Introduction
In many of my posts I speak of legitimacy, of achieving mainstream adoption, about growth, about thinking beyond merely today's market cap, today's activist concerns. Some may not know this but I'm very much a supporter of transhumanist ideals and one of the big issues is dealing with the current sociopolitcal climate which promotes ignorance. The current environment promotes ignorance, diminishes science, and this is a big problem because when faced with a question about whether or not to fund research into anti-aging we cannot even determine (due to politics) whether aging is a disease.
The Age of Enlightenment was critical to the rapid technical progression of society from which we owe much of our success. Science as we know it came about due to the Age of Enlightenment.
French historians traditionally place the Enlightenment between 1715, the year that Louis XIV died, and 1789, the beginning of the French Revolution. Some recent historians begin the period in the 1620s, with the start of the scientific revolution. Les philosophes (French for 'the philosophers') of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffee houses, and printed books and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Church, and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, trace their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment.[7]
The Age of Enlightenment is associated in history with the Illuminati. The Illuminati in history had the agenda of promoting the Enlightenment. The Illuminati basically were the opposite of ignorant and promoted the opposite of ignorance.
The Illuminati (plural of Latin illuminatus, "enlightened") is a name given to several groups, both real and fictitious. Historically, the name usually refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society founded on 1 May 1776. The society's goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power. "The order of the day," they wrote in their general statutes, "is to put an end to the machinations of the purveyors of injustice, to control them without dominating them".[1] The Illuminati—along with Freemasonry and other secret societies—were outlawed through edict, by the Bavarian ruler, Charles Theodore, with the encouragement of the Roman Catholic Church, in 1784, 1785, 1787 and 1790.[2] In the several years following, the group was vilified by conservative and religious critics who claimed that they continued underground and were responsible for the French Revolution.
Anti-aging research
We all are forced to grow old and as we do, our healthspan diminishes. We lose our abilities to do what we did in our youth, our ability to think is diminished with age, our muscle mass goes down, our immune system weakens, and in many cases we consider this to just be aging. The anti-aging research movement is tasked with the mission to pursue research to identify the biomarkers of age.
Today we assume that if you're a certain number of years old that you are a certain age. This is inaccurate because not all humans age at the same rate. We do not yet understand exactly how old any particular person is and we don't even know for sure what causes aging although there are various theories. Any young person alive right now who does not want to grow old has a rational incentive to want to support any research into delaying, slowing, or suspending the aging process. If aging is seen as a disease then it is easier to fund research into the prevention of loss of healthspan at the very least.
Decision science
The science of making good decisions is also under developed. Decision making is critical for anyone in any profession. A doctor, a judge, a jury, a voter, we all have to make increasingly critical yet complex decisions yet we don't have access to good tools from which to do it. In order to bring about a new Age of Enlightenment we need to improve the ability of the ordinary person to make sagacious decisions under time constraints. In essence, the average individual in the future will have to make much more complicated decisions under much more vicious time constraints than we deal with today. These tough decisions which currently require in some cases years of contemplation will have to be made in minutes by people in the near future. Artificial intelligence in the form of intelligent agents or decision support assistants can help with this process and for collaborative decision making this is an area of active research but will be critical.
Knowledge generation and diffusion
Knowledge generation and diffusion is also a major problem. New knowledge is currently so difficult to generate that really it's mainly the work of Phd students and researchers. To generate new knowledge requires access to all of the old knowledge humans generated in history. By building on the old knowledge from previous generations of humans, the future generations of individuals will be able to create new knowledge. Knowledge is something we arrive at to explain some phenomena and science is part of the process for generating new knowledge. The problem of diffusion of knowledge is that most of the knowledge or ideas being generated don't effectively spread to the global population in a timely manner. The knowledge tends to be centralized, and in cryptospace that is just as much the case as anywhere else which limits the generation of new knowledge.
Tauchain + Agoras - knowledge generation, knowledge diffusion, collaborative decision making with AI support
Tauchain + Agoras as promised by Ohad Asor will be the first serious attempt by any team in cryptospace to try to solve the problems of knowledge generation, knowledge diffusion, and collaborative decision making. Knowledge, ideas, facts, can all be stored as triples on a giant graph. Subject + predicate + object is all you need to store any fact, any knowledge, in a coherent manner. Tauchain itself handles the meta language element of knowledge so that machines can parse (make sense) of the shared knowledge base while humans and machines both can contribute to the shared knowledge base as well as make use of it. This shared knowledge base concept is key to ushering a new Age of Enlightenment and Tauchain is really the only serious attempt at doing so.
Lunyr speaks of creating a shared knowledge base but their attempt seems based on economic incentives rather than by technical means. It also seems to be mostly humans interacting by economic incentives so their attempt I predict will not scale because machines (AI) cannot make sense of their knowledge base unless they have an appropriate meta language for all to understand. Tau (TML) offers the meta language which is the core component making a shared knowledge base for all (including AI) possible.
EOS, iExec, Ethereum, Tezos, and Intelligent Agents
EOS, iExec, Ethereum, etc, can all benefit from using intelligent agents. Intelligent agents can access a shared knowledge base from Tauchain for instance and bridge the knowledge through token exchange between platforms. So Agoras for example could have a token which can be bought and sold or exchanged for any other token and the Agoras token can represent the total knowledge of the shared knowledge base as well as other resources necessary to process that knowledge.
EOS in particular has the performance niche making it great for mainstream purposes. To do the decentralized Reddit, decentralized Youtube, to do the virtual worlds and ARGs, we will require high performance. EOS will be fantastic for performance as it's built for performance while making the tradeoffs in other areas. If EOS finds it's niche then it can provide the high performance assets for other platforms including Tau based apps.
Tezos can potentially fill a niche as well because it has a functional smart contract language. This language will be of benefit because for financial purposes a functional language is actually preferable over many other languages and Wall Street already uses OCaml which is similar to the language chosen by the Tezos team. So for Wall Street Tezos could find a niche for high reliability smart contracts designed to trade billions in assets in a safe manner. For financial purposes Tezos could have advantages and could be useful for providing funding or even ICOs.
Currently Ethereum has the momentum and iExec can enable the development of intelligent agents on Ethereum. The problem is while iExec can work on Ethereum it will not be as sophisticated as what will be possible on Tauchain. Mainly Ethereum has first mover advantage and a legitimacy hype advantage over all other projects mentioned. Ethereum will go to proof of stake just like EOS and Tezos are from the start, but and will likely be in a dominant position for years going into the future.
Out of all of these platforms it is Tauchain which will enable the best in terms of intelligent agents (AI) but for the most part it is possible to simply in a technical way, "outsource" or "license" the capabilities to other networks using an API, or using token exchange, to allow for Ethereum users to get the benefits of AI on Tau, or allow for Tau developers to raise funds via an ICO on Tezos or Ethereum, etc. And of course for very high performance where you need to build it quickly then EOS will work great and can bring in the masses.
Conclusion
If all projects work together toward a goal of bringing about a new Age of Enlightenment then we can all achieve much more collectively than we can separately. We all benefit from better science, from better knowledge generation, from better knowledge diffusion, whether it means higher quality research for building future platforms and apps, or better designs due to AI assistance in the design process, we can all benefit with better science and engineering. We also can begin to focus on bigger and much more universal agendas such as anti-aging research, curing diseases. While not everyone is an anarchist, or cypherpunk, or hacker, the vast majority of people do not want to die from heart disease or cancer which are the two leading causes of death. While our governments tell us that terrorism is a big issue and uses this to support massive funding budgets, the actual risks statistically speaking show that 100% of us will die from aging if we don't do anything to either suspend the process or slow it down, and those who do will usually die from heart disease or cancer.
Let's form an alliance to bring about a new Age of Enlightenment across all viable platforms. The platforms I mentioned represent platforms which meet my criteria for being viable for these purposes but as an individual you may form your own opinions or in the future we may use better tools to collaboratively determine a more precise and logical set of criteria. The point here is that those among us who do not want to die, who do not want to lose our health, who do not want to see our loved ones die and or lose their health, can all agree to support any technology which would help make possible the suspension or and reversal of aging.
A new Age of Enlightenment means putting a focus on proper science, on a new and measurable ethics, on effective altruism, on engineering a better quality and greater quantity of life. Beyond this we can debate but in order to use this technology for good we need to focus on transcending our limitations, whether it be involuntary ignorance, aging, diseases, etc.
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati
- http://www.tauchain.org/
- http://www.eos.io
- http://www.tezos.com
- http://www.iex.ec
- https://futurism.com/is-aging-a-disease-one-medical-expert-thinks-so/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4037311/
- http://dailysignal.com/2017/05/09/growing-problem-fake-science/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience
- http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/2016-anti-science-trump-pence-flint-nra-hurricane-matthew/
Working together vs Greed....the classic tug of war!
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You can get more of what you want long term if you have help from others. I would argue long term it's more greedy to work together, depending on the context of course. In the short term if you live for today and don't think much about your future? In the case you think about today, then working with others might not make as much sense because you might not have the time to build relationships with others in order to get what you want right now.
It also depends on what you want. If you just want money then you can get money. If you want wealth in multiple forms beyond just having wealth on paper then you do need cooperation and collaboration from others. If you want wealth in knowledge or in healthspan for example then you are very limited in how much knowledge you can generate and you're not going to have the time to study every aspect of your own health like a doctor can.
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Agree...but it's not about what I or you want. It's about what these companies want. My perception as a pessimistic person is that greed will win out. But, hopefully you are right...time will tell.
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Companies owned by shareholders which means in many cases we can own them. By owning them we can help determine what they want.
People also are under the influence of other people so individuals have wants which are influenced by their friends.
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Good point, haven't really thought of it that way. Even though most of the cryptos are decentralized, I have never felt like I had much of a say as an investor. It's a different way of thinking.
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Good post - Check out my last message regarding the process of increasing the understanding of the value of life. I'm pointing to the very important idea of heath data monetization.
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This was a very intelligent and well written article.
I am impressed in your attempt to call for a second "Age of Enlightenment" and wholeheartedly agree with you.
I found your last sentence somewhat inspiring.
You make your case eloquently.
This is of course determent upon the strength in our collective efforts, as you also mention.
I beg to the stars and moon that we will find a way to follow our true nature of working as a collective and not individuals. We will accomplish so much more.
You defiantly have a proud follower in me, and of course a strong upvote.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, it was a more then an interesting read.
Lets start the Digital Age of Enlightenment together! //CryptoViking
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Another great article, however the Illuminati's role in the Enlightenment wasn't as significant as you claim. They was a by-product of the Enlightenment which had commenced way before the Illuminati had even formed. They was a new Elite more in line with the times.
Also the illuminati lasted only 10 years , and most of its time was wasted in power struggles . Very few of its members were involved in any of the scientific advancements taking place. Their most significant contribution was probably reforming Freemasonry which in a new form then harboured many Enlightenment figures. Some argue the Illuminati effectively took over Freemasonry since all their conditions were met at the masonic conference of Wilhelmsbad.
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How do you measure significance? I think in terms of clearing the way politically their role was very significant because without their activities there would be sociopolitical barriers. Similar to how cypherpunks clear the way politically for blockchain technology by offering the initial subculture and ideological basis for the development of Bitcoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto wasn't even around for 10 years and look at the impact. A lot can change in society in 10 years. While I'm not a historian and not the best person to examine the impact of the Illuminati, I would not underestimate their impact either. Comparing them to the similar groups of today, I can see how a small group of dedicated individuals can have a very large impact depending on who is in the group.
Very unlikely since Freemasonry is a decentralized network and has no centralized leadership. There are many lodges and while some lodges in France may have been taken over it is unlikely that all lodges all around the world were taken over. Again this is speculation and only a historian on Freemasonry can answer that question. If you can cite a historian source then you can settle this because I don't rely on rumors.
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the cypherpunks came BEFORE the blockchain revolution .
Satoshi Nakamoto was an inventor, lots of the cypherpunks programmers.
the illuminati were an Elite backing the scientific revolution which had already commenced. hardly any of them was a scientist. They invented nothing.
the illuminati are more like the Wiklevoss Brothers, Roger Ver ,Barry Silbert, etc. financial and political muscle behind blockchain adoption. important advocates in influential circuits.
Surely important but ultimately the trains set lose by Satoshi, Vitalik and Dan would be running strong regardless.
Regarding Freemasonry, the Strict Observance was binned after the masonic conference. a new form of freemasonry was created more in line with the demands of the Illuminati. After the conference the Illuminati even became part of the New Eclectic Freemasonry and then this merged into the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and Swedish Rite. Leo Zagami (an insider) says the illuminati in the US are ingrained within the higher degrees of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.
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Do you have any sources on this? I don't know for a fact that Leo Zagami is a trustworthy source or that he is even a Mason. So if he is the best source you have then you have to do better than that.
Historical sources are better, where many historians reach a consensus on a chain of events. Such as it's known fact that Freemasons were some of the founders of the United States based on the consensus of historians. Rumors of meetings behind closed doors and unknown individuals like Leo Zagami aren't what I considered to be good sources of evidence.
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Where did you get that idea that they only lasted 10 years...they still rule behind the scenes with satan as their leader and he is going to use quantum computers to even create human bodies combined with the building blocks of life they can create life and they even mapped this whole world with their 64,000 qubits D-wave computer and know what everything is made out of till the core,that is why they have the hadron collider to collide atoms and when they do they create sort of mandala and with that knowledge they know how to make it..they even know the frequentie our thoughts work on and can maipulte it....so we are in for a ride with these new technologies
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This consist of a two sided argument, a good one and a day one. I used to be so interested in this when I used to see things no one could see , also I could see portals to other dimensions and people would just think I'm crazy
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thanks for your post!
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Amazing knowledge! This is far away from what i know but i do believe in ghost even i have'nt seen one and i dont want to see one...lol
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a remarkable one, thanks for putting this out
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Life isn't going to be the same in a few short years. Thanks for sharing.
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This article is not something that can be read just once. There's so much content in it. I need to read this tonight again. Thank you for this work.
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man dana has the best posts in the entire community.
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Or at the least, tied for the bests.
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I don't know much about all this but I am trying to learn,
please do share a blog about how to be rich in no time ;)
Thank You For you blog and have a blessed day
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Why don't you talk about both the good and the bad things the Age of Enlightenment has brought to us? Or maybe you cannot think of any.
I'm more and more scared by people like you. You are a prime example of an ideologist: you just tell one side of the story and hide (or ignore) the other.
I guess your intentions are good (at least on the conscious level) but the way you extol rationality is quite dangerous.
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What bad are you referring to? I don't know what other side you're referring to but being able to read, write, have an Internet, have cures for diseases, are pretty good. So what bad side of the Enlightenment is relevant to our lives?
To me and in my opinion, rationality is what makes us human. It's our ability to reason at a very high level due to our neo-cortex and frontal lobes which make us distinctly human.
As far as "dangerous" goes, dangerous would assume there is an agenda to keep people ignorant? I suppose I am dangerous to that because I don't desire to remain ignorant nor support any agenda of involuntary ignorance. If self empowerment makes me dangerous then it's the justified kind of dangerous, or at least justifiable to an individualist. Individualism simply means to think for yourself. Rationality, simply means to protect yourself to the best of your ability, to do what you can to give yourself a good life, or a comfortable life, if you desire to have that, and to even improve your environment and those around you so as to have a greater probability that your future self will have a good life.
My intentions for supporting the idea of anti-aging? I'm not enjoying getting old, and would prefer to slow it down. If anyone else feels the same way about that then let's pool our resources toward slowing down a process none of us desire or enjoy. Yes it's very rational, and if you're looking for an ideologically relevant interpretation then you have ethical egoism, you have egoist anarchism, both which inevitably will lead to the same conclusions on anti-aging for those who don't like the idea of getting old.
Rationality is a means to an end. Rationality is useful because it's the key behind effectiveness in whatever it is you do. If it's altruism then effective altruism is simply rational altruism. If it's survival then effective survival most of the time is rational. If it's medicine then evidence based medicine tends to be rational and tends to produce better results than belief centered medicine.
Anyone is free to live their life how they choose. I'm not someone who wants to force or demand anyone become rational if they don't want to. Nor do I demand people give up their beliefs even if their beliefs are incorrect, wrong, ignorant, or proven false. I do not have any fixed beliefs myself, so I'll have to admit that I don't and that anything I believe right now will be completely changed no matter what it is, if the evidence guides me to change it.
References
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Shall I remind you the main events of the 20th century?
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And without rationality, without a new Age of Enlightenment in a decentralized global context, what makes you think we will be able to avoid the possible trajectory with AI being abused by some of the most ignorant people?
AI can be used to help people or not. But I don't think AI is going to automatically be used to help people if people don't save science. Philosophy is important as well and as I said there will be residual effects of augmenting the rationality of individuals in that you'll get more effective ethics.
We already see some of this actually but not enough.
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The implications for my post and response:
So this means I recognize my own ignorance and human limitations. I know I'm biased, I know I'm ignorant, I know I'm flawed, and the only way to overcome my human flaws is by having a process (reason, logic, calculation, measurement) to determine the effectiveness of any belief, concept, process, etc. If I believed something enough to form a hypothesis and test it out, and in the test I find it didn't work? Well it's time for me to update my beliefs!
Belief revision is not easy, but it's necessary. I spend most of my life being wrong and making mistakes and if I cannot revise my beliefs I cannot learn, grow, improve.
References
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You say it yourself, just conveniently forgetting to mention the bad outcomes:
One could say that all that happened in the 20th century is the result of people falling in love with the products of their minds. And yes, this includes events in Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba.
The rational mind is capable of both spectacular achievements and absolute disasters. It becomes a dangerous tool when not grounded in morality. And morality is beyond the rational, it cannot be derived from science. It's been tried on many occasions in the 20 century and it failed. You want to try again?
Sounds familiar? This is what modern descendants of Marxism are happy to tell you.
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Let's discuss Germany. Germany had an ideology (Nazism) which was more like a religion than anything rational. Ideology can at times be rational but often is not rooted in rationality. If an ideology is rooted in pseudoscience, ignorance, hate, etc, then it's not necessarily rational.
If we look at Communism then we also see an ideology which under Marx did actually use Enlightenment era concepts and compared to many other ideologies it was very rational. The problem with Communism is it was also anti-individualist (this is also the same problem with Nazism), and to be a good communist means to give up your individualism completely and conform everything to being a good communist. I'll give you credit here that they were rational, and effective, but used rationality (the tool) to push for something which I consider to be irrational (collective identity, anti-individualism). So while I can say the means were rational, their ends were at least in my own opinion irrational for anyone who desires to be an individualist with an ego of their own.
As far as China, North Korea, etc, again we are talking about governments here. The individual is diminished for the nation in these contexts and it's not voluntary. Individuals everywhere are required to diminish themselves and disempower themselves for nationalism, or for family, or for big society, or whatever else. Yet to be rational (means to an end) is merely to be effective and I'm speaking about being effective individuals not speaking about any particular ideology.
Yes but the problem with Marxism is that it was required that everyone submit to the state, to the government, to the commune, or collective, or society, etc. It's requirement of conformity is one of the main problems but it's also the problem of any authoritarian state. At the same time empowering the individual is more about giving yourself the ability to make better decisions, to live a more effective life, to potentially live a much longer life.
I accept your point that there are dangers but in my opinion the majority of the dangerous you mentioned as possible examples came from ignorance (partial Enlightenment). People were and still are guided by ignorance, yet with moments of Enlightenment mixed in, and while the Enlightenment led to great leaps in technology, it didn't mean the majority of people just because of the Enlightenment and ability to read and write will suddenly make wise decisions, think better, etc.
So the risks we have with AI is that we can have a bunch of ignorant people with bots to abuse. That is a legitimate risk in my opinion. But in my opinion the biggest risk is if people who want to stop being ignorant are not allowed to do so because we don't have access to the AI to help us not be ignorant. So the distinction is between people who are voluntarily ignorant and people who are involuntarily ignorant, and right now because AI and other tech doesn't exist or isn't accessible, it's mostly involuntary.
How can we individuals do better if we don't have the tools to help ourselves be better?
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Yes, it acted like religion, and Nazi Germany is an example of what happens when you have vacuum afer removing religion. And it was the rational mind that determined religion to be unnecessary.
No, it means that you get killed if don't conform. Quite similar to being excluded as "bigot" or "racist", if you don't comply with the multicultural policy.
You are right about protection of the individual as being the essential pillar of society. What is the rational / scientific justification for this? I cannot think of any. Maybe because this argument does not belong to science.
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The rational justification for defense of the individual is all persons are individuals and rational persons as individuals would be rational to empower the individual. It's clearly rational to empower the individual but this can also go too far and become dangerous to the majority of individuals.
The balance is you want to not constrain or restrict individual growth and development. This means involuntary ignorance at least in my opinion should be made voluntary or at least a lot less involuntary. By allowing people to make wise decisions more often and by giving AI access to all we can actually improve all individuals. If all individuals improve then everything those individuals touch gets improved and because everyone is connected and increasingly so each day, it's a way to improve your future.
You are right that individualism doesn't belong to science because science doesn't answer philosophical questions. Science answers more fundamental questions about how stuff works. Engineering answers the questions on how to build stuff from the knowledge of how stuff works. And philosophy gives us the reasoning, the logic, the ethics, from which to build stuff which works and is long term sustainable.
So it's not enough to build a new society, but we have to build a better one. We need a new era of Enlightenment to even attempt to build anything better than what we have. Decentralized oppression and ignorance isn't better. Look at the Internet and you see a lot of ignorance, disinformation, and not a lot of improvements to society and life comes from that.
Yet the Internet also has search engines, Wikipedia, word processors, blockchains, and more, which help people to research better, think better, work better, etc. So we need to build the tools in my opinion with pro-science in mind, with the deliberate intention to increase participation not just in capitalism, finance, but also in science. It's not enough to simply make people rich in $$$ by these massive wealth transfers like we see with cryptocurrency, but we also have to make people rich in knowledge which is actually harder but also longer lasting, sustainable, and will have the residual effect of improving ethics.
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So the question "how stuff works?" is for you more fundamental to the question "how to live properly?". I don't think that's really true. Thus science actually deals with less fundamental questions.
But how do you decide which one is "better" if science doesn't deal with value systems?
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If I don't know how stuff works then I don't even know what life is, or what living is, or how to live at all. So how can I focus on how to live property if I don't know what living is?
If you don't know you need to drink water, eat food, require certain vitamins, etc, then you will not live for very long and all those questions about what is proper are quite irrelevant.
I believe it all starts with knowing yourself, and knowledge of self comes from science. Once you know yourself then you can focus on yourself in relation to others using philosophy.
Whatever you prefer is what is better for you. It's not for science to decide what you prefer. Science simply generates knowledge, how the stars work, how physics work, how the human body works.
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Morality in my opinion is super-rational. It's what is best for yourself and others based on consequences of any particular action. There is no objective morality in my opinion because there is no way to determine what is best for everyone with any strong degree of accuracy but you can determine what you prefer for your own life and you can help others to help you help yourself.
Morality is something I've posted about when discussing AI, Tauchain, etc, in my blog posts. I just have the opinion that rationality and morality converge.
Effective applied ethics being an ethics shown to produce consistently good results for those who follow it. If we are discussing any principle, law, rule, moral, it's value is in the result is produces and not the ideological beliefs it produces. If a law produces very negative results, then it doesn't matter to me if the law came from a Marxist, a Capitalist, it simply is a bad law. And a good law, the ideology which generated is irrelevant to me, it's either good or bad law. Same for best practices, if you arrive at best practices it's because it's what works and you can have humans of many different cultures and ideologies arrive at the same best practices over time by rational means of trial and error.
I suppose where we disagree is your statement that morality is beyond rational. I don't agree with that because no absolute morality can produce consistently good outcomes. Any rule will produce a good or bad outcome depending on particular circumstances. Any best practice is only for certain narrow circumstances, such as what to do if x or what actions to take to prevent y. But the way we discovered those best practices is by the rational mind, by someone doing it and people seeing the consequences of it.
References
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What's rational about taking others into consideration? Isn't a psychopath the most rational human being one could imagine?
Or I could reverse the question: tell me what is irrational about being a psychopath?
If I offer some help to a stranger that's quite irrational because chances are I'll never get anything back for my trouble. While a psychopath doesn't have this problem, all his/her acts are 100% rational.
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No, psychopaths clinically are impulsive, lack empathy, and are no more rational than anyone else. The distinguishing feature of a psychopath is the lack of empathy but when psychopaths act impulsively on anger then it's not rational.
It's rational to take others into consideration because cooperation is more effective (long term) than competition. If you compete with everyone, then it's everyone vs everyone, and it's a state of constant war with no peace. In an environment like that then everything becomes more expensive because no one wants to cooperate with you because you could be competing with them. In the prisoners dilemma cooperation if it can be coordinated is more efficient than competition but if you cannot coordinate well enough to cooperate then it becomes more efficient to betray by default.
Why would you betray by default if you can cooperate by default and be guaranteed to never lose across many games? If you betray by default you might win this game, but eventually you'll be on the losing end.
Reciprocity is rational. If you believe you'll never in life be in the position of the stranger in need of help then perhaps it's not rational to help a stranger. If you could imagine a future instance of yourself in a position where you might need help, then helping the stranger promotes an environment beneficial to you being helped at some point in the future. This is rational as I mentioned, it's superrationality and is reciprocity.
Your assumption that psychopaths are 100% rational is extremely flawed. No human is 100% rational and psychopaths are no more or less rational than anyone else. Humans aren't 100% rational and psychopaths simply act on different emotions rather than empathy.
If a human acts on rationality then it's still possible to arrive at the conclusion to help others based on "enlightened self interest" which is to say that you want to create a trend, or a culture where people help each other and cooperate. A cooperative culture could be something you want to create for your own selfish reasons because it's more beneficial to you. Maybe it lowers your blood pressure to not have to be stressed, and so you think you'll live a longer life if you have less competition, and promoting cooperation is a way to reduce the competitiveness of life.
In my opinion competition shouldn't be the first resort. If an individual can get what they want from life through cooperation (and if you're smart about it then often you can), then there is no reason to force a competition. If you can give a stranger something they want, you never really know what the next person can do for you in the future or how that stranger is connected to you. The unknown interconnections between strangers encourages people (for rational reasons) to help complete strangers, but of course it depends on the kind of help. It's probably not rational to help any stranger at your own expense, so I'm not saying it's rational to run into a burning building to save the life of a stranger unless it's your job to do that.
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Absolutely wrong. A psychopath knows exactly what the other person feels and is able to play those emotions to his own advantage.
A proper psychopath never acts impulsively or is driven by his own anger. That's why he can be so manipulative and powerful.
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Psychopaths aren't capable of empathy. Having knowledge of something doesn't mean having an understanding. I know how you feel if you tell me how you feel. I don't understand how you feel unless I relate it to how I felt when in your position.
Of course the above experiment is a bit flawed but it does indicate that psychopaths do not experience empathy in the way neurotypicals do. It is equivalent to saying that psychopaths have a diminished capacity for understanding certain cues and signals.
Psychopaths by definition are impulsive or they wouldn't be clinically diagnosed as psychopaths. Also, the human you describe doesn't exist. Any psychopath is also a human. Any human also has emotions, and which emotions the human will respond to differs from person to person. A psychopath without a short temper might easily get jealous, or may be tempted in many other ways away from rationality. The fact is, the idea of "proper psychopath" like you see in series like Dexter is not based off reality. If you look at actual clinically diagnosed psychopaths, you will never find a "proper psychopath" immune to being manipulated.
Finally I will note, anyone can be manipulative and powerful. Psychopaths do not have a monopoly on being manipulative and powerful. Manipulative is a learned skill, and power is acquired. Terrorists and gangsters can be manipulative and powerful, but not necessarily psychopaths or rational.
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The goal of bringing about a new Age of Enlightenment is a worthy ( and critically necessary) one. While the US political and cultural climate is increasingly opposed to science, Asian countries seem to be taking an opposite tack--embracing science while also becoming more amenable to allowing their citizens a greater level of social and personal freedoms than was available to previous generations.
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EOS and Tau-chain looks like a complete win-win solution. No need for Tezos and Ethereum. If OCAML brings value, it will be implemented eventually on EOS. Ethereum is already facing a dead end (scaling with sharding is not a viable solution).
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I still do not belief in EOS ...
my main points of consern are:
There is much discussion going around that EOS is a scam. This is down to two key points:
EOS TOKENS HAVE NO RIGHTS, USES OR ATTRIBUTES. The EOS Tokens do not have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features, express or implied, including, without limitation, any uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features on the EOS Platform. Company does not guarantee and is not representing in any way to Buyer that the EOS Tokens have any rights, uses, purpose, attributes, functionalities or features.
NOT A PURCHASE OF EOS PLATFORM TOKENS. EOS Tokens purchased under this Agreement are not tokens on the EOS Platform. Buyer acknowledges, understands and agrees that Buyer should not expect and there is no guarantee or representation made by Company that Buyer will receive any other product, service, rights, attributes, functionalities, features or assets of any kind whatsoever, including, without limitation, any cryptographic tokens or digital assets now or in the future whether through receipt, exchange, conversion, redemption or otherwise.
PURCHASE OF EOS TOKENS ARE NON-REFUNDABLE AND PURCHASES CANNOT BE CANCELLED. BUYER MAY LOSE ALL AMOUNTS PAID.
EOS TOKENS MAY HAVE NO VALUE.
COMPANY RESERVES THE RIGHT TO REFUSE OR CANCEL EOS TOKEN PURCHASE REQUESTS AT ANY TIME IN ITS SOLE DISCRETION.
As such, there does not appear to be a set in stone definition of what the exact function of each token has – if any - on the EOS platform.
No U.S. Buyers. The EOS Tokens are not being offered to U.S. persons. U.S. persons are strictly prohibited and restricted from using the EOS Distribution Contract, using the EOS Token Contact and/or purchasing EOS Tokens and Company is not soliciting purchases by U.S. persons in any way. If a U.S. person uses the EOS Distribution Contract, uses the EOS Token Contract and/or purchases EOS Tokens, such person has done so and entered into this Agreement on an unlawful, unauthorized and fraudulent basis and this Agreement is null and void.
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