Julian Assange // about:belief

Politics, Truth, Philosophic musings
Biology, Psychology
Law, Jurisdiction

• If we have a serious problem, we are tasked to re-engineer the world using the best political, psychological and technological tricks we can come up with. IQ.ORG - Mon 26 Feb 2007 : Carbon offsetting

• I loathe these ("everything which is not explicitly permitted is denied") security types IQ.ORG - Wed 03 Jan 2007 : Automated authoritarianism

• When my eyes see phrases like 'right thing to do', 'appropriate' etc, I wonder what unstated world view I am meant to share. These phases smell of that unusually putrid whip; social sanction. But every man has experienced social sanction as the direct manifestation of morons baying at the moon, nodding and calling the result consensus. (...) Insofar as we can affect the world, let it be to utterly eliminate guilt and fear as a motivator of man and replace it cell for cell with love for one another and the passion of creation. IQ.ORG - Mon 26 Feb 2007 : The right thing to do

• A society that can "think" in this way is able to route goodness to people who do good and away from those people who generate hurt. The decision as to what is good is too complicated to be formulated in regulation and elections are a very coarse expression of what people think is good. Any paper formulation will put power in the hands of a political and technocratic elite. Robust routing decisions must be made my individuals and individuals need tools to manage complexity enough so they can make them effectively in a modern society. You might argue that this just removes power one step -- now it's in the hands of people who measure things. IQ.ORG - Sun 30 Jul 2006 : Transparency in the cold light of Finland

• Physics can take you out of yourself. Once you realise that there is no place where you end and the rest of a vast expanse of time and space begin, it becomes difficult, very difficult, to see why one should spend time absorbing the latest adhoc false reality willed by human beings. IQ.ORG - Mon 17 Jul 2006 : Craftier deceptions

• But then, when truth matters most, when truth is the agent of freedom, I stood before Justice and with truth, lost freedom. Here was something fantastical, unbelievable and impossible, you could prove that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and (D => F) Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A => F irrevocably, Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom. Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and finding the dream a pleasurable one sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber. Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors. So first, always pick your poetic metaphor, to make the reader want to believe, then the facts, and -- miracle! -- transitivity will descend from heaven, invoked as justification for prejudice. (...) And before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, on the liberators and martyrs of truth, on the Voltaires, Galileos, and Principias of truth, on the Gutenburgs, Marconis and Internets of truth, on those serial killers of delusion, those brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new. IQ.ORG - Wed 29 Aug 2007 : Iirrationality in argument

• Truth is rarely important in human affairs and if you want to shift your definition the only truth is power over reality. But it was the will to truth pouring its acid over the false beauty of gods and kings that guided us out of the miasma of the dark ages. You are not stupid. You are perfectly capable of piercing your claim, but you choose not to, since, like most people, you'd prefer to please and deceive. By 'you' I mean the entire ensemble, not merely that part which processes words. To be human is to deceive. All human beings are great self deceivers, but this is not the innocent charm of the naively hopeful. They deceive themselves so that they may deceive others and having tasted this pleasure return to lap at its fountain. (...) But then as we fall back into the miasma, the shadow world of ghosts and distortions a miracle rises; everywhere before self interest is known, people yearn to know where its compass points and then people hunger for the truth with passion and beauty and insight. He loves me. He loves me not. Here then the truth can set them free. Free from the manipulations and constraints of the mendacious. Free to choose their path, to remove the ring from their noses, to look up into the infinite voids and choose wonder over guilt. And before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, the liberators and martyrs of truth, those Voltairs, Galileo's, and Principia's of truth, those brutal driven obsessed miners of reality, those serial killers of delusion smashing the whole rotten edifice till all ruins and the seeds of the new. IQ.ORG - Mon 17 Jul 2006 : Arrows for false gods

• If there is a book whose feeling captures me it is First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. To feel that home is the comraderie of persecuted, and infact, prosecuted, polymaths in a Stalinist slave labor camp! How close the parallels to my own adventures! What longing one has when reading Solzhenitsyn's love for his first cell of self similars! Such prosecution in youth is a defining peak experience. To know the state for what it really is! To see through that veneer the educated swear to disbelieve in but still slavishly follow with their hearts! IQ.ORG - Mon 17 Jul 2006 : Jackboots !

• Words have no power to change except when there's a fork in the road with equally attractive paths. In your position, I'd take a deep book, a backpack of food and a tent and go walking for three months along the.au or .nz coast. You need to recalibrate your emotions through recalibrating your body. Emotions are body states. The mind can not be strong without strength in its relation to the body. 'Whatever' is then quickly answered; wake with the sun, take the next step, eat the next bite and behold people and chairs become a delight. It's hard for you to see this now, since future visions are colored with present emotional responses. But these emotional responses are just another part of your flesh, built from the integration of your neurons and body. It's material, stuff, like muscle, constructed from last weeks potatoes and environmental stimulus. You can strengthen your will through overcoming physical hardship. The natural environment provides man with ready motivational gradients, but civilization has filled them in. Hyper-civilized influences, such as computing, artificial lights, drugs, films, instant food supply, telephones and reading decalibrate by disconnecting behavior and reward and failing to provide the sense data that our biological mental and physical structures have evolved to require. There's little difference between a mouse exploring a new maze or a scientist realizing the greatest intellectual act of the age. Both are motivated by the same primitive brain regions that control feelings. 'The point' comes when feelings demand it. It can only be rationalized from the axioms of primitive emotion. If these axioms are weak due to decalibration by civilization, 'the point' eludes us. If they are strong, we pursue our goals with passion and vigor. IQ.ORG - Tue 12 Dec 2006 : Calibration of feeling

• The primitive cortex, the "inner lobster", ignores conscious statements about not micturating when the bladder is full. However it measures the movement of the body. It is simple and easily fooled by jiggling -- simulating walking. Newborns too are fooled by the simulated walking of their parents to keep them calm. Here we see the first simple evidence that control over the body translates to control over emotional states. Through techniques and calibrations like these we become not more conscious but our consciousness becomes more powerful --- the verbal will and higher planing centres of the neocortex and associated structures such as the cingulate cortex are able to obtain greater control over their environment. IQ.ORG - Wed 06 Sep 2006 : Consciousness amplification

• For what follows it is important to understand what you are. You are not your appetite. Now if we examine you closely, we see, merci, there is no clear place where you end and the rest of the universe begins. Likewise, there is no place where I end and the rest of the universe begins. Now invoking transitivity we see there is there is no place where you end and I begin. We are one. But you and I are words people use frequently and take pains not to confuse. This difference in language suggests a difference in reality that yields predictive power when dichotomised into two words. There's no place where red ends and green begins either, but red is not green even if they are on a spectrum. Rhetoricians call red=green argument from false spectrum. But just like I am not you, your breath is not you, your finger is not you, your eyes are not you, your thyroid, pituitary gland and medulla are not you, no neuron is you, infact, none of the parts of you are you. You don't exist as discrete thing, because as we have now established, not only is there no place where you end, there is not even a place where you begin. But we know the word is useful! So what can we say? Since you are reading these words you are the ensemble of strongly connected (i.e primarily brain) causality interactions connected to the input of these words. In the same way the word Paris is has greater predictive power the closer it is to the epicenter of connectivity of the French capital, but Paris is not the geographical or connective epicentre of Paris. Now France is to Paris, as your brain is to the language processing areas of your brain. But within France there are other cities such as Le Mon Atier- les-Bains or Grenoble, that should not be called Paris because their connectivity with Paris is very weak. So to, within your brain there are subsystems the language processing areas are not meaning fully connected to. They operate independently. Many of parts of the cortex and brain stem are ancient and do not differ appreciably to identical subsystems in rats, crocodiles, or even lobsters. In particular those parts of the brain that regulate basic needs such as arousal, temperature, blood pressure, and appetite are very ancient. We already established that you and these other sub regions of the brain must be different if the word you is to retain meaning. Hence we come to the following remarkable conclusion. You share your body with a lobster! This lobster, or perhaps more romantically, "inner rat", is a simple creature, and it controls homeostasis. It controls appetite and activity and You have no direct control over it. All you can do is move it from place to place and buy different things for it to eat. Otherwise you have less control over it than it has over you because it is able to influence your feelings of reward, temperature, hunger and activity. (...) deny yourself no complex food that primitive man would eat (vegetables, red meat, including organs, fish, eggs, fruit, nuts, all simply prepared). Your lobster knows how to be respond to those foods. IQ.ORG - Thu 03 Aug 2006 : Taming the inner rat.

• What do guitars, lollies, lipstick, tamagotchis, padded bras, pornography, movies, opium, Ever Quest, and 98% of any Australian newspaper in common? They are all technologies of emmotional manipulation which distort our perceptions for the benefit of their masters. Language centres in our neocortex may claim to "know" they are fake, but these words only feebly suppress those primitive areas of the brain which give rise to our feelings, colour our memories and command our attention. These non-verbal processing regions of the brain have not evolved to deal such sensory sophistry. For them, sensing is believing. Hence the feelings in a young woman's breast buffeted by the flashing lights and impossibly sonorous tones of the amplified rock star; master of a 20 KiloWatt Adam's apple and by inference a super man having the chest cavity of God. (...) Hence the dramatic rise in the economic take of powerful industries built around using advances in technology to stuff our heads with false feelings and memories. Not content to be zero sum, in exchange for our wealth and time these industries generally leave us less able to function by decalibrating our emotional and intellectual repore with reality. "But, I like it you cold hearted Lutheran, you Stoic, you stone mason, you Zeno loving stick in the mud!". Well naturally, since the whole game is to manipulate your feelings, it is not suprising that you have positive associations about your perceptual opium, is is, after all, what keeps you going back to your dealer.IQ.ORG - Tue 18 Jul 2006 : Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox.

• Your paper under-estimates the consuming nature of litigation. Most intelligent litigants learn the language of the courts in their struggle to understand and control the new environment in which they find themselves. Those with good social as opposed to merely verbal cognition find soon enough that the judiciary and court administration, while accepting this language from its gowned courtiers and other hangers-on do not like to hear their ritual language flowing from the mouths and pens of uninitiated peasants. Cunning actors against the state develop a faux naivity to their pleadings or find a wig to sanctify them. Anyone afflicted with servants of justice will soon find themselves exposed to all manner of hypocracy, mendacity and incompetence. If one is foolish enough to demand fair redress for every new insult then it's possible to create a never-ending supply of injustice and so, in this manner, turn a small injustice into an injustice of unbound size. One must develop a certain cynical understanding that systems of people are careers and intrigues and necessary deceptions and that kind acts fall from the breasts of stray individuals as random acts of love and can not be systematized. IQ.ORG - Tue 26 Sep 2006 : The curious world of the querulous