(04-10-2026, 01:24 PM)MojoMaddness Wrote: The predictability is there, the lack of evolution and change is what gets me.
You appear to be deploring the predictability of human nature. You should praise it instead. Imagine what chaos there would be if everyone behaved unpredictably and illogically, without any obvious reason for their words and actions!
It is exactly the ‘unpredictability’ of the world’s most powerful man that makes him so evil and dangerous. In fact, he isn’t at all unpredictable; he reliably acts so as to enrich and empower himself and his cronies, capture the greatest amount of attention, and generate as much controversy in the media as possible. And just as predictably, decent citizens are shocked by his outrages while his cult members are delighted. You can’t expect either group to change, any more than Trump himself can; all parties are acting according to their nature. The cultists are Trump’s fellow haters of humanity, but unlike him they are socially impotent and can only live out their fantasies of vengeance and cruelty through him. No wonder they love him; he was quite right when he called himself their ‘retribution’.
Quote:Maybe I still hold onto the idea that there is a reason for why we are in the position we are in.
There is an infinity of reasons. The error is to believe that there exists one overarching explanation that makes sense of it all. This is the error of the monomaniac: the religious fanatic, the political dogmatist, the obsessive systematizer, the conspiracy theorist. For a rational, unbiased observer there can be no such explanation – the infinity of reasons exists due to the infinity of causes that apply, and it is impossible to construct a predictive model that accounts for all of them.
In any case, human beings are not very rational. We all have our predispositions and biases. We keep struggling to fit the world into our oversimplified explanatory frameworks because we cannot and do not take account of all the facts.
If
Maxwell’s Demon were a rational actor, it would perceive all the reasons there are and perhaps could construct an accurate picture of reality. Humans cannot do this, though with the help of logic and empirical enquiry we can get pretty close. But to do so demands far more education and mental training than the average person possesses.
Quote:I believe the true nature of the world IS Chaos.
Your post concludes with a symbol that appears to be partly derived from a
taijitu. The meaning of the
taijitu, a Taoist symbol, is that change never ceases. However, the symbol, with its rotational symmetry, has another message, too: change is cyclic, part of an endless seesawing between extremes, which is natural, causal – and with some effort,
can be understood and even manipulated to our advantage (though we should never forget that there will always be unforeseen disadvantages complementing those advantages we enjoy). The world is not chaotic and unpredictable – even on the quantum level, where the outcome of individual subatomic events is uncertain, statistical predictions work just fine. But we need to understand
how things work before we can predict them, which takes me back to the point of my earlier post, the one to which you replied.
I notice that you use the words ‘change’ and ‘evolution’ as though they had different meanings. It may sound pedantic, but it is important to realise that they are
not different. The idea that evolution somehow implies improvement (what some of us call progress) is mistaken. The expectation that things must progress, and improve over time, is one of those false explanatory traps that people fall into because they seem comforting at first. But there is absolutely no reason why events or people should improve over time. On the contrary, they are quite predictably bound for – respectively – meaninglessness and dissolution.
I’m sorry the news isn’t better. And I’m afraid cutting yourself off from the internet and ‘hunkering down’ won’t improve it in the slightest. My wish for you is contentment and a quiet mind.
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