Why do we falsely conflate progress with evolution?

The conflation of technology with biology is a complex false extrapolation coming from the most basic instinct, the fear of death, without which we would not last very long. In other words the fear of death is the most basic level of survival instinct. 

But it is important to remember instinct is the non-cognitive part of the brain, and we do not have direct access to it. We don't have to think about making our heart beat, it just does. Multiply that times a zillion to get some notion of the complexity of biology, and the "biological brain", or instinct, that drives all life on the only biological planet we are aware of.

But we may be only dimly aware of it moment to moment when we stop to consider the damage we are doing to biological diversity, here, on the only biosphere we are aware of. And we do this basically unconsciously, in the sense we are "driven" by instinct. So this basic "drive force" is instinct, not reason. The best we can do is to try and understand this unconscious "drive force" using our capacity for reason.

And it's important to understand how we conflate progress with evolution in order to understand human potentials and limitations.

It's also important to understand that in this day of seemingly limitless human potential we also seem to have a pretty dim understanding of human limitation.

Remember Dirty Harry? And the famous line, "Man's got to understand his limitations."

https://youtu.be/uki4lrLzRaU

The problem with not understanding limitation is one is apt to confuse fiction with reality. We might, for example, go picking fights that will get us killed. How many action movies are based on the idea of limitlessness? All of them. Science fiction movies? Yep, them too.

Now let's spend a few moments considering the difference between evolution, or biology, and progress, or technology.

Big brain humans, sapiens, arrived after millions of years of evolution from our ape ancestors, about 150,000 years ago. Technology progressed slowly with the creation of crude hunter gathering tools from 150,000 years ago until agriculture and civilization began, about 10,000 years ago. At that point technological progress began speeding up a bit. So technological progress was glacially slow the first 140,000 years of us sapiens on the planet, then a bit faster with the onset of agriculture.

But then, with the onset of the industrial revolution, about 230 years ago, the progress curve literally went vertical.

Let's also make note of an important part of understanding human limits: from the point we sapiens first appeared 150,000 years ago to now there has been very little if any evolution in our physiology or brain capacity. 

It is said if a hunter gatherer mother could magically transport her baby into a current modern family, as that baby grew into an adult there would be no distinguishable difference between 150,000 years ago human and current human. Human capacities, physiology and brain size, are the same.

Biological evolution is very (very) slow, but technological progress has been a rocket ride.

There are two types of growth curves, logarithmic and exponential:

The problem with exponential growth progressions is they have a nasty habit of collapsing at some point. The reason is the rate of progression cannot be maintained. If you look at the exponential curve just above you see for that for the rate of growth to continue it would have to start curving backwards at some point, which is impossible because time does not go backward (except in science fiction). 

And it can't turn into a vertical because that would mean all future progress would happen right now! Again, a "time" impossibility (except in science fiction).

Are you beginning to see why science fiction is so compelling. It's a mythology that makes us limitless, which also confers immortality, where a single individual biological life is never ended by mortality, or anything else.

But, it is impossible because biology is created by "we know not what". In the science fiction world we may be able to take command of biology at some point. Cool, no more destruction of the ecology, we would simply re-engineer biology to do what we want. And what is that? To cut to the chase, primarily, to live forever. 

An ironic paradox of impossibility.

To look at it another way we humans are afraid of biology (in an example of the instinctual and unconscious fear of death) because we ourselves are 100% biological (and how ironic is it that we are afraid of what we are completely?) Technological replacements of damaged biological body parts with titanium (knees hips or whatever) does not change the fact we are 100% biological, to think it does is a science fiction.

And to think we can take command of biology will prove to be another science fiction, but one that probably won't be broadly realized as such until we have continued to do more damage to global biology, and ourselves.

Health can only be acquired by learning, accepting, and following the laws of nature, which are not all that complex. And the attempt to re-write the laws of nature will backfire, perhaps precipitously.

The great Leonard Cohen wrote and sang "there ain't no cure for love", an oblique reference to the power of biology to "drive" us in ways we may sometimes wish we did not have to go.

https://youtu.be/gM7vULqs31Q

Even if so, it's not a completely horrible idea to live in actual reality, to the extent possible.

So, to sum up, we have a mostly unconscious wish (drive) for immorality which "plays out" in the conflation of biology with technology. Wishful thinking wants to think that with tech biology can become completely malleable to us. This ignores that biology is bigger than us, that we are created solely by biology, that we are it and only it, and completely "bounded" by it.

And technology is equal parts construction and destruction. The mythology of our day is the destructivity of technology is de minimis and the constructively of tech is de maximus.

Good luck to all us sapiens, it would seem that we could use some right about now. Let us remember also the most beautiful thing extant in our world is biology, and we are that.

mRNA in blood after 28 days

A study from Denmark shows mRNA in blood after 28 days. We were assured by the manufactures this could not happen. Dr John Campbell explains the study, and inferences that can be drawn.

https://youtu.be/fWVxVd6IGgg

‘I want to destroy whatever I want’: Bing’s AI chatbot unsettles US reporter

 An interesting article:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/17/i-want-to-destroy-whatever-i-want-bings-ai-chatbot-unsettles-us-reporter?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

My thoughts:

The bot has no real "feelings" because it is not organic/biological. And that may always be true of AI. If so, how far are we from creating a biological brain?

Curiosity killed the cat, but the cat has nine lives. Which life are we sapiens currently in? We are probing potentially species ending dark corners: AI that can only have fake compassion, genetic modifications of biology (including human biology), genetically modified pharmaceuticals, the most powerful pharmaceutical industry in history whose profit relies on continually increasing disease in the population, and nuclear weapons that are already here, fully formed, and ready to go.

Are humans also vulnerable in the 6th mass extinction (the only one human created)? You better bet your sweet bippy we are.

Freud postulated a life instinct and a death instinct, Eros and Thanatos. Thanatos kicks in when it's "time to go", biology "knows" when this is, when to release life and let go, just as the seed "knows" when to grow. Do biological organisms actually know these things? If so, how?

Well, we don't know, proving to my satisfaction there is an intelligence force greater than human loose in the universe. And we do not like not knowing, it makes us vulnerable. But wait, our biology does know?

Yep, and it's because we are biological, a part of nature. So why does it bug us so much that we don't know "intellectually"?

We love science fiction, aliens in balloons flying over North America. And we can escape species extinction by setting up camp on Mars, a planet a zillion times more "dead" than this one. Meanwhile Earth continues to have huge capacity for the generation of biology, and will likely continue having that capacity even if we sapiens self-suicide.

It occurs to me atheists are the most hubristic of humans. They believe there is no god because we cannot intellectually know there is a god. But if there is a force more intelligent than humans at loose in the universe, how could we even see it?

It's like the old joke, two young fish in the ocean having a good swim, when a wise old fish swims by and says, "hey youngsters, how's the water today"? The two young fish look at each other puzzled and say, "what the heck is water"?

My favorite scientists were/are also mystics, with a deep reverence for the unknown. But I'll admit, religious people do believe in some pretty dumb stuff. Isn't that called mythology? And been around as long as humans? Well we technologically sophisticated humans no longer have mythology because it is definitely not science, which of course is the only way we can know anything for sure. Right?

So then what is this biological "knowing"?

And who needs it? With science and technology we have discovered many constructive principles since hunter gatherer days, but as life on the planet continues to deteriorate it becomes more and more obvious that each constructive principle has a corresponding destructive principle. Every new and amazing technology is a double edged sword, and we can see the consequence of that in the ongoing destruction of biological life on the planet.

And if "more better" technology is not the answer, what is?

A genius thinker I am fond of points out humans tend to project trends into infinity...what is happening now will continue forever. But this is never true. Biological life cycles, and trends, are of shorter and longer durations. And the longer trend cycles extending beyond single generations are those we project into infinity.

Atheist humans seem to think if we could just extinguish cycles the "good" trends could last forever. These are the same fools extinguishing biological life on the planet.

Is our drive to "perfect" biology with genetic modification (including human biology) an unconscious impulse coming from the death instinct? Isn't biology already perfect? Except, dammit, it cycles and dies. Is this desire for immortality ironically what drives biology toward death, and knowing when "the time to go" is rapidly approaching? And hence the ongoing mass extinction.

The biological drives for life and death are bigger than science, bigger than us, and we are in near complete denial of it.

Fundamentally humans are no more intelligent than any other biological life form, because the foundational life/death force in us is the same. Billionaires die too, all are equal in the land of biology. And technology does not subsume biology, just ask your cryogenically frozen brain and see what kind of answer you get.

How can we develop reverence and grace around the life and death cycle?

Why don't we study the cause of health as ardently as we study the cause of disease? Or perhaps even moreso, because the study of the cause of health confers the closest approach to immortality we biological creatures will ever come.

Well that is a difficult ask, primarily because fear of death is a more powerful instinct than the sweet and sublime joy of life. The joy of life is a poetry, powerful, but subtle.

Secondarily, and significantly, and "back to business", there's no money in it, and we unconsciously feel wealth confers immortality. But it ain't true, ask, again, your cryogenically frozen brain.

There's no money in it because we already know the cause of health, and it is 100% free of charge, and we've known it since Hippocrates, if not before: "Let food be thy medicine". In other words the substances we put in our mouths, chew, and swallow, continuously create or destroy our health. It is that simple.

But the range from nutritious food to health destroying toxicity is long, and there is a lot of disagreement about where the sweet spot lies. I believe from the weight of the evidence and my own experience the sweet spot lies in the vast range of whole edible plants. However, "whole" may be a more fundamental overarching principle than plants. Regardless, when combined with the other causes of health, including recovery from toxic addictions, it's about as good as it gets on this biological planet.

I seriously doubt we are going to rid ourselves easily of the health destructive perspectives of the pharma industry, which is a fear based focus on the exact wrong thing, the cause of disease. Nor will we rid ourselves easily of other destructive industries. Pursuing the cause of health will be a personal choice in the foreseeable future.

So go for it, whole, fresh, ripe, raw, organic foods, in no particular order of priority. Blend these qualities in all the foods you consume to get the best overall quality possible.

The body heals itself you know, and when we get out of it's way it returns to a state of optimal health quickly.

So stop putting toxins in. You know what they are. Stop it!

And then once we've done that let's just continue to in-joy whatever time you and I have left on this magical biological god created planet, happy and healthy.

With a little luck and grace it doesn't have to be all that complicated.

Dr John Campbell - current overview

I tab into Dr. Campbell's point of view somewhat regularly. He was strongly pro vaccination at the beginning of the pandemic, but like the many health care professionals I follow, his point of view changed gradually as the data trickled in from around the globe. Here he presents his current point of view, stated very diplomatically.

https://youtu.be/onNe5VMQAwQ

Excess death rate around the world is very high, the unanswered question is why

The excess death rate that is currently occurring around the world isn't news among epidemiologists around the world, but is not being mentioned in mainstream mass media. Epidemiologists have the statistical tools to filter out potential causes for excess death and have been working on it. Here is Dr. John Campbell in one of his reports on this topic:

https://youtu.be/xNT-YNLhprw

Epidemiologists have found for example that deaths from covid have fallen off dramatically, and are not among the potential causes. The primary suspected cause is political responses to the pandemic are now causing excess deaths in global population not due to the virus itself. 

One example of this is lockdown, which was predicted by many of the most respected epidemiologists to eventually cause more deaths than covid itself. This is the reason three respected and credentialed epidemiologists put forth the Great Barrington Declaration early in the pandemic. The declaration has now been signed by 16,039 medical and public health scientists, and 47,456 medical practitioners, in case you've heard it is only a few "kooks".

Here's a brief article sympathetic to that point of view:

Great Barrington Declaration Authors Fire Back at NIH and NIAID Bureaucrats

The new mRNA tech can also be considered suspect in this regard. Most countries around the world have agencies that collect reported injuries due to pharmaceutical injuries. Most of these reported injuries cannot be proven in real time of course, but that is not the point of having these systems in place. The point is when these reports increase exponentially in number (relative to the number that receive said pharmaceutical) the potentially dangerous compound will be pulled off the market for further study. Most medications do not generate significantly high reporting, but those that do have always been pulled off for further study.

But mRNA has generated reported injury rates around the world that are exponentially higher than ever, and are not pulled off the market for study. The question is why? Many independent (non-conflicted) epidemiologists around the world want an answer to that question.

If either or both lockdowns and mRNA are found to be statistically significant in the unusually high death rates will we ever hear about it in mass media? It seems unlikely given the fact we are not even hearing about unusually high death rates around the world to begin with.

The way we have always approached safety in medicine has been completely changed, the question is why?

A related question is in the censorship we were subjected to in relation to all things pandemic. Any "health nut" (myself for example) who consistently tracks health related topics does not rely on mass media, which is well known to have a strong bias toward big business sponsors. We instead go to the internet for factual information about studies etc, where legions of epidemiologists and MDs were speaking out against the responses to the pandemic from the very beginning. But not a peep on mass media unless it was to discredit those many opposing experts.

And then we started seeing online censorship, and again the question is why.

Mike Mutzel is an articulate "cause of health" advocate

Cause of Health is a term I have only heard Doug Graham use. He speaks about it in lectures and has the words "defining the cause of health" at the top of his web site:

 https://foodnsport.com/index.php

One of the more interesting things about Doug Graham is he has shown in himself and others that humans can thrive (to high performance athletic levels) over the decades on a completely uncooked plant diet.

Anyway, when I say Mutzel is an articulate cause of health advocate it's not because he himself uses that term. But I would like to see everyone use and understand the implications of that term because it is big picture paradigm shifting from chronic disease laden to life long energetic vibrancy.

Whether this or that approach to optimum health is better/best is certainly up in the culture, at least on a grassroots level, and I view that as A VERY GOOD THING, whichever side of the friendly debate you take.

Here is Mike speaking with passion about the cause of health.

https://youtu.be/bhFn3kX6cdE