I know that humans are the only type of species that are suitable to manage the earth but it does not make them the right species!
Apparently not.
Did we ever think that we would be living in a world where it is life-threatening to go our side and I am not talking about terrorists or any other Hollywood science fiction movie scenario?
There’s a lot of bad news out there but this is not a death sentence.
It’s time to save the world. ” We can use it as we wish”
No one owns the earth. No one has the right to do whatever they want.
We’re not the only thing that lives here, nor are we more important in any way.
We cannot use the world as we please as our actions are endangering not just us but other species.
Our Earth was meant to be lived on in union with its Ecosystems and we cannot allow that to be broken.
The Coronavirus ( Covid 19 ) is illuminating what is wrong with our world.
So our most crucial life questions are:
What Kind of World Do We Want to Leave to Our Children?
Whatever your interest — whether it’s the environment, health care, poverty, or education — there are simple steps each of us can take to make life better not just for someone in our own community.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” now needs an Earth Declaration.
Here are the top six of my non-legal binding the goals.
Use Global Warming to Solve Global Warming.
Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts to protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss.
Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development.
Sustainable Development Goals which will take years for a critical mass of governments to actually rally behind.
The allocation of resources to fight climate change and other environmental issues over the next decade can be achieved by making a profit for profit sake pay. ( See the previous post on a 0.05% World Aid Commission. How it could be implemented so the costs are spread fairly)
End poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Global poverty. Reduce inequality within and among countries. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
Expand access to clean drinking water, green energy.
Artificial Intelligence and Automation.
The 2020s sounds like such a radical futuristic decade however to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development requires a coherent and plausible conception of social justice. Abasic income, a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.
Stop the sale of arms.
The estimate of the total value of the global arms trade in 2017 was at least $95 billion.* However, the true figure is likely to be higher. On any given day at any given moment in your life, there are at least 15 wars and armed conflicts actively going on all around the world — even if you’re only hearing about a few of them on the news.
There are an estimated 11-12 million refugees in the world today with between 12-24 million Internally Displaced Persons.
Electoral Reform with Citizens’ Assemblies.
These aren’t just focus groups or consultations though but for the members to engage in serious, informed reflection on important policy matters with people they may never normally meet.
As Hubert Reeves ( Canadian-French Astrophysicist) say’s, ” Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and Destroys a Visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshipping “
Feel free to have idea sex between your ideas and mine so we can come up with even better ideas. It’s a way of saying: “We agree that these are the world’s top priorities right now.”
You don’t have to belive but it helps for something to be true.
Our modern society often seems geared towards quick fixes, superficial relationships, material things.
We are bombarded with advertising and social media images but below this superficial level of experience, there are deeper truths.
The problem of determining the truth in current events (and in other areas) when we’re faced with conflicting views from thousands of media and Internet sources seems insurmountable. Does this make sense? Is it likely?
While accepting that no one is going to get everything right all the time without the truth aiming for equality is a recipe for disappointment.
So we enter into our search for truth by asking these vital questions:
Is truth the property of verbal and written language, or is it now visual and as such by-passes the chaotic problem of human perception and interpretation?
Or is truth assumed to exist in an abstract realm of correctly conceived ideas?
Or is the truth the true knowledge of things as they are now, as they have been in the past, and as they will be in the future?
What does it mean to know the truth?
The most valuable asset you can have is trusting but to have trust it must be true?
Pragmatic proofs are paraded daily on TV and Social media which are both promoted by unregulated platforms with unchallenged Fake News making convincing claims to “knowing.”
Truth used to be conceived as a property of accurately stated words or accurately conceived ideas that correctly characterize world realities like the Corna virus outbreak that might turn out to be the modern-day catalyst to defining the truth.
Let’s start with death as it has a way of concreating the mind.
It is undeniable or is it.
We can’t know anything for certain, so the truth is in need of a God.
Without the Ressurection, Christianity would not exist.
We can’t imagine X being simultaneously true and false in the same manner. Another word if something is true, it’s not simultaneously false in the same way.
How to “prove” it.
All truth is empirically or scientifically testable.
There are no eyewitnesses who watched Big Bang so the assumption that something came from nothing is propositional truth. It has been the big question facing humanity since mankind crawled from the primordial ooze – where did the universe come from?
If we consider the hypothetical proposition of the impact of finding life on another planet or it arriving on this planet it will not prove anyone theological system right or wrong, so our confused view of what is true will remain.
For an example of this is.
If by deduction reasoning, verified against observed facts penguins exist.
But put another way, the claim “penguins exist” is itself a penguin.
That said if someone just refuses to acknowledge logic, it ends all rational discourse. You can’t logically prove anything to someone who denies logic.
So deduction depends upon the nature of assumptions.
These assumptions are not applicable universally because the premises from which they are deduced may not hold good at all time and places.
There is a part of the world that we can’t see.
Quantium Maths is a realm of reality that doesn’t consist of material things but of non-material forms. Quantum physics brings us a new kind of reality, provides us with direct suggestions of how we can live in accordance with the numinous realm of the universe.
But the meaning and purpose of our nature are anchored in the numinous realm of reality, not virtual reality. We usually take our thinking for granted, and the thoughts in our mind tell us a lot of things, but they say nothing about where they are coming from!
The word, “consciousness” derives from the Latin, “con” and “sciencia”, and it means a state of “knowing together” what is true and not true.
There is no plural form because there is only one consciousness.
Our concepts of truth evolve in the same way in which our bodies evolve.
For some reason, in our history, worldviews have always been accompanied by threats.
We believe that the evolution of concepts and their understanding is the true function of biological evolution. It is impossible to know, whether we are evolving with the cosmic mind, or whether it is merely our mind that has to evolve to a better understanding of a non-evolving cosmic order.
We are left with verifiable truth taking many paths based on observations which become intellectual toys that the real world may forget in the intellectual gymnastics and mathematical treatment of the observations.
The principle of noncontradiction cannot be established scientifically only by a witness.
Once you concede that *an* absolute truth exists, a whole slew of truth statements come with it:
It can’t be absolutely true since that would create a contradiction:
So if you remove all religious beliefs it is very easy subconsciously to absorb the truth.
An ascending process” in which facts are collected, arranged and then general conclusions are drawn in which we arrive at a generalisation on the basis of particular observed facts. This process is realistic because it is based on facts and explains to them as they actually are. But it can only show that the hypothesis is not inconsistent with the known facts.
In reality, the collection of data is not illuminating unless it is related to a hypothesis.
Either because it is committed to religion being false (e.g., they want to live a sinful lifestyle, so they need to convince themselves that God isn’t real, or at least, worth obeying), or because they’re too proud to admit defeat, or because they’re not really that interested in investigating the issue deeply, or simply because they don’t see things the same way that you do.
The narrower the problem on the basis of logical reasoning the truer it becomes verified by observation.
The penguin stands verified. It does not need a witness or scientifically proven.
But truth relies on the axiom that things are either true or false: things that are false cannot be true, and things that are true cannot be false.
There exists absolute and knowable truth, outside of the realm of the natural sciences, and not subject to empirical and scientific testing.
All scientific knowledge is built upon a bed of metaphysical propositions that cannot be established scientifically. Where experiment is practically impossible, abstraction and analysis afford the only means of escape from those which complicate the problem so much.
So many people hold wrong opinions simply because they’ve never thought deeply on the subject. And our culture is absolutely toxic with wrongheaded philosophical and religious views and now false news.
I won’t say you are wrong if you won’t say I am. The argument depends totally on the rules of the logic game. Unfortunately because of Social media, our intellects are falling.
We established the truth of the claim by the witness and not those who hide behind logically incoherent arguments removing themselves from the field of logical discussion.
The only thing to do (I presume) is to attempt to lure them back by showing that they’ve transgressed logic and are simply appealing to emotion?
Assuming that the public square should be devoid of religion; assuming that faith is irrational; etc. “Absolute truth exists” is absolutely true.
On the other hand, no one can know anything for certain, is sceptic’s absurdity.
This statement is a broad (self-refuting) metaphysical and epistemological claim.
To achieve a trusted world it requires a compromise of the cultures.
At this point in our analysis, we might ask:
Does it all matter? Why should we care?
Our answer is the belief that happiness in this life can be found only by understanding the spiritual background of the universe, and by living in accordance with it.
This means that we have to recognize the invisible background of reality and accept the importance of spirit in our life. Denying the transcendent aspects of our nature can lead to serious problems for our physical health and spiritual well being.
The truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth or someone may claim the right to tell it for you.
Our task isn’t the task of slaves to technology, who have to serve their creator.
“If Materialism is false”, writes Imants Baruss “then what is true?”
What is true these days is that we economizing it.
Let people believe what they want, as long as those beliefs aren’t leading to hurtful or unlawful actions.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chuck in the bin.
We must reclaim reality if not reality will reclaim us.
In a profound and globally interconnected world all our actions and in-actions matter. Nothing on this planet happens in a bubble.
Honesty is truth and the truth sets us free.
To be honest, everything you do directly affects everyone around you and everyone on the planet; and not just what you do, but also what you think, say, feel and believe.
We must all become completely responsible for ourselves and the global society we live in, and especially for all the problems that our global society has created and perpetuated. We don’t solve the problems of the world by blaming others, punishing them or shifting responsibility on to them or others who appear to be in charge, including governments, countries, religions, political systems, economic systems or anything else.
Perhaps with the Corona Virus, we are just beginning to learn this long and hard lesson.
What does it take to be honest?
To be free from deceit.
William Shakespeare ” No legacy is so rich as honesty”
Although often invoked, the concept of honesty is quite tricky to characterize in a world that is driven by inequality, inflicted by false news-Social media, plundered by unregulated profit-seeking algorithms, torn apart by wars, facing mass climate immigration, undermined by world institutions that are out of date.
George Grant, the Canadian philosopher, said ” “values language is an obscuring language for morality, used when the idea of purpose has been destroyed.”
The German philosopher Nietzsche saw all this last century but in all disciplines and at all levels (judges in law, ethics professors in medicine, university professors in a host of disciplines, politicians in all parties and, alas, religious leaders in all traditions) have not realized this point and continue to speak about “values” when they often seem to be discussing something they believe is true.
What is interesting is, these things are not simply, “you have yours, I have mine.” They are not values. They are a world away from “values.” We cannot say, “you have your courage and I have mine.”
I say we “cannot have a meaningful notion of “tolerance” “respect” or “dignity” or “honesty” based on an incoherent base of “values.”
That is why we no longer have any confidence that there are any shared purposes for human life.
To tell the truth is one thing, but the whole truth requires far more detail and doesn’t allow for the omission of anything, including the thought process associated with action or conclusion.
Despite its centrality in ordinary life as well as ethics and philosophy of psychology, honesty is not a major trend of research in the contemporary philosophical debate.
We have become so complacent that the conduct of elected governments is questionable.
Telling the truth — the whole truth — is, at times, practically and theoretically impossible as well as morally not required or even wrong.
Hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty are character traits so deeply embedded in our Political worlds that we no longer even take notice.
But honesty means more than not lying it is the language of values.
It is not “imposing values” but “teaching in truth”
These day’s honesty is on an entirely different level.
As we have seen with Julian Assange revealing what is actually happening can be less than ideal to the ego-mind.
If honesty is not telling the whole truth, what is it?
That is indeed a major question, who in this world of false news is to say which particulars are relevant?
What we need is a TRANSPARENT society, where all the values and virtues of democracy and the free market are really at the service of all of us.
This is what democracy is supposed to be.
But this concept is so far from reality, even in the perceptions of the people in the most consolidated political democracies, that we really need to question what is wrong with our society.
Not just changing this single moment in time but rather gifting all future generations to come.
We Are Living in “The Time of Great Awakening!”
What will our descendants in 200 years say about us?
That our lives were terrible because our cars could not fly, our computers had no protobio-chips and so could not think like humans, our planes could not fly around the planet in 30 minutes?
I think not.
The honest truth is that it is too complicated.
All the virtues are shared as objectively true but they are personal in how they apply to us as persons.
Does it even make sense to say that most of us are not honest and also not dishonest?
We assume, that most of us go through our day with the best intention of being truthful. All our conduct, in a sense, hinges on justice, wisdom/prudence, temperance/moderation, and courage/fortitude.
Only those who can face themselves, in all their own peculiarity, seem to be capable of developing a persona that is true to the self — hence, authentic if not honest.
It appears that much of our learning and education is to learn what the word means.
It is not simply or at all a question of “you have yours, I have mine”?
The day we will be able to push our evolution towards a point to achieve these goals, these values, that day and only that day, we can ask ourselves again: “Is our world we live in really better?”
To be honest, as this world goes its one truth at a time at the point of a gun that
makes honesty into a disposition?
Consequently, we cannot order any human action towards an end, because all means are related to ends.
Is honesty genetic?
Honesty comes with a different lens, and it has a knack of revealing certain truths and they come with different levels of discomfort attached to them. So there comes a point at which honesty becomes something else.
That something else is survival.
The kind of world we are living in, there are economic/social benefits of dishonesty. Given this, and the concept of natural selection, will the truth gene(s), gradually become extinct?
It may take years of science to discover.
As the man-made “lie-gene” is still blessed by every government in every nation.
WE’VE LONG BEEN TOLD OUR GENES ARE OUR DESTINY AND THERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS THE GENETIC CODE CAN BE ALTERED.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Our egos are the parts of our identities created by external influences to boost their own sense of self.
posting about it all over social media. which closes us off from the world
It’s pandering to a market the world seems to want right now.
Were sold algorithms that only add to the materialism.
An honest action is that with no intent of harm.
One primary reason is the influence of social media despise the truth from life,
can’t get away with lying
There are a few ways to tell if you’ve fallen victim to this superficial, materialistic spirituality. We’re told we need stuff in order to be the best, but no one tells us there is no best.
It is widely assumed by the general public that humanity is “progressing” and that we are better both physically and mentally than our predecessors were. Of course, this is true for some of us but for 6 billion of us on 2$ a day I doubt they would agree.
A person’s conception of truth is deeply intertwined with their conception of reality and truth isn’t actually divorced from reality. Science is dependent on truthfulness.
Few of us these day’s has the time or resources to check all of the news we confront on a daily basis. Instead, we rely on other methods of assessing truth, but can we or should we trust the source?
As the saying goes, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
In a world where facts are under siege, credentialed sources are proving more important than ever.
We are getting our news from platforms, run by Facebook, Google, Twitter, Messanger, etc including other social media sites and search engines, but can we place our trust in those platforms.
The profession of undermining truth has been in existence for decades. For much of recorded history, the truth was rooted in scholasticism now it’s rooted in a capitalist haze where political correctness and social justice including warfare have descended from the ivory tower of the rich infiltrating tech, business, healthcare, and governments.
The quest for facts these days is now governed by disinterested Google algorithms that trade us, accuracy for efficiency, creating a “spiral of silence,” in which everyone believes that everyone else believes something but no one actually believes it.
It seems that we accept truthiness instead of requiring truth.
As a result, humankind is losing mental capacity to know the truth and we are living in an era of rationality inequality.
For example, voters act on issues that don’t affect them personally and are under no pressure to inform themselves or defend their positions.
People vote as if rooting for sports teams, encouraged by the media, which treat politics as a horse race, encouraging zero-sum competition rather than a clarification of character and policy.
So what is happening?
History is littered with the bending or inverting of truth by people in power has long been consequential, so the recent prominence of “fake news.” is not a new development. The belief that fake news is displacing the truth itself needs to be examined for its truth.
The implication is that we may as well give up on reason and truth and just fight the bad guys’ lies and intimidation with lies and intimidation of our own.
“Social media.”
Not long ago many intellectuals deplored the lack of democratic access to mass media.
Now a few media corporations, in cahoots with the government, “manufactured consent” with their oligopoly over the means of production and dissemination of ideas.
We used to say, freedom of the press belongs to those who own, one no longer true.
Social Media with it’s like algorithms are now fueling, accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that can be weaponized: since everyone reviles these bigotries, they can be used to demonize adversaries, which in turn spreads a terror of being demonized. It has become the place where one can express heterodox opinions without fear of being silenced or fired.
A network of pluralistic ignorance enforced by denunciation mobs.
So when it comes to intolerant repression of non-leftist ideas, don’t blame the Millennials or the iGens because unregulated Social Media is now blazing out of control abetted in part by government subsidies and lack of will to regulate.
People gravitating to people who are like them.
Social media held out the promise of giving a voice to the people, unfortunately, is making us dumber.
It is true to say that the network dynamics of social media are still poorly understood, but they do not yet host the mechanisms of vetting and reviewing that are necessary for true beliefs to bubble up to prominence from the turbid pools of self-presentation, group solidarity, and pluralistic ignorance.
We project the best sides of our lives through social media but revile real vulnerability.
So we are living in a post-truth world” true?
If your answer is “yes” then the answer is “no” because you’ve just evaluated the statement in an evidentiary manner, so evidence still matters and facts still matter.
But humans are fundamentally irrational – No.
If humans were truly irrational, who specified the benchmark of rationality against which humans don’t measure up? How did they conduct the comparison? Why should we believe them? Indeed, how could we understand them?
We did not evolve with the truth-augmenting technologies that have been invented in recent millennia and centuries, such as writing, quantitative datasets, scientific methodology, and specialized expertise. We evolved with the reality of the thought of what is true.
We don’t believe in reason; we use reason but as soon as you try to argue that we should believe things by any route other than reason, you’ve lost the argument, because you’ve appealed to reason.
That is why a defence of reason is unnecessary, perhaps even impossible. The very fact that one is examining the validity of reason shows that one is committed to reason.
This is the point where it gets somewhat complicated.
We build mental models of the world around us that allow us to explain, predict, and control things to our advantage.
Algorithms know this by monitoring our lives and consultancy firms that specialize in defending products from tobacco to industrial chemicals that harm the public (that have and are with us since the dawn of Capitalism) are manipulating the market place for profit while ensuring that the truth stays buried.
So our reasoning is contaminated by false news.
Social media is a major source of these falsehoods coupled with peculiarities in human behaviour on social media, make it easy for fake news to spread. Twitter, Facebook you name them.
“Political” fake news spread three times faster than other kinds, and the top 1 per cent of retweeted fake news regularly diffused to at least 1,000 people and sometimes as many as 100,000.
Out of all of the news you see reported, how much of it do you believe is made up or fake news?
Around 40% with 70% per cent more likely than true news to receive a retweet.
While the political repercussions of fake news are quite obvious, the phenomenon it depends on how the information is presented and how rationality is defined.
The powers of inference for example.
Rational inference, scepticism, and debate are in our nature but set against false news that is normalizing the production of alternative facts are a project long in the making.
Politicians—two in particular—lies a lot. But politicians have always lied. They say that in war, truth is the first casualty, and that can be true of political war as well.
THERE’S A TON OF MISINFORMATION OUT THERE, AND WE’RE NOT OKAY LETTING IT GO UNCHECKED.
Why is the truth important?
We all need to know the truth if we want to be able to behave rationally.
Spreading disinformation here, hiding evidence of harm there, undermining authorities evidence can change people’s minds. Internet discussion groups, in which these ideas harden and grow more extreme in the absence of critical engagement.
Group loyalty is an underestimated source of irrationality in the public sphere, especially when it comes to politicized scientific issues like evolution and climate change.
Forecasting is no longer the dark art of pundits, gurus, it is big data and everyday fact-checking with Google has and is been revolutionized.
When people are confronted with their own ignorance of the facts, they become more epistemically humble about their opinions.
Unwelcome news is automatically rebranded fake news.
In the end, we are mere mortals but has the day of rationality-promoting norms and institutions passed?
The causes are complex, but it’s exhausting to live in a society where asking for help equals failure.
“Life before Google.”
Nothing can reverse the damage that has been done during our own generation, and some of this regression in truthfulness in the last 50 years is a paradoxical byproduct of the fantastic progress, we have made inequality.
From climate breakdown to air and water pollution, Co2 emissions, natural disasters, the spread of the coronavirus virus, ongoing wars, our media watchdogs that don’t know what they are watching only using them to boost their viewing ratings.
Something important about the way we conceive of truth in our daily lives is needed if we are to tackle the difficulty assessing the reliability of the information that we find on the internet.
To achieve this these platforms with profit-seeking algorithms need to put their money where their mouths are.
Considering the technological boom are humans becoming smarter or more stupid?
The art of creating scientific disinformation is now at a new level of the tricks reanalysing results to reach different conclusions and hiring people prepared to rig methodologies to produce funders’ desired result.
The truth of history constitutes its whole value.
Enriching a favoured few at the expense of the great majority of mankind will be the last lie. The inconvenient truths will inevitably come to light.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
The films served to both promote products and a vision of America undergirded by chemicals and synthetic materials. We learn the industry was proud to produce insecticides, PCBs, vinyl and other materials and toxins later identified as environmental toxins.