Freedom and its limits

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I’ve been thinking about the concept of freedom.

Let’s first see what we have here, because freedom seems to be one of those nice-sounding words, like love, that are used for manipulating emotions, and can mean anything to anyone.

To get the obvious out of the way, if we define “freedom” as “the ability to do anything”, nothing short of total omnipotence will match the definition, so, basically, only God can be free in that sense. Also, if we define “freedom” as invulnerability, so that you don’t suffer adverse consequences to your actions, it’s even more tricky, because here we face ethical issues. For instance, you would probably want someone who wants to kill you to face consequences for his actions. Also, any kind of choice shapes your personality, and you’re not the same person afterwards, because you made a choice, by doing A or not A you chose to become the person who does A, or not A.

So, we have potential limitations to freedom which belong to three categories: of power, choice and other beings. If you are not able to do something, you are not free to do it, and that’s the limitation on freedom that stems from the lack of power. If you can technically do something but you don’t want to because it would spiritually shape you in adverse ways, it’s a limitation on freedom that stems from ethical choices. If freedoms and will of other beings prevent you from exercising your own freedom and will to the full extent, it’s the limitation on freedom that stems from other beings.

So, let’s see the examples. A limitation on power is that you can’t visit Mars. Nobody is preventing you from going, and going there has no adverse ethical consequences, but you just don’t have the ability to do so. A similar limitation stems from the lack of available choices. For instance, if you were born 100 years ago, you didn’t have a choice to buy a PC or a Mac, simply because they didn’t exist yet. You also didn’t have an option to board a plane and fly around the world, because the planes didn’t do that yet. Also, if you are very poor and live in some uncivilized and backward part of the world, you don’t have an option to buy a new car, or to board a plane or to buy a computer, not because they don’t exist as options for others, but because they don’t exist as options for you specifically, because you can’t afford them. So, sometimes options exist for the powerful few, and sometimes they don’t exist at all, and in all cases, this limits freedom.

I am deliberately omitting the limitations that stem from logical consistency, because those are merely trickery; for instance, the ability to do A while doing not-A, or specifically, the ability to make wooden iron, the ability to make a rock so heavy even you cannot lift it, or the ability to factor prime numbers.

So, what does that mean? It means that total freedom doesn’t exist, not even for God. Even God has to choose whether to do something or not. You can’t really both kill and spare someone. You can’t both tell a lie and be truthful. Even if you’re a God, if you grant someone some privilege, you can’t both revoke it and be consistent. So, one of the most important things to understand is that there are limitations even for the Gods. For instance, if you create souls, and grant them the freedom of choice, you have to allow them to face the consequences of their choices, or otherwise you are canceling your grant of free will. What kind of a freedom of choice is it, when you don’t have the option to fuck up? It’s like going to school and getting an A regardless of what answer you give. Freedom of choice necessarily comes with the possibility of choosing the wrong thing, and “wrong” isn’t really wrong if there are no adverse consequences.

This is the true answer to the question of “why did God create or allow evil”? Well, once you truly understand the problem, it’s no longer a meaningful question. The true question is that of freedom – is God free to do whatever he wants, or is he limited by ethics, logic, consistency and reason? We then come to the paradox that a good God is a limited God – he is limited by the boundary between good and evil, truth and falsehood, reality and illusion. An unlimited God is an omnipotent indifference, a force of general chaos that is closer to evil than good, because for each thing such a hypothetical being could technically do, there is no reason not to actually do it.

A good God, however, can indirectly cause evil to exist. He can, for instance, create independent beings and grant them freedoms to exercise their will. They can then use this freedom to explore options that are beyond God’s limitations – they can decide to create illusions, where falsehood can prevail over truth. They can create veils of ignorance that can obscure the light of God. They can choose to inflict malicious harm upon other souls and instrumentalize them for their own purpose. Essentially, once you create an independent being with creative powers, you can no longer be fully in control of the course of action, because such a being can choose its own spiritual path which might be completely different from your own, with consequences that might differ greatly from what you personally would find acceptable. And you can’t just nullify those consequences, not because you technically couldn’t, but because it would nullify your previous choice to allow those beings freedom.

Because freedom to choose and to do implies the potential to fuck things up. Freedom to choose means necessity to suffer the consequences of your actions and, in theory, you can be more “free” than God. You can be “free” to lie or to deceive, however this cancels your “freedom” to be truthful, honest and based in reality. You can be free to betray, but then you lose the freedom to be loyal. So, in case of ethical choices, “freedom” is really a matter of rhetorical trickery, because what can be seen as bondage to some, is a freedom to others. Some see the truth as a restraint on their freedom to lie, while others see lies as a restraint on their ability to be truthful.

Obviously, there are some freedoms that aren’t really worth having – such as a freedom to lie and betray your friends and be a complete bastard. Even if you can technically do it, you wouldn’t want to, because it would adversely influence your spiritual vector and turn you into the kind of person that you don’t want to be. This is how satanic temptations are to be interpreted, because demons will tempt you, they will say they are more free than you because they can do all kinds of things that are forbidden to you. The answer is, “It is true that you can do those things, but not because I couldn’t do them, but because I choose not to. I am limited by my choices, and, if you ever try to reverse your course, you will find out that you are limited by yours.”

About preparedness

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I was thinking about disaster preparedness – prepping, in short – considering I’ve noticed a strong increase in the instinctual-level warning signal, probably broadcast through the global astral field. It communicates immediate and urgent need to stock up on supplies and prepare for a disaster, because when it begins it will be too late, the supplies will become inaccessible. I’ve heard of many instances where people, always the older ones, prepared for the war by stocking up on food and other supplies in their basements, before the 1990s war in Yugoslavia. Obviously, people can sense that shit is about to hit the fan, but only the older ones, who already have had personal experience with war, actually act upon it.

The instinct itself is very similar to that of a squirrel who feels a strong urge to collect acorns and nuts and store them in a hole in a tree where it will hibernate. It’s a very basic, animal urge directly connected to survival. For something like a limited war, this instinct is extremely useful. Stocking up on non-perishable supplies will not get you through the crisis entirely, but will give you a very comfortable margin of time which allows you to avoid desperate options later, and the ability to plot a course of action which doesn’t include extreme risk is what will actually help you survive. For instance, you don’t have to try and rob someone’s food cache, or to go out and risk sniper and mortar fire in order to attempt something. The priorities are clean water, medications (for people with chronic conditions), food, fuel and weapons. Essentially, water is the biggest issue. If you don’t have access to pure drinking water, death from water-borne pathogens is the bigger threat than sniper fire. However, the problem can be solved if you stock up on bleach; two drops per liter of water, stir and leave for 30 minutes to kill the pathogens and you have drinkable water. As for food, stock up on carbs and fats; protein is easy. You can hunt for protein (which includes collecting the earthworms and eating the pets), but carbs and fats are freakishly hard to get from nature, outside of modern agriculture. Stock up on whatever you would otherwise eat, just have a bigger quantity in store and rotate the supplies so that they are always fresh enough. If you think it’s silly, think about Aleppo, Syria. Imagine being trapped there after the war had started. Your options are basically eat whatever you have in your apartment, or go out under sniper fire and try to get something to eat, in a situation where nobody really has much, whatever they have is guarded with guns, and distribution of humanitarian aid is an excellent opportunity for mortar fire by the enemy. Fuel is a big problem, especially in cold weather. Without fuel, you can’t prepare food, or get warm. It increases the chance of people getting sick and dying because of nonexistent health care in those conditions. Also, the cheapest non-perishable foods, like flour, beans and barley, will require cooking. Also, if the electricity runs out, the perishable foods in the refrigerator will need to be eaten quickly. Having your own solar power generator, strong enough to power the fridge and the oven is a great asset, but almost nobody has access to that, so it’s not really worth mentioning. The problem with having supplies is that people who don’t have supplies will be tempted to take yours, especially if they have a gun and you don’t. So, having a gun with plentiful munitions is an absolute life-saver in those situations. In a civil-war situation, people can be divided into active and passive elements of a situation depending on whether they are armed or not. Translate “passive” as “victim”. Also, people who can rely on other people and have plentiful social contacts with the neighbors are more likely to be able to trade for whatever they need. Expect “grid” to fail – gas, water, electricity, phone, Internet. Those who use gas in bottles for cooking will fare much better than those who use gas supplies from the grid, for instance. The more “off grid” your installation is, the less modern and convenient it is in the normal circumstances, the more resilient it is in the case of outages and infrastructural collapse. You can get gas in bottles from somewhere, but if you’re connected to the city’s supply, you will probably need to rework/replace your kitchen stove in order to be able to cook food. Also, if your central heating system uses gas or electricity from the grid, expect it to stop working. For this kind of outages, think Vukovar, Sarajevo, Mostar, Aleppo or Donetsk. We’re not talking nuclear war or a Chicxulub-level asteroid strike, we’re talking things like a civil war, where a city is expected to be split into segments based on the communities, with riots, armed gangs and all sorts of shit taking place, which makes it very dangerous to go out. Even in case of a natural disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, there might be infrastructural collapse, widespread looting and violence, and you want to have some level of isolation from that until it blows itself out and order is restored. The worst possible scenario of this kind is the siege of Leningrad in WW2. I know more about it than I would like. Millions died. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a picnic compared to what happened there. In early 1942 some 100000 people died every month, mostly from starvation. Not fun. I interpret all the atrocities committed by the Soviets in Germany, later, as a reaction to that. You see, shit like that actually happens, it’s not some far-fetched conspiracy theory. At almost every single moment there’s a place in the world where you have a natural disaster or a civil war or a siege. Being able to endure for two weeks without exposing yourself to danger or starving is very useful.

In such circumstances, probably the best thing you can do is wait out the first period of randomness and chaotic bloodshed, and when you figure out what’s going on, make an assessment on whether to get the fuck out or to wait it out. Each option has strengths and weaknesses. However, there are possible scenarios in which getting out isn’t an option, because there’s nowhere for you to go. There are people who have romantic notions of taking a backpack with supplies and going into the woods to “live off the land”. Be absolutely certain that if you do that, you will die. Every shelter you make, every fire you light, is a beacon attracting all kinds of criminals to your camping site, and be assured that there will be criminals in the woods. They will rob you of your resources, and if you resist, they will kill you with impunity, and possibly even eat you. Your home, in most circumstances, will be much more easy to defend from attack. If you don’t already live off the land now, don’t even think about attempting it later. It stopped being possible for humans to live off the land in great numbers in late Pleistocene, and it forced them to invent agriculture, not because it’s fun but because it was the alternative to starvation. I walk through the forests all the time, and it’s true there’s wildlife there – boars and deer, for the most part. I’ve seen pig tracks, and I’ve seen deer occasionally. However, to attempt to survive by hunting the woods for pigs and deer, let’s say that this couldn’t even feed a small village, even if they hunted the animals to extinction. There’s simply too many people for this to work. In order to calculate the number of people who would die in case of a great disaster that would restrict food production, just have in mind that throughout history, human population was as big as the food supply allowed. So, if food production drops to pre-industrial levels, human population will drop to a pre-industrial level. Numerically, this means a sustainable population of around one billion people, which means six billions would die. This, of course, is an optimistic assessment, because the ensuing chaos and conflict would mean that those who are sentenced to death from starvation will commonly resort to banditry of all sorts, and the expectation that one billion people will be able to grow food on pre-industrial level while surrounded by hungry mobs of crazed people is naive. Some isolated, inaccessible areas might continue to function normally, but for the most part, in the rest of the world literally everybody would die before there would be any kind of peace again, because the most realistic and effective survival tactics in those times would not be agriculture, but armed robbery. However, this will not be the universal outcome. In some parts of the world, people are very disciplined and would be much more effective in surviving great hardships. In America, however, I would expect the worst kinds of nightmare.

So, to summarize. Being prepared for a limited disaster scenario is a good idea. Those things happen with such frequency, it’s very likely for a person to experience at least one such scenario during his or her lifetime. Some experience several. However, trying to survive a civilization-ending cataclysm such as a nuclear war or an asteroid strike is naive and pointless. Even if there were survivors, the factors leading to survival would probably be too random to be able to prepare. Most likely, the low-tech, off-the-grid, already living off the land, secluded closely-knit communities separated from the rest of the world by some natural barrier that is very difficult to overcome without modern technology, would have the greatest probability of survival. In urban communities, I’m afraid that there can be no long term survival. I personally know how much food I have to buy for my family every week, and it’s very easy for me to extrapolate the probability of our survival if the urban food supply were to be disrupted. Also, we are completely dependent on the grid – gas, water, electricity, everything. In those circumstances, survival is an illusion.

So, preparedness. By all means, be prepared for low-level extraordinary events, such as an earthquake, a flood or a civil war. Pay your bills, wash your dishes, have some excess of non-perishable food stored, have a bottle of bleach for disinfecting water, have battery lamps and power packs for charging your phone when there’s no electricity for five days. But above all, be prepared to leave this world, because all humans must die. Be prepared for war, but above all, be prepared to meet God. If you are, everything is easy.

About tools

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Whenever I write something about the “material” things, I feel the negative reaction from the “spiritual” people who are “above those things”.

Let me write something about tools.

There is “logos” – the consciousness, the creative spirit, the mind presiding over matter. That’s where ideas are made. Then there is energy that sets things into motion and powers action until it is completed. And then there are the tools, that are driven by the logos, with energy, and they accomplish the creative act within the physical world. Whether the tool is a piece of stone, or a piece of paper and a pencil, or a camera, or a computer, is beside the point. Whether the energy takes the form of money, or gasoline, or food, or electricity, is also beside the point. The point is, without energy and tools you can’t get anything done here, and if you don’t appreciate them, you are ignorant. This means that your logos, the content of your spirit, which pretends to be too absorbed with spiritual heights to care about the material things, is full of ignorance and you don’t know what you’re talking about.

If one isn’t passionate about his tools, and if he doesn’t appreciate the energy that needs to be invested in a creative act, he probably never really created anything of value to begin with. A soldier is very passionate about his weapons and armor. An artist is very passionate about his instruments. A scientist is very passionate about his lab equipment. If you try to accomplish anything of value, you’ll understand that there are requirements, and you will respect and appreciate those things that make possible everything that gives your life meaning.

It is important to me how my lens draws. It is important to me how my camera handles, and how the sensor captures the image. It is important to me what kind of tactile feel my keyboard produces, or how my mouse handles, or how my monitor displays colors and reflects ambient light. It is important to me how quickly my storage drive responds to requests, how quickly my CPU processes multiple concurrent tasks, how securely my data is stored, how accurately my headphones reproduce sound, and so on. Why is it important? Because my mind connects with those tools and projects energy through them, manifesting ideas into concrete form, be it text or image. If the tools suck, the end result will suffer, and the creative process will not be seamless. If the tools are good, I can manifest thoughts and emotions more easily, without annoying interruptions caused by waiting for the computer to do something so that I can go on issuing mental commands that I already have queued. Essentially, if the keyboard and the computer itself allow me to type as quickly as I can, and if the computer gets me the information I need quickly and without pointless delays, I can proceed to elaborate on the line of thought that I’m following. If the tool lags behind me too much or interferes with the creative process in some other way, it doesn’t contribute anything positive, and can be a significant hindrance. If a camera handles very poorly, I am more likely to leave it at home and forget about photography altogether, than take pictures.

Tools are important. Energy is important. They are not a substitute for the guiding light of consciousness that reigns supreme over those things, deciding where to invest energy and how to apply the tools, but they control the result-side of the creative equation. You apply consciousness and energy to the tools and you get a creative act.

Any person who thinks he or she is above those material things is basically too fucking stupid to understand the first thing about doing anything useful, and above all, is too fucking stupid to be allowed to have an opinion about any kind of spirituality, because spirituality isn’t for idiots.

Griffin having better ideas than Apple

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Exhibit A:

breaksafe

Why is that thing not built into the new generation of Macbooks? If you need adapters anyway, why not also adapt to USB C from Magsafe? Provide four Magsafe Thunderbolt 3 ports, and provide adapters to USB C, USB A and Thunderbolt 2. You have elegance, you keep the brilliant Magsafe thing, on all ports, and you can spin the adapters by saying that you made all ports detachable and universal, compatible with all existing port standards. I would actually find this more plausible than the USB C.

About Apple, USB C and standards

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I’ve been thinking about the recent, apparently insane product releases from Apple – an iPhone that doesn’t have a headphone jack although a significant usage case for an iPhone is to play music from iTunes, a Macbook that has only one port, for both charging and data, and that port is basically incompatible with the rest of IT industry unless you use adapters, and a Macbook Pro that has only those incompatible ports, has less battery capacity, doesn’t have an SD card slot although its supposedly main target user group are the creative professionals, like photographers and videographers, who use SD cards to transfer images and video from their cameras when they are in the field and don’t have a cable with them.

To add insult to injury, all those products are more expensive than the previous, more functional generation.

I tried to think of an explanation, and I came up with several possible ones. For instance, although Apple pays formal lip service to the creative professionals, they don’t really make that much money from those. When Apple actually did make most of its money from creative professionals, somewhere in the 1990s, they were almost bankrupt and Microsoft had to rescue them by buying half a billion dollars of non-voting shares, and Steve Jobs was re-instated as iCEO (interim-CEO, which is the likely cause of him deciding to i-prefix all the product names). They then started to market to a wider audience of young hipsters, students and wealthy douchebags (as well as those who wanted to be perceived as such), and soon they started to drown in green. Yes, they continued to make products intended for the professionals, but those brought them increasingly smaller proportion of their overall earnings, and were deprioritized by the board, which is basically interested only in the bottom line. And it is only logical – if hipsters who buy iPhones bring you 99% of your money, you will try your best to make them happy and come back for more. The 1% earnings you get from the professional photographers and video editors are, essentially, a rounding error. You could lose them and not even notice. As a result, the Mac Pro got updated with ever decreasing frequency and was eventually abandoned by the professional market which is highly competitive and doesn’t have the time to waste on half a decade obsolete underperforming and overpriced products.

Keeping the hipsters happy, however, is a problem, because they want “innovation”, they want “style”, they basically want the aura of specialness they will appropriate from their gadget, since their own personality is a bland facsimile of the current trends. They are not special, they are not innovative, they are not interesting and they are not cool, but they want things that are supposed to be all that, so that they can adorn themselves with those things and live in the illusion that their existence has meaning.

So, how do you make a special smartphone, when every company out there has something that has all kinds of perfectly functional devices, within the constraint of modern technology? They have CPU and GPU that are slammed right against the wall of the thermal design, they have superfluous amounts of memory and storage, excellent screens… and there’s nothing else you can add to such a device, essentially, unless there’s a serious breakthrough in AI, and those gadgets become actually smart, in which case they will tell you what to do, instead of the other way around. So, facing the desperate need to appear innovative, and at the time facing the constraints of modern technology which defines what you can actually do, you start “inventing” gimmicky “features” such as the removal of the headphone jack and USB A sockets, and you make a second screen on the keyboard that draws a custom row of touch-sensitive icons.

And apparently, it works, as far as the corporate bottom line is concerned. The professionals noise their displeasure on YouTube, but the hipsters are apparently gobbling it all up, this stuff is selling like hot cakes. The problem is, the aura of coolness of Apple products stems from the fact that the professionals and the really cool people used them, and the hipsters wanted to emulate the cool people by appropriating their appearance, if not the essence. If the cool people migrate to something else, and it becomes a pattern for the hipsters to emulate, Apple will experience the fate of IBM. Remember PS/2? IBM decided it’s the market leader and everybody will gobble up whatever they make, so they made a PS/2 series of computers with a closed, proprietary “microchannel” bus, trying to discourage 3rd party clones. What happened is that people said “screw you”, and IBM lost all significance in the PC market, had to close huge parts of its business and eventually went out of the retail PC business altogether. And it’s not that PS/2 machines were bad. Huge parts of the PC industry standard were adopted from it – the VGA graphics, the mouse and keyboard ports, the keyboard layout, the 3.5” floppy standard, plus all kinds of stuff I probably forgot about. None of it helped it avoid the fate of the dinosaurs, because it attempted to blackmail and corner the marketplace, and the marketplace took notice and reacted accordingly.

People like standardized equipment. They like having only one standard for the power socket, so that you can plug any electrical appliance and it will work. The fact that the power socket can probably be designed as better, smaller and cooler is irrelevant. The most important thing about it is that it is standard, and you can plug everything everywhere. USB type A is the digital equivalent of a power socket. It replaced removable media, such as floppy and CD discs, with USB thumb drives, which can be plugged into any computer. Also, keyboards, mice, printers, cameras, phones, tablets, they all plug into the USB socket, and are universally recognized, so that everything works everywhere. Today, a device without a USB port is a device that cannot exchange massive amounts of data via thumb drives. It exists on an island, unable to function effectively in a modern IT environment. It doesn’t matter that the USB socket is too big, or that it’s not reversible. Nobody cares. What’s important is that you can count on the fact that everybody has it. Had Apple only replaced the Thunderbolt 2 sockets with USB C sockets, and kept the USB A sockets in place, it would be a non-issue. However, this has a very good chance of becoming their microchannel. Yes, people are saying that the USB C is the future, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s adopted by everyone, but I disagree. The same was said before about FireWire and about Thunderbolt. Neither standard was widely adopted, because it proved more easy to just make the USB faster, than to mess with another standard which basically tries to introduce yet another port that will not work anywhere else. There’s a reason why it’s so difficult for the Anglo-Saxon countries to migrate from Imperial units to the SI. Once everybody uses a certain standard, the fact that it is universally intelligible is much more important than its elegance.

Recognize those ports? Yeah, me neither.

Recognize those ports? Yeah, me neither.

Yes, we once used the 5.25” and 3.5” floppy drives and we no longer do. We once used the CD and DVD drives and we no longer do. We once used the Centronics and RS-323 ports for printers and mice. We once used MFM, RLL, ESDI and SCSI hard disk controllers. We once used the ISA system bus and the AGP graphics slot. What used to be a standard no longer is. However, there are standards that are genuinely different, such as the UTP Ethernet connector, or the USB connector, or the headphone jack, or the Schuko power socket. USB and Ethernet and PDF and JPEG and HTML are some of the universal standards that make it possible for a person to own a Mac, because you can plug it into the same peripherals as any other computer. It makes the operating differences unimportant, because you can exchange files, you can use the same keyboard and mouse, you can use the same printer, you can plug into the same network. By removing those standard connections and ways to exchange data with the rest of the world, a Mac becomes an isolated device, a useless curiosity, like the very old computers you can’t really use today because you can no longer connect them to anything. Imagine what would have happened if Apple removed the USB when they first introduced FireWire, or Thunderbolt – “this new port is the future, you no longer need that old one”. Yeah. Do you think an Ethernet port is used because it’s elegant? It’s crap. The plastic latch is prone to failure or breakage, the connection isn’t always solid, the dust can get in and create problems – it’s basically crap. You know why everybody still uses it? Because everybody uses it.