Hubrist

When I started this web site, I was in the midst of a period of hopeful optimism. An optimism inspired by self-delusion, and not a little indulgent escapism. I was under the influence of false confidence, wherein I found myself able to believe that I had finally learned how to effect real positive change in the lives of other people. It was a respite of a few months, not quite a year, from a personal attitude more often characterized by a pervasive expectation that the future is one of dark, foreboding, and terror.

In light of my return to pessimism, I am forced to acknowledge the basic irony which underscores the name and purpose of these pages. I am no hubrist, though I ache to be so. I am one whose fundamental belief is that the individual person, however free to chart their own destiny, is essentially powerless to make a purposive and lasting impact on the attitudes and beliefs of others. Individuals can inspire significant change only in themselves. All examples to the contrary are either the result of blind luck, a confusion of cause with effect by historians, or the most gross manipulation, expediency and opportunistic pragmatism. Successful men, and women, are invariably those who lie, cheat, and steal their way into money and power. But money and power are not success to any but the small minds who seek them, except in the most base way. It is much easier to do lasting harm than lasting good. Hatred has a long memory.

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Autonomous process management. That will get you ten results on Google. “Process management” will get you sixty million results. But I’m into something more specific.

All I know about process management is what I know about computer programming. Here is my logic (or rationalization). Software is a process; in fact, that’s another word for a program while it’s running. Writing software is a kind of management—that of a computer system. Computer programs are autonomous, because once they’re out in the world, the programmer can’t monitor them. So I came up with that term.

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Can you hear it? Do you wear it? Will you reach for it?

It’s a great responsibility. To seek it. To honour it. To listen to it. What is true? What is right? What is good? Can you ask these questions? Can you answer them? Have you considered them? Or have you just filled in the blanks on the paper with the first thing that came to mind, put down your pencil, and got on with your little, personal melodrama?

No one has a monopoly on the truth. I’m not trying to claim one. But there are ways to get closer to it, and ways to avoid it, and ways to obscure it. There are lies, and untruths, and deceptions, and denials. There is misdirection and misunderstanding; there are mistakes and mysteries. There is confusion and contradiction. There are distractions, and interruptions, irritations and aggravations. But there are also honesty, openness, humility, attentiveness, concentration, discipline, courage, logic and science. There are questions, but, eventually, for the persistent, there are answers. More answers than any one person can ever learn, though few bother to learn but a fraction. Few dare to ask, fewer dare to learn, and only the very rare individuals contemplate the implications of what they learn.

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Nothing stops us. Nothing drives us.

We simply go.

The universe is inscrutable. So why do we try to understand it? Why do we ask why? There is no answer, but we search anyway, because searching is what we do. Those of us who search for nothing in nothing. We find it, and yet we continue to look.

The questions are there to be asked, and so we ask them.

We must transcend ourselves. It is our destiny. It is our birthright. We must question ourselves until we become transformed.

I don’t mean to talk nonsense. It’s a touch of prophecy. A dash of imaginative hubris. I can’t know. I don’t know. I only feel. I feel much. I feel intensely. And it amounts to almost nothing. Nihil Agitet. (Latin is pretentious. I’m channelling someone else. Someone with initials “B.A.”)

Allow me to focus.

There is no reason for anything, if you go back as far as we can imagine, which is farther back than we can look or model. Something came from nothing, and to nothing it will return. Thus, nothing is all it is. Nothing in a different form.

It chooses in what form to disguise itself. Although choice does not exist. No matter.

Still, there’s nothing to hold us back except our own imaginations. Create. Be nothing but be it with greatness. Against logic. Without regard for doubt. Without need for hope. Heedless of love and hate, good and evil, beauty and horror, life and death, and all other contrived continua.

Nihil Obstat.

Which world? And from what shall they save it? By what means?

What control have we, human beings, over the events of tomorrow? Do we have the capacity to change our society, our world, or are we mostly the victims of greater forces, be they natural or supernatural? Can we change the world, or does the world change us? Or both?

Whatever you believe, if you don’t discuss it, you are intellectually vain, because you assume that you know the answer already. Whereas, in all likelihood, you have very little knowledge of the true answers to these questions, if indeed they have true answers at all.

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You may have heard that computers are basically pretty simple in design. The general description of the the standard Von Neumann architecture, on which virtually all modern computers are based, is that of a central processing unit (CPU), memory (whether RAM or some other kind), a data bus (wires) connecting them, and in addition some kind of input and output which allows the contents of memory to be read from or written to by some kind of user interface devices. (I/O devices are only necessary because you can’t see the contents of electrical memory devices nor write to them by hand. Once upon a time, that was not the case. Well, it’s also hard for people to read in binary. Although, once upon a time, there were some people for whom that was not the case, either.) The CPU starts reading memory at a predetermined location and follows instructions found therein. These instructions correspond to functional parts of the CPU, which perform operations on registers, which are a special storage space inside the CPU. (Registers are necessary for both speed and wiring concerns.)

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I’ve only read the introduction, but wanted to post about it immediately, as I’m impulsive and excited by claims about knowing or understanding the truth about existence. It’s called The Wholeness of the World.

Personally, I think (/feel/believe) that is time to re-consider the entire enterprise of truth-seeking and philosophy, and question the underlying motivation for it. Granted, it’s easy to dismiss that on various grounds. First, that examining the motivation to know is just another way of engaging it. Second, trivially, that as philosophy is the love of truth is the only justification it needs—or in other words, it needs no justification. In any case, existing directions of thought and work can proceed quite happily in parallel with trying to get to the heart of the essence of the love for truth.

Additionally, theories about the value of truth-seeking and theory-making already exist, including both descriptive and prescriptive ones: the former being that the brain (or at least, the analytical brain) is fundamentally an organic machine for building and refining models of the world that we experience, and the latter being that we, as thinkers, and the brain, as the organ doing the thinking, have done this and will continue to do it because we have evolved and live successfully by that means, either as a by-product of aimless natural processes, or as a part of some master plan inherent in the universe itself.

Still, as of yet, I see no evidence that the author(s) have a convincing argument for believing that good as a universal concept actually exists. I still think it’s just a by-product of the need for individuals to bow down to social norms, as our socialization is an essential element of our evolutionary success, and our sense of ourselves.

Computers, specifically CPU circuits, perform data processing. Computer systems, which takes into account all of the peripheral devices attached to computers which interface with the outside world, and networks of computers, perform information process management. Data processing includes creation, storage, retrieval, update and basic statistical analysis of digital information. Information process management extends this to include communication, using advanced input and output devices (beyond simple teletype) and networks, entire series of applications used in digital workflow, extensible structured storage like modern databases and directory services, data mining and advanced storage techniques like version-aware backup.

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(or, How to Make Sense of Yourself, part II)

Disclaimer: What follows are my thoughts on love. I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I am just a person who likes to think seriously, analytically, about what is important to me. For me, serious thinking is a natural way to express what matters to me. Unfortunately, it is an inferior means to express love, though sometimes, it is all that is possible.

At the heart of all human behaviour is feeling: sensation and emotion. Our feelings are filtered through many layers of mental processes, like instinct, acculturation, and intellect. The mental realm of emotion is without language. Our linguistic minds can only capture vague impressions of the powers that dwell there.

The primary evidence of our emotions is in their effects on our thoughts and our sense of our desires, which are felt as urges to act. When we fulfill our urge to act, it manifests in behaviour. The behaviours we wish to enact and those we can enact are often not the same, however, because the world and our own minds constrain us. I believe that our thoughts and desires reveals the components of our natures, while the way we allow ourselves to act reveals their proportions. (The ways the world allows us to act is a completely different subject.)

Human beings experience countless emotions. Our thoughts are full of them. The complex ways in which we behave reveal them. Love is one of the most profound emotions, or so we take for granted. But what is love? Love may actually be the confluence of many different feelings, an amalgam of many different desires and impulses. But I won’t continue that line of inquiry to its end. I am not going to dissect love into fundamental drives resulting from the instinct for self-preservation. Although I accept that, from the point of view of scientific realism, that is a tenable objective understanding of love.

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“Humanism is a broad category of active ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on our ability to determine what is right using the qualities innate to humanity, particularly rationality. Humanism is a component of a variety of more specific philosophical systems.”

The opposing view: Anti-humanism.

My own interpretation is that humanism is a prescriptive (and optimistic) proposal for human behaviour and culture, whereas anti-humanism is a descriptive (and pessimistic) interpretation of human behaviour and culture. The central point of contention is a re-statement of one of the oldest of arguments in philosophy: freedom versus determinism. The source of contention seems to be the conscious desire to change the world, vis a vis human nature. Humanists are interested in human potential. Anti-humanists seems to be interested in how humans actually are, and reject any proposal that we can change of our own accord, i.e. by conscious choice or effort.

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