Nature VS Nurture

Sorts and Purposes

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It takes me a very long time to come to the point, in fact, before I bury it again, let’s begin with it: the purpose of the Autist is to explain the Neurotypical to the Neurotypical.

We are a mirror, instructive by contrast. What a neurotype cannot see of itself, it can of another type, and vice versa. The Autist, familiar with their own mind, learns what a Neurotypical mind is by listening to them describe ours, the one we know – by a process like arithmetic we can glean what sort of mind theirs is.

It would seem the reverse is not happening, the Neurotypical, familiar with their own minds, rarely learns what an Autistic mind is by listening to us describe theirs, the one they know, and applying the addition or subtraction of our perceptions – thus my partially tongue in cheek new term for the most common, or dominant type – robust. They are not so easily given to introspection, the implicit reverse logic and the opportunity to audit themselves this way doesn’t seem to occur to them.

I think it’s a neurotypical trait, the darkest side of which is conformism, a sort of a policy that other sorts are not equal and comparable. It’s not an insult, it’s a requirement for their very typicality and dominance, isn’t it?

But it’s exactly my point.

This is exactly the sort of thing that everyone else knowing it doesn’t mean jack. They have to know it, somehow, I mean they have to know it’s only a neurotypical trait, rather than God’s Universal Bloody Will, right?

And that impossible job is ours.

It is not our job to explain to the genetically unconsciously xenophobic about all the different sorts out there, that is obviously impossible, they aren’t even interested.

It is our job to explain to them how their way of life is killing the planet and that they won’t survive it either. Right? I may be new as an Autist who knows it, but I am not new as a human being and the framing is always theirs and it is always wrong, and the abuse is always named after the victim, and the abuser has no name, it’s just . . . typical. Because with names comes shame. They are not going to do it themselves. If you have seen the quality of what they call “research,” regarding Autism, you know, they are never going to classify themselves in their system of faults and treatments.

Our job – and I’m tired of doing it alone, honestly.

Jump in any time, Kids.

Jeff May 26th., 2023

Gonzo Science – Your Fighting Genes

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Gawd, the propaganda is so obtuse, so horrifying simple and false. The flighty sounding talk about self-knowledge isn’t always high level, it’s basic as can be too: if you don’t know yourself, you can’t know anything, even your own thoughts, speech, and actions may not be you, how would you know? If the world clearly seems a certain way to you, you have to ask yourself, why is this what my mind looks to see? Why have I evolved the sense of that certain way? If the world is clearly a struggle and a fight to your mind, then you were evolved to see fighting, you have genes for fighting.

It follows that of course we have other genes with other concerns as well, and the current and long time social narrative is that these others have to live around the fighting. The current and long time idea is that you “have the fighting genes,” end of story, it’s static, created Human nature in new words, we are still and forever dealing with them, but of course what is missing from the conversation is the environmental control of genetic expression. If our other genes and other concerns wish to change anything about the fighting, we need to take that argument a level deeper, and undermine the gene, find a way to stop selecting it.

If we could adjust the environment away from abuse, our children would be slightly less under its control, and this would give their children a better chance to do the same. This was my parenting plan – you want to make God laugh? Never mind, it’s still my theory.

Come on, this was easy, it’s obvious. The minute I heard of epigenetics, this was all sitting there, obvious.

There are fighting genes in humans, and there is epigenetics, and there is spanking: the gene, the control mechanism, and us working it like an oar, making sure from approximately birth, that the environment is a fight, ensuring the activation and repeated selection of the war genes. Plain as day, I have had trouble expressing this because I assumed it was obvious and simple and everyone knew, I swear to God. How do we not? Do you not?

I mean, this obvious truth is buried under a ton of flummery.

Freud’s drives are just the static Nature broken down into components, balancing them seems to be all that can be done and I guess most people manage it well enough? Primatology too, just talks about the past, the “making of our Nature,” or something, it looks away from our this-minute evolution too. Any system of human parts and components comes out of the static meme, the meaningful parts are behaviour and genetics, not the structural hardware.

What if your baseline “Human Nature,” was a moving thing, a foundation of shifting mud? (the following I wrote a few days ago on Twitter.)

What if?

What if there were those “warrior genes?”

What if there were? What might the world look like?

Well, you’d expect war – check.

You might expect some rape, warrior genes selecting themselves – check.

You might expect a military sort of social organization, an hierarchy of authority – check.

You might expect that a creature with such genes admires and promotes strength and aggression – check. Ask me if you don’t believe me. It’s most of the blog.

You might expect a development that turns adorable babies into aggressive adults – check. Again, I’m always writing this.

You would expect that individuals lacking the selected for aggression would be pathologized and/or marginalized, perhaps killed – check. (Won’t make you ask: all the “gender critique,” can and should be seen as patriarchy, warrior patriarchy and they don’t really care if boys love boys, but they care terribly if boys love at all and hate insufficiently. This would seem to be the obvious aim of male circumcision, so we do things for this reason.)

Enough?

Show me something about people that says we DON’T have and live from our warrior genes.

Every argument you have for a nasty Human Nature would support warrior genes, wouldn’t they?

Has this book been written yet?

😘

(back to live on Saturday.)

I suppose if the book existed I would have found it by now. I want to write it, but I’m doing this instead.

I’m jaded; I don’t have the hope that we will do this, see our own making, and I have to say, it means all that nineteenth century talk about consciousness is rubbish, that if we don’t see this first level deep into ourselves, we cannot claim to have it. We remain beasts indeed, as long as we do not take this step.

Jeff

May 13th., 2023

The Brain Science of Not Grokking Evolution

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How Thoughts are Formed:

For how things work, how thoughts are formed in the brain, we have some idea of the materials involved, much detail regarding chemical processes – and a lot of analogies.

In some contexts, the brain has pathways, in the context of depression and addiction, we speak of getting caught on a looping path, or of progressively falling into the same patterns of thought, thought to indicate the overuse of a single “pathway.” I have been trying to use this one lately, I have used it a fair bit, and I wanted to for the current blog, but you can’t prove anything starting with a single dubious analogy, can you, I need to at least diversify, if I can’t transcend it.

In Pinker’s brain science tomes, we have modules, or demons, little portions of thought, an addition demon, a subtraction one, one for fighting and one for flight, one for putting a thing on top of another thing, a lot of multipurpose generic thought segments or components that we string together to make a thought or a sentence or a life. He postulates that we also possess a completely unmoored “universal processing” module by which we are able to reason through new situations that our species has never evolved for, citing mathematics and such as evidence of its existence, but this as well as a million other less universal ones, not instead, I think. Perhaps we are born assuming it’s all the universal one, and perhaps we think much of our ideology comes from there, but I’m here to show a major way that this is not the case, that ideology is more basic, made up of simpler demons, using the modules of the brain in the same way everything else does.

I know Freud and other psychologists have their analogies as well, and some folks assign not only identities within the “personality,” as Freud did, but assign them voices too and speak of internal parliaments, but this is a different breakdown, each voice a whole person and we might still be left wondering how each of their thoughts are formed. It doesn’t map onto Pinker’s modules, which are functions, not whole voices. Too, we may wonder how the “ego,” forms its thoughts, etc. the same way.

I’m sorry – only two, modules and pathways?

“Pathways,” has a quirk, an understood one, I don’t think there is a cursor tracing thoughts from point A to point B, away from one ear and towards the other, if it’s a “path,” it’s not spatial but temporal, chemical processes happening over time to take us from one metaphorical “place,” to another. I think I was wrong to use this model so much, “module,” may serve my purposes better after all, but it isn’t a bit temporal, doesn’t seem to move at all!

Perhaps I will change it up, perhaps I’ll be as generic as possible, but you know what is a module of speech or thought that moves is Dawkins’ “meme,” and perhaps the meme is not the module or the pathway, but the product of that structure? The thing I am trying to name in the brain is the collection of cells and processes that produces a meme, say the addition meme, or the flight meme, or the “maybe it’s behind something,” meme – touch the module, it gives you a meme with which to build your thought or your sentence.

It’s difficult, all these things overlap, the modules analogy I’m making mirrors parts of speech, a sentence is a series of components, subjects and objects and verbs, and a thought is a series of modules or pathways mirroring subjects and objects and verbs. We can say, “the dog chased the cat,” and we have modules or some building block or other of thought for each thing, a brain part or process to match each of “dog,” “chased,” and “cat,” and these units can be refitted for wolves and sheep and even Russia and Crimea – analogies prove the point, that there are forms for things, one size fits all memes that we apply to many things and boiler plating these is how sentences and thoughts are created. Ah, here’s a thought, sometimes when a situation does seem new and we have to choose a meme to understand it, apply existing memes to a new thing, we make a poor choice, and that is not the best or most appropriate module for that situation.

This is the point here, however, so before I launch into it, I’d like to produce an example you already know. You know, so you don’t have to take my word for it.

And why stretch it? I’ve already invoked the dreaded wolves and sheep? – nah, no, that’s too fraught. A simple one – ah, “shark infested waters?” I think a lot of us have heard this one lately, that creatures do not “infest,” their own homes! That perhaps “infestation,” is the wrong meme to apply to this situation. Of course it’s  . . . interested. The person calls that an infestation is trying to say the ocean is their home, but the wrong, interested meme gets past us often enough, doesn’t it?

How Thoughts are Protected:

Or, how language maps to thoughts: the word is not the meme.

The word is the label for the meme, in your language, and in your time and place. A rose by any other name. Every culture with a language that knows a rose has a different word, but the rose – and the mental meme – have their own reality beyond the word, and this is the point, if we re-named the rose something else, the flower and the mental meme would not change. Were we to learn that a rose is in fact not a plant but an alarmingly complicated chameleon, then perhaps the thing and the brain unit for “rose,” would have to change, but it doesn’t work the other way about, the word is only a label for the meme in your brain, which is only some bit of brain language for the object.

This is why new, politically correct language is not a meaningful endeavour: labels are not only not the thing, but they are not even the representation of the thing in your brain, only a label for that and changing the word does not, as we hope, change anything inside the brain, indeed, just as saying it in French would not. This argument goes to identities and genders and everything else we try to fix with new language, but I am not going to iterate all that, I am going to go to what I think is the mother of all the PC language failures, “consequences,” in childrearing, followed by perhaps the father, evolution.

This application of  . . . code, I guess, this level of interpretation protects evolved, inherited memes, after all the brain and the person must function in the absence of language too, the  brain couldn’t maintain anything if it could all simply be talked away. I guess where this is heading is if we want to change anything, we don’t change the part of the code everyone sees but leave the new symbols matched to the same old things, meaning use it in all the same places and sentences as the old word, you take control of the mapping – we don’t ask people who may still think of a shark’s existence as an infestation to learn to say “shark inhabited,” if we know they still want to kill them all, we work to educate, remove the fear, and the language follows. We would locate the error by which this person thinks they own the ocean, correct that, and they will stop saying “infested,” when they realize it’s not their kitchen and sharks are not cockroaches and they would apply a more appropriate meme, shark country, or something.

Again, unless someone has an interest in it, then sharks are cockroaches, or ants?

If you felt you had to be in the ocean, though, and had to be exactly where the sharks are hungriest and most numerous, though, perhaps you would say, “infested.” We apply the meme that brings us results, like survival (I don’t mean survival from sharks so directly, it’s not the sharks made this necessary for you, but your employers, I mean to say, “survival of our employment”). The wrong meme is probably not often an accident; you’d think natural selection would either select an accident or weed those out. It’s a form of tech, or engineering, manipulating this layer of thought and existence to our own ends. But it also keeps us at bay when we try to change language for some social improvement, lets us think we’re changing things while the brain keeps everything running to the evolved status quo.

It’s been a long time since I typed this one, about how we stopped saying “punishments” for children after Dr. Spock and started saying “consequences,” instead, and changed almost nothing, punishment already means consequences, it’s only a little more passively voiced this way, and of course, some huge percentage of people still self report spanking, eighty-five or something. Literally the same hands on the same bottoms, different code symbol, same mental meme, same external world and actions. Gentle parenting would have us move from the cause and artificial effect meme both the words reference and to a different function altogether with no contrived “effect,” at all and then neither word would apply.

A teaching meme, perhaps instead. D’ya think?

New words are a dodge, a trick played on us by our species’ memory, by the bureaucracy of biology, where we simply replace the puppet leader figure and none of the machines of state. We live life, thinking the code is the message, blissfully unaware of the formatting beneath, in the evolved memes.

OK, if that was the mother – fitting, I think – then evolution is perhaps not the father, but the great granddaddy of language to meme failures, at least today.

It doesn’t belong among the origin stories at all.

The Human Nature Meme:

The Human Nature idea, with it’s coresident one of creation, is an extension of to quote an archaic term, Man the Maker, or Bob the Builder, using a too-modern one: there isn’t a thing, you make the thing, now there’s a thing, generally with a made-for purpose. This is what we have applied to our species and to the world, we are here, so perhaps something made us, so perhaps we have a purpose (a single, specific purpose, like an axe) and we were made to be this and so we are this. You make an axe, it’s an axe until someone unmakes it. Tools would seem to be the meme for this single purpose, or “Nature,” idea, the Nature of an axe is such and such, and it goes to, “So Grasshopper, what is the Nature of you?”

This is where I get lost, it has this aspect, for sure, the “Natures,” meme, of inferring a single vector, an essence, a single idea like a tool – but on the other hand, people reference if for anything and everything. This “essence,” apparently has the entire gamut of human behaviour in it, from the best to the worst . . . I can’t square it, clearly, “Natures,” are the wrong meme for a living, complex thing like us. Evolution is much better.

But it’s just a word, a symbol. If we just replace “creation,” and “Human Nature,” with “evolution,” we are not changing anything, even in our minds.

And I’m afraid we do. A lot.

Jeff

April 28th., 2023

New, July, 2024:

I’ve had to delete the rest of this, it was not right, we’re moving on, sorry.

It said creation was the older story and evolution the new one, and we don’t think that anymore, now we think evolution was known and Indigenous and natural forever, and creation stories are the new thing. Much of it would still work in proper context, but that context for me now is Neurotype, and it’s all very different.

So that’s it for now, just the language lesson.

I’ll be looking for more to lose too.

Jeff

Automaton

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That’s what I’m calling you, I guess. That’s Antisocialization Theory.

Like a rubber band airplane. Your momma winds you up, and your lieutenant sets you free. Then you go off and do the predictable thing, what you’re designed and built to do, spending the energy they put into you.

Jeff

Apr 14th., 2023

Internalized AST

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That will be ableism, to you, internalized ableism. Perhaps internalized racism, internalized sexism, internalized “gender-ignorance,” internalized hetero-neuro-normative whatever, you name it, I feel my marginalization as an Autist, so I’ll say ableism. It’s not a huge point, because my point that it’s not about any particular marginalized group, we are not responsible for our own disenfranchisement – and words like “ableism,” always name the hate after the victim.

“Anti-Asian hate,” a year or two ago, it’s all-victim, perpetrator-free crime. The news won’t even tell Asians who to watch out for, just don’t be Asian. But ableism.

Thinking ableism is “about” disabled people is agreeing with your enemies.

I know; “about,” and “because,” are complex, and the limitations of language hinder us, I’m trying to solve some of that.

Abuse “because,” we’re disabled, that’s their line – and it’s internalized ableism if it’s ours. It’s not because of us.

Having to abuse everything and everyone, this is some “them,” we’re talking about, a trait of some “theirs,” not everyone except theirs. It’s not like the haters single out your marginalized group, it’s obviously the other way about, they single out one group to keep and marginalize the rest with one broad stroke.

The community on Twitter is forever saying, “nothing about us without us,” and that’s great – but to the haters, it was never “about” us in the first place, they don’t know who we are. We say, they need to start seeing/thinking something about us, but again, they don’t know what we are and they don’t much care, they do it to everyone, it’s a function that really doesn’t look past “Other,” it really doesn’t spend any cognitive energy on things with that designation (what does @autismsupsoc call that, fast and dirty Allistic processing?). That would seem to be the point of the designation, no processing resources for you.

Black people wonder, “what’s wrong with being black?” and the LGBTQ+ community wonders, “what’s so wrong with not breeding?” and the ND community wonders, “what’s so wrong with thinking differently?” and of course the answer always, collectively and individually, is nothing!

Of course, nothing!

I mean, everything has its upsides and downsides, I guess, but nothing, nothing about any of these labels is something anybody needs to bloody do anything about! This trait of wanting to do something about people, though, can we please, before the end of eternity, talk about that? Obviously, that is a problem.

Black and brown folks talk about white people, the Non-Binary talk about cis people, the ND talk about the “neurotypical,” which describes nothing but their perceived numbers, and I don’t deny the Venn diagram is basically one big circle for all of those things, especially around here, but it’s just not the point.

It’s not white peoples’ skin colour that’s the problem any more than it is anyone’s skin colour, is it, and it’s not cis peoples’ breeding habits and it’s not “neurotypical” peoples’ commonness, is it? The hate isn’t “because,” of diverse types of people – and so it’s not “because,” of the simple existence of the haters either, something has gone terribly wrong with them, of course, this is what I’m saying too, but I can’t abide ending the conversation there, naming and blaming isn’t enough.

That we have already been trying for some generations already, the Good Fight is keeping us morally occupied but it’s not solving the problems. Anyway, to say it’s because of who they are, their natures or some such, that’s their crime and their error, isn’t it?

Can we not escape the same lethal ideology of the worst human sorts?

I won’t be caught parroting that, and I’m here to beg you not to be either. There are real world reasons for things, not natures, and the more people insist upon these natures, the worse those people behave.

As I said, there are reasons, there have to be – sometimes I think it is not in my Autistic neurology to accept a noun as an answer to “why” anything, and “because they are, racist, haters, Nazis, white, cis, NT, all these are nouns – and because they simply are doesn’t satisfy me. Nouns are “whats,” and this Autistic needs a verb.

“Why,” is an action question, you “neurotypical” weirdos. Not only is “because those people,” wrong, it’s not even grammatically sane, you couldn’t be right no matter who you named. “Why,” demands a verb.

Of course I had to make my own, it’s “antisocialize.”

The extreme antisocial nature of racism, sexism, etc., this is a noun we all know, hate, but creating hate requires action, a verb, despite what they told us in Sunday school, and despite what your high school science teachers who also attended your Sunday school told you too. You weren’t conceived with a load of hate already on board. They, we, are making the hate.

The noun that refers to knowing this function I have designated Antisocialization Theory, or AST for short, and the dominant folks of this world have it the worst, but most of us have it. It’s what is internalized, AST, the hurt and the need, the hurt from people hurting one another when they think someone needs it and the belief, born of the need, that someone does. Rather, AST describes the process of internalizing negativity generally, regardless of the flavour, and how it changes us, antisocialization is the process of acquiring our internalized hate – I mean the feeling of hate.

Ah!

The specifics, who we’re to hate, and the whys and wherefores of our applied hate, these are perhaps merely informational, a part of our general socialization, certainly they would be considered to be, if we felt that all people have enemies and conflict were inevitable – but the emotional effect, antisocialization, this sets that default. If you were spanked, hate is natural and inevitable to you, and you’ll need to know where to put it.

The same logical structure exists in the positive, your prosocialization would derive from your emotional experience of feeling loved, and so being loved would be natural and necessary for you, but the general socialization of your society and environs likely specifies who and what to love . . . ah, something sort of new, isn’t it.

I’ve been calling “socialization” a general, inclusive heading, the name for all of it and saying it’s made up of positive, neutral and negative socialization – now maybe classic “socialization,” can just mean informational, period, who and what – but the pro- and anti- versions mean something else, something emotional, antecedent to any specifics, the template, the blank forms, so to speak.

Wow, I do believe something moved there.

If only anyone knew, huh.

So the theory is, if you want your kids to experience love, love them and they’ll want that, and if you think you need them to hate, hate on them a little, beat on them a little, and they will want that too, and we know they will find their own people and things to love – and that is the AST theory of racism, etc., that they will find their own things and people to hate too, society provides mates and enemies.

You can “teach,” racism, but you don’t have to. Spank them, show them the systemic racism, and they’ll figure it out, their hate will find its niche. Same for ableism, sexism, too, spanked people and relatively consequence-free targets for them.

This is AST, and this is what we need to fight and to change, that second thing, the “hating on your kids a little,” meme. All of our disenfranchised identities can lobby to be on the “prosocialized for,” list alone, in competition for this decade’s entry, or we can try to solve the problem at its root, with simply deciding we don’t need that, we would rather our kids weren’t hate-ready before they can even speak.

That’s the battle, and it’s the same battle, no matter who you are, stop the spanking, stop the hate.

Simple!

Jeff April 9th., 2023

“Choosing” Love

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 . . . all great ideas, Mrs. Marx and Engels, Drs. M. L. King, Gabor Mate, Alice Miller, Mr. Cavoukian – Bell Hooks, just names from my personal logos, but so many great humanists, all with a terrific idea about how things ought to be, about love over hate, too many to name them all, so many good folks trying, so many apparently obvious rhetorical questions posed, why wouldn’t we choose love?

If I have readers, you know what I think: spanking and it’s mythological excuse, “Human Nature,” is why. But today’s question isn’t that, it’s “why would this be rhetorical?”

All good things hit this wall.

We would choose love – but goddammit, I have forever been choosing love and receiving hate and I’m sorry, but it’s not love I got too much of and not love I need to void myself of, is it? If you didn’t want this from me, why did you do that?!?? We would, but, kind of thing, right? But not for them, or something, right? Surely there is someone out there who deserves some of the limited resource of my mercy.

I’m trying to tell you, you ask, “why choose hate?” like it’s rhetorical, like there’s no answer, like we’re not really looking for an answer.

I woke up today with a thought that is childishly simple, yet still unfortunately true of a world of adults. You know the old saw, a child says in anger, “You made me feel X,” you know, X equals sad, mad, something awful and at some age we start saying, “other people don’t make you feel things, your feelings are yours.”

It’s a bit of gaslighting, doesn’t matter what I do to you, you are responsible for your own feelings, but it has a sort of truth, we do need to own our feelings enough to control them some and such, but it has just occurred to me for the umpteenth time, that isn’t this just what every sort of hate, every “ism,” is, the hated groups are blamed for the feelings of the haters, the haters hate everyone but themselves and it’s everyone’s fault but theirs, all their hate.

But you know what? It’s not so simple, this gaslighting. Rather, there are multiple levels, a ruse within a ruse, and while we gaslight one another in the here and now, that we aren’t responsible for one another’s new and current feelings, we are also closing off any conversation about anyone creating feelings in anyone – about antisocialization, in a word. Nobody affects nobody, apparently.

AST, so, you feel bad, you blame someone, but Psych 101 says your feelings are your own, from some other trauma, not from the person in front of you, so now you feel bad and it’s not their fault, it’s you, and “some other trauma,” of yours, and trauma is always some sort of accident, Psych 101 knows your abuser had their own trauma, so no-one tried to make you feel that way, it’s a . . . choice, ultimately, how we respond to a tragic accident. Why not choose love?

Uh, because it was a trauma and not an orgy?

These haters really don’t create all this hate themselves, is all I’m saying, the haters’ parents do, their caregivers do, their preachers, teachers and coaches do. Contrary to your memes, we can’t just make our own hatred from thin air and we’re not born with an unlimited supply, and of course somebody else makes you feel that way!

I want to say, of course we make each other feel things when we interact, but that’s not the point, the point is they were made to feel that way as a part of their upbringings, and it’s a feeling that doesn’t go away, somebody else makes you feel that way for life.

Your mom, your dad. Your people do that.

Why not choose love? It’s not bloody rhetorical, there’s a real world, living reason, and it’s because of the way they have made us feel, as I tried to express above. If we do not choose love, it is because we have been made to feel something else. Feelings are . . . real, materialistic, they are born and die here, in this world. Your bad feelings happened here, and the source is knowable.

I’m trying to tell folks: we can’t get there from here, but if we stop hurting our kids, maybe they can see more from there, maybe they can “choose” love a little more often than we did.

Jeff

March 23rd., 2023

No Theory

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That’s what people got.

The end is nigh, temperatures will rise, and the fascists are coming again – we can see something coming and with experience we can guess what it is, but it is coming because we have no theory to explain ourselves and therefore no theory upon which to science ourselves out of anything.

Human Nature, whaddayagonnado – this from our fucking theorists.

I am exhausted with all the verbose analyses, the names for attitudes, the recent history of what passes for “thought,” the big words . . . all the bloody detail – when you have no basic theory.

No-one is paying anybody to solve the problem, to come up with a theory – let’s turn that upside-down, antisocialization theory style, shall we? The powers that pay for research have decided to starve a theory out of existence. I do this on my own time and money, I know – I do nothing here, on my own time and money, pretty much.

The money that directs research and society is protecting the whaddayagonnado episteme. They have to believe people are crap and deserve the poverty and death they give them all day long, don’t they, so it’s Human Nature at the universities, and probably something religious or cultish at home.

And if your Nature is bad, then abuse is harmless, what is it hurting, a sinner or a chimpanzee, who cares? Who sees? Not God and not chimpanzees! And since no amount of harm matters since evil is already your Nature, any single digit percent apparently gained from the deterrents, any upside at all – abuse only threatened – is all good. This is the theory of all punishment, all the way to ABA torture, honestly, isn’t it this line of thinking that goes all the way to the death “penalty,” which surely teaches zero percent?

You got no theory and we’re helpless as the world ends because the Kochs prefer a platonic essence to science, but honestly, “Nature, essence,” – it’s pretty complex. Every horrible thing anyone ever did is “explained,” by it, the coming end is supposed to be explained by it – and there’s nothing simple or pure about it, every adjective ever applied to people is in the definition – so it’s a catch-all, if it happened to or by a human, it’s Human Nature. Circular, meaningless. But somehow it ends all conversations.

If somehow, evil wasn’t just natural, then we might feel like we had to do something about it, huh. Then a whole lotta human behaviour might have to explain itself. How many explanations have you missed? How many times have you heard, “ . . . bah, Human Nature?” How many lines of inquiry die there every day, and still we wonder at ignorance if we notice it. The best novels don’t depend on it, you feel like all was provided – but real life can settle for it! That’s not as important as writing a great novel! I know, it’s a joke. Sort of. But we don’t settle for “atomic Nature,” or even probably “chimpanzee Nature.” When we are scientists we are materialists, we want to know specifics, details; when we are talking about ourselves, it is generic language and “Natures.”

So again, this “Nature,” with absolutely everything in it – what creates that? Are we to assume some real causes in the world cause it all, love and hate, fat and thin, tall and short? It is not kind of obvious that each of these pairs of things require at least two causes and not a single Nature?

It is the ultimate in data compression loss, isn’t it? Everything is in there, but all static, whatever goes into the Human nature box doesn’t need a specific cause? People simply “are (insert adjective here),” regardless of anything in this coarse reality! Come back with the weak “dual Nature,” and I will simply break people down into more weight classes, seriously – “OK, how about TWO causes for everything under the sun?”

Seriously?

I’m sorry, I heard that one from a lovely man at a terrible time for them, “perhaps a dual Nature,” but they aren’t the first or the only one to suggest it.

You got no theory because clearly, someone wants it that way and has placed the indiscriminate filter of Human Nature on everything we might like to know. You got no theory because this situation obliterates all causality. By pushing all of our self knowledge through this black box and deleting the tracking data for human behaviour, we set the stage to be gaslighted about anything and everything.

“Human Nature,” the meme, the myth, the lie, not the Nature, is the root of a lot of troubles. Again, if we are to science our way out of the coming end, the firrrsssst thing you gotta do isss get ridda that bear. He’ssss gummin’ up the whole project!, of course I mean lose that “Human Nature,” business that deletes all your data. We gotta get materialist on our own asses.

And dash it all, that is the project.

Jeff

Feb 16th., 2023

The Double-Bind Formula

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I’m feeling nostalgic. Here’s a post I might have made ten or more years ago, back to childrearing.

The double-bind proves the matter, the noise cancels out when Mom and Dad make conflicting demands, make it impossible to do the right thing, the ostensibly right thing, and all that is left is antisocialization. We know it’s a game played upon the subservient person or the child, an unwinnable game for us when we are subjected to it.

But do we know it’s the entire point of all the punitive abuse?

That it’s not some game outside of what is presently a parent’s job, but possibly the most important and causative thing we do? Not an endorsement, important, I didn’t say in a good way. The impossible bind is antisocialization theory in a nutshell, that fairness and actual equality are not the point, the point is that you are altered by the experience, not for the nicer. The naked, public humiliation of the impossible bind only works to embitter us even more, or faster.

Jeff

July 3rd., 2022

Rough Drift

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Not a typo, I’m trying to be clever.

Diversity is the first half of evolution, you don’t get selection without providing options, right? The most common versions of traits and genes, we assume are so because they match the most common environments, they have had the broadest success, but species appear to retain some diversity so that when that common environment changes, other traits and genes have their chance to shine and species carry on, changing in relation to the environmental changes, not necessarily quickly enough or without some serious trouble, but that’s the idea.

If they’re here, they did that, that species does that, right? If something had happened that a species had no capacity to deal with, then those ones are not here. Diversity is flexibility, which is viability when you know that environments change.

The human neurodivergent population knows this about themselves, that they are perhaps spare parts to some in the current environment, but crucial future spare parts for the species.

Personally, my mission in life seemed obvious at maybe six years of age, it seemed plain as day to me that the lifestyle of abuse and control I was born into couldn’t possibly be sustainable and I am spending my life ‘explaining shit to people’ about it, as young Master Hunting didn’t want to, I mean, if anyone is listening. And I mean, I didn’t know about neurodiversity until, well, now. I thought they had the same brain as me and were simply in error, and I could explain it to folks.

Hey, I think that’s nostalgia. It did look much simpler back then, and I just felt smart. I knew I was the odd one out, but perhaps from a more extreme stupidity, I never dreamed that it was me that was disabled. I was looking at adults raging out on little children, I never dreamed it was me that was broken in all of it. My moral outrage ruled me, even when I’d step on a hundred rakes, at least I wasn’t beating children. The whole world was disabled, they couldn’t seem to understand the simplest morality. I still feel the need to say this every day: everything is a crime except that, except hurting people who can’t fight back, on purpose. Only irresistible violence is not a crime to normal people.

Starting to see, demographically at least, by the numbers, this is my disability.

Crucial future spare parts for the species.

The dominant culture, and perhaps the current dominant genetic option, doesn’t think so. It’s rather conformist, hold on, that’s really not strong enough, it’s rather selective, in the deadly, evolutionary sense. Only intuition perhaps, sadly informed by a lot of Twitter propaganda, but I am fighting an awful creeping sense that the dominant thing, mainstream society, neurotypicality is a bad mutation, violently taking over the species by drift, and by fighting diversity, it is setting up to go extinct with the next crisis . . . but that the ‘next crisis,’ is it also, already here. I’ve tried to say, the fighting genes and our social strength are a conundrum. The genetic response to this hazard – humans – wait.

That’s the point, we are the primary hazard that humans face now, not tigers or freezing, and I suspect typicality describes the genetic response to that most typical hazard – strength, social control, “defensive” violence, this is the conundrum. The neighbors response, genetic and behavioural, is our environmental hazard and ours is theirs. This awful drift can be seen, heard, and felt whenever all humanist gains are jettisoned for the next war: if it doesn’t help you win a fight, lose it.

Right?

I think all genes are not “selfish,” but I worry that there are genes operating in error, that the defensive gene is also the genocide gene, that whatever genetic combination it is that wins the wars will sacrifice the crucial, God-given diversity to do it. That even if billions survive the next decades, if they are billions of warriors, that this was a genetic bottleneck where much of what was good in us is lost, because what almost kills you leaves you broken, not “stronger.”

Strength is weakness. Diversity is life.

You know what I think, that all this genetic talk is not determinism, I think the lifestyle change would change the gene options, and I think it’s a two step function, you have the gene options, so our power is to arrange not to activate the troublesome ones, not to create the environment that needs them activated and selecting themselves – stop the violent social control, most importantly stop “spanking” which is a word that means “creating an abusive environment for a child to set his genetic fighting options to “on.””

“Strength,” in the bad gene’s words.

I swear.

Jeff

June 30th., 2022

The Philosophy of AST

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AST is not a philosophy of First Causes, or absolutes, its basic premise is a rather high-level observation that works, despite an entirely fuzzy world in which anything, any word can be twisted into various shapes or viewed from various angles.

To wit, it begins with the observation that punitive abuse of humans that is supposed to improve us has real world effects and an improvement in overall behaviour is not one of them, that bad behaviour and all of its associated pain and suffering abound in the human world, more so than in the worlds of other creatures, who do not practice this self abuse.

I mean, those philosopher folks are right, idealism and all, we really can’t know “things,” “in themselves,” and all that, only the echoes of our minds and senses and all, but I’m sure there’s a school that points out that when these things only exist in our minds, that in those cases that we can. I think everything in my statement of AST’s loose “basis,” are those sorts of things, our behaviour, abuse, pain, “the human world,” all constructs and as such, all proper fodder for thought. Idealism can make none of those things disappear, can it?

AST won’t be dragged down into the minutiae of either genetic chemistry or philosophical idealism. All these things exist.

Absolutes, First Causes, these are likely unknowable – after all, you and I are not God, are we? The limits of the universe are not our limits anyway, so AST dispenses with the idea, let God worry about absolutes – and as for the opposite, the supposed impossibility of relativism, AST thinks it has an answer for that too, my argument about direction. Again, from the premise, AST’s First Observation, we see a direction – which, in a limitless, relativistic universe is really all there is, since we are all moving in time, as evidenced by the sense of gravity, says Einstein – and we do, we have the data with which to fill the only data field, we see the direction, we see what our abusive control does. Well, I do, anyway.

OK, AST – Antisocialization Theory – has some definitions it prefers too, mostly it argues that “strength,” is not an unassailable boon. Strength as sacred, this is the top moral thought of a social group, of a village, or of a nation, and the Earth is all dying together, all at once, we need to crash through that glass ceiling to a morality that doesn’t make the Earth a toxic battlefield. We need to define a morality for all of us, for the world. Group preservation will be the end of everything.

But that’s what we call the direction, strength. That’s the goal, a goal is a direction, in the absence of absolutes. That is our data point. AST sees the direction you are going, I see what you are making of yourself, and I see you insisting nothing you do matters, that you were made this way by something else, but I can see your feet moving and the way you are heading.

In this sense, AST is probably disqualified as philosophy, that it computes using constructs as facts (as the social facts they are), and probably removes it from science proper for the same reasons – but science it is, because it deals with observable phenomena, and doesn’t need to overstep – I should point out that AST’s enemy, the equal and opposite meme, Human Nature, not only also has no good philosophical grounds, rather it’s the assumption underlying most schools, forever unanalyzed, but that Natures themselves have long been the object of ridicule, “essences,” indeed. Human Nature, like AST, is considered “observable,” but the first part, the essence, obviously can’t be. That is only an ancient and much loved circular bit of nonsense. AST, in the real, relativistic world, begins with no such embarrassing error, requires none. Inasmuch as directions exist in nature, “Natures,” cannot.

Jeff

June 25th., 2022