Of Karma and Justice

First of all, it is important to agree that Justice involves interactions within a group, in a world of 1 justice makes little sense. This would suggest a definition of Justice along the lines of:

Justice is achieved through the optimization of individual well-being throughout the group, i.e. maintaining each individual's well being near the mean of the group.

Game theory, would suggest that in a changing dynamic world, with limited, yet growing resources; the reality of Justice as a virtue allows the group (a species) to profit from behavior such as empathy, and self-sacrifice; which would explain how said emotions have become embedded within many species throughout evolutionary time.

Karma expresses the flow of well-being towards achieving Justice as it relates our evolved emotional responses to events and our actions. It is similar to keeping count of standard deviations from the mean.

Many ways of achieving justice have bean thought out; most religions deal extensively on the subject as do all political systems. In the end; justice as something more complex than even the simplest cooperative games is NP - complete and we will continue forever changing and optimizing our laws and beliefs regarding our communal well-being to our current situations.

As sentient being, I agree the pursuit of justice is a responsibility we hold to ourselves, it is crucial to our survival.

Heart Broken

I remember telling someone, on her porch one afternoon: "That's because you have never really had your heart broken, and I will do my best so it never is."

Although I consider the promise was kept, it's easy to falter and maybe believe an impeccable heart to be an unwanted gift. There is a story of an old man whose' wounded, grieving heart he would not trade for that of a boy. A beautifully intact heart which was so naively boasted through the town; the story ends with the boy giving the old man a piece of the suddenly incomplete organ, and is an analogy of giving one's self in love.

In that boys eyes, and specially in these times, Love is a sentiment too often confused with desire, and self-adorement (narcissism), so the phrase: 'you must loose something to understand its real worth' urges one to believe a heart must be broken / given before one can understand its value, yet I believe in empathy. Time has bestowed upon life an infinitely powerful tool of comprehension, of understanding reality not only though our own eyes, but from those around us, of allowing us to share the responsibility of a better world.

It could be argued, that empathy is the root emotion behind the search for Justice (in another post, I quote a French philosopher who state Justice is an invention of man, and as such a responsibility of man unto himself.) So, if Love is a sentiment to be put to good use it must be born though Empathy, Comprehension, Dedication, Patience and Understanding, it must be a sentiment of Sharing, of reciprocal Trust and Cooperative Growth.

I recently heard a song: "What is love without lust" (La Roux - In For The Kill) and its something little short of coming from the black bible and a willingness to over-weigh self-adulation, self-fulfillment above all other things.

In that sense, and living through heart-breaks myself, there will always be choices in life. Choosing to be heart broken, is just as selfish as choosing lust. Evolution has seen to it so that our empathy, and sense of justice, prohibit us from attaining happiness if not through what we have identified as the virtues of life.

Some references:

• LifeScience - Study: People Literally Feel Pain of Others
• Roots of Empathy
• BBC News - Monkeys show sense of justice
• Shareable - Birds do It. Bats do It.
• Love of All Wisdom - Can justice make you happy?
• Suite101 - The Psychopath Antisocial
• Wikipedia - Psycopathy

I just can't keep it to myself

My mom, like the guy in this story has decided to invade my personal choices with her own opinion. She has started a campaign of sprinkling holy water on me now...

Its fun seeing her give me gods blessing and drawing the cross on my forehead; often times I struggle against the urge of playing some prank on her, like yelling: It Burns, It Burns!. I strongly suspect she'd fall to the floor and pray, my lord forgive him, my lord save him. Or something less dramatical, like fake a small wince, and have her spray a little more, and hug me. and then play around with that; but hey, I choose not to, specially since God would punish me if I did.

As a closing argument; an 18 year old boy speaks on why he has chosen to ignore faith: MilenaC

My new phone

0.9999... == 1

How can 0.9999... be equal to one? Won't a little always be missing? "Embrace the power of infinity"...

A daimond in the rough

Just as bad seeds grow in beautiful gardens, you can sometimes find a gorgeous soul amongst corrupted minds. Variety such a beautiful burden... Synonymous to existance...

Day after Thanksgiving.

Yesterday I was reminded about my writing on relationships last year, and was asked how my thoughts on the subject had changed... still, one year later, the gist of the admittedly polar dissertation remains.

There is one note we could extract from an economist's super-rational model of the mind; one simple addition: the role of Wanting, It is simply too painful to accept a partner's loss of interest, yet; beyond reasonable justification, illusion falls prey to reality and change inevitably looms over previous conception of a relationship; making the desire to sustain it either weaker or stronger.

In other words, Love must be fleeting to require hard work and understanding, and some form of self-realization is inextricable from maintaining a healthy relationship. In this tone I give thanks to every human being who finds self-realization in the happiness of others; you are the essence of humanity and the pillars of its achievements.

Authentic Hapiness

These questionnaires are referred to in the video, and I invite you to take at least one and observe your self-perception, after all; and for obvious reasons not mentioned in the video, happiness is also a function of self-perception, those three lives (watch the video) must be self-perceived (filtered, or weighted for the math literate); whatever the facts may be, any delusion renders them useless.

Actually, I believe delusion is quite common, for example, a group of students from ITLA left for Cuba to participate in an international ACM competition. They effected their best effort and achieved the 20th position by solving 1 problem in the set. They came back enthused over the experience, motivated towards achieving a better performance next year.

An excellent advancement, no doubt, their is no previous example. But lets give a little perspective to the situation: how many countries participated?
2
This means, Cuba was not only able to produce 31 additional teams for the competition, but 58% of those teams outperformed our single selection; twice (there was also a warm-up competition in which we placed 19).

An incorrect, but possibly more illustrative statement would be:
Out of 2 countries, we placed -19

The participants are themselves math illiterate, statements like: 1/3 is an irrational number, sqrt(x) is a function from engineering students in college shed further light into our national situation which we seem so bent on ignoring. Our actual GNP is in enormous proportion coming from gifs and drug trafficking, it seems we simply accept our fates as tripping billies (beautiful song by the way).

In any case, and to conclude: the video is very good, and should be compared with its buddhist counterpart. Take the test, delusions help us cope; ignorance is bliss as they say, but authentic happiness, profound happiness is gained through the depth of knowledge; and coming back to this ideals, we are going to start a work-group for math literacy and computer science at kindleit.

A Contraluz

Bocatabú es una banda de lo más agradable, muy buena composición musical y lindas letras.

A Contraluz de Bocatabú.

Abortion - Religion - Stupidity.

I am enraged.

Every time I hear arguments against legalizing abortion I am dragged into rageful despair; the argument tends to state: all life is precious, and it begins on the moment of conception; so society must protect it, at ANY cost. This argument is carried out from beginning to end loosing respectability at each step:

1. most everyone agrees on life's preciousness,
2. about 40% of the world is certain life begins at conception and not birth,
3. finally, it can be argued: virtually no one would kill a random family of 3 to birth a child.

It is easy to understand how it can become a sensitive issue, but every time some fanatic starts arguing for outright abolishment I simply realize how dumb we all are. Stupidity is arguably why religion is so in tune with power, its simply too easy for man to become sheep; to blindly obey and disregard the beautiful causality which exists in our universe. It starts with imagining someone or something being able to do whatever they/it wants and then replacing whatever causal rules actually exist and are observable in this universe with something else.

There is a conscientious and logical deductive path that guides us towards a challenging observation: we need to make all us dimwits smarter, at least in our capability of foresight (or causal search if you will). Enough of this, its amazing how much we need to advance, that we REALLY DON'T SEE WHATS RIGHT IN FRONT OF US!

I propose a worldwide goal:
Raise the global IQ level by 30 points (obviously without recalibrating the scoring statistics). This should be a stated global incentive.

Scientology, what the hell is it anyways?

I always thought of scientology as an agnostic's excuse towards spirituality, and in some ways it actually is :). After seeing these videos it seems a lot like an advanced version of reflection on human religion and spirituality. Something born from what rational and analytic minds go through when completating "life's questions"; almost a scientific approach to spirituality.

Why almost? Because it lacks one of science's most crucial natures: skepticism. True skeptics would find serious flaws for the argument of "Thetans"... Anyways, it seems to do a great job at keeping the pretty parts of religion.

Checkout the wikipedia article on the subject, or look into the auditing video 'which is the basis for scientology'...Auditing or the full sequence that describes scientology (by scientologists: scientology church

In an odd way, this could fit very well into what a friend of mine will end up believing...