Ink And Hope

 

Each of us is like a universe on our own. But to live together, we must find some agreements. That’s been our history since always. It seems that we found some good agreements: most people seem to agree about the sacredness of childhood, and about violence not being our final goal. We will always be human and imperfect, but we can dream of a wolrd where the basic essential agreements prevail.

But how are we, separate universes, goint to find a common goal? How are we going to find principles in which we all believe? Now here are some good news: these things already exist. Long ago we discovered these ideas. Peace, Justice, Mercy, Freedom...

We have these ideals, and ideally, our civilization would be people in power serving the ideals. In the worst case, it’s the ideals serving people. But no kingdom was ever built saying: let’s be evil. They say they will do good, even if they work for evil. The hipocracy is depressing, of course, but the fact that the ideals are there is a good thing.

When someone finds these things in that misterious essential place within ourselves, or in the sky, and when we bring them to words, giving names to them, they have some reality, they are deep in our souls, and they can still prevail.

One example: the American constitution states that “All men are created equal”. It seems that the very guy who wrote it had slaves, and so some said “ let’s burn this hypocritical piece of paper”. But others said “no, let’s use it”. And those last ones are the ones who prevailed. Despite a war that almost destroyed the country, the Abolition itself was perfectly legal.

So, the Constitution of a country is not the Word of God, or the Natural Law of the Universe, that’s for sure, but they are a peace treaty. It says, “to try to live in peace, let’s agree on some limits”. Of course it is good to discuss what could be changed to improve these constitutions as humanity evolves the understanding of the principles, but it’s got to be done carefully. A Constitution is an attempt against the Law of The Stronger.

I think that I can describe what happens after a “successful” violent social revolution like this: First Day, “We won, we’re free, Hurray to the People!”. Second Day, “Man, it’s becoming a mess, everyone has their own ideas, we should install a central comitee to make the decisions”. Third Day, “Nobody is listening to us! We have to show these guys who is in charge here!”. Fourth Day, the guilloutine, or the firing squad. Of course it’s a simplification, but you can check the History and see if I’m so wrong.

So there is a common wealth of mankind, wealth of ideas, ideas that most people don’t dare to go against openly. We can do as those abolitionists, pointing contradictions, incoherences, puting people face to face with the fact that some of the things they do go against the essential principles they said they would defend. Finding and pointing the implications those ideas should have in the real world. Using logic and honesty to make this world transparent.

This doesn’t mean being radical. We agreed that justice is opposed to law of the stronger. Justice should be lead by reason and common wisdom. It is natural if we oppose to someone who tries to impose the law of stronger, but that is different of having a complete idea of how exactly the system should work, and become enemy of anyone who disagrees on the smallest detail. That would go against another basic principle: freedom.

You can, of course, have some ideas of how society should deal with some specific matters, but you have to put the most basic principles in a special place. If the implications we believe that “justice” and “freedom” have lead us to paradoxes, maybe we are not reasoning quite right. We have to believe that the basic principles we believe all come from the most basic: Goodness, mercy and love; and they can’t be opposed to one another. And then work on it, find a way.

Sometimes I think of the good principles like kings being served by selfish brownosers. One day they’ll get tired of it and cast those guys away for good with their own power.

The Mist And The Machine - Chapter 01 - Revisionism and Education

 

            I'm substituting this chapter with a declaration that I changed my mind about a lot of things in it. I attacked modern pedagogy very hard, because I was in online college and the pedagogy guy stated a lot that he was Marxist, so I thought, is Marxism all there is in modern pedagogy?

            Thinking better, I think it is not, and I threw some babies with the bath water.

            I'll write about this things when I have something more to say, but for the moment I'll just keep my plea that teachers be very careful with forced socialization and please don't forget the individual for the sake of collectivism, which I  know good teachers don't.

            Sorry because I definitely exaggerated,

            Fernando

Black Volks

     I heard that some followers of Marx, that guy from Bahia, are saying that Beethoven shouldn't have so much prominence in the study of music, for being too white and European. God and the Kora know I love World Music, but what have Beethoven ever done besides beauty? ( Was he surly? Well, I'm sure those people around him were a pain in the ass) 

    Anyway, with all respect... I, personally, will always prefer a German playing the piano than a German dreaming with an army...

I Do Believe It's Still There

 

            I am always sometimes looking for more refined ways of saying these things. But I still believe that the validity of an argument doesn’t necessarily have to do with it being presented perfectly in the jargon of a specific group of people, but of being coherent, logically ordained, and require no previous assumptions that people don’t somehow know to be true.

 

1

When we talk about Evolution, our language can be kind of tricky, so let’s define two things before we start: behaviour and adaptative success.

            What are we calling behaviour? Basically everything. For instance, the cells behave in a certain way to for the tissues, that behave in a certain way to form the organs, that behave in a certain way to give the individuals a... behaviour. For the lack of a better word.

            Now, from unicellular beings to fishes to reptiles, birds and mammals, a lot of new behaviours arose, obiously.

            And what are we calling adaptative success? A measure of how much a behaviour was successful, or more successful than other behaviours, in helping an individual to endure over the Earth. Basically, that improves the individual’s chances to survive and reproduce.

            So, Natural Selection means that, as the environment can’t support all the members of a growing population, the ones with less adaptative success will die, and the ones with more adaptative success will prosper.

            So, I believe it is only natural that we ask ourselves: why then, the unicellular beings didn’t just get better and better in doing things in the old unicellular way of doing things? Where did all those infinite new behaviours, that lead to our current diversity, come from?

 

2

            We are lead to think that, as the Environment itself changed, the old ways a lot of times weren’t good enough anymore. But that don’t asnwer the question: where did these new behaviours came from, if natural selection can only act after they are there?

            Of course, the changes must have happenned smoothly. But there is still the mistery of how a system evolved in a direction of being able to slowly start doing something of a totally different nature. For instance, the wings of flying animals evolved from members whose behaviour was to walk. But how natural selection lead them in that direction, if flying is not a natural consequence of walking with more success? The physichs involved are very different.

            Let’s try to look at it closer. We believe that some animals started presenting some features that helped them to fall slower, then to glide a little, glide a lot, untill they were eventually flying. But where did this falling slower came from? Not every animal can suddenly start falling slower.

            For the smallest seed of this new behaviour to appear, there are necessary previous conditions.

            For the evolution of any being to even start to turn in the direction of a new behaviour, there is the necessity of previous conditions that presented themselves in the context of a totally different behaviour.

 

3

            So, we must think that, as the living beings evolved, sometimes, or better yet, countless times, conditions appeared for the seed of a new behaviour to sprout. Like, some features were selected by the environment for a reason A, and then after some point started being selected by the reason B. A new form of adaptative success came out of nothing.

            To become good at something new without reason seems to be how all this diversity came to be. Is it a natural consequence of complexity itself, like, complex systems sometimes will just present new advantages, not related to the reasons why they got to their current state?

            Look at nature in all it’s small details. All this diversity of animals, of all the parts on their systems, happened because something that is good for something suddenly just happens to be good for something else.

 

4

            That is, a feature of a system that so far evolved in a certain direction because, combined with a certain characteristic of the environment, helps the individual to survive and reproduce more, after a while unexpectedly combines with another characteristic of the environment to help the individual even more.

            I think one possible definition of coincidence can be as follows: two things meeting with no reason. That is, two things, not related so far, follow their own separate paths, carried by different circumstances, and at some point they just perfetly match. Like the living system features that somehow, at a certain point, just match with characteristics of the environment after following a path that had no relation with that characteristic so far.

            The fact that scientists have names for these coincidences, like “emergence” or “exaptation”, just mean they are studying it, it doesn’t mean they know why it happens.

            If we think, as the environments change, and they sometimes change for the actions of the living beings, it’s more likely that this kind of system callled "living being" would become obsolete, than to think that it could endure and prosper beautifully, relying on the chances that complex systems may have to, just left on their own, present a new advantageous relation with some aspect of the environment, a relation that didn’t exist in the past and is not logically contained in the behaviours that allowed it to endure so far.

            This would require a more than special and misterious unknown property of the reality of the Universe itself, a property that not only we can’t explain, but in fact we can’t conceive.

                

P.S: Just to make it clear, my point here is not that it is impossible to conceive complex systems coming to existence step by step. I believe they do, but my point is that it would require big exaptation (when something has always been selected by reason A, then it starts being selected by reason B) in every single meaningful step. In fact, it makes exaptation, and not adaptation, the big law of evolution, which takes us right back to that thing people always felt when imagining a world with no mind: too much coincidence.

 

               

Ps of ps: i here therefore cancel all i wrote on physics. Geez, who really knows anyway. I think therefore i am.