Friday, November 16, 2012

On The Peak of Intelligence - 2

R&D Intelligence
The first post in this series took some time to explain that intelligence and sanity are not the same concept.

A person can be quite intelligent and quite insane at the same time, and so can civilization.

Some recent research efforts have resulted in scientific data that further complicate our concept of "intelligence."

Especially the concept that intelligence exists only in the conscious mind of humanity.

In today's post we will take into consideration just a few examples to help us question the traditional, populist notions that still exist in ink form within a lot of our textbooks that we still use to educate ourselves.

Textbooks that were in large measure seemingly produced by believers of various sorts of exceptionalism.

Let's consider some behavior of species that our traditions would be hard put to explain, at least in the form of a valid and provable scientific hypothesis:
A professor was doing an experiment, moving a source of nectar 25% further away each day, testing their navigation skills.

His student charged with the duty of calculating and moving the nectar each day called in one morning reporting to the professor that he had car problems and could not do the task on that day. The professor opted to do it himself:
When the professor arrived at the nectar source there were no bees present. But when he arrived at the place where the nectar should have been for that day (but had not been moved there yet), there were all the bees waiting for him! Not only had the bees gotten the math correct (25% farther), but the implication is that they had demonstrated the imagination to be able to picture the future by picturing the nectar — not where it was — but where it was going to be! The professor wrote that he would never have done such an experiment on purpose since he never would have thought that the bees could have been so intelligent!
(ibid, Space, link above). Those of you who read the biomimicry posts know that one of the tenets of Ecocosmology urges us to remember that we can learn about how to bring about our own survival by watching and studying nature appropriately.

Learning such behavior from nature is called biomimicry.
(Will We Destroy Food - The Bees?). We should note that the 25% calculation derived a different mathematical value each day, because it was 25% of the prior distance from the day before, yet when they needed to the bees calculated exactly where that next 25% distance would end up.

There is a similar form of "intelligence" within our brains that is not controlled by our consciousness:
People can process short sentences and solve equations before they're aware of the words and numbers in front of their eyes, finds new research that suggests we might not actually need full consciousness to perform rule-based tasks such as reading and arithmetic.

The researchers say these results suggest that the sentences were fully read and comprehended subconsciously ...

In the second part of the study, the scientists examined how the unconscious brain processes math problems.

This suggests they subconsciously worked out the problem and had the answer on their lips.

Other recent studies have shown that humans might be able to unconsciously perform tasks that have typically been associated with consciousness, such as learning and forming intuitions. The new study adds complex, rule-based operations to that list.

Psychology researcher Ran Hassin, who was involved in the study, said the results suggest current theories about unconscious processes need to be revised.
(Unconscious Brain Reads, Does Math). We have previously quoted a professor and scientist who studies this phenomenon:
Probably 98 percent of your reasoning is unconscious - what your brain is doing behind the scenes. Reason is inherently emotional. You can't even choose a goal, much less form a plan and carry it out, without a sense that it will satisfy you, not dis­gust you. Fear and anxiety will affect your plans and your ac­tions. You act differently, and plan differently, out of hope and joy than out of fear and anxiety.

Thought is physical. Learning requires a physical brain change: Receptors for neurotransmitters change at the synapses, which changes neural circuitry. Since thinking is the activation of such circuitry, somewhat different thinking re­quires a somewhat different brain. Brains change as you use them-even unconsciously. It's as if your car changed as you drove it, say from a stick shift gradually to an automatic.
(The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere, quoting Dr. George Lakoff). The current definition of "intelligence" is also strained by previously unsuspected sources:
Biologists currently classify slime molds as protists, a taxonomic group reserved for "everything we don't really understand," says Chris Reid of the University of Sydney.

Something scientists have come to understand is that slime molds are much smarter than they look. One species in particular ... yellow Physarum polycephalum, can solve mazes, mimic the layout of man-made transportation networks and choose the healthiest food from a diverse menu—and all this without a brain or nervous system. "Slime molds are redefining what you need to have to qualify as intelligent," Reid says.
...
Inside laboratories slime molds have effectively re-created Tokyo's railway network in miniature as well as the highways of Canada, the U.K. and Spain. When researchers placed oat flakes or other bits of food in the same positions as big cities and urban areas, slime molds first engulfed the entirety of the edible maps. Within a matter of days, however, the protists thinned themselves away, leaving behind interconnected branches of slime that linked the pieces of food in almost exactly the same way that man-made roads and rail lines connect major hubs in Tokyo, Europe and Canada.

In other words, the single-celled brainless amoebae did not grow living branches between pieces of food in a random manner; rather, they behaved like a team of human engineers, growing the most efficient networks possible.
...
Just as engineers design railways to get people from one city to another as quickly as possible, given the terrain—only laying down the building materials that are needed—the slime molds hit upon the most economical routes from one morsel to another, conserving energy.

Andrew Adamatzky of the University of the West of England Bristol and other researchers were so impressed with the protists' behaviors that they have proposed using slime molds to help plan future roadway construction ...
(How Brainless Slime Molds Redefine Intelligence, Nature). It has also been discovered recently that microbes communicate and have a language all their own (Microbial Hermeneutics - 2).

It may take a long time to become well versed in some of these new dynamics taking place in the science of microbiology:
... some 90 percent of the protein-encoding cells in our body are microbes ... 99 percent of the functional genes in the body are microbial ... exchanging messages with genes inside human cells ... microbes cohabitating our body outnumber human cells by a factor of 10, making us actually “superorganisms” that use our own genetic repertoire as well as those of our microbial symbionts ... We just happen to look human because our human cells are much larger than bacterial cells ... no matter how you look at it, it’s high time we acknowledge that part of being human is being microbial ...

Microbes may indeed be subtly changing our brain early on — and for what purposes we cannot yet say ... the mere fact that microorganisms can shape our minds brings up many more questions about how humans develop their identity ... these findings call for a complete re-examination of human physiology and immunology. Attributes that were assumed to be human traits have been shown to result from human–microbe interactions.
(The Human Microbiome Congress). Intelligence is becoming more widely seen as being more than what our grandpas thought it was.

More than what they wrote of it in the dictionaries of their day.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

False Climate Change Meme Infects The President

Catch a single weather event?
The meme that will be discussed today has infected meteorologists, some climate scientists, and the President as well, but has not infected all Fifth Graders.

As will be explained in this post, but first, what is a meme?

A meme is an idea that seems to propagate itself, and a theory initially conceived by the adherents of "Memetics" (see The Mother of All Memes).

A meme exists in a meme complex, which is in a way a group, and any such meme complex tends to perpetuate the memes it is composed of, but at the same time tends to exclude memes that do not fit the criteria required to be a meme in that meme complex.

But more than that, meme complexes even tend to spread themselves.

Memetics did badly as a discipline when it sought to clone aspects of Darwinism by merely using new words, but still keeping the-already-there ideology of biotic evolution (see Death & Resurrection Of Memetics).

Today's post has to do with one specific meme that is on the edge of the climate change denier meme complex.

A meme which the President perpetuated in his news conference yesterday:
"[oft heard meme] ... no single weather event can be linked directly to ... global warming."

("President OBAMA: You know ... we can’t attribute any particular weather event to climate change.")
(see Katrina & Global Warming). Notice that according to this meme every single big weather event that makes the fossil fuel industry and government look bad (such as Hurricane-Superstorm Sandy or Hurricane Katrina) "can't be linked directly to global warming."

Now who would want us to believe that?

"Why is that meme a false meme as the title of today's post indicates?" you may ask.

Since we deserve an answer, let's contemplate this problem with an exercise in deductive logic, premised on the false meme under our consideration today:
1) No single weather event can be linked directly to global warming;
2) all weather events are single weather events;
3) therefore, weather events can't be directly linked to global warming.
(see Doctors of Philosophy Make Phd. Mistakes). To see what the propagandists and/or apologists (who originally fabricated this false meme) are advancing, let's analyze this a bit further by considering a realistic meme:
1) Weather is a function of the global climate system;
2) all single weather events are parts of the global climate system;
3) the global climate system has been damaged by global warming;
4) therefore, all single weather events are part of the global climate system that has been damaged by global warming;
(see How Fifth Graders Analyze Hurricane Sandy). See the subtlety that the false meme forces, and see the bigger picture the accurate meme "global climate system" connotes?

All single weather events are systemic indicators of the global climate system which any single weather event is an integral part of.

That global climate system which has been damaged by global warming creates our local weather, including every single weather event, therefore all single weather events are part of the global climate system that has been damaged by global warming pollution.

We can only have an impact on our local weather, or on any single weather event, by fixing the global climate system that has been damaged by pollution.

Let's stop lying to ourselves so that we can get about the business of saving civilization from what we are doing to ourselves (pumping green house gases into the atmosphere) year after year, decade after decade.

Let's drop the denial, the procrastination, and the oil addiction so that we can get busy being good to the Earth, so it will in turn be good to us once again.

They who have put out the peoples eyes reproach them of their blindness.” – John Milton

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Doctors of Philosophy Make Phd. Mistakes

Dr. Who, Phd.
The old saying "doctors bury their mistakes" is spreading to other areas, including civilization itself.

For example, in the U.S. suicide is the number one cause of injury death by civilians and military personnel as well.

It seems clear to those who are resisting The International Private Empire, that in the end, the fossil fuel industry is slated to be the greatest cause of death, and its "customers" are slated to be the greatest losers.

I guess the gist of it is that anyone can make a mistake, but it is also true that there are the big leagues and there are the minor leagues when it comes to mistakes.

Big league catastrophes are for incompetent governments as well as incompetent experts, who seem to be playing the role of Oil-Qaeda terrorists the government can believe in.

Take for example, President Obama, who today in the news conference said that no single weather event can be applied to climate change.

The propagandists funded by the fossil fuel industry have fostered this non-sequiter, because any one weather event is the way that every weather event is characterized.

That is, all weather events happening worldwide are single weather events locally.

Thus, his illogical retort during the news conference replicated a notion created by the fossil fuel industry propagandists, which has a specific subconscious purpose.

When deduced through the normal logical deduction process it goes like this:
1) No single weather event can be linked to global warming;
2) all weather events are single weather events;
3) therefore, no weather events can be linked to global warming.
(see The Name of the Same is "Athena" and How Fifth Graders Analyze Hurricane Sandy).

I consider him, still, to be an unwitting tool of the fossil fuel industry, a.k.a. The International Private Empire.

Doctors are evidently the 3rd greatest cause of death:


Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Propagandizing For Our Lords

Imperial Evangelism
Introduction

In past posts Dredd Blog has considered the damage that propaganda does to the human psyche (see e.g. Etiology of Social Dementia through Etiology of Social Dementia - 7).

The propaganda has been so bad during the longest wars in U.S. history that even those who fancy themselves as progressives advocate in favor of what was once war crimes (Joe Klein Advocates War Crimes).

In today's post we want to compare secular propaganda with "Lying For The Lord."

That is a religious propaganda doctrine found in both religious denominations that call themselves Christian as well as those that call themselves Muslim, and it is a legal doctrine under current American law which protects lying under the auspices of freedom of speech.

American Propaganda Basics

One of the foundational tenets of American propaganda, the brain child of Edward L. Bernays, is that the government knows better than the people what is good for them:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
(The Ways of Bernays). When Bernays wrote the book Propaganda in 1928, from which the quote is taken, that "invisible government" was in its embryonic form compared to the modern international version it has now become.

We call the modern form "The International Private Empire" which we discussed recently (see e.g. MOMCOM: The Private Parts - 4 and The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy - 7).

Religious Influence of The Invisible Government

Military

One of the many problems of an invisible government is that, like the invisible man, we can only observe its tracks in order to see where it has been.

In the post Bully Worship: The Universal Religion we discussed some of those footprints, that is, how the military has been influenced by religious concepts that simulate Christianity.

Those religious footprints have been made all the more apparent by the current scandal involving the CIA director who resigned, and the NATO General who has now been dragged into it too:
Although adultery is rarely a criminal matter in the civilian world, it is formally barred under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to which Allen remains subject even as the senior four-star commander of U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.
(Politico). Sexual morality is a strong factor in military doctrine expressed as military law, which is a footprint of religion (see also Bible Inscribed on U.S. Weapons and The Dogma of the High Priest In Chief).

Science

Oddly enough, various fundamentalist religious activists want to bring propaganda to science too, even as they declare that climate science is itself propaganda:
What does religion have to do with climate science? Radical religious activists promote the anti-science bills, in part, because they also seek to undermine the teaching of evolution – another issue that supposedly has "two sides", so schools should "teach the controversy". Now, you don't have to believe that Earth was created in six hectic days in order to be skeptical about climate science, but a large number of climate science deniers also happen to be evolution deniers.

What exactly is the theology of climate science denial? The Cornwall Alliance – a coalition whose list of signatories could double as a directory of major players in the religious right – has a produced a declaration asserting, as a matter of theology, that "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human contribution to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming."

It also tells us – on the firm foundation of Holy Scriptures – that policies intended to slow the pace of climate change represent a "dangerous expansion of government control over private life". It also alerts us that the environmental movement is "un-Biblical" – indeed, a new and false religion. If the Cornwall Declaration seems like a tough read, you can get what you need from the organization's DVD series: "Resisting the Green Dragon: A Biblical Response to one of the Greatest Deceptions of our Day."
(America's Theologians of Climate Science Denial). The damage to our educational system (see Agnotology: The Surge) is exacerbated by the failure to teach civics to our students.

If they are ignorant of civics they will have no concept about why religion and secular government must not be mixed.

Economics

The impact of religion also implicates financial matters as Dredd Blog pointed out in the post Ayn Rand: Patron Saint of The Plutocracy, showing the link between plutocratic/religious perspectives.

The secret government which Bernays wrote about has the same notions that royalty have always had, yes, these sentiments of plutocracy have been around quite a while:
We have reached the deplorable circumstance where in large measure a very powerful few are in possession of the earth's resources, the land and its riches and all the franchises and other privileges that yield a return. These positions are maintained virtually without taxation; they are immune to the demands made on others. The very poor, who have nothing, are the object of compulsory charity. And the rest -- the workers, the middle-class, the backbone of the country -- are made to support the lot by their labor.

We are taxed at every point of our lives, on everything we earn, on everything we save, on much that we inherit, on much that we buy at every stage of the manufacture and on the final purchase.
(Who was Henry George). In 1879, Henry George published a book, Progress & Poverty, concerning that unfortunate economic reality.

He indicates that this problem has continued to exist hidden in plain sight, rather than having been eradicated as it should have been.

About half a century after Henry George wrote those words, those ideas were echoed again by an American who noticed the same warmongering plutocracy still in existence in his day:
"We are divided, in America, into two classes: The Tories on one side, a class of citizens who were raised to believe that the whole of this country was created for their sole benefit, and on the other side, the other 99 per cent of us, the soldier class, the class from which all of you soldiers came. That class hasn’t any privileges except to die when the Tories tell them. Every war that we have ever had was gotten, up by that class. They do all the beating of the drums. Away the rest of us go. When we leave, you know what happens. We march down the street with all the Sears-Roebuck soldiers standing on the sidewalk, all the dollar-a-year men with spurs, all the patriots who call themselves patriots, square-legged women in uniforms making Liberty Loan speeches. They promise you. You go down the street and they ring all the church bells. Promise you the sun, the moon, the stars and the earth,–anything to save them. Off you go. Then the looting commences while you are doing the fighting. This last war made over 6,000 millionaires. Today those fellows won’t help pay the bill."
(The Universal Smedley, quoting General Smedley Butler). General Butler became aware of the situation only after experiencing it.

But we need not keep on denying reality and history so that we continue to relive these monstrosities of plutocracy.

Conclusion

As it turns out, lying, whether legal under the First Amendment, whether in the name of religion, or whether in the name of government, evinces among other things, a lack of vision.

Vision is seeing things before they happen so that they can be avoided when appropriate.

Otherwise, robbed of reality by lies / propaganda we are bound to live a Groundhog Day existence, repeating painful mistakes over and over.

Worse, those mistakes are relived in the name of fantasy, mysticism, and other impractical notions that boil down to the glorification of lying for the lord or lying for the king.

Why not build and have a reality that is good for everyone and everything concerned?

Little Lies (lyrics):

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Monday, November 12, 2012

A History of Oil Addiction - 3

Don't tell the captives
In this series we are discussing, at a high level above the fine print and above the minutia, a history of the fossil fuel industry, and how that industry has control and/or influence over governments.

Their global intentions have been exposed for a century at least, which we put a finger on in the last episode: "One of our greatest helpers has been the State Department" - John D. Rockefeller (1909) (A History of Oil Addiction - 2). We should not just blow by that quote without analyzing it a bit, because it has some of the DNA of MOMCOM in it (don't we all?).

For example, we can analyze the statement by asking "why didn't Rockefeller say 'The Commerce Department' instead of 'The State Department' when he was pointing out the 'greatest helpers' of the fossil fuel industry?"

The simple and obvious answer is not only that he was being quite accurate, but that those fossil fuel interests had international intentions, foreign policy intentions, which only the U.S. State Department could help with.

The Commerce Department focuses on domestic commerce, while The State Department focuses on international commerce, and has also been around awhile ("The Department was created in 1789 and was the first executive department established" - Wikipedia).

These entities which have now become The International Private Empire, have always had long range goals that entail more vision than short-sighted election-to-election planning that politicians tend to utilize.

Which makes the politicians vulnerable, because they don't see beyond their own noses that way, but the global plutocracy is not completely invincible either.

Even though the fossil fuel interests have significant control within The International Private Empire, they have had to seek to protect themselves from the criticism that gets to their core.

Thus, they have reacted strongly when global warming induced climate change has been discussed, and have used their media, McTell News, to try to suppress climate science.

That is because that particular knowledge of climate science pierces through the outer layers of the onion they have fabricated for camouflage purposes, and goes down into the core layers.

That is, down to Oil-Qaeda, down to "the oil base", and down to the layers of the onion where the Oilah-Akbar language is spoken.

Thus, global warming induced climate change ideology is a very good vehicle for focusing the energy of resistance and good change onto the fossil fuel industry where it should be focused.

Their reaction is telling, in that there is a lot of propaganda of late that is an attempt to blame civilization's oil addiction problem on the populace (on the citizens) for using the oil.

But to the contrary, in the previous posts in this series, we have shown how the powers that be are the ones who led us into The Industrial Age and chose to power it by fossil fuels.

That history includes one standard process which all nations follow in terms of who leads and who follows:
But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship ... voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy.
(The Universal Smedley, quoting General Hermann Goering). Poll after poll over the past decade has shown that the majority of people in the U.S. think that the nation has been going in the wrong direction.

Yet the powers that be do not listen, rather, those leaders continue in the direction they want to go (The W Direction = The Perilous Path).

But when their policies are exposed and then proven to be psychotic, they do as their fellow psychopaths do, and try to put their blame on their victims (see Plutocrats: The Rise of the Global Super Rich, by Christia Freeland; caution she is an enabler to some degree, so also see Ayn Rand: Patron Saint of the Plutocracy).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Moyers interviews two investigative reports concerning Plutocracy: