Worldview Layout

Balancing Truth and Positivity

Sustainability, Goals and Collaboration

Trust, Truth and Equity

Defining the Box

For Posterity Sake: All the Worst Things I've Ever Done

The title may be a joke, but the content isn't.

Decision-Making in Context and across Contexts

One creates nested default groups to make moral judgements and decisions. These groups become the contexts in which to apply principles or analysis to decide, and the final decisions comes from the group which wins when its contextual relevance is given supremacy. For example, if we discuss whether to kill someone is wrong, the universal contextual answer is, "It is wrong." Or perhaps, the universal answer is unknown or is both right and wrong together, and the context of an environment filled with humans, the context of humanity, makes killing wrong. Looking further inward, killing in accordance with the death penalty is right, if we accept that laws are the societally accepted moral framework relevant in a given time and place. If the individual executioner has inside knowledge about the inmate's innocence which was known to be excluded from the legal process, the killing becomes wrong again. So, how does the executioner make the decision.

The spectrum of default groups must reach from the context of the individual to that of the universe. In between the two extremes, there are several natural intermediates: earth, life, animal life, humanity, jurisdictions of law, companies, families, tribes, etc. The time-limited process of making a decision must be imperfect.

Do We Care about the Future?

I often wonder what others would think about various thought experiments I run in my head. In particular, how would the various potential futures I contemplate rank in terms of desirability. Given that each of our ideal futures has a unique composition of features, what would be some of the common trends? Could we agree on any goals at all? And if not, could we agree on a process for determining the goals even if we can't all agree on what they are? There are so many people that don't even speak the same languages that I do; what do they want? Where do we agree and disagree?

Additionally, I'm curious about the prospect of global visions for humanity, rather than today's focus on the meager expression and internal agreement in nation-states. While there is clear, if ineffectual process for guiding nations, the international community's process is certainly less developed. In considering potential futures on this scale, it strikes me that I find some of them very displeasurable.

***

Specks of light dotting the night sky gleamed meagerly in the distance. As the cool artificial breeze of the Martian domes brushed gently against Kaiya's cheeks, she couldn't help but wonder what became of her grandmother's friend's grandchildren. Her Terran peers' parents lost the technology for communicating with the colony Mars over two decades ago now. As the population surpassed one million in 2081, just a few years ago, the celebration was bittersweet, unshared with so many friends from humanity's home world.

***

Do others fear cataclysmic rifts in our species as I do? The Martian example is particularly illustrative for its physical divide, but techno-socioeconomic partitions scare me just as much.

Already, we see segregated communities around the globe - in the Arab States, Nigeria and the United States and elsewhere - stratified greatly along economic lines. When groups with money tend to see positively reinforcing feedback loops that grant them privilege to compounding gains, they stand positioned to run away with our global civilization's power and control. Even now, elites often control laws or have the money to evade them. The top tier of human society stands apart from the rest.

Technology also feeds into the feedback loops. Technology can be adopted first by elites. They know about it first, and they can afford it. If technology Z is build on Y which is built on X and so on, and if an elite group gains access to Z before anyone outside the group has access to A, it may well be fair to say that the elite group has sufficiently separated itself from the rest of humanity. The specific technology could further reinforce this idea. For example, genetic control of our offspring down to the level of individual base pairs and epigenetic fingerprinting would be a game changer in terms of our evolution as a species. Evolved intelligence where humans are integrated with AI in a manner that gives some individuals orders of magnitude more cognitive processing power might also render the unprivileged people powerless and obsolete.

If we really care about human inclusion, equality and the value of individual human lives, we soon must contemplate the implications of technology, resource distribution and economic stratification on the development of our species. Extrapolating backwards the idea of inclusivity in the face of such major technological progress of our potential future, are we in the right place today? While I think we are still largely okay - it's been less than a generation since cell phones and the internet became common - I do worry about the next generation. What if 10% of the world is still without cellphones in 2030? That would mean that many children in developed nations have parents that grew up with cell phones while 1 of every 10 humans couldn't even get one then.

More broadly though, my question is about whether or not we are, as a species, simply alright with that prospect. Do we even care? If we have 9 billion people and the top 7 billion don't really notice when the bottom 2 billion suffer, why would we change? And if the top 10 million can simply ignore or even subjugate the rest of the 9 billion, would there be enough impetus within the elites to prevent it? If your children are part of the future mainstream, if you are, do you care?

Who I am

I'm Grant Robert Smith. I'm Zyzzyx of Nal. Actually, that's an alter ego name that I use internally in several ways. Nal is sort of like my word for God. It's a portmanteau of nothing and all - the combination of opposites into a single foundational concept that underpins my conception of the universe. You could take and restate Nal however you like, which is kind of what I think of when you look at the myriad conceptions that individuals have of the notion of God. For me, it commonly appears as 'Doubt everything except and including this.' Or, 'We know nothing for certain, and this we certainly know.' It is the juxtaposition or combination of nothing and everything, doubt and certainty, whatever you want.

Ok, you may be thinking, "That's nice, but it's kind of not saying anything at all." To which I would respond that this is precisely the point. Because on top of this foundational concept (or without or next to or however you prefer), you can build the rest of your conception of reality. For better or worse, our existence seems to have a decent amount of consistency to it, which leads mostly to conceptions mirroring the universe itself. "Cogito ergo sum," as Descartes put it. And then you have science or fantasy. You have fate or free will. You have chaos or morality. These are inclusive 'or's and not intended as opposites. Build a worldview however you like, but be warned that you may not like the world you view.

How I do it

Balance. More specifically, I think of balancing truth and positivity. That consistency of experience I mentioned before comes in use for our small and limited minds. The fact that we can make predictions based on past experience and causal relationships is quite nice. So, I hold the truth in high regard. While you observe a rock hurdling toward you, it might feel nice - for a bit - to have the unshakable belief that 'the rock will be stopped by your mind powers, and that it will fall to the ground before it strikes your face.' This sort of positivity is almost certainly unwarranted. Here, the physical reality is simple and predictable to a degree that positivity should play no part in the matter. On the other hand, positivity is great when reasonable doubt enters the picture. The unshakable belief that 'I will have a pleasant interaction when I go up and talk to a stranger' is hence more reasonable. Obviously, it's not going to be true 100% of the time, but it's still reasonable. It's reasonable because it's going to be true some of the time and because the potential harms of its falseness are negligible.

While this is a simple and reasonable place to start, it's not much of a worldview yet. Truth alone is enough to create most of my view on the world since I exist not in a vacuum but in an observable space. I hope I'm quoting my friend Shane Golden correctly as saying, "I am, now, in this place." Or, incorporating my brother's idea of 'mutually shared experience,' one could rephrase it as, "We are, here, now." This is the basic acceptance of a shared universe with consistency across local observation of space and time. Truth begets physicalism which begets science which begets more truth, and it appears trivial to simply accept the majority of that which is and of that which you hear and see and feel and smell and so on and so on. I even largely extend this acceptance of truth to that which I read and that which people tell me, so long as it's consistent. And, even when inconsistencies arise, it's easy enough to take Occam's Razor approach, the simplest explanation, assuming best intentions and greatest positivity when explanations are comparably simple.

Good intentions and positivity only seem to matter when I start adding the key ingredient - meaning - to existence. The choice to give meaning to existence is logically arbitrary, but almost universally intrinsic in the context of existing in the first place. If I think I am, here, now, in this place without meaning, I can logically justify anything. I can subsequently create meaning in a bubble surrounded by meaninglessness and derive whatever moral framework I want. To some extent, we all do this. It's necessary because we have limited capacity. We can only process so much information, and we can only observe so much of the universe. But, anytime we make an arbitrary bubble without ever thinking about it's context or questioning it, we risk losing our connection with the truth. In turn, we lose true consistency between the universe and our conception thereof. It will still appear to be consistent because the inconstancy is covered in meaninglessness, hidden outside the bubble of meaning we have defined for ourselves. But the truth and our inconsistency are there, lurking in the meaninglessness beyond our bubble of spatiotemporal relevancy.

Instead, I choose meaning, always. Plus, meaning just feels better than meaningless. It seems like a nicely balanced take on truth and positivity. And with meaning, comes morality. Actually, morality requires there to be context and for that context to include other human beings or comparably intelligent forms with which to interact and reason about morality. But since that's pretty much a given, we all have morality in some sense, even if we don't always recognize it as such, especially in others. I'd guess most people define their personal worldview and morality from the inside out, from where they're positioned in the universe. I do this too, and at the same time, I define it from the outside in. What do things look like for the entirety of the universe? Obviously the answer is beyond my capacity, but it's an important question for me in defining my morality. I do my best to take into account all possible context, from where we come and to where we will go. Personally, this thought process comes from a place of decision making. My morality stems from trying to decide how to spend my time and what to do with my life.

In making decisions, I started with what I felt like are the biggest ones. The things that an individual chooses with greatest impact on the universe are what to do with your life's work and wether to have children (since it's going to be a big part of someone's life to raise that child). Because children additionally have a propagating effect of potentially creating more children, that decision seems to have a high chance of being more impactful on the universe over time than even what to do with one's life's work. So first, I decided not to have children. We have enough people for the planet; if I want to raise children, I'll adopt. Plus, humans are evolving faster based on technology than biology, so it's not like genetic propagation matters much. Second, I decided what to do in the 60 or so years I had left to live. This turned out to be a much more difficult decision making process. Apparently I started with the same question as Elon Musk ("What will most affect the future of humanity?"), but I was trying to pin it down to a single answer rather than a list of topics.

I guess as a side note, the rest of my morality, like how to treat people and what laws should be and all that "simple" stuff is taken on a case by case basis within the context of where I want humanity to go with itself in the future. I'll get back to this later because in deciding what to do with my life, I ended up coming up first with a framework for combining goals and desires with inevitabilities and physical trends. This in turn led to a method for deciding what laws should be. And, the remainder comes from evaluating the local context from the inside out (e.i. being nice to people around you) and from balancing contexts against one another based on the consequences.

Explosions!

"I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write."
— Madaleine L'Engle

I was chatting with my friend QuHarrison Terry about his creative process for writing last week, and the theme of repetition - as presented in L'Engle's third point - resonated throughout our conversation. While typically difficult for those unaccustomed to it, even writing and rewriting the same idea over and over helps. As a perfectionist, I usually try to get it exactly right the first time. When I'm writing, this means editing in place over and over as I try to achieve an impossible goal. I remember being taught in school to work in drafts, and it always annoyed me. But coming back to writing as free-time activity in my adult life, I can see how getting the ideas out is more important than perfecting the phrasing surrounding them.

Transitioning from one idea to another is also a struggle. I would guess that the overall flow of the ideas throughout the work is more important than the phrasing of transitions, so similar to the way in which spitting things onto the page beats chewing them up in your head, having an outline to guide the flow of the paper is superior to working through all the transitions as they enter your flow.

The next thing I want to touch on is L'Engle's first point. It's about practice and repetition much like the third, but it's also about diversifying your topics, discovering your interests and developing your voice as a writer. (As an aside, the privacy portion is something I personally would like to think is unnecessary, which is why this blog would make no sense to someone finding it organically on the internet.) In the talk with Qu, I related this to his notion of author authenticity. If you're going to publish something for others to consume, it should at least speak to you. It should be something you're interested in and can get behind and support and defend in the case where you have a discussion with someone about what you put out there. I don't think this means that you have to have such a discussion, just that you'd enjoy it if you were to have it, and that you'd genuinely believe in what you were saying during the conversation in the same way you believe in your original work.

L'Engle's remaining point about reading is the one I'm least certain of. While I think reading helps your vocabulary, reading generically, reading for content, doesn't cut it. In order for reading to significantly impact your writing, I think you have to be reading with that in mind. You have to be focusing on critically evaluating the author's style. You have to be thinking about how different types of content lend themselves to different types of prose. A fantasy novel would be ruined by the terse nature of the prose you find in scientific journals. Jason approached the cliff at 4.5 m/s and extended his arm with hand outstretched, adding an additional 17 cm to his reach as he caught the falling red Farlax just half a meter from the cliff's edge. Reading contributes most toward improving your writing when you're looking for the things you like in the author's work. For example, in writing fiction, which I rarely do, I find that my setup is often lacking and my descriptive prose, imperative to setting a scene, is frequently imbalanced against the scene's action. So, I might read a few of my favorite sci-fi authors to see how they do it.

Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities

PREAMBLE

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and inalienability of the responsibilities of our human family is a necessary corollary to sustain freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human responsibility has resulted in unsustainable overconsumption of resources and environmental degradation and decreased the quality of human life therein, and has stalled the advent of a world in which human beings shall uphold responsible speech and beliefs, and shall enjoy freedom from fear and want, the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against poverty and oppression, that human responsibility should be explicit in the virtues of society,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of responsible practices within and among nations,

Whereas the peoples of the Earth have in their existence affirmed their duty to fundamental human responsibilities, to the societal obligations of the human person and to the responsibilities of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life by adhering to our greater obligations,

Whereas mankind's Nations have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human responsibilities and fundamental obligations,

Whereas a common understanding of these responsibilities and obligations is of the greatest importance for the full realization of our pledge to the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS,

Now, Therefore THE PEOPLE OF EARTH proclaim THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RESPONSIBILITIES as a common standard of decency for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for our rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to ensure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of individual States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article 1.

• All human beings are born obliged to duty and responsibility. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act together in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2.

• Everyone is obliged to all the responsibilities and obligations set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3.

• Everyone has the responsibility to protect life, liberty and security of all persons.

Article 4.

• No one shall hold another in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5.

• No one shall subject another to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6.

• Everyone has the obligation to recognize each other everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7.

• All are equal before the law and are obliged to seek out, prevent and undo any discrimination that would otherwise prevent equal protection of the law. All are required to promote equal participation toward every responsibility in this Declaration and toward incitement of such participation.

Article 8.

• Everyone has the responsibility to participate in the competent national tribunals when called to serve therein.

Article 9.

• No one shall arbitrarily arrest, detain or exile another.

Article 10.

• Everyone is required to participate in fair and public hearings by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of rights and obligations and of any criminal charge when called to server therein.

Article 11.

• (1) Everyone must presume each other innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense.
• (2) No one shall hold another guilty of any penal offense on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offense, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall anyone impose a heavier penalty than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offense was committed.

Article 12.

• No one shall subject another to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the responsibility to uphold the protection of others against such interference or attacks.

Article 13.

• (1) No one may prevent the movement and residence of another within the borders of each state.
• (2) No one may prevent another from leaving any country, including his own, of from returning to his country.

Article 14.

• (1) Everyone must help each other in seeking and enjoying asylum from prosecution in other countries.
• (2) This responsibility may not apply in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of humanity.

Article 15.

• (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
• (2) No one shall arbitrarily deprive another of his nationality nor of the right to change his nationality.

Article 16.

• (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
• (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
• (3) The family is a natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State. It is the responsibility of every family to maintain a limited and reasonable number of offspring as appropriate in the context of the family's circumstances and ability to provide for those offspring without undue burden on the state and other members of society.

Article 17.

• (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
• (2) No one shall arbitrarily deprive another of his property.

Article 18.

• Everyone has the obligation to respect others' freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this includes their freedom to change religion or belief, and to permit others, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest their religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19.

• Everyone has the responsibility to ensure unto himself safe and reasonable opinions and expression; this responsibility includes exercise of the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20.

• (1) Everyone has the responsibility to allow and protect peaceful assembly and association.
• (2) No one may compel another to belong to an association.

Article 21.

• (1) No one may restrict another from taking part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
• (2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
• (3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22.

• Everyone, as a member of society, has the responsibility to support the social security of society and is obligated to contribute, in accordance with the needs of his society, realizing that society has provided to him dignity and the free development of his personality in selecting his manner of reasonable contribution.

Article 23.

• (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
• (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
• (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
• (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24.

• Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25.

• (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
• (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

• (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
• (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
• (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27.

• (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
• (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28.

• Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29.

• (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
• (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
• (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30.

• Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.