FactFictionFancy-170130

I see some fairly dramatic changes in the discussions on line. When the internet first emerged, a lot of the flow of information was purely trivial and focused on level one (the “me” level): “Join me at the corner of Main and Pine streets,” or wherever “me” was at the time. And of course other-bashing or bullying behaviors and vomits of gossip and inconsequential trivia.

Next, emerged the realization that the internet is the perfect place to “get mine” without dealing with the social conventions or even the facts of life, and the belief that “everyone has a right to his/her own world view.” A belief that could not exist in the real world where people like Hitler and Trump play out their anti-social agendas.

But now, as we begin to see that internet opinions have real life consequences, I see another shift. I hope it’s not too late.   I would really like to see us grow up, get it together and use the internet and all our other technologies to the benefit of ourselves and our future and all the Life of Earth, instead of using them to exert our power and gain our personal perks.

However, right now, I see primarily two attitudes and a lot of confusion. First attitude: The “me” curls up inside its own world view, so as not to deal with whatever else is out there that it doesn’t like. Or lashes out or complains because “there is nothing I can do,” The fact is there is always something one can do, we really are responsible for doing it if we really do want to make a better world, and we don’t find out what it is by curling up inside ourselves.

The second attitude is choosing to believe that the earth resources are infinite. That belief is not discussable, because it simply isn’t true.   There truly are true things, and one of our excuses is to infinitely discuss the undiscussible, rather than dealing with it.   Again, usually lash out or complain because we can’t make it different, rather than doing something different, ourselves, that might get us to a better place. This issue is fact-based, not discussable, so I will return to the first attitude.

The human world has developed at least two levels of organization more complex than it was when the Buddha (and Jesus, and Mohamed) walked the earth during the Axial age – not all at the same time, of course, but all during that vast time of changing human consciousness of ourselves. Now we are having another time of vast change, and if our genuine goal is to make the world better rather than worse for our presence, or even if we only want humankind to survive, then it is our obligation to use our wonderfully evolved mind, in addition to our innate instincts and our learned beliefs, to inform our behaviors.

If our genuine goal is to make the world better rather than worse, we cannot live and behave according to our basic human instincts and values without STUDYING the technologies that we have built and their relationship to the factual truth of the earth and of human biology, so that we can learn how the good these technologies do for us may actually cause great harm to OTHER PEOPLE and to Life itself, and so to us. We need to remember that our technologies, informed by our communal world view, is what CAUSED these problems in the first place, and more powerful technologies attached to the same world view will not make things better, but rather worse.

For example, a common misunderstanding of basic science is the belief that technology can create more resources. (For example that farming, can make more food available). It cannot. Farming is a technology, and technology does not create anything; technology USES the resources, in fact redirects resources to human use away from their natural use. The earth does not have infinite resources, whether it be photosynthesis or chemicals of various kinds or anything else. Technology can change things around, but it cannot make more than there is. When we try to change our reality, rather than trying to live within it, the result is vast suffering to other sentient beings and, as a result, to humans and to ourselves individually.

For example, we are causing mass extinctions of other species by effectively using their food to feed ourselves. Because the earth has reached its limits and we are technologically more powerful than these other species, we can tear up the places where they live and use the land to grow food for ourselves. So they die.

Who cares? This all sounds like a great idea to some people. Kill off the other, and we have it all to ourselves. These people are ignorant of the facts of Life. The fact is that it is the other species — the other organisms that we are killing off – they function together to create the resources in the first place by cycling and recycling the things we need to stay alive (including food). That is the cause of climate change, and that is why our human overgrowth is the basic problem we must deal with if we want to survive, and that is also why me-ism is not how we can help to make things better rather than worse for the whole world and especially for ourselves. However, because we are all enjoying this (unethical) system of killing off the other, we therefore pretend the resources are infinite and we blame other people for problems that actually are caused by the way we use our technolgies. Or don’t use them, in the case of birth control.

The root cause of our problem is overgrowth, and as long as Americans are more willing to enjoy the temporary fruits of our overgrowth, rather than take responsibility for: 1) studying the facts of life as they are on earth today; and 2) reducing technological and population growth — then my opinion is that we (humans, worldwide) won’t make it to 2050. The reason will be not that the environment crashes, the environment will simply change to a form that can support itself without us. What is most likely to happen if we do not take responsibility for our behaviors is what happens to all overpopulated species. They run out of food and start killing each other. Haven’t you noticed? We have already started, but that will not save us from our overgrowth. In fact – look more closely and we realize that it is a part of our overgrowth. It means we can make more babies and profit from that, and then kill off more of whom we don’t want and profit from that. At it’s core, this is no different from farming. Farming people is more profitable than farming vegetables.

So, that is something we don’t want to talk about.

 

What I find highly irresponsible is that we would rather look for our own personal sense of peace by pretending all this is not so — and who cares about the future when it will happen to someone else — rather than taking to ourselves the lesser pain of the recognition that our dream castles are not real (and yes, I do know that tearing down dream castles is very painful) so that we can give everything we can/have to the future of the Life of Earth by taking responsibility for the pain we have caused by our overgrowth.

We humans did it, mostly with good intentions, and it is irresponsible to say that we as individuals “can’t do anything.” Especially considering the current election. What we can do, every one of us, is to study and discuss with each other the reality, what really is, not what the number-crunchers tell us, because they are human too, and their biases are impressive and un-recognized, and if they crunch the wrong numbers, based on flawed assumptions, it is all of life that suffers – not just our dream castles, as beautiful as they may be – and are – I do not exclude myself.

We are not required to do impossible things, but anyone can work to understand BOTH the down side and the up side of whatever we are promoting – and there is always a down side.

As a traditional elder has said (Oren Lyons): “It is our responsibility to plan for the seventh generation yet to come.” The Dalai Lama says something similar, but with a longer timeline. They are right, and that is something that ANYONE CAN DO, together with others in his or her community, or just the family, or even all alone. But we must remember that flawed planning, based on trusting someone else’s world view or value system or bad numbers, will not get us where we want to go.

Why are we afraid of hurting other peoples’ feelings when at the same time we are taking the food out of their mouths without a qualm, by growing the economy and the population beyond the level that the earth resources can support?

 

Buddhism does not say, nor does any other religion, that everyone should be happy all the time, regardless of the pain and suffering that our “happiness” causes to other sentient beings.

What does everyone really want? I think, when we get to the end of that Bodhisatva path that we claim to be walking, the only thing that can make us genuinely satisfied is the knowledge that we lived out our responsibilities to friends, family, community, and to ourselves — not by our opinions — whatever they may be — but by our responsible actions/behaviors, whether or not some of those behaviors made other people “uncomfortable.” That is wise compassion, and that is our responsibility to ourselves, that is, our species.

I would bet the Buddha never said that everyone wants “happiness.” Who said that? The corposystem says that, so that it can claim to give it to us with its technologies.

First, the Buddha did not speak or understand English as interpreted by the corposystem. And second, at least with regard to Tibet, there were two language translations between the original and the English.  The English translation, so far as I know was first made by Christian missionaries working from the Tibetan language that they understood only superficially. I would bet that what the Buddha really said was something like The Dalai Lama’s vision of “wise compassion.”

What we all want is achievable only through our own wise compassion, and wise compassion can be defined as doing what is best for the other; really best, not just convenient for right now but best unto the seventh generation, first by open minded deep study of the issues outside of one’s own belief system, combined with the understanding that there are NEVER fewer than three possible choices, and that we must study all the choices before we act upon them — and second by behaving in accord with the informed choices that we make.

 

 

 

Bare Bones Biology 307 – I Didn’t Do That

Yesterday was not good for me. First I had two doctors’ appointments; second, they were both 100 miles away; third, I drove from my mountaintop to theirs and back, all in one day, stopping for medication on the way back, and then zonked out under my electric blanket by 6 pm. Just before midnight I woke up, went out to my little travel-trailer workshop, turned on the electric space heater, and all the lights went out in our entire subdivision.

I didn’t do that.
Did I?

So, using battery power, I checked my emails, which consisted of about 50 political flyers, one of which I read because it did not have any fantastical, tremendous, horrendous, unbelievable, hyperflagulous words in the title.

While I do not write about politics, I do write about how systems function, and these words from Bernie Sanders could have been me – talking about naturally evolved systems that have nothing to do with politics.: “. . . the American people understand that you cannot change a corrupt political system by taking its money.”

And this is my version of essentially the same reality: “When I say that we may not succeed in implementing your mission, I am not referring to what you can do today to help other people who are caught in the system – what I mean is that what you can do today will not accomplish your long-term heart’s desire and frustration, which I believe is to move up one level of systemic organization — from helping individuals, to changing the system that creates these victims — and in fact what you do today could, unawares, enable the system’s creation of victims. “ Bernie said it better, but that’s the way I talk.

About two hours later, the lights came back on and I went out to the little workspace and turned the heater on again. Nothing bad happened, so I plugged in the DVD player to continued my study of “complex adaptive systems” of which naturally evolved systems are evidently a subset – Subset? That doesn’t make sense. How can a factual natural reality be a subset of a human conceptualization???? Ahhh, I get it. If your head is in the Biosystem world view, the naturally evolved complex adaptive systems are a subset of the Biosystem. On the contrary, if your head is in the corposystem world view, you are required to behave as though all of the natural world is a subset of human conceptualization.

Not long now, we will have to choose sides or lose the field of play.

I did that. One day in 2006 I sat at the end of my driveway in my old white Ford pickup and realized that we cannot solve our human problems from inside our corposystem worldview that created the problems. I decided then and there, ten years ago, that I would approach my life from that time forward trying to think like a system. As though I were a system. And it has been difficult even for me, with all the background that I have in my life as a scientist and a human person, to get my human head around some of the Biosystem needs for its survival.

So it’s hard, but that is an entirely different subject that has nothing to do with the fact that we will soon have to choos. In fact, we are choosing every day — with everything we do. What do we want more – compassionate recognition of the effect our behaviors have on other people and all sentient beings? Or, like a child, do we want what we want — no matter what?

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com.

A copy of this podcast can be downloaded at:http://traffic.libsyn.com/fff/Bare_Bones_Biology_307_-_I_Didnt_Do_That.mp3

 

 

Bare Bones Biology 296 – Suicide by Corposystem

The universe we live in is composed of interacting, naturally evolved systems. We did not create this miracle, but we are part of it; and there are rules, laws of nature that we are slowly learning to understand. And the worst part — it seems we must ever and again, both as individuals with thinking minds, and as social systems, relearn all the same old painful lessons that have been learned the hard way so many times before by others of our kind. We have guides to the “laws” of human behaviors encoded in the structures of our wisdom traditions.

 

The Law of Life itself on this earth is basically simple and is framed by the balance of energy and entropy; of work and information; and the systems that naturally arise within that frame. This universe is what it is; we add our own complications. In fact it is part of our nature as living things to add complications. Complications are a part of evolution. But we have this nice brain and all those wisdom traditions to help us, not to mention modern science, all studying the same universe. You’d think we would learn the rules.

 

As individuals, we humans are naturally evolved systems. We are composed of naturally evolved systems and we are parts of the whole naturally evolved system that maintains itself by balancing the relationships among energy and entropy using the natural laws that regulate work and information. This fact has implications.

One of these implications is that we embody functions within and among the systems. Whether or not we want to. And the better we can manage these functions the less suffering we will cause to others. Or actually, I should say the more suffering we will prevent, because if we were to use our beautiful brain to manage our behaviors within the wisdom traditions and the wisdom of science (I am not talking about technology here, but our knowledge of cause and effect) we could be preventing suffering rather than causing it.

 

You already know my personal prime directive to do more good than harm in my time on this earth. This kind of aspiration is not possible to accomplish if we refuse to see the downside as well as the up side of our behaviors. For me, figuring out the meaning of good and harm is enough of a challenge to keep me going until someone else takes over, but I do have one important guide in the effort. I know that I cannot change the natural laws, and therefore I must align my plans and behaviors with what is, and not with what I wish it were.

I am tempted to say the four noble laws of nature, but some out there may not have a sufficient sense of humor, or is it irony, to enjoy that line. Oh, let’s leave it. It is not likely to do more harm than good. How many people will read this anyhow??

 

One of the primary functions of a system is to maintain itself. You and I are naturally evolved systems composed of other systems that all function together to maintain the whole. Our respective liver, heart, digestive system, excretory system, and above all, in humans, our most highly evolved subsystem, our brain. And our mind. Part of our job of life is to take very good care of all the systems of which we are composed. For the benefit of the whole. That is, for ourselves individually, for the social systems of which we are a part: family, tribe, and now a new system that, like it or not, we are creating together, the global corposystem.

Another primary function of each naturally evolved system is to do no harm to the larger systems of which it is a part. To do good if possible. Because these are our environment, and our environment is the other half of who we are.

 

Now here’s the downside of that magnificent brain of ours and the corposystem that it is creating. The corposystem, that is us, rather than to helping to form a collaborative whole, is determined to establish domination over the Biosystem. The corposystem – in its war against the Biosystem, is making us choose.

 

In this kind of triangle, we cannot do more good than harm unless we think very deeply about the “unexpected” but not unexpectable consequences of our actions.

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com

 

The podcast of this blog is available at:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/fff/Bare_Bones_Biology_296_-_Suicide_by_Corposystem.mp3

 

Bare Bones Biology 293 – Reinventing the Wheel

I am not a physicist. Far from it. I had to take calculus in order to be a good biologist, and I never did understand it until I was able to intuitively grasp what they were talking about, and even then I couldn’t actually DO it without going back to the book every time for the various mathematical expressions that I needed. Nevertheless, I got it mostly right, because, as Neil deGrasse Tyson is supposed to have said: The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” And I know his mentor, Carl Sagan, said something similar. And it is true, by definition.

Facts are facts.

Of course.

That is why many of us lean toward science. Well understood facts are completely reliable, and we can’t say that for many other things on this earth – even some of us choose “science” as our God.

That is a big mistake. First, most people do not understand that technology is NOT basic science. Technology is very powerful, but it is merely a manifestation of man the toolmaker, not man the omniscient god. Humans are not God, and if you want evidence of that, just go for a walk in any city. If you want power, technology is a lot of fun. If you want a future, then it is better to take a path that leads toward fact-based wisdom that combines the benefits of good basic science with the learned experience of human mistakes.

To be a physicist, you need calculus, but you only need to be about 25 years old or so to begin; for wisdom, you need experience, your own and as many generations as possible behind you, on top of your knowledge of the facts of history and of basic science, and that of course is why powermongers, first most quietly and now most forcefully, are overwhelming our sources of information with fake facts. Well, actually, it’s not possible to fake a fact unless the listener is not paying attention, but we seem to have a great lot of people listening to the media with their emotions rather than with their minds, and so the powermongers are succeeding elegantly in this country. They don’t even have to work very hard to pull the wool over our eyes. It’s what we want, so we the people are doing it for them, but that is another story.

This story is about humans choosing between wisdom and power. We have chosen power, I think largely based on a false meme: “Survival of the Fittest” is NOT how Life functions to stay alive, and it would take a little effort – not much, but beginning with a questing mind – to understand how evolution really does work to generate and maintain living systems. I’m not talking about technological systems that powermongers use to elevate themselves. I’m talking about real, sustainable systems that maintain themselves and us by balancing the interacting systems of which they are composed

How, then, do humans find wisdom – the elusive antidote to power? First we acknowledge the real facts and discuss their implications for the entire Biosystem, ourselves included — the root, rock-bottom facts that generated Life on Earth, that guide how naturally evolved systems interact with each other to grow better systems. Those processes do not change. The systems change, of course, but not the processes.

Once we have the knowledge, then our wisdom challenge is more complex. We must of course acknowledge our human instincts and emotions, but we must go beyond that level of understanding to figure out how to navigate our path among the facts of today and into a sustainable future. We are not ants, that make their decisions instinctually, based on response to chemicals in their environments (or if we are, it isn’t working well). The gift of wisdom, when we accept it, is our ability to factor the facts into a wisdom tradition that suits the environments.

The facts give us power to make war over whatever we choose, but wisdom gives us the power to use the facts to make a future for ourselves within Life on earth. We probably can’t do both as our resources dwindle; it’s too bad we have chosen war over sustainability.

This is Bare Bones Biology a production of http://FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com.  A copy of the podcast can be downloaded at:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/fff/Bare_Bones_Biology_293_-_Reinventing_the_Wheel.mp3

 

For Those of you Interested in Some Positive News About Economics

Anomalous economists to convene at Santa Fe Institute

 

Reprinted with permission of Santa Fe Institute Update (Follow SFI online at http://www.santafe.edu).
Last year, at Her Majesty’s Treasury in London, a global team of economists calling themselves Curriculum Openaccess Resources for Economics, or CORE, launched an ambitious, unconventional project.

 
This February, CORE will meet at Santa Fe Institute to discuss how to make sure their anomalous efforts have a lasting impact on how students learn economics – and the way they think about science.  “CORE is teaching economics as if the last 30 years had happened,” says SFI Professor Samuel Bowles, one of the group’s founders, referring both to the financial crisis of 2008, which took many economists by  surprise, and the growing acknowledgment among economists that not everyone is entirely selfish as traditional economic theory asserts.

 

CORE’s interactive ebook, The Economy, is not your usual Econ 101 fare. First, it emphasizes identifying and modeling empirical regularities rather than developing mathematical models from a set of abstract, often dubious assumptions about economic behavior. Second, it focuses on fundamental issues that are connected to economics but that other texts tend to ignore – issues like financial instability, wealth creation in capitalist societies, inequality, and environmental sustainability.

 

Students come to economics wanting to tackle those problems, and recent innovations in economics have a lot to say about them, wrote CORE director and University College London professor Wendy Carlin recently in the Financial Times.

 

As striking as the book’s content is the price. Competing textbooks sell for upwards of $200, but The Economy is free and available to anyone with an internetconnected device at http://www.core-econ.org

 

“Meeting at SFI is a natural for CORE,” says Bowles. “We are teaching first-year students to think about the economy as a complex, dynamical system and to beware of static metaphors and disciplinary parochialism.”  The question now, Bowles says, is how to ensure that CORE continues to grow and mobilize the diverse inputs from teachers, students, and other users. 

 
Others contributing to CORE are SFI External Professors Rajiv Sethi and Simon DeDeo. n

Bare Bones Biology 292 – There Are Rules

Last week I pointed out that religion and science teach us, at the top levels of their understandings, one big message. The message is that there are rules and we are far better off in the real world if we follow these rules than if we do not. I think that’s why humans evolved both religion and science – because the more we know about the rules, the better able we are survive and flourish in a real world of rules.

 

We all live in the same world, more or less comfortably, and therefore our wisdom traditions, including both science and religion, as studied by for example Prof. Huston Smith and by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Prof. Joseph Campbell, Karen Armstrong, and others – if they do a good job of studying the higher-level information, that is the wisdom that is illuminated for us by the various religions and by basic science (not politically useful technologies, but the basic science that attempts to learn what the rules are and how they function) — that higher level information should be the same or similar in all the wisdom traditions, because we are, indeed, one world. Not a different world for science and then a collection of different worlds for the various religious expressions.

 

What do I mean by higher-level information? I mean the actual rules, the laws of nature, stripped of their various metaphorical interpretations. Every religion and also basic science abound with metaphorical elaborations of the rules for safe conduct in the world, and they vary from culture to culture, but the message is similar, and in that similarity are the truths that describe the rules of nature/God that are necessary to the proper function of the universe, the Biosystem, and humans within the Biosystem.

 

There are at least three levels of understanding in every wisdom tradition. First we grow to understand the culture into which we are born, all the things we automatically learn, that tie our instincts to our particular culture of birth — such as language and our interpersonal relationships and our relationships with our immediate environment.

The second level is our education, including the vivid metaphors of our religion that function to align our behaviors with our instinct for survival. Third, beyond the metaphor, is the highest level of understanding the facts of history and the laws of God and nature.

 

For example, all the major religions encourage compassion, preferably “wise compassion,” or “pure compassion,” that is not entangled with negative motivation, because compassion, like any human emotion, can be used for self-aggrandizement (that is, pride), and these same major religions (and the basic science) also carry the message that: “Pride goeth before a fall.”

 

In my lifetime I have seen this meme actualized at every level of human endeavor, yet I have never seen a culture so prideful as are we in this world right now, and yes, we are mining compassion for all it is worth, both for money and self-aggrandizement. We actually believe we only need to think of a thing and it is do-able without any down side or blowback – just because it was we who thought of it. Scary it is. Where is our religion when we need it? And our basic science?

 

At the peak of human understanding, where the teachings agree, there lies wisdom, and that wisdom tells us there is an “unseen order” that drives reality. We only need to listen.

 

 

 

This is Bare Bones Biology a production of https://FactFictionFancy.wordpress.com

The podcast of this blog can be downloaded at: http://traffic.libsyn.com/fff/Bare_Bones_Biology_292_-_There_Are_Rules.mp3

 

 

Huston Smith. 2005. The Soul of Christianity. Harper, San Francisco.

His Holiness The Dalai Lama. 2010. Toward a True Kinship of Faiths. Doubleday     Religion.

Joseph Campbell. 1972. Myths to Live By. The Penguin Group

E. O. Wilson.  Sociobiology.

Karen Armstrong. A History of God.

Bare Bones Biology 271 – Wise Choices

Letter to DV – I printed and read your series of comments on Facebook, because I can see a lot of good food for thought in there, and I even read the article by your poor naïve horror-struck author. I say naïve and horror struck because it seems to me that he (and nearly everyone on the web) somehow grew up believing life is supposed to be neat and easy and on track, just the way we want it to be, just because we are humans. This of course is what the corposystem wants us to believe and is basic to its propaganda.

Humans do not, can not, and should not control the Biosystem. However, there is NEVER nothing that we can do. What we can do now is to conform our world view to the needs of a nurturing Biosystem, rather than nurturing the corposystem lie.

I think our human problem on earth is that we are mostly doing the wrong things, because we are thinking the wrong things, because the corposystem has seized control over and is using our media and our politics to brainwash us. That is hard on those who recognize the problem. But nevertheless, just because someone else is doing nothing, or doing the wrong things, is not a good reason for me to do nothing, or to do the wrong things. That’s not the hardest question; the hardest question is how to live, surrounded by toxic propaganda, so that we do more good than harm to the welfare of the Biosystem.

As you pointed out, it is, indeed, too late for the perfect solution. The reality is that there never was a perfect solution. People are not in charge here; we never were, and the “human question” will surely be resolved long before 60 years. The solution for us will depend largely upon our choices during that time. What goes around comes around. That is not a tragedy, it is a fact of life. We caused our own tragedy by ignoring the reality. We have no responsibility to control the Biosystem, because that is not how the universe functions. Our human responsibilities are first to do as little harm as possible and second do the best we can within the reality that we find ourselves in right now, because now is the only time when we have the possibility to make wise choices.

I believe the most important thing we can do right now is to avoid believing the corposystem propaganda, to identify the reality, and to discuss among ourselves what the world looks like from outside the corposystem paradigm. Not to submit to the arrogance of the current corposystem world view, which is essentially growth for profit by domination. I refuse to be dominated, and increasingly larger numbers of people are doing the same.

What concerns me most is whether these increasing numbers of people will choose viable, sustainable alternatives to the corposystem paradigm, or if they have swallowed the corposystem myth of human omnipotence and will try to create something that satisfies a different set of human values but is equally as harmful to the Life of our Biosystem. The Biosystem does not have human values or needs, only Biosystem needs.

We do need models for our choices. Lots of them. We especially need models that demonstrate the corposystem lie — the failure of the corposystem paradigm — so that we can stop killing the Biosystem and begin to heal. Discussion and publication of negative models is not failure – it is wisdom.

Do you see how the corposystem domination has prevented you recognizing the value of your work?

It does the same to me. That is our challenge. Because whatever happens, not you nor I nor the corposystem have the option to dictate outcomes for the whole world. If that is your goal, then failure is a certainty, for the same reason that failure of the corposystem is a certainty. Humans cannot control the Biosystem. We must learn to conform to its needs or we will be replaced by some other species that will do a better job.

The corposystem has taught us that we must be winners or losers. I reject that concept; I think winners is a losing paradigm. What we can do in this biological crisis is make a success of our individual opportunities by making decisions that benefit the Biosystem, based on good factual research and wise human compassion. And to discuss these decisions with other people who understand the problem and have expertise outside our own in the areas of Biosystem facts and wise compassion.

Our choice in now time is whether to contribute to the welfare of the corposystem or of the Biosystem, because we can’t do both at the same time. If your goal is to save the corposystem you are right – you have no chance — and you would do more good by just giving up. My goal is to benefit the future welfare of the Biosystem.

What we do not and cannot know is when and how the corposystem will crash, and whether or not you and I can help to develop a new system out of the ashes that can support the factual needs of the Biosystem.

So – are we to pout because we are not omnipotent and omniscient Gods? Or are we to accept that as wisdom, and do the best we can to make good choices based in hard biological facts and wise human compassion

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com and KEOS 89.1 FM in Bryan, Texas.

A copy of this podcast can be downloaded at:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/fff/Bare_Bones_Biology_271_-_Wise_Choices.mp3

Sections in green were omitted from the podcast because of time constraints.

Bare Bones Biology 263F – The Problem Is

Right now it seems as though we (as humanity) are running panic stricken, in all directions at the same time without any sustainable paradigm to guide us, each person responding in knee-jerk fashion, mostly trying to “fix” our social collapse, each according to his own world view and without respect to getting rid of the cause of the affliction. This is why I have not enthusiastically focused my energy on any of these separating actions, though many will

 

I bless the culture shocks that saved me from myself. Wisdom is gained, according to the Dalai Lama (Becoming Enlightened) by “analyzing the facts and discerning the actual situation.” He should know – he’s had enough paradigm shifts in his life, and I’m quite sure we would agree that this kind of wisdom, based in factual reality and gained through deep study and empathic participation — combined with wise (altruistic) compassion — is essential to long-term, reasonably rewarding human lives.

 

Before that I actually believed that we had dealt with the problem in the 50’s and 60’s. I knew I had, and that’s another thing about one’s own paradigm. Unless we have an opportunity to experience the logic of another’s paradigm, we just naturally tend to believe that everyone else thinks like we do. They don’t. They don’t even want to. They like their own.

 

We need to begin rational fact-based discussion of issues and stop fighting irrational wars (debates).

 

I bless the culture shocks that saved me from myself. Wisdom is gained, according to the Dalai Lama (Becoming Enlightened) by “analyzing the facts and discerning the actual situation.” He should know – he’s had enough paradigm shifts in his life, and I’m quite sure we would agree that this kind of wisdom, based in factual reality and gained through deep study and empathic participation — combined with wise (altruistic) compassion — is essential to a long-term, reasonably rewarding human paradigm.

 

Is it possible, given the chaos we are now creating, that our response to our social and biological collapse is not so much about the actual cause of the problem as it is about the necessity of “getting together” in order to “analyze the facts and discern the actual situation” in an effort to grow some wisdom around the problem? Is it perhaps that our World Views are pushing us apart, preventing us from getting together even to discuss the real issues?

 

I think it’s important for us to understand that all world views are or were logical in the circumstances of their origin, and to understand that culture shock is one of those painful blessings with emphasis on blessing, and to understand that we always have choices. We can cling to the seeming security of what we already understand, or we can choose to become a part of change, for the benefit of the entire community.

 

The natural biological response to stress is indeed to generate diversity, but I think the wise approach, in this case, would be to benefit all of us by sharing and evaluating the world views of all in our effort to understand why we don’t just admit to the real cause of our pain so we can remove it. And then proceed to develop a more sustainable world view of the whole. In other words, to discuss the issues among the disciplines.

 

There is always a starting point for discussion, because we all are looking at the same problem happening in the same Earth Biosystem. We are not experiencing a bunch of different problems. We are in fact, every one of us, experiencing one common experience, the death of our species.

 

I think that’s worth a little time spent in problem-solving with others of our kind.

 

I believe paradigm change is the only hope for human kind in this age, and it is clearly happening, but extremely inefficiently. We could do more. We could consciously use our unique mental equipment to grow a new world view that is aligned with our current factual reality, which is overproduction, overpopulation and overshoot.

 

My goal is to grow or create a new paradigm that will result in a sustainable, reasonably comfortable human presence on this earth. What is yours?

 

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com and KEOS FM 89.1 in Bryan, Texas.

 

A copy of the podcast can be obtained at:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/fff/Bare_Bones_Biology_263_-_The_Problem_Is.mp3

 

References Cited:

Collapse, by Jared Diamond. Penguin Books, 2011.

Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot by Tom Butler and William N. Ryerson. Goff Books, 2015.

Becoming Enlightened, by His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Jeffrey Hopkins,  Atria Books, 2009.

https://factfictionfancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/17/

 

 

Bare Bones Biology 253 – Answer the Question

We have come to an age in my country, where almost everyone we talk to is afraid of questions. It astonishes me when someone responds to my questions by bursting into tears, becoming stiff and defensive or, worse, angry over I know not what.

But wait. Come to think of it, people also ask ME questions, and yes there are times I get just a wee bit huffy about it. It does depend what kind of mood I’m in, and how I feel about the other person, and also how many times they have asked me the same question. And most of all it depends on whether I think it’s a real question or just something meant to fill the empty space between us.

Sometimes I ask dumb questions for smart reasons or sometimes smart questions for dumb reasons, and most often I ask questions that nobody knows the answers to, but different people have different answers, and if we got them all together some really exciting answers might come out of it.

I am a naturally curious person, and perhaps entering my second childhood, and I like questions because I like to understand more and more about how the world works. So I ask my questions, and what do I get?

Too often, shunned, attacked, shocked responses – too often answers that are not useful, and more importantly the person on the other end of this exchange also gets nothing useful. Or maybe it is that people will only answer the right questions, or questions that are asked correctly or appropriately.

Then you may say, as most people do say about corposystem rituals: “You are doing it the wrong way.” They don’t say the ritual is negative and causes harm to both the asker and the answerer; they say it would all turn out OK if I would do the ritual correctly – that the ritual is the ultimate right and I am wrong. And then they offer to kindly teach me how to do it right — without asking whether or not I had considered and discarded their method before they were even born.

Teeny-boppers!!!!

My answer is: “So what do I care about the corposystem rituals? The corposystem loves to tell us that we are not OK unless we can become perfect at one thing or another. It’s a great technique because nobody can do it, and at the same time these rituals keep we the people occupied and focus our attention away from serious problems we are not supposed to talk about, such as overpopulation, for example, or the corposystem take-over of our political and educational systems.

Imagine raising children and they can’t ask questions. None of us ever stop learning, and in this age of incredibly rapid change, we need answers. If we can’t ask or answer questions – well then – we are stuck in our own history, and doomed to recycle that history. And that’s a really big problem that will not be solved by anyone being perfect or not perfect.

So, as for the questions, my goal is to find answers – not to practice someone else’s proscribed format until my performance is “perfect.” And in the long run, I will end up knowing more, and knowing more is both fun and useful.

We all are stuck with each other, so maybe it would be a good time to make do, swallow our fear or pride or that little tickle in the stomach that says: “I’m not good enough; I can’t handle this,” and just answer the questions. Or tell them it’s something you don’t want to talk about. Or ask a good, relevant question back. Because in any normal social situation, questions are not really a threat to anyone. And they can be incredibly useful to us all.

And anyhow, why this need to prove that you are better than everyone else? Questions are nothing more than children learning how the world really does work, and learning the answers is not an onerous task – it’s FUN! Not only fun, but good information increases your personal power in the world.

So why the angst?

Just answer the question.

This is bare bones biology, a production of FactFictionFancy.Wordpress.com and KEOS radio, 89.1 FM in Bryan, Texas. A copy of the podcast can be downloaded here:

Much better than starting wars or excluding others from important information. Or wasting our time on line trying to prove the un-provable — when we could be contributing information and attitudes that can benefit the future welfare of our communities.

Bare Bones Biology 248 – Instinct and Learning

“One essential step in learning to more genuinely see each other is to bother to look. . . if they don’t make much of an impression on us … it is all too easy to look right through them.” – Sharon Salzberg., “A More Complete Attention”

Bare Bones Biology 248 – Instinct and Learning

When you raise a child, you try to give it the knowledge that it needs to lead a successful and rewarding life.

In the first stage of life, humans and also other higher animals learn about the world. All organisms have instincts that are in our genetic code. Higher mammals, such as ourselves, grow bigger brains, and as we grow up, our brains are able to merge the instincts that come from our genetic makeup and the experiences of our early days, to grow a worldview that will guide our successful and rewarding lives if the world stays pretty much the same as what we experienced growing up.

Our instincts and our experiences become entwined into our worldview, and we keep adding to this awareness throughout our lives. It is our world view that makes it possible for us to survive in the world, and by the time we are about ten or twelve years old we have an image of reality that will or will not help us to lead successful and rewarding lives – depending on whether or not our worldview matches the world we end up in.

We are barely aware of our worldview. It just feels to us as though it were reality – just what is now and always will be. But it’s not reality; it was our reality when we were growing up. But meantime the human world changes.

There are so many humans on earth today, with so many different worldviews, that we are causing the world to change so fast that nobody’s feet are firmly planted in reality, and the young people who are raised so carefully and conscientiously by their parents must go out into a world that does not match the world they grew up in.

I think you know all this; you are aware of a myriad of “different opinions” held by the people all around you, arising from what they believe to be reality, and because our parents wanted peace among all the people, most of us were taught that “everyone has a right to his own opinion.”

Like most sound bites, that one is not true, because some opinions are harmful, but it is true that everyone in modern times does have a somewhat different worldview, basically because we all were brought up in different realities. And pity the children who were raised in a television world that never was real and never can be.

Nobody knows everything about reality, and therefore everyone makes mistakes, and so people evolved to live in social groups, because a group of three people, for example, knows more about reality than one person alone. Each person of a group or a culture has a different skill-set and wisdom-set to offer the group, and the society is more or less successful according to how it takes advantage of the whole set, using that set to grow a successful and rewarding cultural worldview within the reality of Life of the time.

But no society understands all of the mind of God, or reality, or the Biosystem, because each of these entites is bigger than all our worldviews combined. That’s why societies make mistakes and fail in the same way that individuals do. And as an individual, when your social belief system – the worldview it has engrained into your brain so deeply that you believe it to be ultimate truth – when that turns out to be wrong – it feels like God died, and our first reaction is denial. Then we cling with all our might to our limited little window/view of God’s reality rather than deal directly and responsibly with what is happening. That seems to be just how it is – how human minds are made to operate.

Though if we think about it, we could probably do a little better.

A boddhisatva is a person who knows all this and nevertheless reaches out her hand to share in the world of the sinking ship.

This is Bare Bones Biology, a production of FactFictionFancy and KEOS radio, 89.1 in Bryan, Texas.

A copy of this podcast is available at: