Drowning in Trivialities

Humans occupying the top-tier in society have been thinking long and hard to figure out how best to control human beings, and there is little doubt in my mind that today's internet has achieved the ultimate in mind control: dissociating each person from the sense of a shared human reality by constantly baiting them to engage their smart phones.

The simple stuff is what our brain's are already inclined to do - to prefer short term pleasure over long term gains. The society we've grown within has been sure to not emphasize that the long term gain - what we mean by wisdom - is something that can only happen if the self reflects and learns from what it experiences. If, somehow, a human mind can be canalized to avoid or dissociate from intellectual reflection, then you could create a very large system which does to every mind which engages with it in a naïve way, the same thing: center its affective interests (and its 'knowings') on personalized and individualized things. Shared-referents, or "sharing the same semiotic environment", is quickly becoming a thing of the past, which means the brain is becoming ever better at navigating a smart phone for its "dopamine", and more and more unable to represent (i.e. sense, based on passed experience) what is driving another persons interests.

The entirety of the internet is conceptualized by its most influential "doers" as a large phase-space, with individuals 'acting' in ways predicted by mathematics. If they decide to structure algorithms to preferentially guide users to sad stories, then they can do that:

“If it turns out that certain kinds of posts make you sad, and an algorithm is trying to make you sad, then there will be more such posts. No one will necessarily ever know why those particular posts had an affect on you, and you will probably not even notice that a particular post made you a little sad, or that you were being manipulated. The effect is subtle, but cumulative.” – Jaron Lanier, Ten Reason for Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now; pg. 32; Henry holt; 2018

This is more or less what mathematical modelling permits: very coarse yet statistically defensible models of 'how humans respond' when interacting - via a simple understanding of pavlovian conditioning - can become grossly manipulative over time so that conditioning at one predictable stage naturally segues into accepting a particular "meme" that is assumed to be compatible with people in a particular state i.e. "irritability". To be made irritable can be done by, as Lanier writes, being 'guided' through such algorithms to negative information. Since states of feeling determine judgements, a compulsively activated person can be made to act cynically after interacting with negative information i.e. like articles.

Real clever magic seeds the culture with interpretations, or cliche ways of responding, like the tone or mode that Kim Kardashian or other pop-stars often speak in. Are they are even remotely aware that much smarter people encourage and promote such antics knowing it'll guide the interpretive mechanisms of others far away in space and time? That they are mere mechanisms which they exploit for ends they could barely conceptualize?

If behavior is information, then flooding a culture with fiction - TV shows, movies, comics, novels, video games, etc - more or less creates brain-minds that will reference fictional realities and situations when they cognize (since we think through metaphor) and not the iron-clad facts which an education in science and philosophy moors the mind to. In other words, we live in a world where most people have been buried in fiction - not even recognizing the floods that are being held back by a culture of 'excess' - that when the world is destroyed, the people will be destroyed - from within moreso than from without; the powers-that-be mock your surety, your dependency, even though the world they have been fed makes them dependent: their hatred is inapt and cruel; it is a hatred of 'reality' and 'God', or their own essential nature, a metaphysical concerm which overrides any sense of concern for the real human other. A dissociative fantasy of metaphysical retribution - a cricket cricketing against the universe. Their motivation might ultimately be rooted in what they can do: they can make life and existence hell for "Gods creatures", because, of course, God or the Universe must be listening and must be angry.

You can't find any intellectual conversation online: its designed to stupify you, to lead you to a tech site, or a frenzied political site, or a cliche liberal den like huffington post. Science or science based conversation, or anything having to do with reason and all that pertains to that, is impossible to find: I wouldn't be posting here unless I felt dejected by the failure to find a better site. This site has intellligent posters, but of course, the majority are swamped by demons, wanting nothing more in their insanity than to spread the infection, to spread the guilt, the erosion, as if suffering were good. I cannot help but think that the person who thinks "suffering is good" hasn't suffered enough. Can a person be made to hate the other so much that they would rather kill themselves than acknolwedge their own dependence on their own internal other? Call it God or the Self or the Universe, you are imagining an Other whom you rely upon. How can any mind imagine it can be happy without that internal equilibrium - that other side which we must pay attention to and understand if we are to be happy?

So the world has been thrown far down this road, and like the proverbial frog in the pot, we have had our spiritual and neurological systems hijacked by hateful nihilists who fail to misrepresent the fear they cause others - the suffering which they maniacally believe they are beyond experiencing; a dissociative identity disorder condition rules the minds of "elites", people who have been made in the image of their materialist motivations. Their lust for Power corrupts perception and cognition, weaving the devilish lies and narratives that their own little brains reference to regulate themselves, all-the-while insanely identifying conditions in the outside world that parallels their own dysfunction. They project and then forget; amnesia rules, sleep is salvation - as if when we die "we go to sleep". We project our teenage psyches on the universe, believing we have some sort of secret-passage way to evade its menacing presence. "Inside matter"? Or, more likely, the whole - the torus - the circle? And wont the circle, the life, when finished, necessarily "eat itself", or see itself? Completing the circle, its semiotic journey?

The narrative is the biggest lie of all. A good lie and a necessary feature of human existence - we can't organize our relations coherently without one - but to focus simply on the narrative without the interpretation, without the lawful cause and effect of feelings-with-others which narrative emerges from, is insanity. Not articulating these differences, being "pulled" by the mythology, and wanting to believe in the legitimacy of the myth, is positively adolescent - a state of delusion akin to teenage mania relative to the patient maturity and sanity of scientific analysis.

If you could only know that everything about you is a function of what you've had to do to defend yourself, you'd experience yourself in a very different light.

Very interesting and well thought out thread.
Thank you.

But all those thoughts are automatic for me , so, I can not explain them fully.

I just know.

I know when I see something I disagree with, I try to ignore it. Sometimes , that is not always possible, but I try at least.

In social situations, I try to avoid phone use unless I am really bored.

I am aware of the change that society has under gone the last few decades.

Thing about me is I am not easily influenced . I don't follow the crowd and never had. I don't follow trends. I never had a box to think out of.

I'm just me

a reply to: Astrocyte


I don't know Astro . . .

Shared-referents, or "sharing the same semiotic environment", is quickly becoming a thing of the past,

Is is a lack of shared referents; a decline in the quantity, or is it a decline in the qualites of those referents? Do these new referents have less carrying compacity, or is it just that the sacks are stuffed with crap? And if they are stuffed with crap, is that because we're incapable of stuffing them with anything else? Are the sacks incapable of holding anything but crap, or is that all we produce?

I'm not sure.

If behavior is information, then flooding a culture with fiction - TV shows, movies, comics, novels, video games, etc - more or less creates brain-minds that will reference fictional realities and situations when they cognize (since we think through metaphor) and not the iron-clad facts which an education in science and philosophy moors the mind to

The narrative is the biggest lie of all. A good lie and a necessary feature of human existence - we can't organize our relations coherently without one - but to focus simply on the narrative without the interpretation, without the lawful cause and effect of feelings-with-others which narrative emerges from, is insanity. Not articulating these differences, being "pulled" by the mythology, and wanting to believe in the legitimacy of the myth, is positively adolescent - a state of delusion akin to teenage mania relative to the patient maturity and sanity of scientific analysis.

Myth, Narrative, and Fiction are tools for communicating and organizing ideas. Essentially containers, possibly containers that shade meaning to some degree or the other, but more neutral than not in more cases than not. So again, is it the containers or what's being placed in them that vexes?

What's the problem if the mind refrences a myth, which one can argue is capable of carrying Truth with a a capital "T" rather than facts, knowing that "just the facts" can mislead; have done so in the past, and that yesterdays "iron clad facts" are often enough anything but today.

Seems to me that facts are in just as much need of interpretation as myths. And is the misinterpretation of "myth" any worse than the misninterpretation of "facts"?

So I ask again, Is it the sacks or what they're carrying that vexes?

Many in this world wants a collective solution, albeit they want it done to their likening, and without having to take any real responsibility but at the same time being eligible to all the rewards.
The human has never changed and never will change.
I live with you all in the valley of the damned.
A valley where the trees are invisible and people have the faces of smartphones.
Now this thing about the internet.
Its a great distraction.
The fields we walked through in our youth are now artificial.
This is the only the beginning of a campaign which will lead to CERN being connected to the internet and the intelligence of the beast will rise from its tomb.
I tell you we are all 1s and 0s (evil laugh)

Seriously however, technology is a paradigm that isn't going away.
I feel however no matter how much technology we have, or ingenius it is, never will
it be able to get around the stupidity of the human being.