The Most Important Differences

I sent this to a couple people today just to test my ability to make sense.  No answer is required or expected.  It's like a piece of something that you throw at the wall, and if it sticks, it's art!

"8-25-2014 riff, later edited a bit:  

As to trust and distrust and their important differences, I should have stressed that we trust safety and we distrust danger, but only when the degree of safety is known and the degree of danger is not known.  And in a world of living things that operate with intelligent strategies, the dangerous that need our distrust will invariably act with deceptive purpose, and the ones that we can safely trust will not.   So that those that are deceptive without dangerous purposes can’t be trusted not to be dangerous.  

What does that mean?  It means that when deception is a sign of danger we need to be looking for it, because when it isn’t dangerous after all, the looking won’t have harmed us.  It’s the not looking on the premise that deception isn’t always dangerous that will get us killed.

Does that explanation seem too complex for a primitive living system to grasp?  Yes, because it’s the failure to grasp these clues that gets some of them regularly eaten -  those invariably caused to trust by deceptive means.  So in the animal world, the prey have learned to distrust a predator in part because it’s dangerous, but in larger part because its tactics are invariably deceptive.

And these tactics have been used in the world of living creatures since living creatures have been born to use a tactical system to begin with.  Or put another way, their tactical systems are what living systems are defined by.  And tactics will always evolve competitively, or not evolve at all.  This is so, even though the competitive will use cooperation as a further tactic.  

The cooperative that don’t at some point see the need to compete will not have found the need to evolve as well.  And if the environment changes to deplete their resources, they may feel the need to change, but if they fail to see the need to compete for resources, they will invariably tend to die instead.  For those, however that can learn and develop competitive strategies, that competitive need will eventually become instinctive. (Must say why here.)

And I may need to argue that the need to compete for maintaining their existence as intelligently formed functional systems of nature has given birth to nature’s strategies to begin with.  (Must say why.)  And strategies by their very nature must continually be prepared to evolve.  The unsolvable mystery involved here is the question as to how and why strategies had presumably evolved from non strategies - a parallel question as to how somethings have existed as opposed to nothings.

Strategic Hows and Whys

A strategic system’s purposes are not necessarily connected directly to strategic goals, since their trial and error processes are more directed to choosing goals that meet their purposes rather than choosing purposes to meet their goals. The purposes in general involve the best way to choose the best reactions to survival challenges, so while the overall goal of strategies must be to survive, the intermediate goals would involve the hows, whens, whats and even, or especially, the whys.  Which reminded me to write the following:

The whys of something have at least two aspects: The goal that a thing might have acquired, and its particular purpose for attaining it, both of which in turn can have several other descriptive aspects.  Someone for example will tell us of the “what” of a single rock, such as its size, position, characteristic elements, etc.; the “where” as both its general and precise location; the “how” it’s sitting, loose, stable, crooked, etc., and how it looks from near or far, how it shines, smells, causes whistles in the wind, etc., etc.

But as to the “why” involved, that aspect seems to be an afterthought of most descriptions, and if necessary to know at all, it’s our concern for why we’ve found it sitting where it is - in other words for its immediate purpose to exist - and then, if we’re the more curious sort, we will ask how it came to serve that purpose as a secondary aspect of knowing why.

And then we may continue on that same abstract level of curiosity, concerned perhaps with who or what brought the rock there and why they did, perhaps suspicious of the purposes it was put there, but still not suspicious of any purposes attached to the rock itself.  After all, the thing is not alive, and even if it were, are we concerned for example why a something such as an ant has become an ant as long as we’re able to find out what that ant does and why it does it?  

Do we ask ourselves whether knowing why an ant exists at all will change our perspective as to what it’s doing and why?  Yes, some of us will ask that question, but will be easily satisfied with an “explanation" that as living forms, we’ve all evolved from accidental origins.  

To be told for example that the ant’s instinctive qualities emerged, and that its actions have become spontaneous over time, will be seemingly enough for science.  Leave the whys to some old speculative philosopher, such as the ones who’ve told us of the accidental determinations of nature to begin with. 

And so getting back to the proverbial rock, we certainly don’t feel the need to know more about its dead “purposes” than the reasons that any living thing might have to use the rock or move it somewhere else.  Not needing in the process to concern ourselves with any purposes that nature could have had to either produce a rock, or to make any crucial use of its production.

Rocks, we say, were non-living things among all other material on this formerly lifeless planet, and living things could have done nothing other than emerge from that ancient environment spontaneously - if that.  

But then I ask, why use “emerge” as the possible “how” if we really don’t know the possible “why” that any such materialization process would work?   And you might ask in return what has made me have concerns about the “why” if I can’t determine the true nature of the “how” of rocks to begin with.

But wait, isn’t the “how of the why” the most important question here?  Whether we can ever really know the hows if we’re satisfied that we don’t really need to know their whys as well?  Such as why we should have rocks anyway, if they’re really absolutely and uselessly dead things? Because, of course, if they are, why are rocks here, there, or anywhere at all?

Unless in the asking, we might discover why they have needed to be here, and how they’ve helped strategically to make the living come alive.

And how and why those ants acquired instincts.

Predator? No, Just a Psychopath.

        Predators, as I see it, are not the same as psychopaths.  Psychopaths have a defective and more or less untrainable empathetic function.  Predators on the other hand can read their victims empathetically to their own advantage. They see no moral problem in dealing with their instinctive needs as predators - just as other humans generally see no problem with the necessity of killing animals to eat.

Psychopaths however just don’t see moral rules as understandable.  They learn to mimic the expected behaviors, but don’t feel, either fully or at all, the emotionally learned responses that otherwise would govern that morality.

And so we have some psychopaths that are born without the emotional capacity to read the signals that humans (among other animals) in a cooperative setting have evolved to send each other instructively.  

And even if there are some psychopaths that can learn to read the signs, they will lack the capacity to be concerned with the implied instructions.  Essentially, these psychopaths prefer to use deceptive strategies, not understanding the “mechanics” of attaining trust.  Predators however do understand the importance of trust, and very often will form such trusting bonds with potential prey in an environment where the need for predatory strategies has been suspended; where their instinctive strategies, however, will still be there to depend on if circumstances change.

Further, predators in predatory groups will trust each other to obey the rules of predatory society that they’ve been born to learn and understand.  And while there can also be such a thing as a psychopathically oriented group (nomadic gypsies may be a good example), no such group comprised solely of psychopathic individuals has been successfully evolved or developed to my knowledge.

As to fear of immediate consequences, psychopaths, who could not win the trust of this type of predatory enemy, would not know how to negotiate their way out of an immediate threat from this type of adversary.  The expectation of some immediate damage would likely trigger an instinctive fight or flight response.  

But their predators will tend to make more practical use of the effects of fear.  If a fight with a psychopath resulted, both sides of the conflict would attempt to fearlessly deceive the other; but the predators, who can generally read their prey much better than the prey can read them, would have the advantage - especially where the prey were psychopathic and unable to use their limited emotional strategies properly.  That psychopath, fearing the finality of becoming a figurative meal, would likely run.

So yes, you can be a predatory psychopath or a psychopathic predator, but again, the essential differences remain the same.  Predators have functional purposes while psychopaths must serve dysfunctional ones.

(And as a PI, I was always a predator as far as my working strategies were concerned.)

Contending Forces

So how do you disobey a law of nature?  By obeying a conflicting law?  Where does the choice lie, or was it made in some way by the law that has forced the entity to obey, and forced it to choose to disobey the counter law.  

(But how can you force a choice and have it remain as a choice?  Contrary to the usual jargon, to defeat it, you do have to eat it.)

In nature, rather than by laws, are not the choices made by competing strategies for control of both themselves and their competing entities?  And were not those forces within those entities to begin with?  Do they not constitute the strategic forces that construct the entities that then use them for their evolving purposes?  Their "life" being in the strategies that are in themselves the essence of what causes force to have a strategic direction?

To be in other words, strategically directed forces?

Forces that in effect make what we call their laws?

Yes, strategies exist to accomplish strategic purposes.  Which are, in other words, contending purposes. Either cooperating to contend or competing, but otherwise we don’t strategize for a non-contending need.

What did these strategic systems “know” or have to know at the minimum beforehand and how was the skill acquired to use that knowledge actively? To act on it with the curiosity to add to it?  To become a budding strategy that knew somehow that it had the need to learn?  
And yet how could it and how did it know that it was contending for survival to begin with?   The incremental changes and their causes over time that led to these purposive activities seem almost impossible for our human minds to deal with.

Take magnetic forces for example.  Can they exist without the entities that they are exerting force either for or against?

Take light as well - does it exist to ferry protons for their own purposes, and/or are proteins themselves being ferried for various other entities’ forceful purposes?  And what were light’s existing uses and purposes to begin with?

And why are forces in contention, or were ever in contention to begin with?  Or did there ever need to be a first contention?  And what’s the best educated guess for answers to any of that?  

Perhaps the answer's this:  Contention must have to be a natural state of affairs.  Perhaps anything that has to move will have to contend with anything else that moves.  Doing so intelligently, or otherwise chaotically at the very least.  

So what’s wrong with chaos?  Well, it’s not predictable and it’s not evolvable.  It’s not amenable to any natural strategic purposes.

Then how does a strategy direct force, unless the strategy is the essence of the force which exists as a self responsive energetic entity?  But then strategies exist both to thoughtfully construct their entities and as the controlling aspects of the forces that operate their systems.  And they’re set up in addition to evolve all types of their intelligent operative characteristics; in which case they try and they err and try again continuously.

Except that the strategies and purposes of light, for example. don't seem to have evolved for eons as far as we can observe.  So do all strategies at some point have an end game, or just some,.  Or are there simply different types for different purposes?

So stay tuned.

Can we have been unconsciously intended? Or consciously unintended? Did we pave an unpaved road? Or unpave the paved?

intention |inˈtenCHən|
noun
1 a thing intended; an aim or plan:

For us at least, unconscious intention, as a process, is still intentioned (i.e., intended).  We've planned it and we've aimed it.  We chose to react OR we operated from a pre chosen process.  Intended is also something done that would otherwise have been called unintended, or in other words either a mistaken intention or an unintended mistake.  Yet at some point, if there was a behavior, there had to have been an intent to act - to behave or decide to not behave.
And in the end, all our living activities have at some point been made possible by a plan where intelligence was involved.  As it would seem was necessarily intended.  But by what, the unliving that preceded us?

But wait, this begins to seem a bit too silly.  I’m essentially arguing that nothing is unintended when I should at least concede that unintended has a practical meaning, which is to distinguish the planned from the unplanned, even though in theory, something happening is always a preplanned action.
But if an "aim" as well, if it was not the goal that the particular plan was aimed at, then we can have something intended that was also unintended.  Can't we?
Aha!  Context, context.  But what, intended context?  And are there intended or unintended purposes? Or is there any such thing.  Unintended must apply to results, no?  Otherwise we’re only talking of unintended intentions.
Which I suppose are theoretically possible, but meaning becomes lost when we’re simply playing with words for no other purpose than to play with meanings.

Well let's find a serious example, and one with a universal application!  Such as this one:
What do I mean exactly when referring to intentional construction as "intelligent" construction?  Well, that the construction was accomplished through some entity that had “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.”  And that this constructive something could have, in and of itself, been intelligently constructed to accomplish any intended or intentional purposes.
But nowhere down the line will we be able to find, logically, that this process had an absolutely accidental beginning.  Knowledge is not acquired by an entity that has no ability to use or process it.
And the having of skills is just another way of saying that a thing has the knowledge to be skillful.  Trial and error learning of a skill may occur through a series of obtaining accidental results.  But not by accidental trials with no ability to acquire a purpose in the process.
So what then is the ability to acquire purpose?  It may come down to the fact that there’s nothing in existence that doesn’t have some measure of that quality.   The quality of using at the least, the simplest of strategies.  The quality that allows the application of a known skill.  If only to follow the simplest of instructions or commands.  If only to consistently react.

AND If only to know to obey a natural law.  Or to have the ability to disobey it.  To have, in other words, the ability to choose the extent of our otherwise necessary reactions to a force!!
SO now we get to the very essence of the deterministic arguments, which make a difference between intelligent determination or the non-intelligence of a predetermined world and universe.  A universe where all things indeterminate will need to have retained an element of reactive choice!

Intended in the absence of the unintended.  What a crooked road to hell did I intend to pave with that one?

An Energetic Stream from my Consciousness

Riffing on 3-9-14:

Energy is the life of our universe.  It consists of necessarily self evolving strategies as well as their ever evolving fields of forces that, with the ongoing diversity of its strategic changes, have been variously constructed and regulated to use, direct, and accomplish a growing diversity of purposes.
Ah, you ask, but isn’t it simply a speculative assertion that strategic systems at the proverbial start will have needed to act at cross purposes to evolve?
No, because there must have been cross purposes available to act on if strategies were able to develop at all, since all strategies are ipso facto competitively and thus deceptively constructed, creating entities that, as strategic systems have been discovered to do, inevitably conflict.  And in ways that have allowed them to survive via the inevitable circumstances where strategies have had to develop competitive interests.  Interests that, in the sequential change of time, have developed a randomly chaotic system which, despite its trials and necessary errors, has eventually worked to the overall evolutionary advantage of strategic systems.
Why then was there anything like these systems in the universe to begin with since of course we can clearly see that such strategies are with us now.  That question however assumes there was a beginning, just as some assume there was a starting point for anything at all to exist.  I on the other hand am forced to assume there wasn’t one, a something being unable logically to arise from a nothing. Or, by an even lesser logicality, for there ever to have been a nothing.

Regarding what Charles Sanders Peirce had to say about everything having purposes.

May I mention as well

that we serve our own as well as others' purposes?
Everything in existence serves a purpose, whether it’s for our own or someone or something else’s prior purpose.  Which may in its turn be one of a series of purposes being served for the initial constructor of the first in that series of purpose servers; a series  which will tend, with intelligent assistance from other purpose servers, to predictively multiply itself exponentially (but not necessarily in a perfectly mathematical sequence).
And since a purpose requires an intelligence to form itself, all purposive somethings have been constructed by and for their purposes intelligently.  Some of these functional constructions having also been supplied enough of that existing intelligence to reconstruct and evolve themselves, and others more simply to consist of dullish servers in a train of future services.
And then if the initial purpose of all creative and constructive work in the universe was an intelligent one, who or what was the ultimate constructor?  We can logically, and then again with better logic, presume to have an answer, but we’ll never know to any certainty at all, or will we?.
Oh and yes, what was that initial purpose anyway, or what must it have been?
Or is it something that was always there?

And I haven't even tried to talk about how or why purposes can and will evolve in sequence to serve newer purposes countering those originally intended to be served.