Friday, March 24, 2017

evidence based policy making

"evidence based policy making" in M 103 is something the Canadian government is short on. Look at the Canadian good food guide. Incomplete information, not evidence based. It does not deal with those of us who do better on LCHF.

M 103 can be found at  https://www.pressreader.com/canada/national-post-latest-edition/20170131/281659664767177

Religion is based on the lack of real evidence. There is no physical evidence that there is any god. That implies that any god that could be is just in the minds of the believers where concepts exist or there is no god. That is the real logical choices, that it, that's all folks. There is no real physical god. The documented superstition of the religions can be found in the books, the Bible, Quran, Vedas, Pali Cannon, Accolades, etc. Some are better than the others as literature, some have good bits and bad bits; some that should be followed, and much that should be ignored as bad advice.

Islam will not, in the Quran form, not allow piece with others. Other lesser forms ignore parts of the historical collection of myths and instructions, and are less violent. The solution is not only elimination of Islam, but the elimination of all religion for a truth based, atheist, rational thinking, logic based behavior. We can select our good beliefs based on whatever, or go through the books and pick what we would like.

The Muslims that I have known have all been a thin skinned bunch, who get offended an anything, who would like to be treated differently than we treat each other. They get offended in the lunch room of most businesses. They want to be special. They do not fit in with the present society of Canada, and need to be separated. The government can try, but it cannot acheive separation. Many business are separating them out by not hiring them. Oh well, any businesses main objective is to make money, and needs to control costs. I have said more about this here.

Elimination of all religion and install a uniform code of human conduct is the best solution.

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Stoic half stories... Yeh, but how?

Person: it hurts when I lift my arm.
Stoic: then don't lift your arm.

https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/stoic-advice-i-want-a-child-but-i-cant-conceive/
http://modernstoicism.com/resistance-is-futile-stoic-counsel-about-externals-by-william-ferraiolo/

The stoics and Buddhist always say to let go of your desires, attachments, delusions for all sorts of problem, but they never go on to tell anyone how to do that. That is the real problem, we never learned to let go of anything out of our minds, our will. We fail at a lot of things because we have never learned to let go of desires. There in is the "real" problem.

So how did we get those desires anyway? Well we were told that those were good desires to have, or we, as youths, decided those were good desires. These are a collection of common cultural beliefs that we assimilated, and some are just wrong. These we foisted onto us by the well meaning but wrong culture; perhaps it was not what the elders tried to teach but it was what we learned. We assent to that belief and never realized the belief was wrong, just wrong. We assented to eating more because we wanted to grow large so that the little bastards would not harass us for being small; we ate to grow larger, to be able to withstand the bully.  We ate out of defense, we ate because the numbing effect of sugar high took the edge off the pain. Overeating became epigenetically fixed. No one ever took the time to teach us to unload learned behavior, wrong behavior in favor right behavior. It is not until the bully gets the shit beat out of them that many parents even realize there is a problem. Often the wrong problem gets fixed. Do not antagonist the bully, and let the bully have his way. This is the root cause of terrorism; everyone is afraid to offend the Muslims, when the right thing is for Muslims to learn to mind there own business. But nobody ever bothers to teach unloading of wrong beliefs and reloading of the correct beliefs.

We assented to the original preposition without understanding the consequence or testing to see if it is correct. Now we know, and we can call bullshit on the wrong proposition. So until the Stoics and Buddhist start teaching unloading, they are just beating their gums.

Now I have made a few hints at the process of unloading wrong beliefs. First we need to recognize desires, aversions, delusions, as beliefs that at some time in our past we assented to, and as such tuck these into our automatic decision making matrix. Next we need to recognize these as wrong, and this may also confirm the source. We need to become willing to let go of this belief, even if it was religion or parental based. Often identifying it as wrong is helpful. We may need to load a new correct belief in it's place. Eat only the correct amount, just enough to where you can stop eating. Or that desire was our parents, not ours. We are in control of our desires because we assent to them in the first place, and that makes us responsible.

Religions likes to load the gun for there own growth. Rational thought and behavior should trump all religions and belief systems, except when the belief system is rational and complete.  If we apply the legal standard laws of evidence, there is no god.

Some things are up to us and some are not. The main part of what is up to us is our assent to propositions. We are responsible for what propositions we accept, even wrong ones. When we realize they are wrong, we should unload these promptly, and load the correct ones. 

Thursday, March 16, 2017

Questions

http://godlessmom.com/4-questions-brand-new-atheist/

1) Why is there something rather than nothing? (or) Why does the universe bother to exist? (or) Why is it necessary for our universe to exist, and to continue to exist?

All this got me thinking. First let me say that because the mind can create a question object in the mind does not mean it is a real or meaningful question. That is not to say anything against the mind, but if the mind can conceive a god, and no god, it can also conceive of other thing that just are not real.

First, if there was nothing, there would just be empty cold space, aka nothing. Why should there be a bound on nothing? What else would nothing look like?

Before the big bang, what ever was there had higher entropy than matter that existed.  Disorder increases. If it was a singularity, what ever that was, is now gone, converted into matter and energy. If it was not a "singularity" then it could be something like a massive black hole exploding, and we only see the effect of the last one. Some questions we can not yet answer yet. It need nothing have anything to do with we humans. It is a human desire to have an answer. All most all cultures have a creation hypothesis story. We want answers, but some questions are beyond our understanding yet.

Chemical and physical process do not need a purpose, they continue until conditions are not suitable. end of. We humans try to place propose on things where there is none. This is something like our desire to learn and/or understand. Man has no purpose beyond to reproduce, unless we impose one onto it. We should be trying to keep our environment in such a condition that we can live, but there is not enough cooperation to see the obvious. There is religion because people will not see the obvious. Oh well. enough.

Concepts like purpose are just concepts, and as such exist as concepts. Our mind can handle them as abstract nouns, concepts, yet they may have no physical reality. Things happen because of a driving force exists, nothing more. Man is just a opportunistic minimal living on a big rock whirling through space. It has enough gravity to attract an atmosphere, and enough heat for organic material to produce oxygen that we breath. We need to keep the carbon dioxide consuming plants healthy so that we may continue to live. We live in a closed system, and our population has become large enough that we are effecting our environment. Shit happens.     

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Why should I care if the truth offens you?

Cultural stories of creation are myths. So is the bible and the Quran. There is no real god, at best gods are just concepts or belief held by others. Any god is just a mental object. Why should I care if you find this offensive for this is the truth, the one and only truth, and if you find it offensive, that is your problem.

I have religion pushed at me frequently, and I push back now. It is only right.

I find political correctness offensive. You are trying to force your beliefs onto me, even when your beliefs are wrong. Do not expect compliance with political correctness.

Species is often defined as groups which do not naturally interbreed through location, preference, or habit. We humans are, by that definition, a group of species. As such, how can any government expect that different species will live together when the immigrants will not respect our traditions. Every time a immigrant with difficulty speaking English cuts a the line up at Tim Hortons, there are developing ill will. Every time they do something stupid in traffic, there is more ill will. In Red Neck Alberta, expect some immigrant to be shot soon. It is easier than lynching. Those who do not comply with the law get away with much already, "I did not know" goes the cry. Bull shit. I saw the same one get chewed out, and she did cut the like again the next day.

There is no self, or nonself in Buddha terms is true, correct, and real even if we belief in the illusion of there being a self. Our mind is just a mass of neurons with synapse. The self is, at best an image of self created by a bunch of neurons and synapse doing there thing. The whole brain and body is the self, but there is no self within the brain, just a convenient illusion, and a self created ego with "privileges" that expands with power and success, however we define power and success.

Muslims are impossible to not offend if we chose to try to talk to them, so I do not care. So when asked anything religions, I will tell them there is no god, so you can do as you like. End of.    

Thursday, March 9, 2017

Historical Cultural Creation Hypothesis

Historical Cultural Creation Hypothesis

As the old Navajo, in DNA Tracing, said, "calling our creation stories 'myths' is offencive."  So how should we modern thinking humans refer to these cultural and religious myths so as to call them what they are and remain politically correct, and correct in reality. In reality, these are myths, but to have something blow over the head of the uneducated, to remain unoffensive, while remaining truthful to our own beliefs?

There is a new age Hindu fellow, trained in science, and acceptance science, who is trying to adapt Hinduism to modern reality and English. Hinduism has the same problem as most of the religions, with the youth forsaking the belief system; and he sees the solution is to modernize the religion, keep the values and the good parts, at the same time as adopting science that we see as real. Buddhism rubbed off Hinduism, just as all christian branches rubbed of Catholics. Keep the best of both, let the wrong, useless, oversimplified, and waste of time stuff fall off, perhaps even create a new profit or leader. (Joseph Smith, or LR Hubbard type hype leader come to mind, but based on truth.) We do have the three of the four horseman, but these have not figured out the individual non-exceptional human needs yet. But it is the why of routine liturgy that must be explored. The Buddhist spins the wheel to the right as a symbol of "tomorrow is another day to do it all again" and to remind ourselves of karma, (aka, we are the sum of our past), and we have a small effect on the future, and to the right because, facing south, that is the way the sun goes.  

Many of us spend our lives believing or studying a hypothesis, only to find that the hypothesis is false. Now what? Oh well, much good came incidentally out of the effort. Does it matter. Out of the 110 or 120 billion people who lived before us, how much has been lost? A human life is but one test of a biological package, the test is survival of genes, not knowledge or correctness. So if we are to measure our lives by the number of offspring, we have far different values than other measuring by other accomplishment. It does not matter, we are only one of the 110-120 billion other experiments in H. sapiens lives. We each struggle to expand our understanding is specific ways. Comparison is not justified. We should do for others as we would they do for us. We should do for others, not to others, to get our of our heads. It was easier to see this when there was less change, but it still can be seen in multi-generational communities, if we look.

All cultures have there historical cultural creation hypothesis; Science has a new one, which is supported by evidence, some physical, some logical. The old one will need to be abandoned. We need to pay attention now to science, not because of what we know, but for the approaching issues that we have identified on the horizon, and others that are there as well. Yet if we look at the why's of many practices, at there foundation lie a sound ethical reason. Perhaps I need to breath a bit more first.

The words are but a crude pointer to the though behind the concept. The incense create a smoke for the concepts, thoughts, ideas, the abstract nouns, to ride on....    





Monday, March 6, 2017

Control vs Free Will

Philosophy, by simply changing the name, can start the argument over again. How different is free will and what is within our control? Epictetus to Dan Dennett to Sam Harris. How different is that which each define? Well Sam tries to measure it, but what he measures is part body, beyond our control or power, so he finds we little or no free will.

Epictetus starts by defining what we have complete control of, our mind from input acceptance decision to output decision, bounded by our beliefs, values, and reality. Reality includes our talent and skill stack, our temperament.  Our assents, positive and negative impulse, opinion, reason or logic, are all that is ours. We can, also, over time change our beliefs, likes and dislikes, some rationally, but one our beliefs become fixed, change takes time. Also what is marginally out of our power, hidden behind beliefs, likes and dislikes, will vary, person to person. It is those individual differences that make up the diverse population with different behaviors we see today.

We are bounded by reality on one side, and each persons reality is different. Some of us do not tolerate cold, others of us do not tolerate heat. Each persons skill stack is different, as unique as a fingerprint. Yet each of us has control of our thinking, our ability to accept or reject an incoming proposition, as long as that preposition does not conflict with our beliefs. If it conflicts with their beliefs, then it conflicts with their learned beliefs, for all beliefs are just learned, which often people have never rationally examined.

Some of what we learned is just wrong. We do not know what part or which "fact". We just do not know. Which or what. Some facts do not stand the logic test, other the total lack of evidence makes it unlikely, even inconceivable to some. So one wall of our free will or control is movable by adding or subtracting beliefs. This may be why AA and the like work, they change our beliefs and place behaviors out of our control. Oh well, who knows.

Free will, or within our power or control, is what personal responsibility is based on. So if instinct is to eat, we are not responsible for overeating; if what we eat is within our free will, our overeating is within our responsibility. Likely, is in that zone of partial control, where our free will permits the body to have input. We can use our power of impulse to move ourselves into a food free environment, but others may contaminate our environment or we wait too long, instinct takes over, and we lose control. Staying out of places where we lose control may be the best control some of us have if instinct is in overdrive.