End of the Family

It is childish to presume government should get out of the business of governing people. By definition, government governs. Government will govern people, and eventually government will govern whatever higher intelligence may replace people. The question that cuts more to the chase is whether government should govern people through families or by replacing families and rendering them obsolete.


No doubt, many people have emotional or intellectual grievances against the notion of families. Some presume replacement by government, run by benevolent elites, would be better. They may wish to transition to such a system by having government place home and school monitors and bureaucrats, to ensure parents and teachers do not inculcate children with politicially incorrect ideas. ("I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you become politically correct. Don't worry about me. Watch my NWO pendulum and pay attention only to more pressing concerns, such as the lifting of all boats by acceding to the free trade of international crony capitalists.")

These people want to undermine any spiritual or religious component of marriage by denigrating all literalisms of religions, thereby hoping to attack all traditional values that have grown up in every culture that is not to their liking. They also undermine any traditional values of culture simply by dividing culture with multi cultural diversity --- as if diversity merely for the sake of diversity were a guaranteed good in itself.

Marriage can be understood, in part, as representing a cohabitation contract that is subject to enforcement not by the federal government, but by state governments. If cohabitors do not otherwise specify, the government, by law, for the protection of children and ordered decency, imposes a default contract. Cohabitors can expressly choose such contract by entering into formal marriage, or they can become bound to the State sanctioned contract by their actions, by entering into marriage at common law. Cohabitors can amend such default contracts by entering into prenuptial agreements, or by undertaking relationships alien to marriage. The state sanctioned default contract for cohabitations among monogamous pairs of persons of opposite sex tends to proscribe such contracts between persons who are already married, too young, or too closely related. It often encourages cohabitors to have children, as by respecting the authority and rights of parents and by giving them various tax incentives. It provides for inheritance, in default of a will, and it confers certain rights of representation among familial persons who are next of kin. Much of this could be done by express contract, but most people, as they are starting out in relationships, tend not to foresee or prescribe for such contingencies.

So a role for government in prescribing default provisons for cohabitation contracts is appropriate. Only those who want to "fundamentally change" America argue that States lack such interests and authority. What human secularists and their social upheaval apologists vent their disgust against is that such contracts should be called "marriages," rather than merely "contracts in default of other provisions upon entry into monogamous cohabitation." They want to force each State to recognize that there is nothing special about its interest in encouraging the celebration of certain aspects about how the next generation is to be raised. Why the disgust of opponents of society's interest in defending marriage should outweigh the disgust of ordinary persons with the irresponsible exemplars and polyamorous behavior of many homosexuals is not a point that is justified in logic or science. Rather, it is a point that is insinuated and forced, as by the slithering of a snake, by infiltrating to control what is broadcast in media and academia.

I am wrapping up a reading of Sam Harris' The End of Faith, as well as The Moral Landscape. I find he inventories the moral and religious concerns of humanity quite well. I agree with him that much good could be done by bringing the tools of quantitative science into closer interface with concerns for the quality of conscious well being among human beings. (I regard the field of consciousness as implicating religious overtones for empathy at a higher level; he seems to regard it as having spiritual overtones. Religious, spiritual; tomato, potato; interfaces of fluxes of perspectives of consciousness, souls --- how much is his disgust with the values that continue to evolve with religious influence affected by his semantics?) Regardless, if Harris denigrates opponents of same sex marriage as being unscientific, as if implying proponents were scientific, then he oversteps --- and offensively so.

Of Moon Bats among Fundies and Militants

See http://www.jewishtvnetwork.com/?bcpid=533363107&bctid=802338105001.

By a process of Eastern pre-modern and Western post-modern meditation and deconstruction (dissolution of wholes by intricate analysis of their parts), one may deconstruct a bell until it no longer may ring. Indeed, one may deconstruct all of substance, until it dissipates into mere words (dormant information or“stored consciousness”) — layered on top of “some meta flux of becomingness” which is so ineffable, ethereal, and ephemeral as to be beyond description or measure in relation to any model that can be coherently correlated with physics — even though, intuitively (unavoidably?), such Meta beingness is implicated.

Yes, we still experience an unfolding appreciation and manipulation of sensations and signs of interactions and relations among apparent fields and their expressions of particles. No, we have no way of knowing what is the most fundamental essence that causes or underlies such sensations and signs of “substance,” or that avails us with our interpretations of selfhood and individuated agency of causation. Indeed, one may deconstruct selfhood itself, until one’s very consciousness of one’s identity merges to become pure consciousness — that is aware of no self.

From the standpoint of Meta Word, consciousness and physics would seem to be interchangeable, in that both are derivations of a more fundamental essence. Depending on purpose, perspective, and context, consciousness can be expressed as physics, and physics can be expressed as consciousness; that is, active, informationally qualitative consciousness can be converted to a stored or radiating form of informationally quantitative physics, and vice versa --- however, not without a directional, sequential, relational, expanded, entropic change in the shared field of space time.

We have no perspective or model by which to relate, simultaneously, to an unfolding of consciousness into physical substance, or to an unfolding of physical substance into consciousness. We have no coherent model that can accomodate light at the same space-time locus as being comprised of both waves and particles, nor do we have any coherent model that can equate (or beam?) a conversion of the quality of consciousness back and forth into a quantity (or quantum) of physical substance. Yet, we may infer, from an implicated standpoint of Meta Word, that consciousness is actively unpredictable substance, and substance is stored, inactive consciousness --- depending only on how Meta Word deigns to unfold.

Given this state of affairs, one may ask (trivalently): (1) Is consciousness inferior to and derivative of substance; (2) is substance inferior to and derivative of consciousness; or (3) are mortal experiences of both consciousness and substance necessarily implicated as being inferior to and derivative of Meta Essence (Meta Word?) — that is, does there abide a Meta Being that has trivalent capacity to avail changing-interpretations-of-the-changeless, to reconcile all that is Possible ... with all that is Manifest ... with all that is Unfolding?

For convenience, I take liberty to refer to such Meta Word as “God.” This puts me at odds with most who seek the comfort of more popularly contending states of confusion. As to religious fundamentalists and their assorted, attempted literalists, I am loathe to accept any mere “sacred” text of words, translated in respect of any expanding universe of circular definitions that are collected in dictionaries for mere mortals, as being apt for defining (or confining) “God.” As to militant atheists, I am loathe to accept that mankind should sever relations with the history of our unfolding traditions and moral values (of which most such texts and myths can be useful repositories, when properly or figuratively interpreted). Rather, I seek to bring quantitative science face to face with qualitative morality.

I begin with an intuition about morality, which I take to be common and reasonably objective. First, I decline to try to replace God with respect to any need to judge the subjective merit (or soul?) of each person or perspective of consciousness. Rather, I try to build on a moral ethos, not altogether unlike Kant's Categorical Imperative. My test is: What is necessary or helpful to facilitate a civilization that avails its members with decent opportunities to freely pursue their individual quests for meaning and fulfillment?

Insofar as Meta Word is manifestly at work in guiding us to states of consciousness that are leveraged with brain capacities as powerful as we find among human beings, it strikes me as reasonable, perhaps even obvious, that civilization ought not needlessly stymie such powerful perspectives of consciousness in their individual pursuits of meaning. That is not an intuition that is derivative of science. Rather, that is an intuition that may come direct from one’s state of beingness. Once accepting that qualitative intuition, techniques of quantitative science can be brought to facilitation, face to face. In that way, a “science of morality” may come to make sense, as may broader political platforms.

Given pursuit of a science of morality, manageable questions become obvious: What parameters of family and social values are necessary to sustain decent civilization? Should such values be sustained by law, not hindered by law, or only be encouraged by tradition, howsoever it happens to unfold? What kind of regulation of economic activity and trade can best facilitate free enterprise? How can citizens of good will be protected from crony capitalists? What kind of traditional myths, parables, and figures of speech are best understood and suited for inspiring the kind of analogical reasoning about values that is needed in order to inspire appropriate moral standards, to assimilate and preserve decent society?

To my lights, it is morally insane to expect to preserve decent society based on nothing more than government established worship of savage competition, hiding behind masks of calculated abuse and greed by faux libertines who maneuver to own the government (and to erase nations). It is insane to expect that government “ought” to force toleration of every multi culti affront to demographic maintenance and assimilation of traditional values, merely to expand opportunities for godless and greed based maneuvering among contenders for controlling laws, finances, taxes, entitlements, and government gifted monopolies.

The kid in Sixth Sense saw dead people. As an equal opportunity offender of fundies and militants, I see moon bats.

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Decent civilization, trying to be tolerant, has allowed gays, Muslims, crony capitalists, communal utopians, and stick up artists to overstep.  Decent civilization will fall, if it tries too hard to accomodate such who want to subjugate it.

The Changeless Changer

The Changeless Changer:

Mere words can never accord a complete, non-circular accounting of reality, because our words cannot define reality in itself, but only circular definitions of other words. Still, what is most interesting does not consist in word games or in words in themselves, but in that we exist to appreciate consciousness of poetry, i.e., what it is like to use words. Something (Meta Word?) abides, known even to inferior animals, of which the words of mortals are only an inferior derivative, but of which our mere words, in themselves, cannot create or define. At best, our words and models can enhance a qualitative or poetic appreciation of the reality of which they are dependent, but our words, by themselves, cannot change the shared, synchronizing, unifying, underlying reality with which each of us is only an inferior participant, dependent upon a common and superior holism.

Meta Word abides in all by which is experienced the subjective sensation of every inferior word, sound, sight, relation, reaction, conversion, equation, parameter of transition, feel, instinct, and emotion. Meta Word avails that by which we all – even inferior beings – pull at the same bootstrap – “scientists of ethics” not excepted. It is only out of the holism of the Meta Word that all of particular, subjective, and apparent experiences, attractions, repulsions, and organizations unfold, in synchronous feedback with observed and observable manifestations.

Our shared sense of reality does synchronously flux and change, yet an essence of reality remains changeless — in that it humbles all of its particular participants. Reality abides as a trivalent, holistic identity:  The possible, the manifest, and the unfolding. That which changes is the aspect or sense of reality that unfolds to our shared appreciation. However, our common and abject Dependence upon that reality neither changes FOR us, nor is such Dependence changeable BY our mere manipulations of words, metaphors, and models. Still, we DO participate in an ongoing, continuous, logarithmic, discrete, and digital changing and unfolding of choices among both fields and particulars of possible, overlapping, and fuzzy realities. With what meta sense, energy, or power do we do that? I suggest that all change emerges and dances in flux with apprehensions of meta energies of fields and perspectives of meta consciousness. To me, a quality of subjective intuition – which refuses to be denied – suggests that Something of higher power abides, with which each of our perspectives of consciousness participates. Beyond that, mere words will not confine that Something, but may help remind or inspire us as we assimilate in respect of it.

To appreciate that a higher reality does abide, beyond the words of mere mortals, necessitates appreciation of a non-quantitative, non-empirical kind of poetry, intuition, and inner sense. Meta Word is that which avails our empiricism, by adding quantitative layers on top of qualitative connotations of what otherwise would exist only as ephemeral words and un-manifested possibilities for the organization of “information” (i.e., “stored consciousness”). Meta Word may be appreciated as that by which physics (stored information, i.e., stored consciousness) and flesh are added to mere words.

How else to appreciate or “define” Meta Word, I know not — except to bow, in common and due respect of it. All that we measurably experience in consequence of Meta Word is measurable only in relation to models, analogies, and metaphors about it. The words of mortals that we find inscribed in our science books and “sacred” texts have no power to explicate God’s sole, special, or Meta Word. This is because we have no power to comprehend God, much less to comprehend a complete or limiting exposition of God’s Meta Word. Rather, we deal only with impressions concerning the words and poetry that flow to us through inspired mortals. Still, in proper context, we can find value and guidance in the inspired words that flow through mortals, as they connect us to our antiquity — warts and all. Such texts help bridge our context, to connect us with how we have come to be defined, measurably and poetically. However, it is no use to suggest that such are the ultimate words of Nature or God, for we have no means, while mortal, to apprehend such ultimates or to conceit to comprehend the Meta Word.

Yes, we can model and relatively measure such aspects of that part of the potential of reality that are presently manifest to our shared experience. No, our hubris avails us no power of declaration by which to limit the entire potentiality of reality. For us, our “sacred” texts can provide no limiting description — either of the entirety of reality or of God. Rather, the value of sacred texts concerns our capacity to refer to them, to connect us with our past, to help guide and inspire us during our unfoldment along our shared and poetically meaningful path through time. God abides; beyond that, sacred texts facilitate, at most, only figurative interpretations or apprehensions of God.

The door that separates our particular experiences from the holistic experience of God has never been breached by any mere mortal — neither by the best of our philologists, nor by the best of our logicians. “I” abide only as an inferior participant, dependent upon the superior holism of Meta Word. In that aspect, as a shorthand reference, for convenience of communication, I intuit value in referring to such Meta Word as “God.” Still, it is my sense that we have no moral sanction to abandon unfolding responsibility or reason to literalistic impressions of entire texts of antiquity. For argumentation, sacred texts are often of poetic value, not scientific value. They can help attest to what we would will, not to what God must demand. This is because neither the Cosmos nor God are subservient to the mere will of mortals.

At best, each of us can advocate for good will only in respect of that which we intuit to accord with our humble receptivity to the higher values of Meta Word. To my interpretation and intuition, present context calls for Americans to seek to preserve civilization that accords decent respect for the freedom, dignity, and well being of each well meaning individual.

******

To abide (to be recognized or recorded?) as a "Changeless Changer" (Unified universe? God? Ineffable essence?) necessitates a dance between a scientifically backed, indifferent objectivism and a willing, caring subjectivism. A Changeless Changer requires that quantitative predictability and qualitative free will must coextend, each to define the other --- depending on fluxes in purpose, point of view, and frame of reference. Because of their coextensive codependence, neither objectivism nor subjectivism can provide a complete model of either physical or moral reality. Further, every plane upon which objectivism and subjectivism meet will necessarily produce fuzz and uncertainty, because every focus of qualitative perspective with quantitative context is also necessarily changing --- constantly and continuously.

The field of consciousness perceives the particle as being quantitative, while the particle of consciousness perceives the field as being quantitative. Neither the field nor the particle is "really" quantitative or qualitative, in itself, but only in relation -- depending on attitude of view and frame of reference. The idea of an ultimate, substantive, reconciler --- whether quantitative (Higgs Boson?) or qualitative (White Haired God of Abraham?) --- is flawed and bogus.

Saved by the Light

What lit up the Enlightenment was white European culture --- not because of its whiteness, but because of its culture. Not all cultures are equal. Some are inferior, and some are especially evil. When the test is, What is needed to sustain a decent civilization? then it becomes glaringly apparent that Islamic culture is evil. Applying the proper test, it is often glaringly obvious regarding the shared sacrifices that are necessary. Decent Americans hunger for that kind of leadership. Why aren't we getting it, and why is the light of European culture being buried before our eyes? Well, look around at who is benefitting from inculcating people that Western culture is bad and that it is bad to "act white?" Decent people have too long been lulled into allowing decent civilization to be canibalized by the most opportunistically corrupt, cynical, and historically ignorant. We have failed to ask, Why should European culture stand aside and allow itself to be replaced by ignorance and evil? Why should we bow before a NWO comprised of the most cynically corrupt? When enough Westerners begin asking the right questions, we may yet enter into the kind of shared sacrifice and assimilation of individual effort that is needed in order to rescue the light.

Nothing Indecent, Nothing Preserved

Nothing Indecent, Nothing Preserved:  Consider a concern from the other side of a coin, and set aside a notion that declining respect for a concept of a decent and caring God is the root cause of moral and cultural decline of the West. Instead, consider whether the root cause is the loss of any assimilating identity in the West. Ask: What is inspiring our people, that they are identifying with, bonding with, finding meaning in, and seeking fulfillment from?


Are we identifying with anything that can unite us, apart from giving free rein to personal greed and entitlement? Absent respect for some higher notion of assimilating moral sentiments, will Providence stretch out its invisible hand to guide us, in respect of nothing more than mere greed? When each feigns to be his own gold standard, so that the only purpose felt is to do that which pleasures only us, then how can any nation, culture, family, or system of belief ward off the corrosion of such a moral vacuum?

Look at the tug of war between Dino unionists and Rino corporatists: are they united in pulling America apart at its seams? Do those who fund either party identify with any interest or value that is fit to preserve a decent civilization? Or do they only hire shills to promote their own greed and lust?

How can we sustain faith that working together can preserve a worthwhile ideal of America, once we have lost faith that many others really want to preserve America? How can shutting down greed-based public service unions help America, so long as greed-based international corporatists are freed to ruin America? How can improving our military technology defend us, so long as we place over us those who seek mainly to sell us out? How can political activism help us, so long as we only strengthen forces that are pulling us apart, instead of empowering and representing a decent middle class that is actually inspired in respect of assimilating, higher values?

Can America preserve assimilating faith in herself, without preserving faith in any unifying purpose that is higher? What we have to fear is the prevailing and deadening loss of faith in a sustaining and common decency. When nothing is indecent, then nothing is what we will preserve.

When Nothing Makes Logical Sense

When nothing makes logical sense in itself, then to what, if not some superior kind of consciousness, does it fall to construct sense?

It would be nonsense to try to explain an idea of conscious free will as anything that could emerge solely from material that is bound through and through to nothing but rules of physics. It would also be nonsense to try to explain the physics or our universe as emerging solely from its own physics, as in a chicken birthing itself. That sort of bivalent reasoning devours its own tail when it tries to derive free will from physics.  Even so, there appear to be gaps in our notions of physics, which can never be closed by a unifying or standard model that is based on nothing but bivalent reasoning. I suspect bivalent reasoning becomes circular in either case, whether one wishes to believe in an emergent quality of free will or whether one wishes to believe that a quantifying model of physics can be superior enough to avail the derivation of every other aspect, both material and moral. I say we have no choice but to make choices. So, what's a materialist to say: That matter has no choice but to make choices? lol.

When it comes to the necessity of making choices, such as about how best to inspire and sustain a decent civilization, what's an intelligent materialist or moralist to do? What's a conscious being to reason (trivalently?), when reason (Godel?) shows unable coherently to exhaust a universal set of all the possibilities that are mutually exclusive?  I say, what quality of crap is this? Is it horsecrap, bull crap, unmitigated crap, or precious crap?

******

From Dave:  The idea of free will as something beyond mentally tangible (conceivable) is nothing more than a human creation. A dog has as much or as little as we have - but doesn't ask why. The question therfore must be contained only within our minds and therefore depends upon circular reasoning.

From Dlanor:  Perhaps a notion of a singularity in intelligence may relate to an even more interesting (or ridiculous?) question:  What ought we consider the purpose, if anything, of conscious free will? Is it the mere accumulation of power through the application of reason? Is that which is the best which we ought to be about nothing more than a matter of the unfolding discernment of reason?

I received the following, which I attribute to an interesting source:

http://www.singularity.com/
The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.

Accelerating change:
In futures studies and the history of technology, accelerating change is a perceived increase in the rate of technological (and sometimes social and cultural) progress throughout history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future. While many have suggested accelerating change, the popularity of this theory in modern times is closely associated with the ideas and writings of Raymond Kurzweil, especially in relation to his theories about technological singularity.

In 1938, Buckminster Fuller introduced the word ephemeralization to describe the trends of "doing more with less" in chemistry, health and other areas of industrial development. In 1946, Fuller published a chart of the discoveries of the chemical elements over time to highlight the development of accelerating acceleration in human knowledge acquisition.

In 1958, Stanisław Ulam wrote in reference to a conversation with John von Neumann:
One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Communal Inspiration vs. Elitist Lawgiving

In the absence of institutions for enacting and enforcing an all pervasive system of laws, people tend to come together of their own accord in order to seek and sustain shared sympathies. They often assimilate and bless the upshot as being divined in respect of a source of higher values. They may intuit that they were receptive to some kind of guiding function or field. They may even refer to its source as "God."

Some people want to take that away, to say no one should find inspiration or charity, except in respect of material and measurable facts, reason, and science. Perhaps, as the "science is settled," they mean to replace voluntary communal receptivity to God with a system of laws, migraine inducing in their intrusiveness, as reasoned and meted out to us by our elite betters. No thanks.

I prefer good faith receptivity to a shared idea or source of higher, guiding values. If, in some instances, that devolves into mafia like cults of religious abuse, the solution should not be in banning or ridiculing "God," but in bringing the wider community, with its own modes of pressure or law, then to rein in the abuses. That is the time to apply law and force: when religions, in their actions and incitements, become abusive. Not when they merely pay homage to a caring, guiding, higher Source of values.

Is there a changeless yet changing standard, against which morality can or should be measured? May it consist in the human form? Or the well being of the human form? Or some imagined evolving apex of an organism? I doubt it. As pressures change, the change in our niche, form, and material appetites will accelerate in their changes. If the needed changeless yet changing standard cannot prevail against the withering rate of material change, then what sort of changeless yet changing standard may meet our need? May it consist in a standard that is merely intuited, beyond material, even qualitatively superior to quantitative material? I believe yes. I believe there abides such a standard, a sort of encompassing, synchronizing, field of present and stored conscious will, unchanging in its capacity, yet changing in its "mores" and in how it "appreciates," in feedback (prayer?), a quality of interfunctioning with various limited and inferior perspectives of itself.   Respect for that Source is vital, if we are to avoid the inhuman encroachment of law spouting oligarchs, who invariably confound our lives, all the while considering themselves above the law.