No Wife, No Horse, No Mustache...Ewige Blumenkraft, vol. XXIII

We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.

Pico della Mirandola Oration on the Dignity of Man.

More older stuff...
23 September 2007
Pico, quoting from the Hermetica, states the same thing as modern day existentialism, Objectivism, and even LaVey's version of Satanism, that man is free to make his own choices and fashion himself as he pleases. What remains is for man to gather the knowledge and resources to make the optimal decisions and fashion himself in the best way possible for himself - requiring the development of purpose - which is not inherent in him at birth. Man is not born with purpose, he may choose to develop one for himself...or not.

Good and evil are not axiomatic. These concepts can only exist via self-referential consciousness. The lack of good and evil's existence as fundamental axioms does not negate the possibility for a code of ethics and morality; indeed, our survival requires it.
Strive for intellectual honesty, intellectual integrity, and intellectual courage. This is the only way in which you can fully develop your personal philosophy in such a way that it will (to the fullest extent possible) be developed logically and clearly.

How Far Have I Really Come?

Found this sitting on the hd the other day. Hmm...I don't know if I really agree with all of it, but I was reading a lot of wierd shit at the time. Enjoy.

6 December 2004

Man has no intrinsic, inborn, fate-determined destiny or purpose. You make your own purpose. All existence is one (as above, so below; micro/macrocosm); we are only different because our self-reference allows us to negate and realize our being, our subjectivity. Increase awareness and understanding. Gain knowledge and learn to properly connect it and conciliate it. Tap into your divinity. There is no supernatural, just aspects of nature which are not widely understood. God is the infinite, the nameless – that which cannot be understood given the holistic nature of God – everything is ‘God’, being is ‘God’, infinity is ‘God’. We are just different patterns of the same energy as everything else. These patterns create systems, subsystems, and metasystems. Look at the similarities of the physical patterns against information patterns. Dreaming as reorganization of memes (or ‘filing away’) and the mind coming up with stories to explain why you are thinking what you are thinking (compare with the plasticity of the brain). Transform negative experiences into something that furthers you, makes you grow. Altruism breeds victimology.

Appreciate your challenges. Transform yourself: Extropian Alchemy.

Mind expansion!

Higher awareness – being aware of life and of living!

Realizing your subjectivity, and even more profound, realizing you are the unknown Other to everyone else, or more specifically in everyone else’s subjective perceptions. Other people have their interesting views of you that you are unaware of. They see you as something you are not. You are what you do, your actions, and what you have done. But the majority of people have no idea who you are, let alone what you have done which makes you who you are, and furthermore, you to yourself are something different than what you do.

Sartre, by saying that you are who you are through your actions (I presume) is implying that that is who you are to everyone else. Quite on the contrary, you have the intimate knowledge of your thoughts (whether acted upon or not) and also your unique subjective perception of the world and thusly, are a much different person to yourself than you are to others. And on top of this, every other individual has their own unique perception of you whether it be from different shared experiences with you, hearing different stories about you, meeting you at different times of your life (or day for that matter). This, to an extent, references to the question of who we are: the ‘every changing “I”’.

Are we really the same ‘I’ that we were ten years ago? Firstly, our cells regenerate every seven years (or so), so technically our bodies are not the same, but our minds, though having taken on many more memes are along the continuity/continuum (as far as an autobiographical ‘narrative’ of experiences, et cetera). But I pretty much believe that our minds are the product of our brains (bodies/soma) and so henceforth, discounting the mind/body duality. So, are memories/memes somehow made physical when ‘recorded’ in our brains? If this is so, then our memories must be copied to newer cells (check on the factuality behind this as in neurons and neuronal connections) before the cells are replaced. [Sounding a bit too much like Dianetics (engrams and such)> find out how much more physiology/neuropsychology has discovered; ‘electric patterns/neuron-firing patterns’].

If all you do is self-directed, how can you feel like you are living? One action can change how people think of you completely. Up until you do a particular action people may say that they ‘Didn’t think you were “capable” of doing it.’ Of course, this can have positive or negative connotations. So who are you really? You are many people; you are many possibilities. On a daily basis, most people tend to act according to probabilities, but that in turn is more often than not a form of laziness; continuing along patterns of mere existence and fortifying the status quo.

I am not here trying to proselytize the reader into chaos or anarchy, but saying rather to find positive purpose in ones life so that one may move towards something better – to improve as opposed to just staying the same way, which is never as optimal as it could be (tautological? – is it possible to be more optimal?)

Experiences can create memes because they replicate the situation in objective reality into a mental state in the brain. This mentalization can then be conferred to another brain i.e., replicated.

What is the relation between experiential memes and fundamental memes? Experiential memes can possibly be viewed as a combination between memes and qualia. Fundamental memes are irreducible, and are the foundations on which more complex memes are based upon, or at least enabled by.

Y2K As A Cultural Benchmark Pt. II

Just as sociocultural currents influenced the technological implications of the 19th-Century, so too did the sweeping sociocultural tidal waves of the 20th-Century affect the evolution of the technology we employ everyday now in our quotidian lives. And just as art influences life and vice versa, technology too influenced life and vice versa.

The practical applications of technological developments direct the way in which they are designed. These practical applications may be different from user to user, i.e. the government, the military will use certain technologies many times in much different ways than civilians will in their daily lives; businesses may use certain technologies in different ways than NASA, etc.

The 1990s with the 'Tech Boom', or the birth of the Information Age, saw the beginnings of the fruition of many, many technologies trickling down to the lay person. No longer was it necessary to educate oneself to a staggering degree in order to fully immerse oneself into the realm of personal computers and the burgeoning internet. Gone were the days where only the wealthy and electronically-inclined were able to build hi-def home stereos and theatres. Just as the Industrial Revolution brought high-speed travel, electricity and long-distance auditory, telephonic communications to the masses, the Information Age brought PCs, video games and satellite television to the luddites - technology used and embraced by everyone from retired seniors to elementary school children.

So how did this new state of affairs affect and infect culture? The technology boom of the 20th-Century was by no means instant or universal, but you can find Toyotas and Michael Jackson cassette tapes in Third World villages the world over. The Cold War's military forces brought plenty of technology to these remote regions and so did the growing phenomenon of globalization.

In the smoldering ashes of the fallen Soviet Union, the door was opened for the West and its investment capital to move into previously verboten territory making new strides in the increased availability of cheap labor and the subsequent lower production costs.

As with anything viewed as change, whether the particular point of view deems it as good or bad, there are those who see more negative than positive aspects in the new state of affairs. Not that their fears are totally unwarranted every time: nuclear warfare threatens us to this day, new diseases arise with stronger immunity to our medicinal countermeasures, global finance is at the whim of a growing international market affecting all corners of the world, terrorist backlashes (sometimes referred to as blowback) from groups ranging from suicidal fundamentalist Muslims to jaded fundamentalist 'pro-life' Christians to crazed, homegrown activist-zealots (be they of the animal-rights, racial supremacist or other ilk).

One such fear stemming from the unique situation we have become accustomed to as a result of our modern-day digital world was the so-called 'Y2K' scare. This particular circumstance involved the date change at the beginning of the new millennium when the dates of computer software would traditionally have rotated on a two character year format from '99' to '00'. As you can see, this problem would have resulted from computers representing the year 2000 as the year 1900 by default - as all computers (electronic at least) up to this point had all existed in one century, the 20th.

I will take for granted here that everyone reading this will remember vividly all of the possible apocalyptic scenarios peddled on all of the nightly news programs(and by that time the twenty-four hour news channels as well for that matter).

As the urgency to change code in all possibly affected software increased, businesses large and small from banking conglomerates to independent business owners, and government agencies and offices hurried to update all their software and operating systems to show the four digit year and thus avoid any possible breakdown in the immense system of res digitalis on which we had all come to depend.

Even with the lumbering bureaucracies of the US government, the updates were completed in time and the earth did not crumble even as we clinked glasses over the familiar melody of Auld Lang Syne. Yet another Eschaton had failed to be immanentized. Sorry, Nostradamus...I guess.

In the wake of this largely non-event, a subconscious affirmation of our abilities to avoid Frankenstein-like self destruction by way of our own technological developments arose. We had dodged a bullet which we had accidentally, or unknowingly, fired at more vital organs than our feet. As the decade wore on the first generation to be totally immersed in internet culture started to grow up. In a few short years cell phones became as prolific as blue jeans once had, and quicker nonetheless.

Everything from instant messaging to instant bill payments became a way of life for more and more. Harddrives became more capacitous and processors quickened at an incredible rate (and continue to). And size decreased making it feasible to hold 2 gigabytes of information on your keychain for a few hours' wages. The ability to carry thousands and thousands of high-quality audio tracks in your pocket, to check your myspace page and take pictures with your phone.

As we said before, life influences technology and technology influences life and hence, culture in general. It seems that our successfully overcoming the Y2K dilemma has renewed our confidence in mankind's ability to overcome both problems in nature with our technology and our technolgical problems with our intelligence and increased awareness. We now live in an age where the generation is living which doesn't know life without complete digital immersion, just as our parents were the first to lack the ability to understand life without television.

The implications of this fact are numerous, but specific cultural tremors are already being felt: the total marketization of all Western sub-cultures. A phenomenon which was already moving in full force starting in the '80s with rock and pop music continuing to partition further down the rabbithole of subgenera and subsubgenera and the increase in them to steal more and more market share from the broader more sterile powerhouse acts. The '80s saw the last of the true giant hit makers such as Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen. Underground music in all broader genera of rock and pop (and the rise of rap/hip-hop) served as alternatives to the sterile, formulaic corporate rock and pop.

Just as punk had sought to rebel against the overproduced, over-indulgent arena rockers of thh '70s, the New Wavers and alternative, college radio bands of the '80s on into the '90s flew largely under the radar - but not necessarily without any success or attention.

The '90s saw recording technology become available which was both affordable and easy to operate with which musicians could record themselves and feasibly distribute their do-it-yourself recordings on a wider scale through tape trading and thankless touring. In turn, a sort of fetishization with low quality but seemingly more genuine recordings set in and soon the alternative became the norm, much as it usually does.

The moral of the story, of course, is not who got big or who sold out, but rather the way in which technological growth allowed for a new dynamic to take hold of an industry and bring us closer to the unique situation we experience today.

And where we are today is a total commodification of every tappable subculture from dance-rock to violent, mysogenistic hard-core rap, from Swedish black metal to 1001 subgenera of techno. That which was risque just in the Reagan adminstration now will not raise an eyebrow. The free-wheeling flower children of the '60s are now becoming grandparents and the freaks who dressed in all manner of bizarre regalia for Cure shows are now sending many of their children to college (and more Cure shows).

A cultural benchmark has definitely been set and has it served a real purpose insofar as the cultural evolution of society as a whole is concerned? Have we made progress as a result or are our standards for a modicum of 'decency' merely watered down due to oversaturation of 'offensive' behavior and media products?

The '60s's cultural revolution is now trivialized (if it wasn't then) and the adament please for universal LSD usage didn't really do much to change the overall consensus reality outside of certain isolated echo chambers. This naive beseeching for a tuned in, dropped out world may have been responsible for some actual, progressive change, but many aspects have merely morphed into casual facets to the normalities of bourgeois humdrum.

It must be noted however that many in the '60s revolution did, after the fact, turn inward to further their personal growth journey and reformulate their approach to changing the world. These individuals who retained an ability to continue their maturation have effectively promoted actual paradigm shifts in an array of sociopolitical aspects. Everything from medicine, politics and academia to the subtle overall views on all things previously underground.

The groundswell in changing perspectives has slowly, but definitely, affected the shift in what is thought to be 'normal'. The forward momentum with which erstwhile avant garde memes have taken hold in the cultural vocabulary and the whole constellation of accepted behaviors and style is definitely a legacy of those subcultures and countercultures of the 1950s and 1960s.

Recap of the Last 2.5 Days of My Life...Not A Live Journal (Calm Down)

We are all time-travellers insofar as we all progress with time. It is always the eternal now. We always have the past with us in our present in terms of recall.

Self-analysis's usefulness is limited by our understanding of the fundamentals of our philosophy. If our premises are false, our logic is not in line with reality...hence, wrong decisions; poor judgment.

The more accurate our understanding of our fundamental, basic philosophical keystones are, the closer in line with reality our value judgments may be. Otherwise we risk false equifinality which leads, or can lead to, future poor judgment due to faulty implementation of reason / logic.

When we can (through, oftentimes painful, journeys through the fires of Chapel Perilous) face our demons and conquer them, only then can we start to understand and implement the art of living. We cannot conquer our demons without first facing them. All too often we decide to give in to their 'will' and 'run with the devil' as opposed to standing up to them and knocking them down so that they can no longer hinder our progression and our evolution as individuals. This act of standing our own ground will usually be rather difficult as it is foreign to us and uncomfortable as hell (terminology meant literally), but there really is (in my experience) no other way to reduce these (formidable in actuality) 'demons' which hinder our everyday lives and every subsequent value judgment (i.e. every decision we make) and, hence, how we live our lives.

This may not have the intellectual impact on the reader that it should, so please go back and re-read this last paragraph because every decision, and hence, every act one performs, is based on your philosophy. The problem tends to be that most peoples' philosophy is not delineated nor is it clarified or articulated to an extent that said individual's understanding of oneself is sufficient for actual understanding of overall reality, specifically the reality one finds oneself in.

Y2K As A Cultural Benchmark Pt. I

What would humanity do without the differing degrees of apprehension felt concerning the next apocalyptic lunch date with the Eschaton? How would we survive without the vague possibility of not surviving looming on the flip-side of the desktop calendar?

When we run out of specific time frames for the fruition of our myriad existential risks, what then shall we have to fret about as a species? Specificity is the key distinction regarding this phenomenon as we shall always retain plenty of factors which threaten our race. The lurking fears will always haunt us pacing just outside our door: nuclear destruction (mutually assured), epidemic, extraterrestrial invasion (via life-forms or supersonic projectile matter), supernatural reckoning per prophecy or otherwise, etc.

The date 1 January 2000 stood to play this role of possible global disaster and waited impatiently to wreak havoc upon our power grids and digital fiat money stores (i.e., our bank accounts). As we approached this milestone, turn-of-the-century event, we raced against time to update our operating systems and governmental databases to ensure that massive cybernetic haywire did not ensue thus rending useless the technological achievements of the entire 20th-Century and triggering the distress that having to adapt to a lifestyle known all so well to our quite recent forebears would lead to.

Indeed when the proverbial clock struck midnight, the celebrated ball dropped much less clumsily than our collective jaws as we exhaled a great sigh of relief, albeit in amazement, wary though it may have been. And on into the 21st-Century we headed full of apprehensive hope as a resurgence in our possible capabilities to technologically survive ourselves was reawakened after our Space Age, Promethean dreams had been slowly sobered due to the natural course of events playing out according to a different script than the sci-fi writers had envisioned (with notable exceptions such as William Gibson coming to mind).

The accrued time-binding of human knowledge logically led to the Industrial Age, and furthermore, had led to sociopolitical restructuring as an offshoot of the cultural ramifications thusly resultant thereof. The previous governmental dichotomies of the Eastern and Western world of the Enlightenment had been totally reworked both due to imperial colonization of the former and the uprising of democratic, humanistic, individualistic revolutions in the latter.

Philosophically, the Lockean movements for individual freedom had led to the classical liberalism, which in one form or another, affected much of the Occident and America as well. In the United States especially, this libertarian, though specifically Calvinistic, push for 'the American Dream' coupled perfectly with scientific, technological breakthroughs which ushered in industrialism. This state of affairs led to gigantic corporate entities wielding power previously unseen by nongovernmental organizations (the addition of a phenomenon known as corporate personhood further complicated this matter).

Immanuel Kant gave way to Hegel and before you knew it, Marxism is born. The Marxist ideology was picked up by disenfranchised, yet-to-be-unionized American dreamers of the Industrial Revolution giving birth to the union.

In Russia, the Axis shipped a sealed boxcar containing a 'plague bacillus...more deadly than any bomb' (Churchill's words), Lenin, who promised 'bread, land and peace' to the war-weary, disenchanted people and communism had a breeding ground ripe for the taking. An Oktober Revolution later, the Czar was unthroned, a dictatorial authoritarianism was instituted and the Soviet Union erected itself. By the 1940s a treaty signed in another German train was broken and the major powers of the world were in heated worldwide conflict again.

This time around, of course, the Russians did not accede to their Teutonic neighbors and Stalin teamed up with Roosevelt and Churchill to fight a multi-theatre full-scale war against the Nazis leading to the ultimate victory in Europe thanks to Hitler's decision to pull a Napoleon qua Operation Barbarossa. The ensuing political and geographical dynamic turned into a geopolitical chess game the likes of which Great Britain's eternal sunshine had never known.

The ideological differences once swept under the carpet for the purpose of defeating Hitler were now no longer confined to academic debate. The US arose with peerless hegemony in the realms of financ, production, and hence political, not to mention military power. The Soviet Union on the other hand with their own ideas of national sovereignty and individual liberties (or lack thereof) began jockeying for position as the benefactor of the world.

It took until the Berlin airlift and multiple violent national takeovers until the US realized the new state of affiars - they were now th leading proponent of 'democracy' and their erstwhile allies, the Soviets, were now trying to outbid them for the future of this new world.

Compounding this issue was the fact that the European empires were now in shambles all over the world. The race for hegemony now became a bit of a bidding war, cold though it may have been - usually, over which newly independent countries would choose to side with whom: puppet states of either the democractic ruling power or the socialists.

This led to scores of engagements over hitherto unknown nations and innumerable amounds of covert operations by the CIA and the KGB and their allies' counterparts. Every possible measure was employed by both sides, and the technology boom which the Second World War had launched did nothing but gain momentum as the competition heated up on both sides.

Global hegemony in a nuclear age called for further and further capability to strike first and have as much intellignece on the other side as possible. Von Braun's rocket program in Nazi Germany evolved into the Space Race, ushering in the new age, and with it new possibilities.

Von Neumann and Shannon et al. brought us number and information theory, eventually the personal computer as well as communication theory leading to that crowning achievement, the World Wide Web.

It must be noted that the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about was not the sole progenitor of Western technological revolution as Stuart Brand of the Merry Pranksters and the whole '60s movements in hallucinogenic, antiwar fuelled cultural backlash were and are heavily responsible for the direction so many of those technologies took once in civilian hands. This is not to mention the influence of the sometimes utopian visionaries like R Buckminster Fuller and the science fiction and underground writers of the '50s, '60s and '70s.

Whose Responsibility is it to Adapt?

Humans, having the faculties of reason, have over the course of our existence as a race furthered our knowledge of and, hence, our ability to manipulate nature, the Universe. We employ reason to develop technologies which aid in our survival, primarily (which is our primary purpose - the only inherent inborn purpose we have), and also aid and allow for the development of our own unique, individual, arbitrarily chosen purpose.

Even the most primitive jungle-bound tribes employ technology. These 'savages' reap the rewards of the capacity for reason their forefathers implemented ages ago when they developed the now primitive (in context with the 21st Century's Western civilization's high degree of sophistication) technology of spears, loin-cloths and thatched huts.

Many argue the traditional relevance of their culture and subsequent lifestyle and their 'right' to retain their primitive heritage, though it seems to only serve the status quo and an unwillingness to adapt to changing circumstances - i.e. changing realities.

When humans apply reason to a particular question they have about nature they can learn, i.e. increase their knowledge, new things about the way the Universe works, both micro- and macrocosmically. The more knowledge we have about the Universe, the more we are able to manipulate aspects thereof to serve our own purposes. This is how we develop technology.

As we implement new technologies, our lives too change as we are able to substitute one way of doing something for another via the implementation of said technology or are able to do things we weren't previously able to do at all in the first place.

This changes our situation in the world, it changes, morphs our circumstances and, thus we are in a situation where we have to adapt, or attempt to adapt.

Adaptation explains the do or die, the sink or swim aspects of reality. Adaptation consists of a system responding in the most preferential way for its own system as stimuli from res extensa are perceived within the sensory and conceptual parts of the system.

It is ultimately the responsibility of an individual to respond in the optimal way for oneself to external stimuli (changes in circumstances). Oftentimes, individuals do not have the requisite variety which comes with sufficient knowledge of a situation and the available knowledge surrounding its comprising parts to make a proper decision in terms of the long-term consequences.

Culture is a transient thing and changes as necessary to fit the changing times. As we employ our reason to increase our knowledge and then use this new knowledge (integrated with our previously gained knowledge) to create technology with which to make certain tasks easier or to allow us to perform erstwhile undoable tasks. This increase in our abilities leads to a new situation either subtle or extreme. Now we have altered our situation and must adapt to our new state of affairs.

What happens if we don't? Refusing to adapt to new realities implies an arbitrary refusal to perceive and conceive of reality as it is. This denial leads to the inconsistencies on par with trying to insert a square peg in a round hole. Either one can adapt as necessary to changes in reality and / or one can (within the reality of the situation) attempt through further reason to manipulate the reality to a way in which one wants it.

It must be noted that force / coercion are not viable options in terms of this second option (that of changing the circumstances to fit your preferred mode of being). Bear too in mind that this second alternative still requires varying degrees of adaptation to new circumstances.

Too often though, those who would prefer to keep circumstances at a status quo level disregard reason (and its implications of individual freedom and the respect subsequent thereof) in their attempts at reversion to preview circumstances.

It must be here said that the faculty of reason is what allows us to best deal with reality as it is, hence failure to apply reason to our situation as it is in reality leads inevitably to an inability to properly deal with situations in which we find ourselves. Our survival depends upon our application of reason.

We, of course, tend to employ greater and lesser degrees of reason in our quotidian lives, but the difficulty stems from prevalent mis-reasoned fundamental philosophical basics. What I am referring to here is the lifelong programming / conditioning process we go through.

As we enter this world tabula rasa in terms of concepts (discounting possibly inborn instinctual / response mechanisms) we are quickly bombarded with all manner of new sensations and subsequent perceptions upon which we, via our faculty of categorical perception, develop and integrate concepts to allow for an understanding, nascent though it may be.

With the development of linguistic capabilities our ability to grasp increasingly more sophisticated concepts grows and we are thus able to both receive concepts as well as clarify to others what our remaining questions are. Those questions being the knowledge gaps existing in our understanding of that which we perceive and the subsequent abstractions thereof.

The problem thus arises that we are at first depend upon others for our information (or rather, meta-information). The cause of the problem is not the dependence itself necessarily, but rather the reality that those upon whom we are dependent tend to have their own irrational understandings which they pass on to us.

Without necessarily malicious intent, our elders pass on faulty concepts and poor critical thinking habits which we habitualize and become to employ in a conditioned sense. This is why all mystical traditions first require deprogramming of the individual in order to rediscover the ability to perceive and conceptualize aspects of reality which are not 'visible' post normal Western lifelong conditioning. It should be noted more explicitly here that the majority of this conditioning occurs, more or less consciously (on the part of the 'elders'), early in life and become more rigid as one ages.

When culture is adhered to merely by virtue of tradition without regard to emerging realities then the fact that an irrational refusal to allow culture to modify or be modified will logically become obsolete as it does not conform to reality and thus hinders individuals involved in said culture from adapting to the new reality leading to a lack of proper / correct responses. This lack of correct response will inextricably lead, sooner or later, to difficulty in overall survival.

According to humans being rational, reasoning creatures, culture is an implement to be employed, updated and discarded as necessary to best allow for adaptation to changing circumstances. Toleration of emotionality dictating what we modify, or how or if we modify our culture, will inevitably disallow us from properly responding to changing realities because it is reason which enables us to know how to appropriately modify - via adaptation; correct responses - our culture.

Subcultures arise due to the fact that all societies with their cultures are comprised of individuals and individuals each have their own unique complexes of reason - i.e. differing degrees of the ability to correctly apply reason as well as deciding upon different things to apply reason to. With this being the case, it follows that certain individuals will develop differing concepts as to how or it a present culture should change.

This may be due to a better or worse grasp and application of reason or to the willingness to employ reason over emotionality or not.

As humans increase their knowledge of the Universe, i.e. the 'world we live in', it is inevitable that we will apply this knowledge to developing new ways of doing things and new implements to help us do them. These new implements we classify as technology. Knowledge and subsequent technology leads to changing realities and hence to the necessity for modified culture. When new technology is denied on the grounds of culture then we come to the aforementioned cundundrum, that is an irrational response system to the objective reality we find ourselves in.

If our new knowledge and subsequent technology abides by reason, and is acquired by way of reason, then a refusal to accept it is irrational.

Culture, like religions, which are 'designed' to disallow its adherents from updating it is response to changing realities are inherently 'built' to cause the overall downfall of its adherents. Abiding by a dogmatic, faith-based approach to reality will inevitably lead to this downfall because it refuses to accept changing realities and does not apply reason to understanding objective reality.

Faith insinuates the negation of reason for the purpose of understanding reality regardless of whether some of its claims turn out to be correct or not. Failure to apply reason to understanding reality is a set up for failing to respond to reality itself properly. 'Properly' in terms of the context of survival of any individual.

Primitive and developed cultures alike lose or decrease their ability to survive in a competitive world made of individuals (all out to survive, at least long enough to reproduce) when they arbitrarily decide not to do what it takes to adapt and respond accordingly to new realities. It is not the fault of those who do adapt and apply reason to acquiring new and more accurate knowledge of objective reality and implementing said knowledge as technology that other individuals / groups of individuals do not.

Those who do not adapt are not the responsibility of those who do.

Why a Free Society?

Why is a free society where everyone has equal individual rights most preferential?
Because no one possesses inherently more or different rights than others. Stating otherwise is arbitrary. People can only hold more power than others - i.e., more wealth, knowledge/information or force.

Force implies the disregarding of others' individual rights. Wealth implies material assets which can be employed in coercion (and the ownership thereof is not inherent at birth - discounting parents' or benefactors' assets, ownership of which can be transferred within the framework of an arbitrary legal system). Only information (which can be doled out or withheld for coercive purposes) and labor involve the equality with which humans have inherently. Unless, of course, we lived in a world where wealth was always obtained via information and labor - both gained and employed honestly - and not through offensive force and coercion.

Acquiring information and applying it through labor requires adaptation. Actions themselves are a form of adaptability insofar as they are responses ('correct' or not) to external stimuli to the individual.

Since, in regards to interpersonal affairs, all individual humans are inherently equal it follows that the use of the term 'better' is arbitrary and contextual. No one is intrinsically 'better' than anyone else without some contextual, delimiting qualifier. Someone may be better than another at performing a particular task or grouping of tasks, but each and every one of these is ultimately a man-made construct.

One may be a better runner than another but the qualification is arbitrary in that we must look at the arbitrary rules we outline for the performance of a competition between individuals to see who performs better in said competition. One may be faster (at the time of a competition), but one may also run longer, one may have better 'form' (as we arbitrarily define it), etc. One may have longer legs, whereas a shorter-legged person may actually move their feet faster.

Using the term 'better' implies a valuation which is in itself an arbitrary process based on personal self-interest, i.e. what is more and what is less preferential to a given individual.

This is how we develop purpose - by giving value due to our preferences to our desired outcomes given particular circumstances which we perceive from external stimuli and apply the integrated concepts in our ideospheres to reach decisions via cost/benefit analysis on how to act as responses to said stimuli to adapt to said existing circumstances. This continual feedback loop involves more and more complexity as our understanding of our external stimuli/circumstances (and all the aspects that comprise them), our perceptive and sensory faculties, our ideospheres and desired outcomes, and the why for of each increases: i.e., information is power. QED.

Res Extensa - Res Cogitans - Res Extensa

It is important to note that res extensa affects our subjective experience and how. Objective reality exists ‘apart’ from us (although we are part of it). Our perceptions thereof, via our senses, are conceptualized in our brains and those conceptions help create our reality tunnels. Our reality tunnels in turn affect how we respond to our perceptions.

Every concept in our ideosphere colors how we integrate each new concept we receive or develop (memetic reception or memeogenesis respectively). We need to analyze what our concepts are in order to realize how our ideospheres affect new concepts as well as our responses to perceptions.

Seeing as how we have reality tunnels which affect how we view the world (i.e. how we respond to our perceptions) we need to understand what our reality tunnels are; what they are comprised of. We do this by analyzing our metaprogramming and finding our imprints (what they are, how they affect our programming, whether they should be changed, deleted, dealt with at all, etc.); not only looking at what our concepts are (what our ideosphere is comprised of), but also how they affect our responses to perceptions and how our imprinted metaprograms affect our way of integrating new concepts.

All these things affect how we give meaning to the representations we have in our mind of the sensorially perceived objective realities of res extensa. They affect our concepts of quality and how we feel we should behave (our behavioral strategies) in order to achieve certain outcomes.

It is important to find out what our programming is (via imprint) insofar as it dictates what our responses are to our perceptions of res extensa. We may see a gray building and our response is negative – sadness, for instance – and it makes us depressed – i.e. our hormonal secretions may increase or decrease (depending on which hormones) and change our overall mood which affects our reality tunnel. We may see a gray building and the inverse happens and we become happy – ‘this gray building reminds me of the abilities of the mind of man’. The way we process the perceptions we receive via our senses is affected by our metaprogramming / reality tunnels.

If we irrationally respond to certain perceptions then we must chunk down until we find the imprint, i.e. why we respond as we do, in order to change our responses because our physiology affects the way we respond to perceptions and vice versa.

If we perceive something in res extensa which does not threaten us in reality, but ‘triggers’ something in our brain which causes us to respond with panic and subsequently triggers the appropriate physical responses for panic, i.e. quick breathing, sweat, inability to focus on anything but the situation at hand – all evolutionarily stable responses when the threat is real. But when these responses are not appropriate this is not an evolutionarily stable approach to said situation. It is therefore necessary to find the imprint which has caused the brain to react to such perceptions so one can change this.

One’s metaprogramming has been such that ‘it feels’ that this response is appropriate because it has always worked in the past (even though the conscious mind may not agree) and so it does not change the response to the signal. Once you can change what originally caused you to react a certain way to a certain perception then you in essence change the ‘coding’ of the metaprogram which instantiates the irrational response to said perception.