When nature hurts us, we do not accuse nature of wrongdoing, we do not feel resentful. When a plague strikes we burry our dead, we cry, and we move on. When humanity turns on itself, when humans harm other humans, we feel victimised by our own kind, we cannot help but to see the perpetrators of the crimes committed against us as beings of the same kind, like us, but despicable. This implicitly makes us despise our kind, and thus indirectly despise ourselves. The resentment associated with victimhood is essentially self-hate. This hate can last for generations, it does not just go away, but must be conquered. The key to its resolution also lies in our belonging to humanity, but requires discernment of that which unites us, makes us human: the collective creation of meaning.
The pursuit of eternal life is a symptom of spiritual death: nihilism.
“The leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life. Even if killing death seems a distant goal, we have already achieved things that were inconceivable a few centuries ago.” Y.N.Harari
Humankind already has eternal life; the generational cycle of death and birth make it eternal.
“The Human Brain Project, founded in 2005, hopes to recreate a complete human brain inside a computer, with electronic circuits in the computer emulating neural networks in the brain. The project’s director has claimed that, if funded properly, within a decade or two we could have an artificial human brain inside a computer that could talk and behave very much as a human does.”
Those who desire eternal life are implicitly confessing that their life lacks meaning, but are too unaware of their nihilism to suicide.
An integrated self is not afraid of death, because meaning transcends life. A conflicted self will not find meaning even in immortality.
“The leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life. Even if killing death seems a distant goal, we have already achieved things that were inconceivable a few centuries ago.” Y.N.Harari
Humankind already has eternal life; the generational cycle of death and birth make it eternal.
“The Human Brain Project, founded in 2005, hopes to recreate a complete human brain inside a computer, with electronic circuits in the computer emulating neural networks in the brain. The project’s director has claimed that, if funded properly, within a decade or two we could have an artificial human brain inside a computer that could talk and behave very much as a human does.”
Those who desire eternal life are implicitly confessing that their life lacks meaning, but are too unaware of their nihilism to suicide.
An integrated self is not afraid of death, because meaning transcends life. A conflicted self will not find meaning even in immortality.
Yuval Noah Harari asserts that “technology will turn Men into Gods”, but this is a category error. The essence of God is internal perfection, perfection of Self which is also moral perfection, and any technology available to Man would still leave Man as we are, morally imperfect, mentally conflicted and delusional. Technology and the perfection of Self are two independent categories. In fact, fixation on technology may be a sign of moral failure, of becoming less true to the ‘image of God’ and more like a smart animal.
Is she registered with the local council, microchipped and desexed? Who is her owner? Cats are generally not permitted to roam public spaces or trespass on other properties and can be seized: “Stray or roaming cats create a nuisance by trespassing on other peoples' property, and they can also kill local wildlife. Neighbours can object to your cat on their property and your cat can be seized by our animal management officers.” 24h curfew applies in some local councils: “Residents in Melbourne’s east will be hit with pricey fines if their cats stray from their home at anytime.” I suggest a weekly flea treatment. BTW, how does she know what it feels like to be a cat? I hope she is not also claiming to have any human rights.
Yuval Noah Harari claims that free will does not exist, which implies that human thought is deterministic and therefore completely predictable, but few sentences later he asserts that technology is non-deterministic, because (the allegedly deterministic) humans can invent new uses of technology. This guy is not a consistent thinker. Regarding ‘free will’ (the idea that humans are capable of coming up with thoughts that are not pre-determined by the prior state of the world) can in fact be formally defended, because to assert thought-determinism would be to commit Russell’s paradox: https://culturalanalysisnet.wordpress.com/2018/06/08/russells-paradox-contra-determinism/
Cultural Analysis & Philosophy
Russell’s Paradox Contra Determinism
Causal determinism, the idea that the present state of the world is fully determined by its antecedent states, is generally considered incompatible with causa sui thought, the idea that t…
Is anyone interested in a solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness? Going cheap, Sunday night special. For clarity, the phenomenal-content of subjective experiences is symbolically expressed as f-properties in the included formulas. https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWODO It just occurred to me that nobody noticed that this was (at least provisionally) solved.
If transhumanism were beneficial to humans then you’d think the billionaires would be doing it already, but they don’t. Schwab, Thiel, Gates, Bezos, Musk are not getting any implants, no neurolink, no biotech augmentation. They are eating organic meat, use homeopathy, send their unvaccinated kids to Waldorf/Steiner schools and avoid digital technology as much as they can. Transhumanism is only for you, the slave class, just like vaccines.
Harari sets up a strawman argument that because humans are influenced by external information they do not have free will. This is not what free will means or has ever meant; free will means only that external inputs (which are necessary to have thoughts at all, providing us with the objects of thought) do not fully determine our choices, that something else within us creates an opening for indeterminacy. The fine print reveals that humans just dont use free will enough by blindly following desires. This part makes sense; to blindly follow desires is to act as an animal, but humans reason about choices, and can resist desires if reason dictates that the ultimate-self interest (or what is Right) lies in not fulfilling certain desires. In short, acting like animals following impulses makes us deterministic, whereas acting as deeply rational beings makes us indeterministic, therefore free will. Self-scrutiny, suspension of judgement, careful reasoning and examining objections to our own preferences, is the secret of freewill, and the essence of humanity (understood in the Kantian sense). I again suspect that Harari’s target audience are the majority of people who do not think rationally but blindly follow the implicit instructions given to them by the news networks (or by their trusted alternative media, for those who desire to be alternative). Since the desire to be alternative is a well established human urge for a substantial percentage of human population, any corporate entity serious about “biohacking” would need to control not just the mainstream media but, necessarily, the alternative media as well. Social engineeng is in fact easier via the alternative media, where the “agents of change” naturally reside, whereas the mainstream (the naural followers) are effectively restrained and awaiting directions. Logos (reason) liberates; Desire enslaves. Behind the strawman argument against free will Harari (perhaps unwittingly, or perhaps intentionally) implicitly invites us to submit completely to corporate powers or to choose Logos, and therefore free will. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/14/yuval-noah-harari-the-new-threat-to-liberal-democracy
the Guardian
Yuval Noah Harari: the myth of freedom
Governments and corporations will soon know you better than you know yourself. Belief in the idea of freedom has become dangerous
Humans cannot become free until they regain free will, which is Logos. Logos is hard work, and the majority has grown intellectually lazy, but the rewards of Logos are incommensurable to the cost: to think critically and have the emotional capacity to acknowledge being wrong, to evaluate reasons and seek inconsistencies in your desires, to question your will.
People have limited bandwidth for consciously absorbing information, especially if the relevant information conflicts with their beliefs. Effective political movements use factually or symbolically correct, logically consistent, and relentlessly repetitive messaging: the same message or two everywhere, over and over again. Messaging is about imprinting the subconscious mind of the unthinking with the message, until they become conscious of it and compelled to reflect on its merits. Many different messages amount to no message at all, because the unthinking will not be imprinted without persistence and repetition of the same, narrowly defined content. A distinction needs to be made here between propaganda and ethical messaging (both can use the same tool for different ends): propaganda seeks to deceive whereas ethical messaging only seeks to be considered without prejudice.
Every organisation, rebel doctor or politician on Telegram is now defending the right to Informed Consent, but hardly anyone apart from NORMAL even mentions the right to Free Medical Consent, free from social-opportunity coercion or economic deprivation. Your Informed Consent is useless if you have to take the injection anyway, because you will lose your job and profession if you would refuse. To give up on Free Medical Consent is to accept that being born human is no longer a guarantee of human rights, therefore there are no human rights, only conditional privileges. Now that you are informed enough you may want to ask those champions of freedom why are they not defending your right to Free Medical Consent. Why are they dragging their feet? Is there a problem?
The Golden Rule is an intuitive realisation of the ontological fact that consciousness is essentially a mirror, and every instance of subjective thought is a reflection of a reflection between Self-consciousness and Other-consciousness facing one another, giving rise to a virtually infinite depth and complexity of being, a relational virtuality becoming the fragmented (and thus objectified) substance of the real. https://philpapers.org/rec/KOWTGR
philpapers.org
Michael Kowalik, The Golden Rule as it Ought to Be - PhilPapers
The Golden Rule, most commonly expressed in the form "do to others what you would have them do to you", has attracted criticism for failing to provide practical guidance in case ...
Difference between Informed Consent and Free Consent
Informed Consent: I am informed of the risks and benefits of this medical procedure, and that I will lose my job and profession if I refuse it.
Free Consent: I might not fully understand the scientific merits of this medical procedure, but I know that my rights and freedoms will not be restricted if I refuse it.
Informed Consent: I am informed of the risks and benefits of this medical procedure, and that I will lose my job and profession if I refuse it.
Free Consent: I might not fully understand the scientific merits of this medical procedure, but I know that my rights and freedoms will not be restricted if I refuse it.
It is unwise to base a legal challenge on the hope of winning a scientific argument against the experts. https://www.news.com.au/national/courts-law/maelstrom-in-a-petri-dish-cop-loses-fight-against-covid19-vaccine-mandate/news-story/ab6a3e18fdaed5620efdb8abd97f2e0d
Disagreements cannot be eradicated by force or prejudice, but disagreements can be resolved when two parties recognise one another as beings of the same moral status and subject to the same rules of reason. Tribalism of any kind rejects the first condition. The consequences of this are far deeper than just conflict or violence; it suppresses the degree of consciousness of the tribal self. It interrupts the social reflexivity of the human kind, which is the source of all meaning and of all instances of self-consciousness. By devaluing the conscious rational agency or moral status of any person just because they do not belong to ‘my tribe’ we devalue our ontological kind, and thus we implicitly devalue ourselves. We always knew this on some level (Anthropos = one who is alike; the Golden Rule) but Kant was the first to formalise the principle, his Categorical Imperative, albeit without going into the ontological consequences (that was my contribution).
This is a comparison of the attention score between the most popular BMJ paper promoting vaccine mandates and the ONLY paper opposing vaccine mandates (mine). As you can see in the screen grabs, 125 news sources picked up the pro-mandates paper, while 0 news sources picked up my paper. Despite this de-facto news embargo, my paper was read in full by 67000 online visitors, while only 15000 read the pro-mandates paper, over a roughy the same time period, so there is clearly 4 times as much interest in arguments opposing the mandates. Nevertheless, news networks were happy to forgo 4 times the readership (4 times the revenue) just to suppress the information opposing the mandates.
Email to the Queensland Human Rights Commission (25.08.2022)
ATTN: The Commissioner of the Queeensland Human Rights Commission
I am a philosopher of ethics and the leading voice in the academic debate questioning the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates. I recently published on this topic in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics (cited below).
This communication is motivated by the Dept. of Education announcing that unvaccinated QLD teachers will be penalised for their non-consent to this medical procedure.
I submit that vaccine mandates, or any systemic discrimination against the unvaccinated, infringes on human rights, including the right to life. This conclusion is based on the following grounds:
1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow our unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. This devaluation of the innate human constitution is not only universally dehumanising, but it perverts the very concept of human rights; discrimination against the unvaccinated implies that our innate human constitution is no longer a guarantee of full human rights. This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240.
2. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of free medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, under any circumstances, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right (including the right to life) can be subverted by medical coercion. Free medical consent is the most fundamental protection against crimes against humanity being committed under the guise of healthcare (several instances of such abuses have occurred in this century).
3. Vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of the mandated activity. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that infectious pathogens also kill people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. Critically, any discrimination against the unvaccinated amounts to a violation of the right to life by coercing people to undergo a medical procedure where a small percentage of otherwise healthy people are expected to die as a direct result of that procedure.
An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT and subsequently published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/04/26/medethics-2022-108229.responses#fundamental-values-are-not-defeated-by-utilitarian-calculus
I suggest that we are facing a human rights emergency and the outlined issues call for immediate administrative action, especially in regard to the actions of the Dept. of Education.
I am open to collaboration.
Sincerely,
Michael Kowalik
https://philpeople.org/profiles/michael-kowalik
ATTN: The Commissioner of the Queeensland Human Rights Commission
I am a philosopher of ethics and the leading voice in the academic debate questioning the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates. I recently published on this topic in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics (cited below).
This communication is motivated by the Dept. of Education announcing that unvaccinated QLD teachers will be penalised for their non-consent to this medical procedure.
I submit that vaccine mandates, or any systemic discrimination against the unvaccinated, infringes on human rights, including the right to life. This conclusion is based on the following grounds:
1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow our unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. This devaluation of the innate human constitution is not only universally dehumanising, but it perverts the very concept of human rights; discrimination against the unvaccinated implies that our innate human constitution is no longer a guarantee of full human rights. This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240.
2. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of free medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, under any circumstances, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right (including the right to life) can be subverted by medical coercion. Free medical consent is the most fundamental protection against crimes against humanity being committed under the guise of healthcare (several instances of such abuses have occurred in this century).
3. Vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of the mandated activity. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that infectious pathogens also kill people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. Critically, any discrimination against the unvaccinated amounts to a violation of the right to life by coercing people to undergo a medical procedure where a small percentage of otherwise healthy people are expected to die as a direct result of that procedure.
An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT and subsequently published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/04/26/medethics-2022-108229.responses#fundamental-values-are-not-defeated-by-utilitarian-calculus
I suggest that we are facing a human rights emergency and the outlined issues call for immediate administrative action, especially in regard to the actions of the Dept. of Education.
I am open to collaboration.
Sincerely,
Michael Kowalik
https://philpeople.org/profiles/michael-kowalik