The Rough Draft

Journal Entry for Mar 12, 2021:

Guidelines for Facebook arguments

Today I started brainstorming many of my philosophies, and feel that making them explicit and sharing them will empower better discourse, problem solving, and create unity. And with these as a foundation, I might not be as hesitant to enter philosophical or political debates in this venue. This is a rough draft, and I am open to amending it. Without further ado, here are "Acknowledgments and guidelines for better civil discourse":

-Because we disagree does not mean I don't love you. In fact the opposite is true. I hold that that my best friend is that person who will tell me when "my fly is down" -- That way I can zip it up and not like look like a fool anymore!

-Because I say you got fooled, I'm not calling you a fool. It happens to the best of us. And it is the case that there are actors in the world whose objective is just that -- to fool others into giving their personal sovereignty away.

-Because I say that you're lying (I probably won't, but you never know), does not mean I'm calling you a liar. We all practice self-deception to some extent all day everyday. And when we show up in love and compassion as each other's mirrors, the truth shows up, and that's when we ALL get ahead.

-I don't see the world as it is. I see the world as I am (Anais Nin). None of us can escape our biases/blind spots. Everything that we've experienced in the past determines how we perceive the present. The best we can do is to rely on each other and tell each other compassionately what it is we see from each of our distinct, unique perspectives.

-I know a ton of stuff, and so do you! But in the grand scheme of things, we know an infinitesimal amount of all the truth that exists.

-None of us knows what it is that we don't know, or how much we don't know (incognizance), although before wise we get that it's a ton! The Socratic paradox applies here: "All I know is that I know nothing." (Plato said that Socrates said this).

-I couldn't care less about being better THAN you -- My deepest desire is to be better FOR you!!!

-I consider myself foremost to be an epistemologist. (Epistemology, the study of knowledge itself... Both how we come to know what we know, and how we can verify that what we know is actually what we know.) In epistemology, (s)he who considers the highest number of variables wins. And I'm not talking about one person wins and another loses. The game is won by the person who is willing to consider all or as many variables as possible, independent of other "players". Bill Maher recently said, "ask what is true, not who else believes it." The objective is to look at whatever it is you're looking at from ALL perspectives, including one another's, and especially those that are "uncomfortable" to look at. This is a practice with the end goal of mastery, and the path to eradicate blind spots.

-My goal in a discussion/debate is to craft a cogent argument and present factual, thoroughly vetted evidence, and to be wide open to being "wrong" and changing my mind. This is the goal of science. A researcher has to be willing to acknowledge after exhaustive scrutiny that their hypothesis was flawed and that their theory is invalid... I'd like to think that this is the goal of civics. (I feel that, optimally, civics is about social progress through unity, and politics is the art of keeping your job so that you can keep working in civics.)

-Ego is about taking credit for something. Progress is about the progress itself, not about authorship or ownership. Tongue in cheek, teamwork is like the right side of my head... There is no "I" (eye) in teamwork!!!

-Daniel Boorstin wrote “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.” (Ironically, this is often misattributed to Stephen Hawking. )

- When You and I engage in an argument, we are on the SAME team, engaging our complimentary strengths/knowledge in opposition to IGNORANCE, not each other. The word "guru" was described to me by a teacher of mine from India as "one who dispels ignorance." I feel like there's a wide open "market" for "collective gurus," not individuals, but dyads or groups of individuals working together.

- When I make an argument, I'm not arguing AGAINST you. I'm arguing WITH you, and AGAINST ignorance - both yours and MINE. I'm arguing against incognizance. When I'm arguing with you, I am with you, I want both of us to win, and ignorance to lose.

-It is the sad truth that if a person has made up his or her mind, it doesn't matter what facts or evidence -- graphs, charts, PowerPoints, data sheets, etc are presented. Argument is fruitless.

- Most (not all) of what we might call evil in the world comes from pain and ignorance, not evil for its own sake. Most people want to "do good," so to speak. This is not to say there are not "bad actors" who know exactly what they're doing and exploit the dynamics of "the game" for their own selfish, nefarious agenda. It is up to us to unite TOGETHER against such actors.

- "Thou shalt not commit errors in reasoning." If you want to be successful in a domain/discipline, It's a good idea to have a cursory knowledge thereof. If you want to put together a coach and argument, please take a look at the accompanying graphic and familiarize yourself with the different ways our minds can be fooled.

- It is useful to acknowledge that there are different kinds of truth. There are universal laws, and then there's truth whose extent of truthfulness is based on usefulness. For example, is it really true that all men are created equal? In almost no sense is this true. But if everyone believes it, there is great utility in this tenet. It enables mass cooperation which is almost infinitely scalable. In another way, the dictum is absolutely true, based on the criteria that we all have the seed of life within us and the ability for foward progression that, so far as we can tell, is infinite.

Mass cooperation and mythology. Money, government, and other intersubjective realities.

Yuval Noah Harari, Jordan Peterson, Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman.

If you're invested in a particular "informational outcome," this is an agenda and means "game over" from the very beginning.

If you have an investment in a certain outcome, you are blinded by that and you're dead in the water.

If you're invested in an outcome, you're not looking at it objectively, so you have a bias, so you give up credibility.

We are all blinded by agenda to some extent from time to time. And when I am blinded by agenda, it takes a third party who doesn't have any investment in the outcome to come along and free me from my subjective experience, if at all possible.

- "Keep the main thing the main thing." I might say Trump is this or Biden is that, or Pelosi is such and such... Or that the democratic party or the republican party is this or that or the other. That doesn't mean I'm arguing for or against any of these. Democracy that works is based on criticism of the policies, not the people, of one's own party as well as an opposing party. Unbiased (objective) criticism must apply to those policies and issues that I agree with, or hold, as well as those that I am against (that I oppose).

One heuristic that the human mind employs is the obfuscate or equivocate. When someone calls attention to a policy, the mind holds that a particular public figure is undergoing an ad hominem attack, when this may not necessarily be the case. Either way it doesn't matter. Again, the most successful application of democracy is when we treat policies, platforms and issues to scrutiny.

And finally, if your mental response to all of this is "I don't know about none of that stuff, All I know is I'm right!" ... Then there is no hope for you.

Some people are overpowered by their ego. Or more accurately, their "ego boundaries." They will lie, cheat, steal, kill... Do whatever it takes to keep these boundaries. These are the kind that will hold on to self-limiting and false beliefs in the face of blatant, repeated, abundant truth. There is no use arguing with these people. Willful ignorance in order to keep the hierarchical structure of one's perceptual system intact, remaining a prisoner to one's incognizance, is perhaps the most dangerous thing that exists.

(Added Nov 7, 2020)

Don't take it personally

Nobody is bad or sick or wrong for not seeing things the way you see things. Tell me what it looks like from where you're at.

Give feedback more like a college professor and less like a stepfather with mental issues.

No parroting of ideological one-liners or sound bites don't say anything that anybody else could say. Tell us about your perspective. Be original.)

Identity cannot and does not exist in a vacuum. We are who we are in relationship to everyone and everything else. Until absolute unity.

The ultimate and highest question of all religion is who am I? And this necessarily is in relationship, reference, comparison to/in the context of ultimate being and Truth.

The birds do not have an FAA, the water drops do not hold coordination meetings, the tuna do not spend hours choreographing a dance to perform. The clouds of starlings putting on a show of light and dark and mobius-dream-like forms, are not putting on a show. They've not rehearsed. They are following their most important sense. Their sense of self. Who else would they follow?!

Divinity is infinitely variated expression infinite expansion

Photography is perceptual, values based, symbolic, interpretive, constructivist. Little did I know when I was a 7 year-old taking a picture with my mom's Olympus 35mm automatic film camera at Universal Studios that everybody would be a photographer in another 30 -35 years. Doesn't seem like a long time, but it's relative, you know? Everything is relative. We can only conceptualize anything in the context of anything ELSE.
..Little did I know that they (we) were photographers already, creating mental snapshots in our minds, to go through later, greatest hits... that's a helluva trade off for greatest gifts.... The now. The present. Cliche. Why? Same reason as rote prayer. Prayer without action. Faith without works isn't faith. Faith IS works. You DO what you believe most in, most deeply in, most feeling, pathos in. Talmage .. mere intellectual asent, vs. faith ... Psychologically, nothing else will constitute the impetus that gets you off your butt! I know this can be so I'm going to put my butt on the line, money where my mouth is, I'm the fall guy, the buck stops here. I AM ACCOUNTABLE. I VOUCH. THIS ONE'S ON ME.

That's Faith. I know without reason and I roll the dice, for all the moolah. Bring it on! Bigger the risk, bigger the gain, go big or go home... No wonder gambling is addictive. It's the counterfeit for faith. It's superstition. It's a seductive fake. Like lead in our bones.

There is no growth, expansion without risk.

So, divinity is risk.

09-07-22 Heaven or hell, good intentions

Everything and everyone is a work in progress, and each of us furthers our self by that which we manifest in the physical world. I am not going to overemphasize editing here; these are my musings, contemplations, newborn ideas, and in varying stages of development, and thus, subject to change. Also, by way of caveat, I believe in the "law of conservation of truth," and so also, that there are no original ideas. Most - probably all - of my ideas are influenced by others, so I am not going to make a huge effort at bibliography, but I will make an honest endeavor in this regard, and if I don't cite Walt Whitman here, or Joseph Campbell there, no one need worry that there is anything nefarious afoot. 😄

I am going to disable comments, since these are my journal entries, not points for debate. If you would like to expound on any ideas, feel free to do so on your page. I'd like for anything here to spread and cause more love and light in the world.

If you want to discuss anything with me, I welcome that also.

Thanks for tuning in 😊

Nate