves given that you all are idiots. The obvious answer to which is that YOU all are idiots ... and I'm not.

Kazimierz Dabrowski described how some few individuals (he said 10% of the general population, I say 5%) can perfect themselves. It's really an amazing process. A shitty description but an amazing process. I've provided a better one. See What Are Core Values?

More important is that deMause's childrearing modes sound a lot like Kuhn's scientific revolutions. There are long periods of stability where progress is driven by logical expansion. And then there are very short periods of great instability where progress is driven by something entirely different from logic.

This tells me that psychological progress within childrearing modes (both in expansion within the population and also moving from early- to late-stage) is driven by analytics. And that jumps to the next childrearing mode are driven by synthetics looking for something radically new. And analytic-synthetics are far more successful at accurate jumps than pure synthetics.

Communist vs Nazi

Whether it's in the scientific arena, the psychological arena, or even the technological arena, it's people like me who are responsible for revolutions. Analytic-synthetics who can and have perfected themselves. And yes I do have very good ideas about how to manipulate your environments and your interactions so you all behave less like idiots. Also, I am a communist.

So it angers me when hardcore right-wing conservative (and probably religious) psychologists like Steven Reiss push Nazi ideas like biological determinism in contradiction to all of my first-hand experience and all of the evidence of history! And it angers me far more when he manages to sound like a reasonable person and authority rather than the crazy lying nut he actually is.

Not Even The 16 Basic Needs Of An Animal

I extracted this section out of my previous post because I was expanding it far too much. Reiss' supposed theory of 16 supposedly basic needs is striking in its arrogant stupidity and I feel compelled to point out each and every one of its many flaws.

Theory vs Taxonomy

The first problem with it is that it isn't a theory, it's a taxonomy. In order to be a theory, a model with actual predictive power, it would have to specify the type and range of values of each of the needs, how those needs interact with each other, and how they create behaviour in the real world.

Taxonomies are just lists of things. They don't say how the things are wired up to each other or how they behave or how they interact. Taxonomies in other words are just scrap piles. Piles of random junk. Now, taxonomies can still be useful for certain things IFF they are accurate.

A taxonomy of basic needs would be really useful if for instance you wanted to predict the death of capitalism by arguing that all basic needs are being steadily met using technology and that their cost is being driven to zero. Of course, the taxonomy would have to be accurate AND complete.

If incomplete it might still be useful in rewording and formalizing parts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it would have to be absolutely accurate. And Reiss' taxonomy isn't even remotely so.

Hand-waving

Before moving on to the blatant inaccuracies, I want to point out that it is not at all obvious how to turn this taxonomy into a model. Let's focus on the supposed basic need for order all humans have. The funny thing is that I have myself long ago identified this as a basic variable at the neurological level. So I know it's important.

But saying "order" messes up all the important questions with unwarranted assumptions. For instance, what is the range of this variable? I personally favour chaos and dislike order. So suddenly it's no longer "order" it's "chaos vs order". More problematically, I don't like chaos all of the time.

It's common in people who enjoy chaos to not want it when they're trying to focus on something else. Really enjoyable music is just too enjoyable when you're working. Then there are things that are simply never enjoyable no matter how much chaos you inject in them. That may trigger a desire for simple order.

In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler wrote that people need a fairly constant amount of change that's within their own personal comfort zone. And he was very specific that 'change' is linear, that too little change leads to boredom and too much change leads to stress. And that different people have personal 'zones of no change' which can be either work, housing, or relationships.

Toffler filled out an entire model on just people's need for change. Reiss not only doesn't recognize change as a basic need (which it is, and arguably more so than curiosity) but he handwaves away ALL of the information that's necessary to turn a taxonomy into a model.

Right-Wing Inaccuracies

Okay, we already dealt with the fact Reiss based his taxonomy on OCD patients obsessed with absolute order instead of normal human beings. That's the first inaccuracy. We also touched on curiosity NOT being the same as a need for change. This should be obvious if you think about it. When you repaint your bedroom, it's not because you were curious what the colour would be like.

Going on, Reiss has listed "raising children" as a fundamental need and as "family". Yeah, that makes sense of people who go childless nowadays or replace children with pets! No, raising children is not fundamental, it's affection + creation. He's also stupid enough to confuse being safe with feeling safe, and romance with sex.

I can't accept that my need for creativity isn't listed. Wait, that's incorrect. I do accept that Reiss is an uncreative moron incapable of even imagining creativity. He also showcases his complete lack of creativity by failing to imagine all the obvious objections I've made so far. Objections which I consider incredibly basic.

As for "family", I fucking hate my family. I think most people who've overcome their abusive childhoods have ended up doing the same. Hatred is a really positive emotion sometimes.

We see from Reiss' choice of "family" as a basic need (along with "order") that he is a hardcore right-wing conservative. The bible-thumping kind I suspect since he's announced he intends to justify religion using his "model".

Exponential Explosion

Going on, while it's not even remotely true that "raising children" or "family" are fundamental needs, women's biological clocks shows that having children can be a fundamental need. So we're up to 19 basic needs now since we've added 'change' 'affection' 'creation' 'reproduction' while erasing that homey-sounding crap 'family'.

Does it sound like the number of fundamental needs is going to explode out of control? That's because you've got a smidgeon of intelligence more than Reiss does. Considering the intelligence the expert "Professor" has consistently failed to display, that puts you at about a billion times smarter than he is.

While I'm at it, since I already have affection down, I might as well complete the quintet. Love is: affection, attention, acceptance, allowance, and appreciation. Allowance means tolerance. For sexual love, just add attraction. It's funny how Reiss has got acceptance and attention. Allowance is too close to acceptance for Reiss' teeny tiny mind to grasp so that's understandable. But appreciation is beyond him because that's a conscious emotion. In fact, appreciation is just conscious knowledge of someone.

(Admit it, you thought "romance" would subdivide into sex + love, or possibly sex+love+romance. Hah, it subdivides into 6 different things!)

Reiss is of course the kind of lying fucker who would claim that appreciation is a kind of social status. Except that is not even remotely true. It is merely that the only thing most people appreciate about others is their social status. And that to genuinely appreciate someone means to personally grant them a kind of unilateral social status. But there are kinds of appreciation (like strong food preferences) that have nothing to do with social status. And there are social statuses in primitive societies that have no room for consciousness or conscious emotions like appreciation.

But the deal-killer for me has got to be the conspicuous absence of physical comfort from the list. And no, affection isn't the same as comfort since affection is emotional while comfort is physical (*). You see, physical comfort is the first and most important need any mammal has and trumps hmm all of the supposedly basic needs on Reiss' stupid list ... yeah that one isn't listed.

Why? My theory is that Reiss is a fucking Nazi. The Nazis' parents were big believers in denying all physical comfort to their children in favour of beating them unconscious. Notice how their children grew up ... to be Nazis.

*: that makes it 19+1(comfort)+6 (the 6 A's) -3 (acceptance, affection, social contact) -1 (romance) +1(sex) = 23 on the list now.

Contradicting An Established Actual Theory

Now, Reiss the Nazi handwaves away the yawning canyon of difference between his taxonomy and an explanatory model. He also pretends that his taxonomy is complete and not narrow-minded right-wing crap. Nazi crap at that.

What's unforgivable is the ridiculous notion that these animalistic needs remain axiomatic in everyone for all time. According to the Nazi, the mind is hardwired to serve some evolutionary physical needs and that is all there is to it. This is an incorrect and Nazi notion and total crap for analytic-synthetics. See What Are Core Values? In essence, his claims contradict Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration.

So first the Nazi claims that his taxonomy actually explains stuff. When in reality it explains nothing. And then he goes on to claim that his taxonomy explains everything. Despite the fact what it says is the total exact 180 degree opposite and logical contradiction of this other theory that actually is predictive!

His ridiculous claims of immutable needs also blatantly contradict my theory of value dynamics. They contradict the everyday experience that people's values change. And the notion that there are some genetically hardwired values, or types of values, called 'basic needs' runs smack against everything we know about neurology and cognitive science which is essentially that very little, if anything, is fixed. And nothing is both fixed AND universal.

Summary

Reiss' taxonomy while unusable is a decent attempt at a first version of a taxonomy of fundamental desires. In software development, I would call it version 0.1. It is far too wildly inaccurate to be usable as a taxonomy. Nobody but a moron would rely on this crud. As a prototype of a taxonomy, it's pretty decent. It showcases what a taxonomy of this kind of thing should look like. It needs a lot of work.

As a model, it is complete and utter total crap. It is blatantly misleading, lying and evil. It doesn't qualify as a prototype or even a rigged demo. Nobody but the most clueless and witless moron would take this for version 0.1 of anything. This is the half-baked sketch of an idea you put on a whiteboard during a brainstorming session. This should never have been published.

SO if you find yourself successfully using this "model" on a broken fucked up human, one of two things has happened. Either you're deluding yourself about how successful you are OR you're really using a freakishly large amount of other-psychology that you're deluding yourself about not using.

Psychology: A Litany of Failures

Some few people are genuinely interested in developing an understanding of the human mind. As opposed to knowledge of the gross and pathetic circle-jerk that is the academic field of psychology. For those very few who seek genuine understanding rather than a PhD, it is vital to appreciate that only a tiny number of psychologists are worth reading.

Academics: Narcissistic Twats

It continues to baffle me how academics keep confusing a subject like the human mind with the history of their own understanding of it. Physicists do the same damned thing. The collective narcissism of these moronic twats is absolutely revolting to me. It is also hypocritical in the extreme since they claim to care about objectivity instead of their own self-aggrandizement.

You would figure psychologists have a better grasp on their own egos than to act in such a narcissistic manner. And that physicists have enough analysis to grasp the difference between the level of physics, the meta-level of their understanding of physics, and the meta-meta-level of the history of their understanding of physics. The real puzzle is that these two radically different mental handicaps result in the same damned collective behaviour.

Physicists don't have the slightest grasp on how their own minds work and some of the most celebrated among them were sick twisted fucks. Meanwhile, psychologists haven't the slightest grasp on logic and some of the most celebrated among them implied human minds don't exist. Yet for some incomprehensible reason, physicists and psychologists act, as a group, the same damned way!

The Ones Worth Reading

So anyways, Carl Jung, Kazimierz Dabrowski, Lloyd deMause and Julian Jaynes are pretty much the only psychologists in human history to have contributed any important insights to our modern understanding of the human mind. In What Are Core Values? I will show just how very little insight Dabrowski provided so you can see I really am scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

In the case of Carl Jung, his better ideas have so thoroughly permeated modern pop psychology that reading him will only leave you with the dreck. I recommend instead reading my articles on fundamental cognitive traits. They're so much better than that crap about supposedly equal archetypes. Worst case, read an overview of Jung's ideas then give him a pass.

The Ones Not Worth Reading

The Big Five Factors of Personality were uncovered through statistical analysis of essentially random questions. This is the kind of scut work which any second year statistics student could have done. You don't even need to know any psychology to do this. And "interpreting" the results of the factor analysis was no doubt just an exercise in free association. Yes you need to know what the Big Five Factors are but then you get that from pop psych so just read a summary.

Myers and Briggs were hacks who churned out an assortment of questions to fit Carl Jung's personality theory. The questionnaire named after them to this day shows not a trace of understanding of the underlying theory. It even contains errors which they no doubt considered "improvements" in their last trait which is just nonsensical and wrong. The entire test is verbose, redundant and unreliable as hell. And their interpretation of results, especially that some personality types aren't superior to others, is just blatant lies.

Fun fact: the MBTI data says men with analysis and synthesis are three times more common as women. Good chance on ever getting a date that's your peer. No, I don't believe that data. I already said it's crap.

Bloom's commission was a commission comprised of many groups not just psychologists. And they still managed to get it wrong as they never realized Judgement is the synergy of Analysis and Synthesis. This is forgivable since these people are all stupid. But they also claimed (or maybe just now claim) that synthesis is a faculty on top of, and not independent of, analysis. And that is just unforgivable. A single psychologist (or teacher) working a single hour should have realized how blatantly wrong that is.

Hare is disappointingly obvious. I'm sorry that psychologists are so fucking stupid they consider detecting psychopaths to be some kind of an achievement. It really isn't. And Hare himself proves that every culture has a concept of "someone who should be left to die on an ice floe because they lie, cheat and steal without ever expressing any genuine remorse". The concept of psychopathy is not even remotely novel.

Now, while the PCL-R is definitely a useful diagnostic tool, it in no way, shape or form enhances our understanding of psychopathy. In fact, there is no conception among psychologists of just what the hell empathy is (see Formal Definition of Empathy). All that crap about mirror neurons cognitive scientists have come up with is just crap. It is entirely on the wrong level, like talking about the features of Intel x86 CPUs when you want to know why MS Windows crashes.

Finally, Hare's latest work with (not on) psychopaths, trying to "redeem" them through intellectual discourse and logic is downright disturbing. Psychopaths should all be put to death, no ifs ands or buts about it. They harm society by being free. They harm society by talking. They harm society by existing. They harm society by us having to put them to death. The only real issue is which of our options minimizes the harm they do.

Maslow is just a quack spouting ridiculous and obvious nonsense. Nonsense which blatantly contradicts reality if you take it seriously. So you're asked not to but then what the fuck is the point of that? Maslow's concept of self-actualization is essentially a crappier, dodgier, fuzzier, less comprehensible version of Dabrowski's Multi-Leveling which at least has the Theory of Positive Disintegration as a huge juicy bonus.

Reiss is a right-wing possibly Nazi fucker whose "16 basic needs" is not even the 20+ basic needs of an animal. By the time you fleshed it out, it'd be 30+ basic needs, it wouldn't actually explain even animals, and a good few percent of homo sapiens sapiens would remain forever beyond such crass reduction. Reiss is almost a new Skinner.

Skinner is a blatant charlatan who claimed that human consciousness does not exist and that humans are just animals. The fact anyone takes his crap seriously is ludicrous. The fact revisionists have tried to rewrite history to make Skinner seem less like the total fucking nutcase zealot he actually is is infuriating.

Freud has left us with pretty much nothing. His id, ego, superego divisions were, at best, specific to Victorians. The superego (persecuting alter) disappears entirely with childrearing mode 6. Conversely, there are people whose minds are segmented many more times (multiple personalities). So we're looking at the notion that the mind can be segmented and that's as obvious as ancient demonology.

Freud can't be credited with discovering the Victorians universally abused their children sexually since he reversed himself on it, trying to make excuses. His dream analysis is useless because symbology is too individual (can't be looked up in a dictionary) and people lie, especially patients.

What Freud is "best known for" is trite and obvious shite such as the subconscious existing or people repressing memories. Far from being some kind of giant in the field, Freud is a complete non-entity to modern psychology.

The Latest Failures

The latest coup among theoretical psychologists is to claim that multiple personalities does not exist. So-called "dissociated identity" means that a personality system's multiple concepts of self (multiple identities) are dissociated from the underlying truth of a unitary personality. IOW, that their senses of self are a lie. There is a lie here and it is in the DSM-IV and in the empty fucking heads of psychologists.

The truth is that it is a fucking miracle that something as ad hoc and arbitrarily complex as a mind ever manages to coalesce into a single unitary personality. There is absolutely nothing obvious about why it should happen. At all. And yet it does in nearly every modern person. That it does not in some people is unfortunate but entirely predictable. You have to be some kind of fucking retard to imagine that the present state of affairs of unitary personalities is a universal law to which deviations are simply impossible.

Julian Jaynes says humans didn't experience this coalescing as recently as 3000 years ago. And while he points to a great deal of psychosocial changes at the time that somehow resulted in this happening, the "somehow" remains a big question mark. Of course, Jaynes just had to die before he could answer these questions and I don't believe ordinary psychologists understand the questions to begin with. Also, multiple personalities do not spontaneously merge so that situation is only vaguely similar.

What's Wrong With Psychologists?

The reason why psychologists are such failures is because they're incapable of logic or synthesis. It's the same reason why they're incapable of detecting psychopaths. First because they're incapable of detecting contradictions in what the psychopaths say. Second because they're incapable of generating original psychological models of their patients so they can't check that those models (based on the psychopaths' lies) don't match up with their actual behaviour.

To work as a psychotherapist is to work overwhelmingly with people who lack analysis and synthesis. As someone who possesses those cognitive traits, I say "no fucking thank you!" Since psychologists are incapable of the basic processes of cognition (ie, they can't think), it should be no surprise that one person capable of those processes can, working alone, achieve a better understanding of the human mind than the entire community of psychologists put together.

Psychopaths

It should also be no surprise that the solution to reliably detecting psychopaths so they can be put to death lies in letting people like me diagnose them. People who refuse to work as psychologists but have an excellent understanding of the human mind. Now, while I'm certain it gives everyone a warm glow inside to think of me having the power of life and death over everyone I come across, let's all pause for a minute in order to appreciate the full magnificence of that wondrous vision, my actual recommendation is to summon random juries of my peers to decide on a case by case basis.

(The political side-effects of correctly putting all psychopaths to death is that it reduces magical thinkers to third class citizens since if they whine too much, they'll get conveniently diagnosed as psychopaths and be put to death. Mere analytic or synthetic people would become second class citizens since they are naturally less annoying than magical thinkers so would be given much greater leeway. This political situation is best described as "everything as it should be". This is obviously a great solution since it solves problems I never intended it to solve.)

And yes, I seriously believe that putting all psychopaths to death as they're detected (and instituting universal testing) in order to try to wipe them out of the gene pool is the biggest priority for psychology. Gaining a full understanding of the human mind is nice but the only thing it's useful for is building machine intelligences which themselves won't be useful until they can be built in the hundreds of millions. It's also useful to understand why I'm superior to you all and hate you but that's only of personal interest to me. So yeah, psychopaths. Psychotics used to be a big problem until thorazine was invented (not by psychologists). In our era, the biggest problem is psychopaths.

It might be an idea to start solving the psychopaths problem by criminalizing their creation. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome looks an awful lot like psychopathy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with jailing a woman for delivering a baby she's soaked in alcohol during her pregnancy. It's a good thing some countries recognize that. Yes, I know, it's a pipe dream. Psychologists are too stupid. Politicians are too stupid. The courts are way too stupid. And society is made up of stupid people who stupidly believe they're first class citizens. But I can still dream.

Imagine there's no religion.
No psychotics hallucinating Jesus.
No nutters or zealots.
And no psychopaths too!
You may say I'm a dreamer,
but I'm not the only one.

What Are Your Core Values?

This is an exercise for analytic synthetic intellectuals. If you're not analytic, you won't get any coherent answers. If you're not synthetic, you won't generate any answers. And if you're neither, there aren't any answers for you to get, period.

See also What Are Core Values?

Theory for Non-Intellectuals

If you're not an intellectual, you don't concern yourself with questions of self-knowledge so you simply won't care about this exercise. Despite the fact that you should care as self-knowledge has many important applications in your life.

Then again, if you're a non-intellectual (to say nothing about anti-) then your whole approach to life is empirically wrong because you're assuming you can reliably predict, using a simple heuristic no less, the practical value of theoretical understanding before having acquired said understanding. You cannot and your understanding of how the world works is warped.

If you're a non-intellectual, there's nothing you can do to become an intellectual since it's fundamental. However, it remains useful to recognize your limitations instead of denying they exist. Hanging around intellectuals and following their advice when they say a purely theoretical exercise has immense practical value is a good idea.

Orient Your Life!

So what are the practical applications of knowing your core values?

For one thing, you will know what you want to do with your life. As opposed to what you've ended up doing by chance. As opposed to what people tell you they want you to do. As opposed to what people tell you you should want to do. As opposed to what will bring you the most money, the most glory, or the most acceptance.

Assuming of course that your mind and self-identity aren't so broken that you are some kind of psychopath who cares only about power. Or a narcissist who cares only about glory. Or that you haven't had your self-esteem ground down to nothing until you are so fucked up as to have no concept of self-identity period. Yes, people that fucked up exist in modern society.

It's not a coincidence that I warn against narcissism and psychopathy. The same mechanisms that drive empathy (the formation of other-identities) also drive the formation of self-identity. See Formal Definition of Empathy and Empathy, Synthesis, Autism and Psychopathy. Whenever I get around to writing them, there's still too much uncertainty in my theories.

Learn To Communicate!

For another thing, knowledge of your own and your peers' core values will allow you to understand how to interact with them. Or why you cannot. It will allow you to see why a certain line of argument will never work with someone despite it making perfect sense to you. And vice versa. It will allow you to see what's normal to you that others consider hurtful and vice versa.

And the reason why it works is that your core values are like axioms in a mathematical system. Some things can be proven in one axiomatic system but not another. Some theorems translate to other axiomatic systems. Some need to be adapted. And some will simply never translate.

So if integrity is one of your core values then logical contradictions will be intolerable. And any logical contradiction between your core values and another person's core values will mean you can't interact with them, period. Hypocrites will also be intolerable regardless of their values.

Incidentally, this kind of meta-level behaviour, where your core values determine how your core values interact, is quite common. As it should be since there's nothing more fundamental to appeal to.

Understand Your Friends!

Finally, understanding someone's core values is the essence of understanding them. You can't say you understand them without knowing their, accurate, concept of self-identity. Knowing their food preferences or their childhood damage doesn't hold a candle to knowing their life-long enduring personality traits.

The same personality traits that will explain and often even predict over 90% of their major decisions for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, food preferences are liable to change at any time with no warning. And childhood damage tends to be overcome by analytic-synthetics just because they can. Even seemingly enduring traits like severe depression may be solved without warning.

Core values are those things a person holds which they will never want to overcome.

Determine Your Core Values

Now here's a fun little paradox. Are the people who skipped straight to this section intellectuals for not needing the sales pitch or non-intellectuals for going straight to the practical section? This will keep me up tonight, I just know it.

Okay, determining your core values is incredibly simple if you just fucking know how. Which means if someone tells you. So you can maybe appreciate that it took me more than a decade to discover mine since I only had quacks and charlatans to "guide" me. You know, the people holding PhDs in psychology and philosophy.

The questions "who are you?" and "what do you want?" are hopelessly vague as-is. In order to fully answer those questions, you need to answer: "what is the intersection of your answer-sets to the following questions #1, #2 and #3?"

1. what abstract properties would you be perfectly happy were they to become universal, fundamental and inviolable laws of the universe (because they are never evil)?
2. what gives you literal joy to see more of (because they are always good)?
3. what kinds of people would you cheerfully murder if you could get away with it (because they have no hope of redemption)?

In other words, what abstract qualities do you feel strongly about to the point where they bring a literal smile to your face when you see them, literal tears of pain when you see them destroyed, and one of a red haze of rage, a cold burning hatred, or a spiteful contempt when you see someone who will go on to destroy them for the rest of their life everywhere they go?

Tips & Tricks

Start off with any answer to those questions. Ask yourself whether you always want exactly this with no exceptions. If you only want it 99% of the time then there may be a closely related term which is  a better fit. As a last resort, look it up in a thesaurus.

Construct counter-examples. Not just to the individual core values you've identified but to all of them. Imagine the worst possible world that fits ALL of the core values you've identified. If you think it's okay then perhaps you haven't made your imagined world a bad enough hell.

If you can imagine a scenario that is obviously bad because the people in it are obviously evil, stupid and/or just plain moronic yet it obviously satisfies ALL of the core values you've identified so far then that's because there's a core value you HAVEN'T identified which it violates. This is a clue.

Ask yourself, or better yet ask one of your friends, whether the core values you've identified are sufficient to reliably predict your major decisions, your major likes and dislikes, to greater than 90% certainty. If not then that's because your real mind is much bigger than the model-of-your-mind you're constructing. It's time to start digging into some of those dark spaces of your mind.

I have identified 9 core values in myself and I think they explain pretty much all important decisions in my life. Identifying 4 core values in someone seems like the beginning of understanding them. Knowing 6 of a person's core values seems like the beginning of a solid understanding. But yeah, EACH core value must be something you have absolute 100% confidence in before it really counts.

Taxonomy of Beings In Earth and Heaven

There is a notion bought by the majority of people that there is such a thing as a homogeneous humanity and then there are Others. Aliens, machine intelligences, angels and demons. This is utterly fucking ridiculous as I know, or know of, human beings that fit every possible archetype of an intelligent being you can imagine. And I don't believe in Cthulhu or Solaris. Hence this exercise which has nothing to do with mythology but rather describes actual people I know. If you don't find it helpful, spare me and fuck off. If you're offended because you're religious, fuck off even harder.

Humans

First there are the ordinary humans. They lead ordinary lives. They don't have individual power over the world, they don't transform it, they don't even dream of it. They live their lives as part of society. They are an integral part of the world.

These are the people who think they're dreaming big if they wish to be mutants with magic powers so they can "fight crime" and gain glory. Or win the lottery so they can acquire lots of pieces of paper and gain glory. Or be an insignificant cog in a dubiously effective mass protest that makes it into the papers so they can gain glory.

Or become politicians like Obama who are impotent figureheads incapable of changing the behaviour of the political system they belong to so they can gain glory. Or become head of a big corporation so they can be swept adrift by the storms of finance so they can gain glory.

Are you perceiving the pattern here? These people are PART OF THE SYSTEM. And the thing they ultimately care about is their place, their status, IN the system.

Types of Humans

Now, there are many different types of humans and the differences between them are rather interesting. The three major types of humans are cows, people and zealots.

Cattle are those placid humans who follow along with the group, always. They don't have any independent desires, not even to better their status within the group, unless of course the group says so. Don't think for a moment that cattle are pacifistic or harmless. Bloodthirsty mobs are made up of cattle. The genocidal savages in black Africa are made of cattle. Anyone who's ever seen a cattle stampede knows they are dangerous.

People are those with some independent desires but no great passions. They are moderate, not extreme. They have no overriding ideologies. They have Hobbies, not Causes.

Zealots are those with crazy ideas which they follow to extremes. Crazy ideas like participating in politics really matters. Or mass protests do a lick of good. Or industrialization is a bad thing because poverty is better. Or the economic status quo is something to be preserved. Or poor people ought to die, starve, freeze to death. Or we can avoid freezing to death using weak ambient sources of power like wind, sun and biomass which belong to the Medieval Ages. Or war is good. Or nationalism is good. Or religion is good.

Then there are two minor sub-types of humans. The super-man and the hero.

Super-men are humans whose will far exceeds that of ordinary humans, even zealots. They make things happen. They are leaders of humans. They're still human so their aspirations still lie entirely within the system. Their dreams are the system's dreams, and not necessarily the dreams (or orders) of those around them. Super-men want glory, they just want it infinitely more than ordinary humans. William Gates III is a super-man.

Heroes are people who sacrifice for the system, for society, for others. They achieve what nobody else accomplishes because it took exceptional and individual sacrifice to do it. If "sacrifice" is expected then it isn't sacrifice at all, it is mere duty. Sacrifice is voluntary. Soldiers and firemen are often called heroes by fascistic societies like the USA but they rarely are because they're just doing their jobs.

Zealots all like to think they're heroes. They aren't. Almost none of them are. They just fantasize they are like adolescents reading American comic books. Not even the zealot leaders are heroes since they rarely if ever sacrifice anything at all. Their usual method of operation is to demand sacrifices of their followers and the world at large. In exchange for special dispensations against guilt or just plain old ego stroking. They're indulgence sellers.

A human who's a combination of super-man and hero is obviously a super-hero. Oskar Schindler probably counts as a super-hero.

Powers

Powers are beings beyond even super-men. They're not at the extremes of humanity because they have moved entirely beyond it. They hold individual power which they have created rather than societal power which they were given. They have the willingness to impose their will on the system, on society, and on the world.

They are capable of independent judgement of good and evil (goals), not just right and wrong (what achieves a goal). They wanted to develop and possess their own independent standards. They can't be judged by human standards because they are the judges. It is the system, society and the entire world that are judged by the Power's standards.

Powers' lives can no longer be contained by this Earth nor any society within it because they seek to transform it. Their dreams are not of Earth but of Heaven. Powers come in two mutually exclusive categories, the merciful Angels and the merciless Demons.

Demons

Demons are Powers of limited empathy. They are incapable of genuine concern or mercy for anyone else's suffering. Their overriding concern is exploiting all others, whether they be minions or free-willed, in order to bring about their vision of Hell on Earth.

The demon Steve Jobs for instance is constantly seeking to bring about Appletopia. And if many zealots worship Appletopia this only means they're demonic cultists, not that there is anything redeeming about Steve Jobs' vision.

Arch-demons are lords of demons.

Steve Jobs' superior William Gates III is an arch-demon.

Elves are not the bowdlerizations of Tolkien but the enticing creatures of chaos and destruction depicted by Terry Pratchett. Elves are evil. Elves lie pathologically, they are malicious, and have no concept of morality. Empathy is beyond them.

The typical psychopath is an elf, whether violent or non-violent. Bonus points if they're charming.

Auditors are worse than even the elves. They seek the destruction of humanity for their own petty convenience.

Any demons pushing Deep Ecology are obviously Auditors. They push the ridiculous notion that morality entails homo sapiens sapiens submit to extinction so viruses can live. Obviously they have no grasp of moral theory and they seek to annihilate humanity to cover up that lack.

I'd like to classify Ayn Rand and other key lying zealot leaders of the right-"libertarian" Cause as Auditors. After all, if they ever succeeded in bringing about their hellish nightmare of a world where everybody is a psychopath and a slave, civilization would collapse instantly and human extinction would begin within a month.

But unlike the scary eco-zealots, the right-libertarians don't actually desire humanity to go extinct or to undergo a massive die-off. The eco-zealots do. That's what makes them Auditors. And it is why I personally vote they should all be put to death like the elves. Every single one of them, even the merely human zealots.

Angels

Angels are Powers of full empathy. This means they have an acute understanding of your suffering and are capable of genuine mercy. This does NOT mean they'll have any mercy on you. Meeting an Angel is not always an unambiguously good experience.

There's a reason the Fallen Angel and the Avenging Angel exist as stereotypes. The former has expended all its mercy and has none left to give you. The latter wants to see you suffer in retribution.

Angels live their lives dreaming of Heaven. Their overriding concern is transforming the system to make of the Earth into a Heaven. They may consider this Earth to already be Hell. If so then they want to make of Hell a Heaven.

I'm not going to name the Angels I know. I will say it doesn't take much effort to see their halos.

Archangels are lords of Angels. No longer just leaders or teachers of Angels, Archangels are grim and forbidding figures. They no longer implicitly trust Angels or consider them their peers. They may not trust Angels at all. They're now willing to veto, impose their will on, and even judge Angels. If they seem happy and amiable, it's just because everything is going their way.

Demiurges have mastered their power and are transforming the world using what's already there.

Gods create ex nihilo.

People Who Waste My Time Calling Me A Troll

The ultimate hypocrisy is a lying asshole like programmer Tom Novelli of TUNES fame calling me a troll after he has gone out of his way to deliberately waste my time.

Let me be very clear. If you think I'm a "troll", a person who "goes out of his way to upset everyone's precious Harmony" ... fuck you. Seriously, go fuck yourself. I do not care to talk to you. Ever. I consider you to be retarded and a moron to boot. Talking to you will be either painful or excruciatingly boring to me. It is not an experience I will enjoy.

I do not need you to be my "friend". I do not even need you to be friendly. What I need from you is to stay the fuck out of my way. Preferably by warning me that you are worthless if I think otherwise. Because as you pat yourself on the back about how tolerant and open-minded you are like some POMO cultural relativistic fucker, the truth is that you are stealing my time!

What I need from people who aren't my intellectual equals is their acceptance of that simple fact. Either so they will believe what I tell them implicitly or so I can avoid the many subjects they cannot understand. Anyone who is hostile to me and hostile to the truth will obviously not provide me that acceptance. So they can just go fuck themselves and stay out of my way.

And if you don't. If after this warning you still waste my time in order to make yourself feel better, I will do everything I can, and it is considerable, to destroy you psychologically.

People's Self-Evaluations

I'm always on the lookout for potential peers and equals. The fact I so rarely find them is one reason why I hate you all. But when I do, talking to them is wonderful and invigorating. Even the occasion where I talked all night with an equal only to decide I despise him for being a nihilist. I never once regretted a single minute of that conversation after the fact. It was a great experience even without counting what I learned that night.

What I regret each and every time is the people who snow me. People who I initially think are my peers and equals but who after being pushed just a little forcefully, end up spouting the most bizarre crap. Stuff like going through a Star Trek transporter means you die and a copy lives on. Or that AI in our future is something you can choose to "believe in". Or that your opinion in a subject is precious and valuable even though I know literally 10 times as much of it as you. Or that "withholding judgement" makes you a nice guy when I would myself have rendered judgement on 1/10th of the data you have available.

I shudder in horror and revulsion every time I find out they lied to me. And they DID lie to me. Every single one of them swear up and down they are logical and creative and intellectual. Then I find out they are incapable of applying their so-called logic to a simple scenario like their mind/body being copied. Or they are incapable (*) of applying their so-called creativity to the ebb and flow (the meta-level) of the conversation they are involved in. Or they are incapable of applying their so-called intellectual curiosity to anything that doesn't have practical ramifications for themselves. When I find out they've lied to me, those are the conversations I regret ever having, those are the people I wish I'd never known.

How can you count yourself an intellectual without being curious? How can you count yourself logical when you can't apply logic to personal situations like your own life and death? How can you call yourself creative when you scorn the very form that original ideas come in as "mere talking"? And yet these people do. Perhaps they think there's something wrong with me for being a linguistic thinker instead of a pictorial one? Oh wait, that would just mean they have no conception what an 'idea' is. No, these are just self-inflating blowhards who like to think they're analytic synthetic intellectuals because it sounds nice. When in reality they're just putting their egos before the truth. And I hate that.

Over 95% of people are cognitively broken. And even though I dismiss greater than 9/10ths of the people I see around as worthless, I still end up with a dud rate of about half. It's pretty sad. And exasperating. Which is probably why I'm not in the mood to handwave these liars away by saying illogical people have no conception of logic or uncreative people have no conception of creativity. That's crap. They should fucking know. It doesn't take much effort to compare yourself to fellow high school students and see that you are more or less capable at math, programming and logic than others. Or that you are more or less capable at artistic and creative endeavours. Or that you are more or less intellectually curious. Who here has never met a good math student, a good student artist, or a good philosophy student?

They should fucking know and they are willfully and blatantly lying.

*: I can tell when someone is resisting willfully versus when they're simply unable. To resist something willfully you have to know it exists and recognize it when you see it. I consider it perverse and exasperating to resist meta-leveling but I can work with it. Just like an artist might work with another who insists on doing everything in black and white, but not with a blind person. There are limits to what one can work with.

What Are Lambdas?

I'll start with some observations.

First, you can't say you fully understand something until you can explain it to others. Second, whenever you explain something fundamental, you can do so as a totally arbitrary property or in terms of some cognitively fundamental concept. 

Defining numbers as idempotent to sets is pretty fundamental. Defining addition as merging of sets is also fundamental. This is good. Defining these things in terms of Peano axioms is uselessly verbose and obfuscatory besides. This is bad.

Lambdas

Lambdas are just blocks of code. Lambdas DO things. This is a good, simple, cognitively fundamental explanation. The problem with this explanation is it violates every tenet of functional programming. It says lambdas DO something instead of MEANING something.

Since programmers are all idiots and computer "scientists" are even worse evil idiots, they resort to hocus pocus about ISK and lambda calculus. Read above about uselessly verbose and obfuscatory "explanations" of totally arbitrary properties. Summary: these explanations are bad!

So we come to the conclusion that Haskell programmers and computer "scientists" don't know what lambdas are. This is ... totally unsurprising. We have a world chock full of idiots here. A crapsack world from my perspective. A world where just one more drop of evil would lessen the horror I experience at it.

What Lambdas Are

When you finally realize what they are, it's just beautiful. Lambdas are "the meta-relation 'relation'". Everything is a relation in functional programming, and lambdas are the meta-relation. When you apply lambda R, you state the input and output are related through R.

All to say that today I finally learned what lambdas are from an FP perspective. And it's all so laughably trivial. There is something distinctly wrong with your brains that you couldn't have taught me (or anyone) this trivial thing. This trivial thing that properly belongs on the first page of the very first book read by anyone learning functional programming.

What the fuck is wrong with you all? I mean, there are plenty of idiotically written books on OOP that explain objects are "data structures with member functions" whatever the fuck that means. But at least, people understand 'hey, an OBJECT' from their real world experience.

If you losers wanted to avoid explaining what lambdas are, couldn't you have named them oh I don't know 'meta-function'? None of you losers seem able to grasp things for WHAT THEY ARE. How long did it take to rename CAR and CDR as head and tail or CONS cell to Association?

It's like you stare at a plane and think "shiny metal thing with two giant outflying struts each with underslung fast-spinning rotors attached". Fucking autistics, ought all be shot. Or at least get declared as second-class citizens.

Lambdas Are Meta

Lambdas are unavoidably meta. Their meta-ness stares you in the face when you know what lambdas are, because meta-ness is ALL they are. Which functional programmers don't seem to understand since they are all idiots. Or evil idiots. Bureaucrats writing tomes about type theory to pad out their resumes.

I emphasize this point because LISP has no special syntax for lambdas so it makes it appear that the relation 'meta-relation' is a similar kind of thing to other relations. And this blatantly violates a fundamental rule of UI design which states that you must never confuse the level with the meta-level.

I like Smalltalk's Block O' Code syntax - [:variable1 :variable2 | variable1 + variable2]. It's very ... hefty. It's very special. It's very good. It's exactly what it should be. When you stare at it, there is no doubt in your mind "this thing is not like these other things". And it really isn't.

Thinking Non-Linguistically

I was chatting with a fellow systems designer today who told me that when we first met my OS design project seemed more advanced than his. The more I tried to place the year we met, the odder this impression seemed. Eventually he told me that my precise use of words and names for my ideas made them seem more refined than his.

It turns out that he thinks in pictures and gestures. This is hardly the first time I've heard that idea but it always just baffled me previously. You know all those people who advise you to think of something visually or other-than-linguistically when you want to memorize something? That "advice" never meant anything to me either. The whole concept of non-linguistic thinking seemed incomprehensibly alien. What else are you supposed to think with?

Well, I understand it now. It has nothing to do with thinking. My friend uses pictures and gestures as referents to memorize ideas and concepts. The same way that I would use names. Now, the idea that naming isn't thought is hardly novel. Richard Feynman, that world-class evil fucking asshole wrote about how his father taught him that knowing the names of a bird in 10 different languages says absolutely nothing about the bird.

(And let me say that it is a majestic tour de force for him to have left an impression of himself as easy-going and folksy in his books when I heard he was a sadistic torturer who enjoyed destroying his students' self-confidence just to make himself seem all-knowing and better-than-them. He was also the biggest hypocritical fucking idiot in physics since he correctly diagnosed the cause of Einstein's lack of productive work later in life and then ... proceeded to emulate him!)

So anyways, names are not ideas. Big deal. That doesn't mean anything until you can actually explain what ideas are in the first place. That turns out to be absurdly simple if you know exactly what synthesis and analysis are. Or maybe I've got that turned around since I think I figured out what ideas are before nailing analysis and synthesis. Or maybe I did them simultaneously, since these questions are so closely related.

What's an idea? An idea is a chain or graph of concepts. The relations between the concepts are themselves some of the most fundamental concepts. Some of these are structural identity, essential identity, association, negation, opposition, and implication. An idea is a TOPOLOGY OF REFERENTS. Think of a web with words at every intersection. Unless you're a non-linguistic thinker in which case the words are replaced by gestures, pictures or pictures of paths.

What's a concept? A concept is a contiguous shape in an N-dimensional scatterplot. I highly recommend reading this essay on machine learning if you want more details. It's what made me understand synthesis and exactly what space concepts are shapes IN. Beforehand I only knew that concepts had a sort of shape, and that they were fuzzy, and in some people could be ridiculously malleable. In a few, concepts get systematically broken down into subcomponents.

So what does thinking non-linguistically mean? It still doesn't mean anything and it is still absurd. But no less so than thinking linguistically. Because you don't think with words. Words are merely placeholders. Symbols with no intrinsic meaning whose meanings is arbitrarily imposed on them from without.

And what does this mean for non-linguistic thinkers? Well, it means they're at a severe disadvantage in communicating anything. Because keystrokes are extremely fast and drawings are extremely slow to generate, even on paper. Their brain's use of non-linguistic referents presents an enormous obstacle to communicating their thoughts. Or even writing them out in a diary and forgetting them.

Most importantly, it means people with a refined use of names (or language in general) are not necessarily better thinkers. Neither more analytic, nor synthetic, nor even more intelligent.