More Thoughts About Isms

Thinking about isms, one of the obvious questions: is there a way to evaluate where an ism falls on a scale of function / dysfunction. The first question is what are the metrics for this evaluation. Here is a first pass of measures that may be useful measures to gauge the health of an ism:

• Is it oriented to the past, present, or future? If we agree that we are part of an evolving, changing universe, then it seems that a future orientation is critical. Walking while looking backwards at the past as our authority is prone to serious accidents of running into obstacles as they always seem to arise in this ever changing context. Being focused on the present, smelling the flowers and enjoying the moment is also prone to accidents. If we agree that on a long journey, as this universe seems to be, then survival and thriving entails preparing for the future to the best of our abilities. For example, we prepare for winter by making sure we will have heating and sustenance for that season.
• How large is the circle of inclusion? Does the ism create a tribe in which most members of our species is outside our tribe? This is a serious dysfunction. One of the lessons from our understanding of complex systems and the very basic evolution / trajectory of the universe, is that diversity is critical for the stability, resilience, and viability of an ecology. 
• Is it an evolving ism?  Does it evolve with us and our understanding of us and our place in this universe? There is a feedback loop in the evolutionary process. Many factors causes change, including the entity in question. These changes, with awareness and acknowledgment of them, are feedback that change / evolve the "ism" structurally. By structurally is meant everything from the basic axioms / presuppositions of an ism to its rules / policies, perspective, ...
• Is it an open ism? Does it allow membership to all? And in its tenets, does it allow both joining and leaving without side effects?

By these rather basic and simple measure, most (if not all) of our current isms are very dysfunctional isms. This includes almost all the religions either in their basis or their practice or both. The same dysfunction applies to other isms such as nationalism, communism, capitalism. fascism, totalitarianism,  atheism, anarchism, ...

How do we go about creating an ism that creates a healthy, resilient, antifragile, and viable ecology for our species with the two above metrics?  Are there other metrics that we need for this evaluation?

A side issue to note is that an "ism" proposes a causal chain with a first cause. That first cause is a reflection of the level / stage of development of the creator of the ism. Ism followers often take their notion of first cause as "absolute truth", rather than a window into their own level of development and understanding.

Thoughts About Isms

Some thoughts from reading "The Portable Atheist" an anthology of essays about that topic. Sometimes it helps to look at the larger context of a phenomenon rather than the phenomenon itself.

Semantic Baggage

"You can't step in the same river twice" according to Heraclitus is an example of a statement at a memetic level that bring a lot of invisible baggage with it. One can immediately engage cognitive functions to show how true it is. However, it invisibly brings a world view of constant change and flux that is at odds with a lot of our daily experiences. These experiences can be from our address remains the same, our relationships don't vary all the time, we don't lose our skills, ..... There are interesting philosophical roots for this notion. An innocent sounding "wise" phrase brings with it an entire world view which we may end up espousing without even realizing that we have pulled in to a semantic gravity well. Another way to think about is that such statements bring with them a frame that we enter without often realizing that we are not in a different "reality" / perspective / worldview.

Presuppositions and Logic Errors

If we have the presupposition that the world is a fair and just place, then it follows that what happens has to be cast in that light. The victim then has a causal relationship in what happened to them. The victim has to be responsible (in part?) for what happened to them, otherwise the presupposition is invalid. And since the presupposition is generally invisible and out of consciousness, victim blaming is the result. There is some psychological research on this phenomena.

Individual / Group Fractal

There seems to be a deep fractal pattern in behavior of an individual vs an individual as part of a group. We can see this from particles on up. A hydrogen atom by itself has different behavior characteristics than the same atom as part of an H₂O complex. Can we then fractally generalize this to: and individual person's characteristics / behavior pattern is different when that same person is part of a group, tribe, organization, nation, ...

More Thoughts About Moral Foundations

There are some earlier thoughts on Haidt's Moral Foundations model.Take the moral foundations model with the six foundations: The six foundations are Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Sanctity/degradation, Authority/subversion. It creates a characteristic "personality type" for an individual. This creates a bit of a "flat earth" model of a person's type. If we include the integral perspective, then people are at various level / stages of development. So, a conservative person can be at an ethnocentric level or an integral level. It seems to me that how a "conservative" at these different levels would behave, could / would be very different.

Thoughts About Moral Foundations Model

There are some earlier thoughts on Haidt's Moral Foundations model. It occurred to me that in a number of social science models, there is no linkage to biological structures as possible bases for the proposed model. Take the moral foundations model with the six foundations: The six foundations are Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression, Loyalty/betrayal, Sanctity/degradation, Authority/subversion.

Pitfall in the Learning Process

When we are learning something new, e.g., a language, a programming language, math, ... we are in an open receptive mode. The syntax and grammar of what we are learning is often being assimilated into the neurology  past critical thinking filters or questions about the presuppositions built into the syntax and grammar of what we are learning. That syntax and grammar then become filters for what we perceive. They also limit the expressibility of what we perceive by the constraints of that same syntax and grammar.

Fairness as a value

Came across this article about how fairness is perceived differently by conservatives vs liberals. One way to parse the difference is that liberals want to satisfy needs, e.g., hunger for the poor (provide aid where it is needed). For conservatives, this is modified by whether those getting aid are deserving of  the aid, i.e., are they / have they worked, contributed, ... to deserve any aid.

Rethinking Free Will and Agency

The question of free will is often phrased as whether we make our own choices or physics, biology, psychology, ..., i.e., external factors, determine all / some of our choices. There is a presupposition in these phrasing of the question - that we are agents acting on a passive environment. Another way to look at what is going on is as a dance. A dance between us and the context we are in. We change the context and the context changes us. The combination drives what dance steps we can do next and which dance steps are not possible because of the nature, geometry, structure of us and the context we are in.

Spectral Thoughts

Attended a talk on Laws of Life from an astrobiological perspective, i.e., are there basic laws / principles that can help us determine life from non-life. This may also shed some light on what forms of life are possible. It occurred to me that is a binary view of life - life and non-life. What if it is really a spectrum - there is a spectrum of complexity, capability, functionality that is arising. Life happens to be one that is past a certain threshold with emergent properties that we find particularly appealing as we happen to be of this form. One can look at universal evolution from energy, to particles, to atoms, to heavy elements, to replicating molecules, life, ...... as a spectrum.

This bring up an interesting question, what is next after life as we know it -  higher levels of complexity, capability, functionality ?   Access to space, time, matter, in ways we can't yet imagine?

Thinking Modes - Spectral, Fractal, ...

I while back I posted on Spectral Thinking. There are numbers of other who are also talking about spectral thinking - 1, 2, 3, .. Continuing the exploration of the modes of thinking, it occurred to me that there is also fractal thinking. This notion was brought on by reading this post. The basic notion that I got from the post is that we are victoms (in a sense) of propaganda machines such as religions, current education systems, cultural myths, ... And that these narratives keep us in an unhealthy geometry of being.

Just as spectral thinking moves us from binary categories to gradients with some form of distribution across that gradient, fractal thinking is about seeing the same pattern at different scales of existence / being. The geometry of one up / one down scales all the way from sub-atomic particles to our behaviors. When two particles unite, each gives up some of its properties. Typically, one side gives up more than the other. When atoms combine to form molecules by sharing electrons, losing electrons, ..., one atom gives up and changes more than the other. These forms of "inequality" are a fractal pattern at different scales of existence.

Types of hierarchies

Ken Wilber makes an interesting distinction between types of hierarchies:

• Growth hierarchies are means of growth. They transcend and include, e.g., particles, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, ...
• Dominator hierarchies are means of oppression. 

Original distinction seems to be from Riane Eisler in The Chalice and the Blade.

Engine Problems vs Crime Scene Problems

Anand Giridharadas makes an interesting distinction about types of problems:

• Engine problems are problems that need some adjustment to the engine to fix the problem. Problems such as mismatched skills in an organization, different interface plugs for the same function (common standards)
• Crime scene problems are problems that have a history that caused them. You need to find out who did what to whom, why, when, where, ... A lot of our social problems are crime scene problems. For example, race issues, poverty, health care, drug problems, ....
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