ma.juii.net

During a 3D programming customer project, I accidentally created some textured materials with a really strange look … unlike anything I’ve seem in the real world:

I think it’s irresponsible to be fond of children because they’re light-hearted and unburdened.

Yea really; if people feel the adult world as a burden, but don’t fix that world, instead glorify childhood until their children grow up and suffer from that same world.

On persons as systems

What’s really interesting, and I am not aware of anybody who has researched into it, is how do people work as personalities from a systems perspective? Every person can be seen as a psychodynamic system; to maintain proper operation, motivation, enjoyment, relaxation etc. are needed and have to come from some source. Now it will be interesting to see the very different ways how people provide these, and become a working (or non-working) system, within their own environment. This is especialy helpful to understand cultural differences.

And in the same way, open source projects are sociodynamic / psychodynamic systems. And even societies are. Failure arises if these systems cannot maintain their own integrity and stop working properly: open source projects die, societies falter.

So there should be a discipline “social engineering” and “personality engineering” that helps structure people and groups so that they can be working systems. It seems that nobody attempted that yet (on society level, they just focus on money … what a poor abstraction).

On personal disintegration

While we are at this topic, there is another aspect: avoiding personal disintegration. One should take care to keep up ones personality as a system, to keep it from falling apart, that is, disintegration. Because, disintegrated persons are no longer able to live on their own; they are also unable to learn living on their own again; instead, they need “professional help”. A disintegrated person is what is commonly understood as a “broken personality”. Someone who stopped working as a self-supporting system.

There are many “disintegrating forces” in life. Stress, the lack of relaxation times, the expectations of others, substance dependence, other dependences, unhealthy nutrition, lack of fitness, … . The result of disintegration is normally no physical issue, at least not alone. Physical issues like lack of fitness, bad nutrition etc. can contribute, but more important are the mind issues to which these physical issues contribute: lack of motivation, depression, inability to enjoy, lack of visionary goals, feeling a lack of meaning in life etc..

On free will

People still discuss if people have a free will or not. Here is a new approach: the free will might be nothing that has a biological foundation (biology might even hinder it), but free will might be nonetheless present, “purely in software”, that is, in learned brain function. In that respect, the concept of “personhood” might be correct simply because others expect people to behave as persons, and they learn to fulfill these expectations (they learn to behave as persons: being responsible, having a conscience, having a free will). That way, personhood would be a social construct. (Just as free will, so also responsibility, so also moral debt, which are entailed in the concept of personhood.)

Google, eBay, Facebook, Yahoo, GMX, MSN, Windows, Apple, Linux distributions etc. are like nation states in cyberspace: if you engage in their society, they provide something to you, but also might demand money from you, to know things about you, and to control you.

So in addition to being a citizen of a nation state (and as if would not already be bad enough), one is a citizen of, mostly several, cybernation states.

The good thing is, it is easy to choose and prefer those you like. I like those that allow me to be free: Ubuntu Linux. And I am opposed to those that have too high taxes (eBay, Amazon) and those that have too powerful intelligence services (Facebook, Google) and those with paranoid property laws (Microsoft) or too strict legislation in general (Apple).

It is shocking to see that adults are damned to stay as they are. Only children are supported to learn something new, but once they threw you into the world of the adults to go out and earn your own money, all support is gone. It seems they just intended to educate you as far as you need to earn tax payers’ money for paying taxes and buying commercial crap. But they do not support you to become a mature personality.

Of course there is self-education, but that is limited to technical things (electronics, computing, …) and does not help to overcome social problems (because of fear to learn what one wants to learn).

And of course, there is experience, but that does not help you to learn social things either, as they only allow you to gather experience (on the job) in areas where you already have some qualifications so that they can hire you. Also people will fear to accept a job that they fear to fail in (as it is about something they need, and maybe want, to learn yet).

And also, there are adult education services, but that is expensive, totally inefficient, and people do not have the time for it. Instead, education must be integrated into daily life.

Might this be a solution: we need hackerspaces for education in technology, and intentional communities for education in social and self governance skills, both with a semi-formal mentoring and evaluation program.

This world has only two big unsolved problems. First, the truth about God is not apparent (so people cannot believe the right thing easily). Second, people are bad (so people cannot live in freedom and peace and sustainable manner).

It’s an important insight that these are disconnected problems: even if Christianity is the right religion, and is applied large scale to the whole earth, people are still bad on average, and the world will not become a free and peaceful and sustainable place. Because, there is much power abuse and exploitation of both people and nature in “Christian” nations, and also by Christians.

So we need two solutions. I propose Second Acts for the first problem, and EarthOS for the second.

From a practical, motivational and experience-based perspective, it is useless to try to do something that is not favoured by the current circumstances, if that activity is something regular or habitual or something that requires many contributions over time (as part-time work). Such attempts will all fail eventually, and up to that point of time, they burn a huge amount of motivation, strength and other resources.

The solution is to change the circumstances instead. That is, to create surroundings (infrastructure, organizational rules etc.) that favour the activity one wants to do. This can be called “behavior setting design”; see the behavior setting theory.

It is however possible to perform one-time projects “against the circumstances”; this also consumes much motivation, strength and other resources, but that is o.k. if one can “re-fill” that wile living in ones day-to-day circumstances.

Examples:

• To gain fitness, don’t create regular “train this or that” tasks, instead find a friend as a training partner, or a sports group so that training will get a regular, fun activity.
• To become a more social person, move into a flat sharing community instead of creating tasks to meet people while still living in a very isolated way.
• To recover from a burn-out situation, place yourself in a relaxing, supportive situation instead of creating tasks to relax, tasks to train physically, tasks to socialize etc..

A related insight is that it’s complete nonsense to permanently try to exhort and persuade the population to do more sport and live healthier, to increase public health. Because, all of the population know about the risks of not following these recommendations, and still do not follow them; so this must have a reason, and cannot by cured by simply intensifying the exhortations. The reason are multiple obstacles in the circumstances that make it impossible to uphold healthy activities in the long term with average human motivation (see above). People are simpl in a behavior setting that promotes unhealthy action (on average and in long term; individual actions and people might deviate, but a behavior setting is always effective on average, and average health is of interest here). So peopel cannot be blamed for living unhealthy, instead, these circumstances have to be changed to be more supportive.

Examples:

• open, friendly sport groups to join
• more informal social security to motivate people (by friends and family)
• 24 hour gratis gym, operated by the city, incl. trainers
• well-known places to meet for sports in informal manner
• city-operated public Internet forums to find sport mates etc.
• …