WE ARE NOT – SO WHY KILL EACH OTHER?

The extraordinary topography of the human brain is exemplified in a new image of one cubic millimetre of the brain cortex of a 45 year old woman, created from electron microscope images of 5,000 slices. (Nature Research Report)

There is something important to be said about this image. It is one cubic mm of human cortex. Here is where and how we learn. This image represents the very similar image that can be drawn from any 45 year old woman or man on the planet. Yet there is no person in this image. There is no depiction of another person in this image. There is no culture or religion or race in this image. This image puts lie to any reason anyone might have that someone else is actually different, someone else is not human, someone else doesn’t deserve to be treated with the utmost care as a human. I put to lie the idea that one human can’t get along with another human, really. It does tell us that our cultures, religions, tribes etc, are made up. They are virtual representations designed from the firing of these plastic networks. And just as we can design a horror story, we can as easily design a romance. Some people make an argument for a horror story. And from that story they unleash real weapons on real life. I prefer a romance, a story of flourishing and abundance and love.

Indeed, what this image shows is that the image itself, while itself is not a made up virtual reality, is a rendering, a depiction, of the forms that the same neurology can create from its own capacity. The neurology doesn’t have direct access to thing-of-itself. It is not necessarily everything related to the ‘structure’ of the brain or mind. Even as it makes a rendering of a whole structure and then associates it with a completely virtual story called “I”, we can easily see that there is no “I” in the brain, just neurones. And we can only see, even in this marvelously detailed image these are only the neuronal structures those neuronal structures can make a representation.

We live in a circular virtual argument about who we are. And then we choose to kill each other over it.

Could it be that there are un-rendered aspects of reality that offer another story of who we are altogether. Could those aspects of reality show us that the things we call “I” are simply units of emergent consensus from an enormous topography of even more varied structures that can’t be replicated in the neurology we see here, i.e the neurology that makes up a certain awareness of its own output and only its own output. And in the more enormous topography from which the story of “I” emerges, all beings are represented, all humans, all creatures.

And could it further be that such topography is not limited to the 3 space and 1 time dimension, but flows into infinite dimensions of space and time.

“We” are most likely to be small renderings of an infinite being. And from our small rendering we form an attachment story so limited in scope, so impoverished, that we would kill over it. The flourishing story reaches out into the topography we don’t have access, right now. It reaches into worlds we don’t have access right now.

World Peace will Give Us the Universe

I have no answer for the future except in peace and human collaboration and deep consultation. I do have a sense of the great possibility that emerges from such a future. .

There are signs from philosophy, psychology and brain sciences that the collective de-traumatised human experience, that might take several generations after complete peace breaks out, could create inventive power that itself is infinite or shall we say very very large.

This inventive power is based in the possibility of a state of human designated by the idea that, when we think of ‘who I am’, could it be that who I am is the showing / presence of everything and everyone in my experience. This leads to an idea of as complete reception of the world as it is, and, as all humans becoming competent and some masters of such receptivity, a ‘shared brain’. I intuit through this ability for collaborative engagement, the human future is infinite far beyond the sense that we think of as resource infiniteness.

I intuit that it is only under these conditions that certain breakthroughs will occur e.g. efficient and effective space flight and exploration. Such a breakthrough will establish access to a virtually unlimited resource, some of which aren’t even discovered.

On this planet however, the many necessary competent characteristics for every human being required to achieve a peaceful planet, will also provide the necessary applications to ecosystem details and flourishing while perfecting new more subtle energy technologies and resource farming. Going by the economic growth formula, this may also show a declining growth. The real question then is, if there is a flourishing ecosystem with a flourishing human planetary society but a declining economic growth, then maybe the whole model is transformed and we are not even using those measures to determine how we are doing.

There is in that future, a feedback loop between the new human way of thinking about ourselves and the ecosystem, even the solar or galactic ecosystem, and our exploration and population of the galaxy. Will we meet new friends? Will we finally determine whether we are already under observation. Will we be enrolled into a larger galactic civilisation with it’s own magical technologies. This is the stuff of science fiction but only so long as seems impossible. As breakthroughs in peace and global civilisation come about, we will notice something about ourselves as humans that will be magical to our current selves.

EVERYONE is NON-BINARY

Professional intelligentsia are people whose work largely begins in words and ends in words. There is a major logical trap that anyone of the professional intelligentsia can fall into, as a tendency to get locked into a logical cycling related to unfounded premises, rather than explore external views, diverse sciences, or research via the question, “Is this true?”

There are two religious cases of how that can distort or stagnate the fundamental principles.

The first relates to the strange case of the Orthodox Jew who, on a sabbath, ran a few hundred metres to the house of a non-orthodox Jew to ask that man to come and put out a fire, but could not participate in putting out said fire themself. This non-orthodox Jew had the practice of leaving the front door open on the sabbath so an orthodox Jewish man could walk straight in because he couldn’t knock on the door. It was a simple practice of the non-orthodox Jew to contribute to these neighbours yet it could not be reciprocated on a sabbath. And that it is not held by an Orthodox Jew that the religious law, if designed for purification, is not equally relevant for non-orthodox jew, is also discordant although perhaps a function of believing that the non-orthodox Jew is impure already and can’t be made more impure. Of course Jesus tried to debunk this in his story of the Good Samaritan, but did not prevail with the Jewish teachers.

The second case relates to the fundamental Islamic schools of Iran and previously Persia. In such schools, the sciences are avoided, superstition prevails and the Koran, revealed in the pre-scientific era and which initially fostered the sciences well before the Europeans, now becomes bogged down in an anti-technological, extremely socially controlling structure. Eventually that bubble will burst as the desire of the people to extend their capabilities will add a pressure beyond the control of the Islamic Republican fascism.

Why is this related to the concept of a non-binary human being and the multiple genders theory of some of the western intelligentsia?

Firstly to show that possible serious even fascist-like or just stagnating impact of politically accepting the outcomes of intellectual work that begins and ends in words. Secondly to begin to unpack the absurdness of much of the argument for a multiple gender theory. Thirdly, to show that such multiple distinctions has only one real outcome, the distraction of people from realising their true selves and role in the world as given to service in the path of social unification and the advancement of civilisation as a whole. While the last requires a much more lengthy discussion, for purposes here, the importance of ‘given to service’ of humanity is the critical attribute through which active community engagement and conversation across diversity of thought, experience, and culture, without proselytising (demanding others align for fear of retribution), is essential.

I am using the term ‘non-binary’ as a focus of the discussion of absurdness of the multiple gender theory. Clarifying definitions, binary means requiring two different, opposing but synchronous elements that when operating together can create a novel outcome. Non-binary thereby means not having (all that). As individuals, human beings operate by internal binary systems that establish complex negative feedback loops that create everything from stabilising the sugar content in the blood to formulating theoretical mathematics. However, as individuals, human beings, themselves, are all non-binary. I am non-binary. There is just one of me, whole, complete and indivisible.

As non-binary, in gender terms I am male and masculine. When I get together with a procreation partner, we are binary and can and have created novel outcomes.

Now there are some pop psychologist types who have said to me, “but what about your feminine aspect?”. When I ask them what they mean, they have told me that things like nurturing, kindness, creativity, intuition, are feminine. And force, protection, labour and legal and technical thinking is masculine. This is just another absurdity avoiding that the reality is something more simple.

Taking the premise that there are human virtues or characteristics that make humans, human, such as loving kindness, courage, nurturing, protection, high-mindedness, patience, creativity, intuition, problem-solving, and empathy, then the simple reality is that both male and female genders, and masculine and feminine affects have all of the characteristics. Once we acknowledge that all of the human characteristics are present as both masculine and feminine affects then when we look we can see that the only difference is the manner and degree of expression of those characteristics. Most obviously, a female will mostly bond strongly with the growing foetus and neonatal child because of the upwelling of hormones such as oxytocin. Men often report a more significant bonding at the moment they first held their child. However, when we look at the issue of protection we see that the female is highly protective both through direct force, indirect force and negotiation just as males are with the variation relating to a stronger empathy on the part of females which causes a more defensive posture, and a stronger capability of males bringing personal force into negotiations which causes a proactive attacking posture but is a capability steadily loosing value.

The problem that many people have in relation to masculinity is in contextualising the male as controlling, aggressive, even murderous. It is difficult to come to terms with the naturality of masculinity through this contextual lense and so some have imagined that more feminine nature is required to dilute the masculine to make a peaceful world. While that is an applaudable goal, it is unnecessary and even further obscures the potential of the unmitigated masculine and feminine affects in the advancement of civilisation.

The problem with men, if there is one, is the cultural mode that has developed over the past 10,000 years of the male as soldier, fighter, and war fodder for alpha males, kings, emperors. Recontextualising ‘who men are’, we can view cultural history since homo-sapiens stepped out, as a slowly distorted system, boosted (as per the story of Cane and Able) with the development of agriculture and excess wealth over the last 10,000 years, and through the amplification of primate tribalism based on the command of the Alpha male. However there is historical evidence to suspect that this form of socio-political orientation was destructive both intra and inter tribally, preventing the stability of social groups necessary to develop technologies, and intellectual and spiritual pursuits, all necessary for an advanced civilisation.

It is religion that mitigated that amplification of the impact of the Alpha male and allowed stability for the development of civilisation and improving technologies. Nonetheless such masculinity continues to assert itself and we now know that these males have a particular brain structure that heightens control and manipulation and diminishes empathetic responses that we now call psychopathy. On the female side there is also a hierarchy with controlling matriarchs but these operate in a less forceful manner than the Alpha males. In general, subordinate males and females, the vast majority of the human population, are empathetic beings desiring belonging in family, community and a general social cohesion. These are they who are attracted to the notions of religion and spirituality, create new technologies and sciences, and master artisanships, and are the real heart and body and impetus of the advancement of civilisation.

The issue of masculinity and femininity lies only with the affect of the genderisation of male and female and not with any human characteristic as specific as either mascuiline and feminine.

Genderisation is the foetal developmental process of forming a male or female. This process relies on a sequence of biochemical developments with each phase of embryological development. And such biochemistry is formulated by the genetic combination that foetus has been given by the mother and father in.e the binary procreators. This cascade of biochemistry influences both the physical characteristics of the embryo, the phenotype, and the minute and generic structure of the brain. Both the brain and physical characteristics of each embryo is idiosyncratic to that individual. Evolutionary processes have, in the most minor animals, founded a contiguous neural to body sense, what can be called the embodiment of the individual. This embodiment that includes odours, sense of smell, visual range and colours, and physical format etc, has the value of even the most simple animals being able to distinguish between their own kind and others. For example some snakes are snake eaters. However snake eaters usually don’t eat their own kind of snake. Males of the salt water crocodiles that are 240 million years on the planet, will eat their own young that are protected by the female, suggesting that such primordial distinctions weren’t as consistent in the earlier phases of evolution. And perhaps indeed, these brain structures that offer protection and nurture for the juvenile, are primordial structures for empathy.

What we can see from evolution of animals is that there are only two successful ways to procreate: the most widespread is binary sex, and the other way is asexual and in animals like snails this means that they have both binary, male and female, reproductive organs and can engage in binary sex and asexual reproduction.

The embryological development of the brain and body is a synchronicity that creates, for the individual, an obvious sense, an embodiment, of gender. In language it is simple to term the individual with a penis, male; and the individual with a vagina, female. Such nomenclature is simple as it is accurate to the embodied state of the vast portion of the population. In a small number of cases, the brain development is out of affective synchrony with the reproductive organs such that the person grows feeling ‘wrong bodied’ rather than embodied. Indeed these cases prove the issue of the relevant brain structural development. When a male with dysmorphia say they are female, they are noting that there are two genders, the one defined by their body parts and the one defined by their brain structure but which there is a failure of the brain to embody the physical nature of the person. Brain structure wins over physicality in all cases as the brain, expecting to find for example, a female physicality and external sex characteristics will be forever discombobulated when finding these physical traits missing and even other traits not expected, insitu. Indeed, the only resolution for dysmorphia is to surgically correct the physicality as, while the female sense of the brain structure could, theoretically, be ablated, a male sense cannot be in any way transposed into a brain. The brain, itself, only has a structural qualia model for either male or female and never, so far as can be ascertained, both.

The case of homosexuality is quite different. Homosexuality is when the embodied brain appreciates its maleness or femaleness yet the erotic orientation of the brain has developed for the non binary rather than the binary procreator. This tells us only that the brain has structures and processes for distinct aspects of gender and erotic desire. So in the vast majority of people the structures and processes are contiguous and synchronous, creating an embodied effect that begins with admiration for the specific gendered self and later attraction from the binary procreator as an erotic orientation.

Within the human population, the expression of gender and sexual orientation is essentially idiosyncratic to each person. In otherwords, I am a specific male unlike all other males and my sexual proclivity is specific to me and none other. Even an effete male will be unlike all other males and females and not at all like any females. Likewise transgender women are unlike all embodied females and often evince an uncanniness of masculine affect. Similarly, eunuchs are unlike all mature males and females, yet are proclaimed males. In practice the expression of gender is either male or female. In sexual orientation the expression for humans is limited by erogenous organs (physical attribute), and erotic desire (brain attribute). Erotic desire is impacted by libido with a consistent variation between genetical males and females. Erotic desire is also impacted by the desire for novelty, also an idiosyncratic aspect of brain structure. Libido can also be quite low in otherwise physically robust, sexually intake people, creating a non-sexual affect.

Sexual expression is also mediated by social moral education and this is a necessary education in the cohesion of society, albeit in the past often imparted with little finesse. Nonetheless this cultural modeling about sexual expression should not be confused with anything to do with modeling gender. The inverse is actually true, that embodied gender is one of the most significant drivers of cultural formation. In the main, how culture deals with asynchronous behaviours to the vast consistency of men and women, such as homosexuality, transgender and any number of erotic variations, is a distinguishing feature between cultures as determined by the story of successful social life that each culutre formulates. In any case, gender itself remains consistently male or female, each individual non-binary and each procreator couple, binary. Homoerotic sexual partners are also technically binary just as a binary computer code might have two zeros or two ones adjacent. But as such, this sexual connection is non-procreative.

Some intelligentsia assert that gender is a cultural expression. Although there is vague hypothesis for this, there is no scientific evidence for this. Gender is, perhaps, the primary embodied aspect of a human life as founded in embryological development. There are only two genders. While gender predicts sexual desire, and drives reproduction and the survival of the species, it is by no means an absolute control, and this can also be seen in other animals. These variations are part of the nature of evolution itself and do not need to be particularly successful, and, so long as they are not particularly unsuccessful, the variations will continue to be expressed from generation to generation. Culture is mainly an expression of the embodied genderisation of human beings and how we come to deal with our binary procreating nature.

The Bottom Line

When you look at your brain. Your brain is looking at your brain. And it’s making it up.

Well, it’s not entirely making it up. But let’s look at what’s really going on here.

What’s really going on here is that we can’t get a handle on what’s really going on here.

So far as we think (something that is happening in the brain) our brain receives a great deal of data in the form of various electro-chemical signals from our peripheries – eyes, ears, skin, joints, muscles, nose, mouth, tongue.

Our brain then takes those signals and organises them into a pattern that forms a consistent quality that shows up as perception.

Perception is a way the brain presents qualia (quality) to our consciousness.

We don’t know what consciousness is. Presumably it is some side effect of how the brain works.

80% of our perception is from our memory of something like that we are experiencing. So from a 20% input our brain guesses the rest and overlays our memory of how that guess was previously and provides our reality experience.

So when our brain is looking at our brain (and input nerves) we can presume there is something like nerves and something like a brain.

We can’t presume that we have all the data. Our nerves from our periphery and our brain are only capable of a finite selection of information.

We do know about some of the information we don’t have direct access to because we made tools to pick up that data.

We made tools from a guess about how the universe works from what data we could pick up.

Our guess was good.

Our guess came from our brain.

And our brain is making up the qualia (objects), and only that qualia it CAN make up.

We have no idea how much of reality our brain can get data about, nor guess or imagine about.

The bottom line is

We KNOW 2 tiddly-squats about reality.

We know there’s probably more to the question.

We don’t know whether there’s not much more or a lot more.

Given what we’ve already guessed and guessed good,

I’m guessing there’s a lot more.

The 3 Scenarios of Climate Response

I’d advise everyone with an interest in restoration technologies such as iron fertilisation to read the new book by the founder of the Foundation for Climate Restoration , Peter Fiekowski.  Peter has been investigating this work and others with a lot of the scientists over a decade or more, so you will find identified in the book the parameters for the appropriate use of such technologies.

On the broad issue of technology and science in climate change solutions. While many investigations were in their early bloom a decade ago, much is now known. And of the unknowns, such as ocean fertilisation, a lot more research in the field is now required. For some people (an I have talked to environmental consultants who raise this objection), trying to solve nature with science is anathema. And they have a lot of well-documented stories of everything that has gone wrong so far. Even if there was an outside chance of making an error, let’s say, to really stretch the argument, making an endangered species, extinct, why might we use science? The answer to this question is a risk management one. It goes like this, (and you can fill in the data gaps): What are the losses of xxx species, xxxxx individuals of flora, fauna and human, and whole local and regional ecosystems, given three scenarios: unmitigated climate change; nett zero emissions by 2050 but only by restoring local ecosystems; and restoring atmospheric CO2 levels using a range of technologies for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering as such in a variety of ways.

In the first scenario, we are already experiencing touch and go on species loss. At some point we will begin to have local ecosystems fail, here and there. And as that chaotic system change amplifies over time a certain tipping point will probably cause the collapse of all global ecosystems which could increase those losses logarithmically and very quckly. Here’s a species loss story from the USA in the 19th c to exemplify what can occur. There was a pigeon called the Postal Pigeon. It is recorded that there was only one huge flock of these pigeons in such numbers as to darken the sky for hours when they flew overhead. Colonisers would just go out with shotguns and shoot in the air and bring down hundreds of pigeons. It seemed they never dented the population of these birds. Then one year, and it is estimated that the flock numbers were still around 1 million birds, the species went extinct. Apparently less than 1 million birds created a breeding collapse. In other words, we will find it difficult to predict the collapse point. Perhaps we are already near there.

In the second scenario, we already have 95% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. Natural restoration like planting trees is estimated as unlikely to restore the CO2 levels except over a long time. Meanwhile the chaotic climatic conditions are already perturbing though a high flux and that flux drives itself along a positive feedback loop. Some of you will be aware that the mathematical theory called chaos theory was identified by a climateologist, Lorenz. To remind us, Lorenz in the 1960’s found that an 1/1000th of a shift in the conditions (a parameter of data) at any time compared to a predictable order, will create a vastly different weather pattern over time. This came to be called the butterfly effect. The greenhouse in which we are now living is not just a new stabilised system. It is a very unstable system that will, for sure, over a long time, find it new ‘strange attractor’, a new stability, a new more or less predictable pattern. But whatever happens between then and now throws all ecosystems and human communities to the whim of an increasingly unpredictable and volatile weather system. And at ‘then’ the pattern will be most likely unkind to our current ecosystems and therefore unkind to us. We may still find ourselves faced with tipping point collapses of ecosystems, globally.

In the third scenario, we are able to restore the greenhouse to pre-industrial levels. Let’s say over the period 2030-2050 there is a double effect: the gradual movement to nett zero emissions from humans AND the gradual removal of legacy GHGs from the atmosphere. The weather continues to be increasing unpredictable but now also in a different way, hopefully a softer way, as energy is removed from the climate and weather system.  I doubt we can say that we can ‘restore the climate’ which is the catch phrase of F4CR, however, so long as we have i) softened those volatile and unpredictable effects in the first instance; and II) bring the climate to a new more human-friendly balance, we will have mitigated the loss of many species, billions of individual members, local ecosystems and avoided tipping into global collapse, then only being able to say that a species loss (say) is unlikely under a new technology is the only viable stand we can make for a future that can sustain us and the ecosystems we flourish within.

I have come across arguments, the most recent during a trip through a town called Lismore, NSW, Australia, in which an environmental activist told me she would be okay with the loss of human beings from the planet, so long as we just stop playing God with nature, coz the planet will bounce back. Given what we had seen here in 2019-2020 with massive bushfires (wildfires), I must admit to a horrified feeling at the casualness of dealing with the possibility of the losses worldwide. A few weeks after our conversation Lismore had the biggest flood since colonised settlement, 14metres, people clinging to rooftops to get rescued. Two weeks later, it got re-flooded, just a clean-up of the first was partly underway. The issue with this is that, Lismore is flood-prone, it was predictable, except this year people thought the flood period was over, safe for another year, and then it was just worse than ever, and a double dose. I haven’t had the opportunity to find out whether anyone feels differently about the climate ‘mission’, in Lismore. I have some empathy. It is a big ask for us to deal with all of who we are as human beings without feeling it can all go to hell in a handbasket. It is a big ask to take on that we might make choices that result in the loss of a species for the saving of a hundred species (this is the classic challenge from moral philosophical mind games). While there’s no such thing as an isolated species loss as fall-out, definitely not when it comes to endangering the lives of a lot of homo sapien sapiens for those critters have a tendency to hunt and dig up and chop down anything for their survival. Nonetheless, it is an important question for all of use to ask, what would we trade off (let go, even for now) for what we would work towards solutions. I think we can certainly avoid species loss from any technological adventuring as there is no reason why we are unable to finese any work. And there is hopeful expectation in most arenas that the technology even improves ecosystem restoration as well a human economic activity.