Does consciousness exist? Why is it different from gravity? Can consciousness not be the name we give to a phenomena which is in fact not something that originated from within us, but the sum total of all the chemicals and energies that are acting on us all the time, whether or not we can sense them?

If a ball rolls down a hill, it takes its path according to how gravity works on it. Why is the ball, which seems to have chosen its path, not conscious as we think we are?

Viruses mutate all the time in response to their surroundings. The are able to adapt without needing a neural network based brain. Why are viruses not conscious?

Can the "self" be an internal "gravity" no different from an external "gravity", that interact with each other such that we need to differentiate the inner gravity from the external gravity, thus resulting in the phenomena we call self-consciousness?

Can't we as a species consume less? Make goods last longer. Lower GDP. Limit mass production capabilities. Limit the use of mass media for marketing. Make it unfashionable to follow trends. Raise the personal cost of social actions that translate into high environmental costs in the short or long term.

One asks, and another answers.

But the answer never satisfies the asker
Not as much as the question satisfies the answerer.

The answer is not the goal, but the question is the beginning -
It is not how it ends that matters.

It is not what you think,
But the journey that I would take with you with the question I ask
Either with words, or without -
That sends you off to a journey of seeking.

I am tired of seeking answers; it is questions that now I seek.

The right question at the right time
Could be enough
To make all answers right.

The more industries develop, they figure out ways to satisfy the same desires and needs with minimal hard costs. I would like to see how sexual services can be virtualized to a point where the senses cannot tell the difference between real and simulated sex. Then sexual workers will not anymore need to prostitute their bodies - they will only need to prostitute their identities for money.

More than that, it would be interesting to see how patents would work in such a world!

Ah well, that being said, patents are exactly how thinkers prostitute their ideas...

Organizational Knowledge

i'm not a politics geek, but i think democracy has two major pitfalls:

- in democracies with a good mix of political parties - ideologies not being able to run their full course, because the population gets fickle about the ruling party because of how their policies affected them in the past few years;

- and in democracies where one single party runs the show - tweaking of policies that result in the party garnering too much power, weakening the power of the voter (who are, again, fickle), and turning against the original ideology it was built on.

why can't we have multiple ideologies coexisting, linked together via a minimal set of pre-agreed ("universal") protocols that allow them to interface with one another but beyond which they can run their own show? members of each group - or "tribe"? - are allowed to freely move between tribes - but tribes may require a minimum membership time-span of perhaps 10 years.

in doing so, those in power in each tribe will be forced to remain faithful to the ideology they represent because they are constantly serving a changing demography of voters.

and in doing so, ideologies can run their full course, towards disbandment, or towards a balance where its members grow at a stable rate, remain at a stable number, or maintain an effective balance between outgoing and incoming members.

wouldn't this be a more accurate articulation of our claim to this planet we share and right to be different?

i think that i am. but chances are i am not who i think i am.

Science is leaning that no matter how different we are, we're all basically the same animal. Culture is pretending that we aren't.

「和」と「無」は、共存できるものかな？