If you haven't read the article read it, don't just read the title.
I have no idea if this is the type of thing they put as reading material in toilets in the pentagon (which I fully support if they also regularly run out of toilet paper) or if this is what top level intelligence analysis is.
If it's the former the West is doomed:
>The term "psycho-terrorism" was coined by Russian writer N. Anisimov of the Moscow Anti-Psychotronic Center. According to Anisimov, psychotronic weapons are those that act to "take away a part of the information which is stored in a man's brain. It is sent to a computer, which reworks it to the level needed for those who need to control the man, and the modified information is then reinserted into the brain." These weapons are used against the mind to induce hallucinations, sickness, mutations in human cells, "zombification," or even death. Included in the arsenal are VHF generators, X-rays, ultrasound, and radio waves. Russian army Major I. Chernishev, writing in the military journal Orienteer in February 1997, asserted that "psy" weapons are under development all over the globe.
At the time the Russian Armies largest concern was getting enough socks for it's conscripts in Chechnya.
I would expect to read material of this quality on the 4chan conspiracy board or maybe infowars if it's a slow newsday, not in official US government documentation.
Tangentially related is the concept of a memetic hazard, although this would be more something that targets the collective hivemind rather than weapons that target individual human brains.
I like to call these "thought prions" - infectious thoughts that near-permanently alter the way you perceive the world. I've seen several extended family members (on both sides of the political spectrum!) completely alter their worldviews based on political thought prions planted in their minds during covid.
The word "meme" as originally defined by Richard Dawkins (in The Selfish Gene) fits the role well - a self replicating belief or set of belief. He gave religion as the prime examople of an infectious meme - 'you must believe these set of things - you must also transmit the beliefs to others, or they risk eternal damnation'.
My recollection is that the process in Snowcrash is different in a significant way. The language that hacks people's brains is a protolanguage which the people hearing and speaking it don't understand. That limits who can wield it for their own ends. It works on a subconscious level.
Memes work on a conscious level in that people know and can explain what the meme is saying, and more people can create them.
> Memes work on a conscious level in that people know and can explain what the meme is saying, and more people can create them.
Some memes work like that — pictures with text in particular — but “common sense” is also a set of memes, memes which are, in my experience, mostly approximations with failure modes that (in any given instance) most people are ignorant of, and where those with knowledge can exploit that ignorance.
“Everything that goes up must come down“ except spacecraft.
“You can’t be in two places at the same time” except where your body is straddling the border between the two places, or one place is nested inside the other, or places like the Hala'ib triangle where two countries both claim sovereignty.
And stage magic, street magic, and scams like the shell game or Victorian seances, where “common sense” denies the audience in the first two cases and the victims in the last two any significant awareness of the effort put into the illusion. Or the homeopathy, Bach flower “remedies”, “healing” crystals, etc. that my mum believed in.
And then you have cognitive stop signs and applause lights: politicians saying “for national security”, “think of the children”, “brexit means brexit”, or even just “9/11”.
"Understand", "Story of Your Life", and "Division by Zero" are short stories by Ted Chiang featuring similar concepts, including a deadly information weapon and other radically mind-altering ideas.
You might enjoy "There Is No Antimemetics Division", a story (told in a series of short stories) about the idea of "Antimemes" (if memes are ideas that spread like viruses and can't be forgotten, antimemes are the opposite, they're not invisible but you can't remember them).
> Tangentially related is the concept of a memetic hazard, although this would be more something that targets the collective hivemind rather than weapons that target individual human brains.
>>The only body-related information warfare element considered by the United States is psychological operations (PSYOP)[5]
>>What technologies have been examined by the United States that possess the potential to disrupt the data-processing capabilities of the human organism? The 7 July 1997 issue of U.S. News and World Report described several of them designed, among other things, to vibrate the insides of humans, stun or nauseate them, put them to sleep, heat them up, or knock them down with a shock wave.[9] The technologies include dazzling lasers that can force the pupils to close; acoustic or sonic frequencies that cause the hair cells in the inner ear to vibrate and cause motion sickness, vertigo, and nausea, or frequencies that resonate the internal organs causing pain and spasms; and shock waves with the potential to knock down humans or airplanes and which can be mixed with pepper spray or chemicals.[10]
It literally isn't. This is the equivalent of attacking a network switch by running main power into the Ethernet ports. I have no idea why they are using the word firewall here, a much better title would be 'Human senses have no fuses'.
>>According to Solntsev, one computer virus capable of affecting a person's psyche is Russian Virus 666. It manifests itself in every 25th frame of a visual display, where it produces a combination of colors that allegedly put computer operators into a trance. The subconscious perception of the new pattern eventually results in arrhythmia of the heart. Other Russian computer specialists, not just Solntsev, talk openly about this "25th frame effect" and its ability to subtly manage a computer user's perceptions. The purpose of this technique is to inject a thought into the viewer's subconscious. It may remind some of the subliminal advertising controversy in the United States in the late 1950s.
The whole thing reads like the National Enquirer but for spooks. I seriously hope that this is not the level of discourse in the military and 3 letter agencies (but expect it is with dread) because we'd be better served by a troop of chimps flinging shit at a chart when it comes to deciding what new technologies to finance.
At least it makes the last 5 years of insanity around Russia, Trump, Facebook and everything else we are having a moral panic over seem sane by comparison.
That's quaint. Post Cambridge Analytica, FB's instagram affecting kids story, ad-tech, alternative data providers, unpersonings, twitter bots, etc. "psychotronic warfare" sounds adorable - or maybe from that time in history looking forward, we could be considered to all be hooked into the global Psychotron now?
The mind does have firewalls, and it filters on the same keyword principles as network ones. The difference in online news sources affects the language people use to express the ideas they affiliate with, and we identify words and even patterns of thought with those tribes. It's like class.
Psychotronic weapons sounds like a cool startup idea though.
> During the initial run of [A Fish Called Wanda], a Danish audiologist named Ole Bentzen died while laughing during a screening, which led newspapers to report that he had died from laughter. The official cause of death was heart fibrillation, which may have been caused by an increased heart rate due to extended laughter. Cleese considered using the event for publicity, but ultimately decided it was in too bad taste.
I heard of (and even understood) Roko's Basilisk and I don't feel the least bit in danger.
You need some pretty niche AI / futurology beliefs to even have a chance of considering it dangerous. For most people it's no more convincing than Pascal's Wager.
there's enough who believe it that I still get emails asking for help with dealing with it (I wrote most of the Roko's Basilisk article on RationalWiki)
Yeah that article (and reading some of Yudkowsky's stuff back as a teenager) is the only reason I can claim to understand how it works.
I also may be underestimating the number of futurology / AI enthusiast types; but my intuition is that there can't be _that many_ of them outside of Silicon Valley bubbles.
Roko’s Basilisk seems like something lifted straight from Christianity: if you know about the scripture you don’t have an excuse of ignorance to sin freely; the day of judgment is coming, etc. I see a lot of parallels.
While reading this I've checked the URL (more than once) to be sure I'm really reading a Nature article. I've checked even the TLS certificate of the site after some while.
It has a working DOI, it's form Nature. But it could be something written by an Anon on 4Chan actually! Still not sure what this is, and why it's in Nature. Do they occasionally publish jokes?
This article seems to imply that these energy pulse weapons that affect mental state, like the ones rumored in Cuba not so long ago do exist or have existed since the 90s.
The events in Cuba have been studies and even US government reports say there were no microwaves, no ultrasounds, no other energy weapons. The only sounds that could be recorded were positively identflified to a particular cricket.
Do you always believe every study or media report? Not even saying I believe directed energy weapons were used as I am half-joking but the original article above is from the 90s. What top secret tech does the military have that you don't know about and what would the reports on prematurely leaked classified defense secrets sound like in the media?
No, but I do tend to believe the ones that are going against the heavily pushed story, especially if they are in support of the null hypothesis (no one was attacking American diplomats with woo woo energy weapons).
The book Infinite Jest is centered around a video that, if watched, renders the watcher incapable of doing anything else but attempting to re-watch the video.
Several years ago, there were a number of credulous stories in the tech news about a DARPA project called the "Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot", 'EATR' [0], a robot that could refuel itself by ingesting biomass. Obviously the idea that the US military was researching robots that ate (formerly) living things as fuel engendered a certain reaction in the online community.
You probably haven't heard much about EATR in the intervening years. Who knows, maybe it's still being developed?
But what intrigued me at the time, though, was that the research organization to which this EATR project was attributed was one 'Robotic Technology Inc.', RTI [1] - and that, on that organization's projects page, they list (I actually find it kind of amazing that this is still the case to this day):
- EATR
- IVTT (apparently the 'intelligent vehicle technology transfer project' [2]
... so far so DARPA... but then:
- Military Memetics
- Cognitive Collective
So what stood out there: Military Memetics. From their website: "The initial focus is to establish a scientific basis for memetics in order to predict and control memes and their effects.... The attempt to establish a scientific basis for memetics is critically important. For example, within a suitable memetics framework could be the means to prevent irrational conflict and promote rational solutions to endemic national and international problems. Of course, without safeguards memetics can become a double-edged sword."
I leave it to your judgement to determine whether the announcement of the EATR project and its subsequent online reaction were a legitimate DARPA robotics research announcement, or alternatively just a bit of practical military memetics research....
It's kind of interesting that this site hasn't been updated since. It almost feels like a leftover outpost in some kind of ARG marketing campaign.
Note this was first in the news in the timeframe of 2007-2010.
At the time this seemed kind of amusing. Well before Cambridge Analytica, eastern European fake news troll farms, or GRU Fancy Bear weaponized misinformation campaigns. I guess it's kind of reassuring, in a way, that the academic defense research establishment has maybe been considering the post-Internet information warfare environment seriously for some time...
That's an interesting point which got me thinking. I guess religions don't have a firewall against memes that don't compete with them. But if you've ever tried to convert somebody, once you start questioning their core beliefs those firewalls are very obvious.
(I do understand some people may find this offensive, as Atheism is considered immoral or unpatriotic in the US and other countries. I'm not making moral claims about atheists; I am one - but the "death of God" did seem to lead to new secular philosophy/ideology, some of which was dangerous.)
Perhaps it is more accurate to say a religious mind had no firewall. All good hackers lock the door behind them.
The people who genuinely have no firewall are not so much the overtly religious as the ones we might broadly class as "new age" - the kind of people whose sole criterion for belief is whether or not it makes them feel good to believe it. There's a lot of them.
They are simply using the term "in demotic and in decrepit use" to indicate almost its opposite. It is not always easy to find terms (some in the end use the formula "so-called religions"); a possibility could be 'fideism', but it was "hijacked" (legitimately, this time) to mean something different. Even the expression 'blind faith' would be improper, because "faith" there may mean "grit, persistence" (where a degree and a pre-vetted version of "blindness" is functional). But certainly, if the poster used the almost-oxymoron «religion believed in», of course what was meant was very different from what the terms should have meant.
To move to the positive content of that post, the idea could be simply that of "focus": when exposed to mental poison it may work not to re-enforce it by giving it attention (during rational analysis you could treat the poison as an assumption (also in broad outside logic terms: much poison comes not in form of statements), which brings the risk of reinforcing it - it is not easy to "handle with care"), and instead return focussing on the clean and let the subconscious systems at least pre-digest it. De-power ideas (etc.) by refusing attention feed.
Which oddly enough, is one of the techniques practitioners had to meet.
This is a much more substantial reply than I expected...and I'm quite sure I don't fully understand it.
But I think I have a half decent idea (of what you meant), and believe that it doesn't answer my question (at least in the way I intended it) which is how the statement "...a religious mind has an excellent firewall against everything except the religion believed in" applies to Taoism specifically.
The thing that I like about Taoism is that it is an extremely abstract religion, and its ~definition is....~recursively self-referential and self-"disproving" (of dogma), and all-encompassing:
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
Making "...a religious mind has an excellent firewall against everything except the religion believed in" stick to this would be an extremely impressive feat in my estimation. More likely, I suspect any such attempt would demonstrate the validity of the ideas (although it may not be realized as such, which would also demonstrate the point).
You are mixing up completely different things. Why?
The poster seemed to have meant that "radicated beliefs hinder other beliefs". Which is trivial.
That has nothing to do with religion - which may sometimes use """belief""", but is not belief - if you mixed up the (different and opposite) things, you would be using a very weak terminology. You are playing on an equivoque. Either you are attempting to take that elected subject as a belief system (what?! why?! how?! why?!), which would be contradictory with the first stanza - and would be mental poison, the actual subject ("let one now accept the false in ideas, outside formulas") -, or you take it as religion (in this case: "[We witness] there is a way, [find it]: mind you, first of all: it cannot be put in statements"), so there is no radicated belief to curb other beliefs (explicitly in the case you chose, as beliefs are things you can put in statements).
> You are mixing up completely different things. Why?
What do you mean when you say I am "mixing up" things?
What do you mean when you say "completely different"? All things that are different have differences, and in some cases the attributes of two things are a complete mismatch (zero common attributes), would that be an example of "completely different"? Are there other examples?
Regardless, there can be (but not necessarily is) ~relationships/associations between things that are completely different, sometimes at the object level, and more often (and sometimes only) at the abstract level. My comments are related to such abstract relationships.
> The poster seemed to have meant that "radicated beliefs hinder other beliefs". Which is trivial.
I very much agree with the general premise, but:
- I don't necessarily agree that it is necessarily (in all cases) trivial.
- Radicated beliefs can also promote/reinforce other beliefs. Now, your statement does not assert the opposite or rule it out, I suspect it is likely a consequence of the natural ambiguity of the English language and standard writing conventions, but I believe it is noteworthy that third parties reading conversations such as this may have their perception of reality distorted by not realizing such things, and generally speaking I believe that this can be harmful in some cases. I also believe that this demonstrates the correctness of the first few lines of the Tao Te Ching.
> That has nothing to do with religion...
This seems like a bold claim to me. I believe I can and have demonstrated otherwise (above). If you disagree, I would enjoy discussing the relative merits of our individual perspectives (perspectives that a human consciousness "takes" (often without being willed, or our conscious knowledge) upon reality, as opposed reality itself (which we do not have direct access to) is an important part of the ideas I am doing my best to communicate).
> ...which may sometimes use """belief""", but is not belief - if you mixed up the (different and opposite) things, you would be using a very weak terminology.
Here you seem to be suggesting that you have accurate knowledge of the mental state of billions of people on the planet. If so, I believe that this is an illusion projected by human consciousness - it appears to be true, and you believe it is true (I presume?), but whether it is actually true, absolutely, is beyond our ability to know.
> You are playing on an equivoque.
equivoque:
- an expression capable of having more than one meaning; a pun.
- the fact of having more than one meaning or possible interpretation; ambiguity.
I think this is ~correct. I use "~" because while it is true, it is not necessarily comprehensively true. A third party might read that sentence and form the conclusion that that is all that I am doing. Now, it may be true that that is all I'm doing, but I am now asserting explicitly that it is not. A third party now has the explicit option to decide which one of us has a more accurate description of reality.
Note also that I said: "The thing that I like about Taoism is that it is an extremely abstract religion...", and when one is taking an abstract perspective, ambiguity naturally manifests in many cases, does it not? In some ways this is a bug, but in other ways it is simultaneously a feature.
> Either you are attempting to take that elected subject as a belief system (what?! why?! how?! why?!), which would be contradictory with the first stanza - and would be mental poison, the actual subject ("let one now accept the false in ideas, outside formulas") -, or you take it as religion (in this case: "[We witness] there is a way, [find it]: mind you, first of all: it cannot be put in statements"), so there is no radicated belief to curb other beliefs (explicitly in the case you chose, as beliefs are things you can put in statements).
For starters, this is a false dichotomy (an extremely common mode of thinking, I believe, based on several years of closely observing millions of human beings describe reality to each other on social media platforms). Of course, this doesn't mean that it is necessarily wrong (in this case), but it is surely not great odds, or an optimal perspective to take upon any issue.
> ...which would be contradictory with the first stanza...
I think I do not understand what you mean by this, could you explain in a different way?
> ...and would be mental poison...
Also this.
> ...or you take it as religion (in this case: "[We witness] there is a way, [find it]: mind you, first of all: it cannot be put in statements"), so there is no radicated belief to curb other beliefs (explicitly in the case you chose, as beliefs are things you can put in statements).
If I understand you correctly....personally, I do "take" Taoism not only ~"as a religion", but also as kind of the foundation of my mental model of reality, and it very much is a radicated belief that exerts a strong influence on my beliefs. An example of this is when I encounter someone whose model of reality disagrees with mine: in such cases it is very common for someone to say things like "[reality] "is(!)" X", but very often the person making that statement does not realize that they are referring to their personal model of reality as a proxy for reality itself, or, they do not consider the distinction between the two to be important (I know this from many hundreds of prior conversations - one thing interesting I have noticed in these conversations: I regularly encounter a phenomenon where if you even inject this simple and academically uncontroversial idea into a conversation (reality vs perception of), people's cognition will often start to behave like it is driven by a script[1]).
I think my main point about the value of Taoism as a base methodology for building one's model of reality is that it is a very simple method for moderating the often harmful behaviors of evolved human consciousness, the main one being that consciousness manufactures and projects a synthetic, predictive model of reality into the conscious mind, and the conscious mind considers this to be reality itself[2]. Now it's true that one kind of "has to" "take this as it is", but it is often incorrectly asserted that not taking it as it is will necessarily result in ~cognitive paralysis. That idea itself is yet another subconscious prediction of reality, perceived as reality itself.
I'm not sure if you and I are talking about two entirely different things (likely, at least to some degree), but hopefully this helps clarify where it is that I am coming from. To me, these ideas are endlessly fascinating, but they very often seem to have the exact opposite effect on other people, so hopefully that is not the case here.
[1] Regarding "common scripts": in response to the types of ideas that I am referring to here, a relatively small set of rhetorical rebuttals/dismissals are most likely to arise in a response:
- downvote (or not, it is technically unknown) with no reply (sometimes one will even attract a following of downvoters of every other comment one might make on a platform - this has happened to me on two occasions right here on HN, as confirmed by dang after I reported it after several months in each case).
For the sake of argument/discussion, if one considers it to be possibly true that what I say here is accurate (I have studied this "extensively", and I propose to you that it is indeed very true, and I not only welcome but encourage disagreement, however "pedantic" it may be (provided it is offered with a desire for epistemic soundness)), it suggests something very interesting about the human mind, as well as reality itself: that many/most people perceive reality (or portions of it at least) according to a common and predictable (simple) algorithm, which is very different than how they perceive they perceive reality. And if people's perception of reality is objectively and significantly ~manufactured and incorrect....then what is reality, really? And if this is true, another interesting question might be: is it (or might it plausibly be) important?
If you find this short description to be unconvincing, there is a lot more supporting evidence and ideas where these came from.
(For fun: I predict that as you are reading this explicit list of ~invalid rebuttals, your "spider senses" may be going off in some way, perhaps a suspicion that I am "up to something". If that is the case, I would say that sense is accurate - there is indeed more than one reason why I have gone through the trouble of explicitly documenting this list of common human behaviors in this particular conversation. I think it would be interesting to see what would happen on a platform where ideas/phenomena like this were first class ideas/rules, kind of like HN has a set of rules and cultural norms. I think a "No hallucinating reality, except where explicitly allowed" rule, if strictly & competently enforced, could be a game changer in social media. There would obviously be a massive learning curve for new members (overcoming evolution is a tough row to hoe), but some people could surely manage it.)
[2] People commonly seem to consider this idea to outright false, I suspect because the natural tendency is to consider it with respect to oneself (which significantly alters the cognitive processing of the idea, as is well known in psychology). But if one considers it with respect to other people (a technique of choosing the members of one's outgroup, like Trump supporters, antivaxxers, etc often makes the mind not only much more accepting of it, but often downright eager), it can be much easier to see the accuracy of it.
Sorry for the short reply. First of all, certain things should not be discussed here, for many reasons. (In fact, I had to re-write my response, and, sorry, but much of the substantive I judged not to be discussed here.)
Among those reasons, that if you want to use Dirac as a manual for cooking, that may be even intellectually interesting, but if you want to use texts made with those other specific aims as the guidelines for a theory of logic, you are contributing in vilifying that content. ("The Personality was appointed to the Office of Critical Responsibilities, she wore organza mauve".) You already had paraconsistency, fuzzy logic, all of contemporary studies: no need to create confusion in something that is already confused, and "does not need" (as they say) further mess.
And if you treat one's statements as meant for syntactical analysis, you will not understand them. You have to read them with intelligence. It's call 'intelligence' (intus legere) because it gets much deeper: you have to pass the input through "the black box inside", and if you need to clarify the responses, still intelligence is needed. Syntactical analysis is just a tool.
<Intermission>
> Now, your statement does not assert the opposite or rule it out, I suspect it is likely a consequence of
Yes, it is perfectly normal that "A whitens B and A blackens B": it happens because terms are semantically loose.
> third parties reading conversations such as this may have their perception of reality distorted by not realizing such things
Misunderstanding may be descriptively normal, it is not deontically "normal". They should be educated, and they should know that participating in communication they are to understand it, not "live it like a bohemian". They are pretty much expected «[to] realiz[e] such things».
> A third party might read that sentence and form the conclusion
The third party is pretty much required to understand what was written vis-a-vis what was written.
</Intermission>
Now: if the original poster states that something that means that "beliefs hinder other beliefs", that may be correct, and is correct (it is immediately evident in the rough form of the idea and explored academically in the Belief Change Theory), but it cannot be applied to what is not a belief system. Of course. That excludes riding a bicycle, and many other context - those which are not belief systems.
> false dichotomy
You have not understood what I wrote: you are trying to read it with the wrong lenses. Is it possible that instead of "thinking outside the box" you have "created a new box inside the other box"? There is no mystery in what I wrote, it was plain and direct: if you want to understand, read without prejudice.
The first stanza are the first four lines of what you wrote in the 'code' form. Mental poison is the assumption of beliefs which are toxic in term of content or in term of function.
If I have reticence in making all terms explicit, it is that I really find it inappropriate to treat as an object something that should be respected.
And, if you read the text you proposed with similar analysis, let's say, instead of ___synthesis___ - the opposite -, do you think you could really understand it? Was that text conceived for analysis or for understanding? What was the intention of the author? What is superior, the intention of the author or a mental framework?
Now: you seem to have a keen interest in logic, and also in its psychological sides. If you also like a mathematical consideration, I suggest that you take a degree in that area: you will find the contemporary debate very interesting and also productive. Also, before incomodating Dirac for writing about cooking, consider first if Dirac would approve it.
I should have probably noted this earlier: please try to not take my gruff/coarse/disrespectful writing style at face value, it is one of my biggest shortcomings. Pedantry and politeness is a tough combo to pull off (for me anyways).
> Sorry for the short reply. First of all, certain things should not be discussed here, for many reasons. (In fact, I had to re-write my response, and, sorry, but much of the substantive I judged not to be discussed here.)
I'm curious what this refers to: is there a blacklist of taboo topics on HN that I'm not aware of?
> Among those reasons, that if you want to use Dirac as a manual for cooking, that may be even intellectually interesting, but if you want to use texts made with those other specific aims as the guidelines for a theory of logic, you are contributing in vilifying that content.
Do you believe that I am "use texts made with those other specific aims as the guidelines for a theory of logic"? (Hint: Dirac seems orthogonal to the question, yet you have included it for some reason....rhetorical persuasion perhaps?).
> You already had paraconsistency, fuzzy logic, all of contemporary studies: no need to create confusion in something that is already confused, and "does not need" (as they say) further mess.
I don't know what this refers to.
> And if you treat one's statements as meant for syntactical analysis, you will not understand them. You have to read them with intelligence. It's call 'intelligence' (intus legere) because it gets much deeper: you have to pass the input through "the black box inside", and if you need to clarify the responses, still intelligence is needed. Syntactical analysis is just a tool.
Are you under the impression that syntactical analysis is the only tool in my kit, or are you just making a general observation?
>> Now, your statement does not assert the opposite or rule it out, I suspect it is likely a consequence of
> Yes, it is perfectly normal that "A whitens B and A blackens B": it happens because terms are semantically loose.
Something ~doing the opposite under identical conditions doesn't seem normal to me. I don't see what this has to do with what I wrote.
>> third parties reading conversations such as this may have their perception of reality distorted by not realizing such things
> Misunderstanding may be descriptively normal, it is not deontically "normal". They should be educated, and they should know that participating in communication they are to understand it, not "live it like a bohemian". They are pretty much expected «[to] realiz[e] such things».
So...hope for the best (as opposed to exerting some effort to increase the possibility that the best transpires)?
>> A third party might read that sentence and form the conclusion
> The third party is pretty much required to understand what was written vis-a-vis what was written.
"Required" by whom? And if they do not meet that requirement?
> Now: if the original poster states that something that means that "beliefs hinder other beliefs", that may be correct, and is correct (it is immediately evident in the rough form of the idea and explored academically in the Belief Change Theory), but it cannot be applied to what is not a belief system. Of course. That excludes riding a bicycle, and many other context - those which are not belief systems.
"Beliefs hinder beliefs" can be true (it is true that it happens at least sometimes), but is it necessarily true, under all conditions? The assertion leaves it as an exercise for the reader (most of whom have active imaginations). I simply curious about what is comprehensively true, without exception - this is not only acceptable in science, but ~demanded, and everyone seems to looooooove science, so why the aversion to similar epistemic standards in other fields?
>> false dichotomy
> You have not understood what I wrote: you are trying to read it with the wrong lenses. Is it possible that instead of "thinking outside the box" you have "created a new box inside the other box"? There is no mystery in what I wrote, it was plain and direct: if you want to understand, read without prejudice.
You wrote:
>> Either you are attempting to take that elected subject as a belief system...or you take it as religion.
You are explicitly asserting that it is one or the other, a textbook false dichotomy. From where have you sourced the Perfectly True Knowledge that there are no other options? For example, is it not possible to use something as a logical tool, or a mental model of sorts, in addition to many other techniques? (Or, something else you haven't thought of?)
> The first stanza are the first four lines of what you wrote in the 'code' form.
My question however, was regarding the part I quoted: "...which would be contradictory with the first stanza..", but I think my "use it as one tool" vs "an [entire] belief system" covers that misunderstanding.
> If I have reticence in making all terms explicit, it is that I really find it inappropriate to treat as an object something that should be respected.
Note sure what you mean....am I disrespecting something, or is speaking with precision, accuracy, and non-ambiguity disrespectful? If it's good enough for science, I don't know why it isn't good enough for other fields, at least where a disagreement arises. If people are happy "winging it" then great, but when I look around the world, I see a lot of extremely unhappy people, and most of these people seem to be winging it when it comes to epistemology in my opinion (and often strongly ideologically opposed to strict epistemology when I talk to them about these ideas).
> And, if you read the text you proposed with similar analysis, let's say, instead of ___synthesis___ - the opposite -, do you think you could really understand it? Was that text conceived for analysis or for understanding? What was the intention of the author?
Oh I can't disagree here, on a "clarity of communication" basis - The Tao Te Ching is anything but easy to understand - but then, perhaps that shortcoming is actually a benefit - it is a rather popular book after all.
> What is superior, the intention of the author or a mental framework?
I have no idea the intention of the author, but I believe the mental framework (roughly: the world is mysterious, what appears to be true is [typically] not, [due to post-published discoveries like] the illusory nature of consciousness, ontology and decomposition, IS vs Equals(), etc) is excellent, but like most any tool there are good and bad ways to use it.
> Now: you seem to have a keen interest in logic, and also in its psychological sides. If you also like a mathematical consideration, I suggest that you take a degree in that area: you will find the contemporary debate very interesting and also productive. Also, before incomodating Dirac for writing about cooking, consider first if Dirac would approve it.
Thank you for the advice but while I would surely find it interesting to get a math degree, I don't think it would be a good investment of time with respect to achieving my goals in the time I have left on this planet. Maybe in my next life (were I a Buddhist)! :)
The context of HN is that of "intellectual curiosity". Serious matters require much more respect than "curiosity". The tentative approach we may use with discussing engineering and worldly trends is not appropriate with them.
Dirac was used to provide a simile to make you understand the point: you seem to be using a text outside its purpose.
Contemporary advancements in the field of logic seem more pertinent to your interest: you demonstrate a penchant for syntax, and contemporary logic was largely busy in studying complexity in a formal way. But also in philosophy: there are studies where the topic was explicitly that which seems to intrigue you - without the need to bend other texts outside their purpose.
The matter of the false dichotomy, a formal note, is completely irrelevant to the content. That «there are [no] other options» does not seem the least bit relevant to the message I wrote: was it understood? It was there for understanding. Some things are not belief systems, hence they will not be part of the consistency game in the Weltaufbau. How does mentioning that there could be more options help clarify that or correct it?
The respect which creates reticence is in that before speaking of something (some domains more than others), one must know about it, with sufficient degree. Similarly for the counterpart.
Incidentally: you wrote about «speaking with precision, accuracy, and non-ambiguity», and the broad context is about a text with starts with saying "If you can talk about it, it is not the Way". And you call it not being «easy to understand» a «shortcoming»: are you sure you understood what the text is about?!
The intention of the author was very probably religious. If you are interested in the matter, good. It will probably not take you a weekend.
No, it is to say that you do not seem to know what you are talking about, and that you do not seem to understand what you are told.
It is to say that you should intensify work on building your intellectual keys, and avoid focussing on your strict interests, which could entangle into an overgrown cage of ideas. Hopefully you still have in front of you a long and proficuous time for formation.
There is "curiosity" in the fascination for potential for growth, and 'curiosity' in the sense Heidegger used - of shallowness. Tackle matters when you are ready to understand them - which will also enable tackling them seriously.
For most disciplines, there is lot of literature around. Some of those writers knew something: you should use them to learn.
> No, it is to say that you do not seem to know what you are talking about, and that you do not seem to understand what you are told.
It may indeed seem that way, but if I say the same to you (that "it does not seem what you know what you are talking about, and that you do not seem to understand what you are told"), does it then mean that it is the True state of reality that you do not actually?
Or, might it be possible that I am wrong, confused, have misinterpreted your words (there are many points along the idea transmission chain where loss of fidelity can occur), or something else? And if it is possible that an error can happen on one end of a communication, might it be possible that it could also occur on the other? Are you one of those rare (or maybe not so much lately) people who never makes any mistake at all, however small?
Many thanks for your advice (or: thanks to the degree that it actually contains value), I hope for your benefit that you follow it with perfection yourself.
I've got a religious mind and can firewall things just fine. In fact, I wager that a sola scriptura Christian mind will basically eject things like Q with prejudice.
Q contains a potent mix of many elements of Christianity and extra-Biblical content twisted into something that (not surprisingly) isn't compatible with actual Christianity as described by the scripture. For a sola scriptura Christian, that should be undigestable.
I have no idea if this is the type of thing they put as reading material in toilets in the pentagon (which I fully support if they also regularly run out of toilet paper) or if this is what top level intelligence analysis is.
If it's the former the West is doomed:
>The term "psycho-terrorism" was coined by Russian writer N. Anisimov of the Moscow Anti-Psychotronic Center. According to Anisimov, psychotronic weapons are those that act to "take away a part of the information which is stored in a man's brain. It is sent to a computer, which reworks it to the level needed for those who need to control the man, and the modified information is then reinserted into the brain." These weapons are used against the mind to induce hallucinations, sickness, mutations in human cells, "zombification," or even death. Included in the arsenal are VHF generators, X-rays, ultrasound, and radio waves. Russian army Major I. Chernishev, writing in the military journal Orienteer in February 1997, asserted that "psy" weapons are under development all over the globe.
At the time the Russian Armies largest concern was getting enough socks for it's conscripts in Chechnya.
I would expect to read material of this quality on the 4chan conspiracy board or maybe infowars if it's a slow newsday, not in official US government documentation.