Category Archives: Agnostic

Agnostic, Business, Religion, Science, Technology

Conservation will not Save the World

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When I speak of my “Save the World” goal I don’t mean saving the planet. After all, the known life cycle of the sun dictates the ultimate demise of our planet. Saving the sun is not on the agenda.

So when I say I want to save the world I actually want to save our species, or more correctly I want to save our species long enough for it to evolve into it’s next revision.

In the long term there appears to be only three alternatives for that to happen.

  • 1. God rewrites the physical world laws to reveal a new reality that our species can survive in.
  • 2. A more advanced extra-terrestrial life-form than ourselves takes pity on us and facilitates our escape from our doomed planet.
  • 3. Our science and technology develops sufficiently for us to escape.

Both 1. and 2.  I can only hope and/or pray for, and as I really don’t want the responsibility of saving the world, would be really cool alternatives.

Unfortunately in my reality, three is the only alternative that I can take action on.

OK,  now that we are all convinced that without science and technology advancements we are eventually doomed. We being us and all our plant and animal friends. We necessarily can only use conservation and sustainability measures as a means to delay premature destruction of our planet long enough for our species to get off it. It seems logical to use science and technology as a means to advance conservation and sustainability to give us that time and as a byproduct keep our hand in; High tech conservation and sustainability techniques are sure to aid our escape.

I guess that means that only some of us will have the luxury of going back to a simpler less technology driven lifestyle, and only then, for a few billion years.

Some of us will need to carry on pushing the envelope of science and technology and converting our new findings into something useful using the change agent of business. This is where Kahatika fits in.

P.S. Yes I know about the “Big Rip” Theory.  If it is real I guess I’m working to give us enough time for us to develop technologies that will enable us to pass to another universe. i.e. I’m on the road to the multiverse.

Agnostic, Fair - Justice, Giving, Love

The Festive Season

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It’s an interesting time of year to observe human behaviour. All the monotheistic religions are having or recently have had a major event in their calendar. That seems to put a perceivable buzz in the air that effects us all, regardless of whether we have a faith or not. It manifests in lots of ways, not all good. Stress, violence, suicide all go up at a time when we practice rituals designed for us to engage in positive things like Love and Compassion. Both reason and faith in a benevolent higher power has us wonder at the irony of these strange statistics.
Is there only so much love in this world to go around? Do some people experience the joy of the festive season at the expense of those who experience negative feelings?
Is it something to do with the ways we are executing our rituals? Has social evolution of rituals over thousands of years improved the system?
Is this part of some Darwinian evolution model where the way we act at a given time of year, strengthens those in society where its to our species advantage for them to survive and weakens those detrimental to our species?

What is it that we do at this time of year?
A lot of time is spent in and around the act of giving. Obviously when there is a lot of giving happening there is a whole bunch of receiving also happening. The process itself generates expectation, and leads to contemplation on fairness and justice.
Does this contemplation on fairness and justice cause our stress, violence and suicide rates to go up? Is anger and despair generated as a consequence of additional time to make a comparative analysis on our lot in society? Some of us count our good fortune and it just doesn’t stack up with our expectations?

Perhaps our ritual of giving needs to be reassessed? Maybe a small tweak to the system to de-emphasize cause and effect in the giving process would be in order?

A return to anonymous giving?

Agnostic, Fair - Justice

How Dangerous is being Wise?

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  • Wisdom – the quality or state of being wise; knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action; sagacity, discernment, or insight. ~ Dictionary.com
  • Insight -an instance of apprehending the true nature of a thing, esp. through intuitive understanding ~ Dictionary.com

If I create a tool that gives us practice at exhibiting wisdom how dangerous could this be?

  • Dan Ariely in the following talk exposed the possible danger of using our intuition. I found this talk very interesting and his work on cheating 4 and a half minutes in caused me to tweak some practical aspects of my design for Kahatika.
  • It is well worth watching in it’s entirety but if you are running short of time he tells of his personal pain due to intuition in his opening statements and sums up on the danger of using intuition 14 minutes into the talk.

    • Agnostic, Fair - Justice, Love, Saving the World, Technology

    The Decision

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    If you had a virus that if given to a patient, cured them, and once cured, would give that patient the ability to infect other sick people with that virus, hence curing them and so on until all sick people were cured; Would you start the ball rolling by giving that virus to the first willing patient?

    What would your answer be if only patients with the capacity for compassion were cured and patients without this capacity for compassion died as a result of becoming infected?

    “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile Universe.” ~ Albert Einstein

    Agnostic, Business, Fear, Love, Power, Saving the World, Science

    The Climate is Changing?

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    The world needs saving because the climate is changing. This is impacting on the way we as humans currently live and we are all worried.

    Being agnostic I find I just don’t know what the truth of the situation is. There is so much conflicting information out there that seems to be so complicated and with so many compelling reasons for it to be presented in a particular way that I can’t trust what I see or hear.

    But nobody likes a fence sitter. You have to decide.

    Anyone could be forgiven for deciding that this is where you concentrate your efforts to Save the World.

    Our planet is under attack, and it’s under attack by us.

    Seas are rising, ice is melting, floods are massive, droughts are long, hurricanes are bigger and more frequent; and that’s just the start. We are also going to freeze to death. As individuals we must all do our bit, right? Rah rah rah speeches, social media campaigns, politics, advertising.

    • How do we keep everyone on track?
    • How does everyone stay engaged?

    You can generally get everyone on the same page for a short period of time when in a time of war. Define an enemy, generate some hate by laying blame, tell everyone what to do. If they don’t do it, kill them. Unfortunately the enemy seems to have been defined as all of us. If we use the same strategy we’ll legitimise killing our neighbour simply because they don’t car pool.

    The generation of an enemy to accelerate change unfortunately works but it is wrong, when the enemy is us, it is really really wrong and self-destructive.

    If Deming was right and over 90% of the problem is due to the system not the people we must look at the system.

    Regardless of the debate over climate change; and there is still significant debate, moving around the proportion of responsibility for action is simply an elaborate dance.

    Business for better or worse is always going to be the main change agent. Inventing the light bulb didn’t change the world, commercialisation of the light bulb did.

    A seemingly forgotten base principle of business needs to be revived. “More with Less” (See Buckminster Fuller Institute, Deming Institute, Excellerated Business Schools)
    Following that fundamental principle in combination with following the principle of, “Think Global act Local” would render the debate redundant. There would be no reason to debate if the climate was changing or what was causing it. The consequence of following sound first principles simply because they are the right thing to do puts us on the right track and eliminates the need for an enemy.

    Furthermore the original reasons for incorporation of a business needs to be remembered. The law was originally written to produce entities to serve the people. “Us”. Build roads, bridges, railways etc. Through a succession of  bastardisations of that original law do we get the entities we have today. (see the movie “The Corporation”)

    We also need to remember that it’s not that the climate is changing it’s the speed of predicted change that is the problem.

    Assuming the climate will follow these predictions how do we get our biggest most powerful change agent to respond quickly enough?

    Thats all I can remember that we should remember. I’m sure there are other things, I just can’t remember.

    Love, Peace, Bellbeads 🙂

    P.S. This is not the solution but it is related. Read on.

    Agnostic, Fear, Money, Saving the World

    The Journey is the Goal

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    You can imagine with a goal or mission to “Save the World”, especially when you are not certain that it even needs saving, that the journey along the way becomes pretty important.

    You’ve got to like the process. You have to enjoy pondering things. You have to find it interesting connecting disparate things together and deriving solutions from first principles.

    Finding elements that are very likely to be  close to the truth and working forward from there.

    Ultimately you have to find it fun to be so deluded that you think it is possible that you may have the/an answer. After-all this delusion is your reality.

    I often wonder how many people out there have the solution but like me have been too fearful of ridicule to share it.

    I did a personal/business development course once called Money and You. The course put you through a survival game to teach the value of synergy. As a team and as an individual you had to plan your survival and the results compared. It exposed that there was a greater probability of success as a team than as an individual. The bigger thing I got out of it however was in the debrief afterward. There are always one or two individuals that would have survived by themselves but as a team met their demise. The learning point was that their inability to get their message across to their team literally killed their team members and themselves.

    So where does this put me with my plan to “Save the World”?
    Leave it to others who are more certain that their solution will achieve it? The problem is that they may be wrong, or worse still, their solution may accelerate the world’s demise.

    The same course offered this definition of Courage. “Doubt + Action = Courage”

    Not noted for my extraordinary levels of courage and my agnostic view of the world providing me enormous amounts of doubt;  Simple algebraic arithmetic “Action = Courage – Doubt” which in my case is of course negative.

    Does this realisation stop me from pursuing my mission to save the world or does it just mean my action is always backwards?

    I have had a consistent course of action for the past twenty six years, producing parts of the plan and slowly fitting them together. The short answer is “I guess not”.

    Rest assured I am enjoying the journey.

    Agnostic, Family, Love, Religion, Saving the World

    As if you needed a reason to save the world

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    I’ve never been a disciplined person. I wish I was. I’m sure if I had been I would have achieved a lot more than I have by now. I know the theory but have a hard time putting it into practice. I should have goals. I know they should be attainable, measurable, and time bound. When I actually do set goals I generally, but not always, achieve them. So let’s start the process of setting me a goal, a really cool goal that I really care about.

    So what do I really care about? Ummmm! See this is where it gets tricky, I have this tendency of letting my mind get away on me.

    Take for instance the thought that I would like a happy life, which quickly gets extended to wanting a happy life for my daughter, and once I start thinking about that, I want her offspring to have a happy life as well. Well she doesn’t have any children yet, so I don’t know them, and yet, I want them to be happy. Ok, so I want people I don’t even know to be happy, well, I don’t know most of the people in the world, so if I move on down the thought process, I perhaps want everyone in the world to be happy. Very quickly I have got to something that I want that is seemingly unattainable. I have seemingly broken the first rule of goal setting by finding something I want that is unattainable.

    I guess this is where you are supposed to break the thing down into manageable hunks and create some mini goals, which are attainable, that sets you off in the direction of your overall goal. I guess one could call that overall goal a mission or a vision.

    So my mission is for “Everyone to be happy for evermore”?

    Well first things first I guess, we need hope that there will be a “for evermore” for people to be happy in. So I guess my mission could be to “save the world”; yeh! That will do, my mission is to save the world and my mini goal is to come up with a plan to do it.

    I can hear you saying hold on, that’s a complete waste of time. What ever you come up with will never work, much greater people than you have tried and thus far failed. What makes you think you can succeed where others have not?

    The answer is “I don’t know” but it’s my mission now so time to give it a go.

    Am I alone in this mission? Seemingly not, for a start I apparently have all the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant contestants wishing for world peace and determined to use their crowned stature to achieve it. I’m in good company. How common is this mission? If we look at what got me to my mission I would suspect it is very common. A huge proportion of the world population want to be happy and want their children to be happy. If we add in the constraint that this must be achieved in conjunction to adhering to one or other religious beliefs, this happiness desire is almost universal. Assuming everyone wants to be happy, by necessity we require a world to be happy in. Q.E.D. The world must be saved and its no less my responsibility to save it as yours.

    Agnostic, Saving the World, Science, Technology

    The World Doesn’t need Saving?

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    A famous visionary Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller , as he neared the end of his life, suggested that perhaps the world had seen a turning point. He saw the event of man-powered flight across the English channel in 1979 as an inspirational example of “Doing more with Less” and that if, as a global people, we can continue to follow this principle in every thing we do the world is on a path of recovery.

    Since his death in 1983 have we continued on that path? Perhaps we have. Have we bottomed out as far as negatively impacting on our planet and humanity? Perhaps the natural momentum of doing more with less will carry us to a peaceful, prosperous world where poverty has been eliminated. I don’t know. We certainly seem to have the technology, the tools, one would suspect the individual will to continue on the recovery path. Perhaps there is nothing to worry about.

    Just in case this isn’t so, I feel it is my responsibility to create an action plan to ensure a path Bucky saw as having started, continues yielding the results he envisioned.

    The following is an amusing Talk by Robert Wright doing his best to convince us that we are indeed on the right track. His brand of Optimism is best listened to with distance between you and razorblades. 🙂

    If you are running short of time, skip to 14:40 minutes into the talk the last 3 or so minutes, and listen to what he has to say about “Launching a Moral Revolution”. Personally I am more optimistic than he is on this process. I guess that’s because I think I have invented a mechanism to make it happen. Pay special attention to what he has to say about the Intelligent pursuit of self-interest as this is somewhat related to how I intend to “save the world”.

    Agnostic, Religion, Saving the World

    My Religion?

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    It seems to me that Religion, from a practical perspective, is a set of guidelines to live ones life by. (Brand loyalty gives rise to a multitude of flavours; Judaism, Budism, Christianity etc)

    I guess I have one of those.

    I like to think I have derived them from first principles.  “If I was on the receiving end of the action I am taking, what would I think or feel about that action and the person taking it?” Karen Armstrong is doing her best to get us back to those first principles by advocating reviving the golden rule.

    Being agnostic there is one overriding rule I feel compelled to live by “Don’t Recruit Followers to My Religion” , or in other words,  “Thou shalt not promote one’s Brand”. I have my own reasons for this rule.

    • There is Power in Numbers.
    • Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
    • “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy!” – quote Brian’s Mother, Life of Brian (1979)

    Even more compelling a reason is that someone I can assume carries a great degree of credibility, forbid conversion of Jews and Christians (people of the book) to Islam. Who am I to argue with the Prophet Muhammad ? Not until the 10th Century did it become legal to convert Jews and Christians. Obviously 400 years or so is sufficient enough time to corrupt a religion.

    Someone else that holds a bit of sway in the Jewish community, Rabbi Hillel, stated that, “The Book” so to speak could be summed up by “The Golden Rule”. This guy died when Jesus was 10. Not sure how well teachings got around in those days, but I can assume that Jesus was pretty taken with the Golden Rule as well.

    • Taking the advice of a the pretty switched on historic figures above as, likely to be “good”.
    • That my religion (my system by which I make my moral decisions) is based on the golden rule.
    • Q.E.D. No Recruiting Rule.

    I can show you a man made plan but I can’t show you a miracle.

    Agnostic, Love, Saving the World, Science

    Not Knowing

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    Being an Agnostic is a bad thing.

    Humans don’t like uncertainty.

    If you don’t know, that makes you inferior in some way doesn’t it?

    You are wishy washy, you sit on the fence, you are indecisive.  Definitely not leadership material.

    I decided a long time ago I was probably agnostic, I say probably because I don’t really know. I went to University and learned about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and realised I was probably right to doubt what I knew and what I didn’t know.
    I like the saying “A true scientist never says never”. Not that I profess to be a scientist. Far from it. I do however find living a life being open to possibilities is more fun than that of living with a closed mind.
    I guess it all comes down to probabilities. What is most likely to be right? Once you get close enough to 100% proof, acceptance saves a bit of time.

    So if I don’t “know” anything for certain, what sort of things would I like to be true.

    A couple of things come to mind.

    Humanity is basically “Good”

    Individuals are “Good” because they have a capacity for “Love”

    I will attempt to deal with “Good” and “Love” in future posts.

    Of course I don’t know these to be fact but I do find them assumptions which make my life fun.

    They are in fact essential assumptions in my Plan to “Save the World” and rest assured this won’t stop me from acting on my plan.

  • To justify my point that, not knowing is bad, have a look 2 minutes in to this video on what Tony Robbins has to say on “knowing”.
  • Good advice for getting ahead but in my view needs to be tempered by the fact that, the more you know the more you know you don’t know.
  • I hope this sets the stage for my future writings. Where I state things as I see it, you may well assume that I don’t really know.
  • Update:  Steve Schwartz takes this knowing and not knowing a bit further