What is the Root of all evil?

[Tina]

The Truth just "IS" and any departure/disconnection from it, is the origin of Dysfunction/Malfunction/The Lie, that is Evil.

So, if to COLLECTIVELY accept or adhere to The Truth is to benefit All, and to deny The Truth is to allow Evil to exist, then the manifestation of SELF-awareness is the root of all Evil.

If what benefits ALL (the Collective) is the manifestation of Love, then HYPER-awareness of the Self/the complete denial of Love, is the manifestation of consummate Evil incarnate.

Leskey - I've trimmed your response to discuss a problem I see with your argument.

You name the manifestation of SELF-Awareness as the root of Evil. Can I suggest it is lack of real self-awareness that was more to blame....

I especially refer you to the religiously determined basic idea of "self-awareness" of the Judeao/Christian/Muslim traditions - it is one of "shame and disgust" at our very natural naked selves.

Can you begin to comprehend what this thinking has done to pervert and distort our most fundamental concepts of self? Children are instinctively comfortable with their natural naked selves/bodies until they learn that they should not be....this is western societies first step in the process of the perversion of self awarenss.......how can we even begin to love others if we cannot love our very skin...

How can you signal out "self-awareness" as evil when real self-awareness has eluded us beginniing with corrupt ideas of the (natural) born self?

[leskey]

I was interrupted during this post, so saved it, thinking I could edit later: I couldn't.

In my haste, I realised that I should have used the term "self-consciousness," instead of "self-awareness." Does that make it clearer?

I apologise for the confusion.

[futrethink]

---Just a little note to say, "I'm still here. Relatively."
---It appears that I have some writing, to do, for to answer Tina and Darwin34. This is to, briefly, describe the basics of the reasoning for interaction being the root cause of evil.
---My usual way of getting my point across is; over the course of a discussion I cause people to think in response to my questions and thereby figure out the answers for themselves.
---This is to save me from writing out something that; resembles a book (in one post).
---Apparently, in your case Tina, you don't want it done that way and so I must change my style.
---The feral children are living their lives to the fullest as a human animal. True, they aren’t living their lives to the fullest of being a human. As for a human being living, their life, to the fullest we would first have to know what the limits are to being human, right? Those limits include being an animal as well as anything else. Otherwise, you are subjectively making a choice as to where you think those limits should be and not what they actually are.
---Darwin.
---Some things to think about before I continue with the possibilities of the human future and spell out for you how interaction is different from your 'cooperation’; take into account that we cannot prove that we think (we just live our lives believing we do), what the process is for thinking to occur (on ALL levels {quantum and relative}) and then think about if you first have to perceive/interact with something (even an idea created from different variables interacting with each other) before you can cooperate with it. Think about the Borg in this way; human beings who merge with and allow AI/computers to run their lives, because it is easier to live with that rather than with the pain of being just human or because of the condemnation/insults of others who have proven themselves better cybernetics and the animal instinct of being with the group, overriding self-preservation of the self.

---This post is not to be answered, just thought about. I will have to take a while to write up my answers. This will be due to the obvious information that I must include in it, since I don’t know what exactly you know and must guess. So be patient with me, please.

[Darwyn43]

[QUOTE=Tina;48288]

I don't think there is any particular helpful post that I could refer you to so I will summarise here: Humans at some point in evolution, or for the religious, were created as creatures that would escape animal reality.

Animal reality is governed by "instinctive" responses to the natural environment it finds itself in. eg Instinct will determine if a mother mouse will eat her young in overcrowed conditions, or whether males will start to become sterile to reduce population. Instinct is a very old fashioned term expressing what we now understand as the complex workings of feedback responses of DNA biochemistry. Ultimately the animal is 'wise' in its responses even if it means self annihilation...because ultimately it all will aid survival of its species.

The animal lives its life to the fullest because it is fully attuned to what it is and needs to do - and it does not try to do/be what it is not. (domesticated animals exempted)

In the human, instinct is fractured into what we can call Emotion and Intellect. The unified "wise" responses of animal are no longer evidenced in human. The connection of insinctive wisdom is severed and all our behaviour is now primarily motivated by the two driving (and often conflicting forces) of Emotion and Intellect. Our intellect is thus often in conflict with the biochemistry of our once instinctive responses. We do not live our lives to the fullest because we seek/or are made to be what we are not by totally arbitrary determinations of what is good and what is bad.

I have a somewhat lengthy diatrabe that I never the less think you will find interesting (even if you disagree) because of the nature of our conversation here. I'll start it off a little before the interesting part so you can see how I'm getting there... I'm just now realizing that this is actually a pretty complicated argument, though, so hopefully you can understand what is supposed to be a book reduced to a couple paragraphs.

I read a theory of language evolution that essentially, syntax isn't a property of language, but a property of the brain that gives rise to the structure we see in language. In fact, syntax is the ability of the brain to organize information hierarchically (five kinds of sensory info outputs to a neuron/concept, which in turn is one of five concepts outputting to an abstract category neuron/concept, etc.), which is what we see reflected in language's hierarchy of clauses and subclauses - but not the other way around. The point is, the ability to hierarchically organize information set up the conditions that would have made the selection of symbols being linked to concepts relatively worth it in a cost-benefit analysis (for reasons I'll go into when I get to the interesting bit). And when symbols could be linked with concepts, it did something for the first time in animal history - it allowed people to conjur up a mental representation of something by thinking of the symbol rather than waiting for the actual object to activate it's conceptual representation. It unlocked the power of our imagination.

On the contrary, up until then, the infinitely generative hierarchical organization of mind isn't something animals were selected for because the ability to generate new concepts and abstractions would have made them paradoxically less fit. Nature programmed them with a few conceptual categories that are selected for based on the efficiency with which a concept can trigger a response to attain its goals. No extraneous concepts beyond the immediately useful would be selected for, because in fact, it might be counter productive and compromise the efficiency with which the motor response was linked with the sensory info, making such a creature more likely to be outcompeted evolutionarily.

However, when a deeply social animal with opposable thumbs was perched on the threshold for symbolism, what drove it over the edge was that suddenly all of this excess information that would muddle the minds of animals was useful because humans could cooperate on almost every need they had. Thus, it wasn’t the individual’s ability to use the imagination to represent more patterns and benefit individual intelligence, but the collective ability for a group to generate new concepts that could directly pay out in terms of coordinating complex goals like navigation, hunting, gathering, mating, war, security, shelter, and so forth. In fact, the group's control over where our individual minds went likely was a check-and-a-balance to the risk of over-representing the world and compromising efficiency. Yet with the potential gain that could come from abstractions of all kinds, there was the potential usefulness of having all of these abstractions meet in a single hierarchy of neurons where they could themselves be combined to increase the complexity of the represented world and make it possible to conceive of new ways to cooperate in manipulating it. (Even in humans, though, the problem of efficacy of communication and action still puts pressure on having “two much information,” which is one reason why conformity often keeps people locked into pre-organized and dumbed down ideologies)

This in turn allowed for cultural evolution to operate on our symbols and expand them to represent the world more fully in concepts, which would be encoded in the underlying neuronal structure by some kind of connectionist model of the brain. But as a result of the pay off to the group that happens when you gain the ability to generate new concepts, unlocking of the imagination still holds the potential for individuals to over represent the world, or misrepresent the world, because some of the patterns they generate in concepts could be real, while some of them could be fantasy. Whenever you create the ability to misrepresent, you generate the ability for your emotions to be triggered incorrectly. This I think, is another way to talk about your point.

At the same time, cultural evolution is selecting for bodies of information that might not benefit the individual, but might benefit the group. Religion, for instance, is a body of concepts that might compromise an individual's reality and therefore, the activation of their emotions, but when everyone believes in those concepts, such as God's judgment of them, it lubricates social cooperation and "moral" behavior. Thus, on some level, we have to analyze if when a person is not living their mental life to the fullest, it's so that the group can try to live its life to the fullest...

Either way, I agree that it is possible for group and individual to be in alignment - with consciousness about how we create an entity bigger than ourselves, we don't need fantasy to do the job for us. But in the mean time, we have to accept this transition period of magical thinking, I think.

I loved your info about the heart beating like morse code - could you tell me more about that? I've never heard of that, but it sounds fascinating - where can I find out more?

[Rufus]

Tina and others

The more I think about this thread, the more I agree with your trepidation, Tina, of revealing your opinion of what the root of all evil is.

Why did you begin the thread with the root of all evil? and not evil itself?

There is a discussion of truth but what is truth?

The root of all evil could only be voiced in a convincing way, it could not actually be voiced in an accurate way.

In life, the Lion will eat the Doe
What could be more evil than that?
Does this demonstrate the degradation of the human condition?

There is no real answer to this thread

my apologies

[leskey]

Rufus, your analogy is one of predator/prey. I put it to you that what makes a predator is self-consciousness (Ego).

The Ego is a disconnect from the group-consciousness. In distancing itself from the group-consciousness, the Ego becomes insecure. In moving away from The Truth (the interconnectedness of everything; everything being in harmony for the benefit of All), The Ego becomes a selfish predator: it's steely eye views all that exists is a resource to be exploited.

That which separates itself from The Truth, is Evil.

[Rufus]

The Ego is a disconnect from the group-consciousness. In distancing itself from the group-consciousness, the Ego becomes insecure. In moving away from The Truth (the interconnectedness of everything; everything being in harmony for the benefit of All), The Ego becomes a selfish predator: it's steely eye views all that exists is a resource to be exploited.

That which separates itself from The Truth, is Evil.

Leskey

Yes that is very interesting.
You concluded with "that which separates itself from the truth, is evil.

That is, no doubt quite inspiring as are many considerations of truth, good and evil.

But try to make a statement that is not conjectural, is my point.

ie: "that which aligns itself with truth, is evil"

is the opposite of your statement but seems to hold some validity

No statement of moralistic values has complete validity

[Darwyn43]

Tina and others

The more I think about this thread, the more I agree with your trepidation, Tina, of revealing your opinion of what the root of all evil is.

Why did you begin the thread with the root of all evil? and not evil itself?

There is a discussion of truth but what is truth?

The root of all evil could only be voiced in a convincing way, it could not actually be voiced in an accurate way.

In life, the Lion will eat the Doe
What could be more evil than that?
Does this demonstrate the degradation of the human condition?

There is no real answer to this thread

my apologies

Hi Rufus,

I appreciate your statement about the doe; it echoes my original point about evil, quoted here:

Evil is a part of the creative process of evolution. Evolution "red in tooth and claw" necessitates that for a mother lioness to feed her cub she must rip a gazelle apart. Similarly, for one basketball team to win, another must loose. For one person to get out of a relationship to find a better one, one person must have their heart crushed. It's a fundamental organization of the universe.

It's continued somewhat on page 58 or 59 and then after.

I think the best way to think of evil is out of it's "moralistic" terms or 'things that are "bad" because they are defined by what they mean to us.' That's why I call it a "fundamental organization of the universe."

I consider it "the organization of the universe," to differentiate it from some root cause - I think we must all beware of the risk here of devolving into scientific reductionism, or even worse, philosophical reductionism.

Science itself has started to wake up to the fact that it just isn't that simple, and we here at the TOE certainly shouldn't believe it's that easy.

A note on methodology: Philosophy as a tool is not complex enough because there is no system to escape our subjective cultural realities and the limits of what can be known experientially; the real world is simply far too complex to think we can break it down without every field of science informing our abstractions. In the words of one scientist, philosophy ends up "looking at the meaning of words" without a system to facilitate common understanding and quantify progress.

Meanwhile, even scientific reductionism, while at least having a system, thinks that the world can be reduced to one neat cause of causes - in my mind, that belief is a by-product of how we think of things at our level of reality, being accustomed to things seeming like they have neat cause-and-effect relationships. I think if you traced cause-and-effect across every science you would see there is no neat beginnings. Instead, I think most apt for a TOE is systems theory's approach of "irreducible complexity:" we can conceptualize the inability to reduce in cultural anthropology, sociology, biology, psychology, etc., by conceiving of the system as the basic unit of reductionism or epistemology (the organism as a system, the society as a system, the culture, and so forth). Not only does that explain why there are no neat beginnings, it creates a common denominator among everything in the sciences (and therefore the universe) and thereby creates a new lens to see how things interconnect. That's when things start getting really interesting, IMHO.

[Darwyn43]

That which separates itself from The Truth, is Evil.

---Leskey, I've quoted you here but I mean to address a few things you've said and other people in the context of this entire discussion. I find your statements interesting about the nature of truth as an interconnected whole, about measurement and self-consciousness, but I disagree on some points. For instance, you speak of measurement as the thing that takes us away from the truth, but it's the other way around - humans started off with no information and measurement has gotten us to this point, to the point of being able to conceive of what we don't know and the nature of truth.

I agree that measurement fractures truth into pieces but it’s a necessary evil (hey, I think that's a pun) given that humans need to construct reality through our representational system of sensory information. Our brains literally impose arbitrary measurements on the world (colors are properties of our visual system, not naturally occurring in the world, for instance) in order to construct holistic sensory representations of it through concepts. Furthermore, more abstract concepts organize some patterns of the world at the expense of others, further compromising the panorama with the properties of our brains. All animals must operationalize the world in order to know it (which you may not be disputing). Now we've taken this to the next step culturally by measuring the world scientifically and linguistically. Rather than lament that, I think we should conceive of the next step of how we put the truth back together again.

What we now need is a new method that follows in the chain of knowing from religion, to philosophy, to science and finally to this final method, the synthesis of all science, to put together the products of specialization into the greatest panoramic, the pattern of all patterns, the paradigm of paradigms. For my money, I think that is by synthesizing all of the sciences into a big-picture view that we can use to get around the barriers of truth. That is a thread by itself, but personally I think the barriers are: meaning, trust, relevance, communication, organization, subjectivity and narrative. I’ve also elaborated more on my methodology on my last post to futurethink.

Furthermore, my thoughts on our ability to reduce things to the root of evil (or the inability, as it were) is in the above post.

[leskey]

"To learn there is much, young Skywalker."

When read in the entire context of my post, "that which aligns itself with Truth, is Evil" is redundant. You validate what I've been saying by isolating selected components. Currently, Education encourages, actually insists, on this. I view this as part of the problem.

Without seeing the the whole, the big picture, the interconnectedness of everything, every specialisation/disipline continues to miss the mark.

Furthermore, to hypothesize from where we stand as isolated components separated from The Truth, I suggest that there is no Evil without a moralistic view.