Memeverse

I’ve done a mockup for the graphic header of the upcoming DoublePlusHuman.com.

It presents a human standing at the top of a cold stone or iron made structure with his/her hands risen up into the night sky.

Nothing can stop a human who is free and the site will be dedicated to helping people free their minds and avoid being dehumanized in the coming times.

You wont know what hit you. Yet you shall stay there amazed at how much power you thought you didn’t have.

Stay tuned.

The reason is quite simple really. The more capable you are to think independently and cognitively the less susceptible you will be to being controlled. If you can’t think for yourself then anyone can fool you and anyone can make you believe anything at any time. I can only feel sorry for you at that point, but no, this time I will not blame propaganda or the person who is trying to convince you of something.

I will blame you.

Propaganda is, quite simply, a tool. It can be used to convey any message or idea, whether I think it’s good or bad. The only thing that differentiates it from an educational film is that aside from your reasoning capabilities it also appeals to your emotions which can in many cases actually be a good thing. Involving emotion into the matter is what makes people passionate and energized about something. It is also a way to get people who usually don’t care about a particular thing to start caring.

Propaganda is therefore like technology. You can’t blame it, you can’t ever blame a “thing” anyway. You can only blame a human being, the producer of a propaganda movie if you believe that the idea he is conveying is the wrong one or the viewer of propaganda for being too willing to accept what is being conveyed without thinking independently about it and researching the facts.

Besides, there is no such thing as an universally wrong or an universally right idea. There is only what is real and what is not. If you have an idea which makes you act in a particular way, reality will always kick in with the consequences of your action. If you dislike the consequences then you might judge your idea as a wrong one. If the consequences are good then you might be on the right track. And the only one who can decide if the consequences are good or bad is you, with consideration to what your desires and goals actually are.

The problem with people in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China is not so much propaganda as much as the willingness of people to accept its message almost without questioning. It is ignorance and intellectual laziness. If Hitler’s propaganda was to convey the ideas of individualism, individual sovereignty, freedom, rights to life, liberty and property and people blindly accepted it, I would be willing to bet that they would all be better off because such propaganda would have the same exact message I am trying to convey with many of my posts: think for yourself.

And that would be an example of propaganda which, EVEN when accepted blindly, actually created what can by most people probably considered a good outcome, because everyone is an individual, alive and to a point selfish - and everyone wants to be free of force.

Ideally, of course, they would accept such propaganda only after they have thoroughly questioned it which is excellent because then those who do accept and adopt the idea will do so not only on basis of an emotional appeal, but on the basis of reason, making their enlightenment all the more profound.

In other words, the ideal way to tackle your exposure to propaganda is with the prioritize reason over passion mentality. This doesn’t mean that the emotional appeal shouldn’t entice you to explore the idea further. I mean, if it works for you then go for it! It just means that the emotional trigger should be secondary. It got you intrigued, it got you excited.. to stop at that and turn yourself into an immediate true believer now would be a mistake though. You still need to think it through, do some research to see if the trigger of reason would switch to green for the newly discovered idea too.

Propaganda is especially useful for small grassroots movements who are having trouble convincing people to even give them a chance, to at least try and hear them out. So if making an emotional appeal can get people to listen who can blame them for trying it? They aren’t forcing you to believe anything after all and they aren’t the ones who can brainwash your mind if you don’t let it. You can proclaim them as “evil” if you end up disliking the idea they conveyed (though in my opinion that’d be a foolish proclamation as I don’t believe anyone is inherently evil) or you can praise them for “opening your eyes”, but in both cases it is you who is responsible for what you end up believing in and the consequences of actions you undertake in pursuit of such beliefs, and nobody else!

The answer is 42.

It’s incredible how much insight or even “enlightenment” can come out of one healthy debate. I lately had a tendency to call everything an “organism” thus emphasizing the collective, procedural and evolutionary properties of all things in the universe, albeit by a perhaps very imprecise definition of an “organism” (as I further realized during this discussion). My motive for doing so is to basically motivate myself and others to think of ourselves as part of a bigger whole which we can actually affect, in which we can make a difference, that whole being an organism in which there are many other “cells” like us which have the same kinds of powers.

In doing so I didn’t necessarily negate the importance of individualism and what makes each of us different and unique, as I’ve indeed been pointing out (especially lately), that by being well rounded full individuals who know who they are and what they want can we actually make most of the difference in the world. Yet the classification of human societies as organisms might sometimes have an effect of actually over emphasizing collectivism over individualism, which is not what I support. I support a balance between the two with starting point being inward out, acting based on who you are rather than based on who you think the society wants you to be (albeit you do first have to know what kind of a society it is you are living in before you can have a reference point for what role you want to play in it).

Ultimately, and as it often happens, we ended up coming to pretty much same conclusions, but from different, almost directly opposing directions. He views the world inward out, from the perspective of an observed set of objects, seeing what makes them different from each other rather than what makes them same. I on the other hand do exactly the opposite, I first see what is common between them and then what makes them different from each other. His equation is essentially addition, mine is substraction.

It is probably just the way we are “wired” so to speak and I would be hard pressed to call either of the two approaches as more right or wrong relative to the other. But it is true that both approaches have also their disadvantages and advantages, in fact probably in the same amount. The debate helped me see more clearly the disadvantage of my approach and hence allowed me to take greater care of it.

Interestingly, after having this moment of clarity, I’ve further recognized this trait of mine in a lot of what I do and in ways that I think. For example, I tend to couple all of my online projects in a “network” and these days the ideas I’m having call for even further consolidation and “unitedness” of some of these projects under a single brand. Doing this gives me a sense of having more power, which in turn gives me the satisfactory feeling of achieving something that is big enough to put me higher up whatever ladder I perceive. United we are strong. My projects united through networking under a single banner make me more strong. That seems to be my philosophy.

But I think there’s not much wrong in this. It’s just that by seeing this tendency more clearly I am urged to take care that this way of thinking doesn’t go out of control, turning me into a power hungry monopolist, because that seems to be the extreme end of such tendencies. You know how it goes. One single entity acquiring more and more and more under its one single brand run by a single “board of directors” presided over the man himself, the executive director or the president, the emperor of the empire that devours everything in its way.

Of course, I don’t want to reach that extreme end, hence the expressed concern. On the other side of the coin, inward out thinking, the thinking that sees differences first and commonalities second, has its extreme end too. It is one where you become oblivious and uncaring towards the “outside”, the society. Interestingly, that too can lead an entrepreneur falling to that extreme end into the desire of position of a monopoly, not by way of consolidation, but by way of first ignoring and then extinguishing the outside as if it was an enemy..

Well.. every position has its extreme ends. I guess we just have to keep our eyes on the balancing point, rather than be caught by the gravity of the extreme ends.

I’m thinking this question was bound to be asked. If you look through what I’ve been blogging on since this blog was started you’ll probably find plenty of what you might consider “weird”. If it isn’t obvious by now I’m an impulse-blogger, and that’s an admission you can take for granted. If I get an idea or a thought or even a profound emotion and feel like I want to express this, I tend to do this on my blog, almost impulsively. I want to get it out just for the sake of getting it out, and perhaps for that small chance of someone actually having a comment on that.

So how much sense did it really make so far? How much sense am I making right now? Part of the reason I’m asking is because I see all these bloggers, even including on our own Planet Libervis talk about their work, life, the ongoing affairs in the Free Software world - and it occurs to me that these guys may be too busy to rant about some obscure topics that I’m blogging about and conversely I have too much time on my hands and should work on getting a life they already have.

I also occasionally feel that I might come across as sort of self-important by delving into these deep topics and ranting regardless of who is reading…

I don’t know.. I’m just wondering.. if anyone who reads (if any ) cares to reply. What do you think of this blog so far? How do I come across? Am I boring? Am I making any sense? Should I keep my rants for myself? Should I get a life?

Thanks

Danijel

[video width="400" height="300"]http://www.memeverse.com/misc/FactsvsPersonality_trek.ogg[/video]

By default our instincts seem to be tuned towards appreciating truth and detesting lies. We have an universal fundamental sense of ethics which pretty much always prefers to know and believe the truth rather than a lie.

But how exactly do we know what is the truth? What is our process of determining this? And isn’t the very existence of this process in our minds a potential corrupter of our knowing of the truth?

The truth is believed to be completely objective, existing despite anyone’s perception of it. Believe what we wish, the truth is the truth and will never cease to be what it is. Your belief alone cannot alter it.

Is there a human being who can objectively claim to know the truth? Isn’t that very question already skewed from the beginning? A human? Objective?

To attempt an objective analysis a human being would have to completely disregard their own subjectivity, but I wonder if this is really possible. What will a human be left with if he is stripped of his subjectivity? Based on what exactly would such a human analyze the reality? I would dare to suggest that without its subjectivity, a human is not a human anymore.

Isn’t whatever we learn and experience feeding our subjectivity, not our objectivity? No two persons are the same for no two persons experience and learn same things at the same times and in same situations. How can then any human hope to be completely objective when he is from the beginning, by simply being, subjective. As data finally concluded, “a person fills in the missing pieces of the puzzle with his own personality resulting in a conclusion based as much on instinct and intuition as on fact”. Isn’t that the real truth? (No pun intended, but, it is there.)

If our “conclusion” is always based on a combination of our personality, our subjectivity and the facts we know as such, this conclusion can hardly ever be considered objective and always contains a significant risk of being simply false. Faced with this realization we can never hope to know the complete objective truth on pretty much anything, especially considerably complicated issues such as those usually addressed by (a)theology. We can only get so far. We can strive to be as close as we possibly can, but to at any point assume that we know the complete truth is, in the face of this realization, quite overconfident and foolish.

This may be one of the greatest testaments to the importance of an ongoing open and perpetual conversation between all humans in a constant state of exploration. Any conclusion reached is merely a milestone on a road to the forever escaping singularity that is the truth.

Truth Relativity

The truth I have referred to above would be the absolute and universal truth, if such a thing exists. There is, however, something we could call a relative truth. Sometimes in our language we refer to something known as “the truth of the matter” or “the truth of yourself”. This must be the relative truth, relative to the matter at hand or a person in question.

Maybe, just as Einstein determined the theory of relativity in physics, we could get to know such a concept as the relativity of truthiness, or relativity of reality. While we can continue believing in the existence of an absolute truth and an absolute reality, the fact is that a lot of the reality which we really perceive is the one which we create ourselves, collectively in this world we call Earth, in this region of space we call the Solar System and pretty much anywhere else that we might find ourselves going.

We talk to each other, we act upon each other and our environment. By merely existing we are affecting it and the “truth of the matter”, the truth of the universe around us. As we converse with each other in our striving to get as close to the holy grail that is the absolute truth and knowing of absolute reality, we are creating a perception of reality and effectively a collective reality of our own. No matter if it is at least slightly different from the, to us escapable, absolute reality, it is what a significant portion of us finds to be true, and hence in our collective common sense it is the truth.

A century from now this truth may change yet again.

This may be one of the greatest testaments to the importance of keeping an open mind and embracing change as the only constant in our universe. Isn’t it interesting that, as our common collective sense may currently tell us, the objectively real universe is always changing just as our perception of it does (our current relative “truth” about it). That change is the only constant in the universe may be the biggest fact of all, but don’t get too stuck on it. That fact too is changeable by itself, literally.

All of this simply underscores that if humans care about the concept of truth, the best thing that they can be are explorers and journeyers - perpetually. The fulfillment does not come from the realization of absolute truth because when will you ever be sure you really have it? It will come from any discovery in itself, no matter how small or big it is, as long as it is significant to the discoverer.

I hope this ramble made ANY sense. After all I’m just one of those explorers stumbling on a thought or two every now and then. Maybe you’ll have a thought or two after reading this as well.

Video quote posted under fair use!

This will be a home of a new blog by the founder of Libervis Network, Danijel Orsolic, that is me. While the blog will be in good part personal, it is also going to be about philosophy, freedom, technology, science and fiction. I would likely at some point allow guest bloggers as well, to make this little memeverse more interesting and diverse.

And just what is a memeverse? It is an universe of memes, the “units of cultural information”, the universe of ideas, thoughts and dreams. I’ll try to share portions of mine with you.