Zen and The Art of Transition

Hullo loves! So, I’ve been in a contemplative mood lately…

If you know me, you know that I’m am an amateur theologian and to that, I find myself applying many of the theories and philosophical excercises I have learned over the years to my experiences since coming out.

Lao-tse once stated: “The more one interferes with the natural balance of the universe, the further away harmony retreats to the distance.”

I’ve been chewing on this for a few days now… these are my thoughts:

Being born trans, one is inherently out of balance. So our nature therefore, is a long journey in search of the balance which would align us with our true natures.

In short, we seek harmony.

It has been noted that the more we force situations to conform to our will, the more trouble, stress, and anxiety we encounter. Heavy or light, masculine or feminine, fast or slow, everything has its own nature within it, which cannot be violated without causing difficulties.

Essentially, when abstract and arbitrary rules are imposed from the outside, struggle is inevitable. This then sours our life experience.

Hmm.

Dear stupids of the world,

I am in state of evolution. I am becoming. Moving forward to a place that is greater than the sum of my parts so, please keep you’re abstract, and arbitrary rules to yourself.

I will not allow you to sour my life experience anymore.

With love,

Felicia ❤

It doesn’t take a lot to notice that people in the West are obsessed with binaries: in ethics an action is either right or wrong, with no gray areas; in politics there’s only left and right or conservative and liberal, with no one truly occupying the liminal and no one venturing outside the boundaries of right- or left-wing ideology. This is why it is crucial to eventually leave the Western hemisphere and study Eastern philosophy. The Taoists following Lao (hereafter called Laoists) identified a position that is neither objectivist nor subjectivist.

Interestingly, psychologists and moral pluralists have identified this approach without making it explicit. When making moral considerations, I am consistently and now unconsciously Kantian, but I recognize in certain situations, a Kantian analysis doesn’t get the job done. That does not make me an objectivist nor a subjectivist; it makes me what Laoist Shihwere, an attitudist. Do I consider that a person is an end in themselves if I realize that this person is a Narcissist or anyone on the Dark Tetrad? For sake of myself, I simply cannot proceed with a Kantian analysis. I now have to prefer, for this specific situation, an egoist approach. The best course of action caters to my self-interest. Anyone who cares about their mental well-being knows that they have to cut this toxic person out of their lives, completely and utterly. Once you realize that someone has been treating you as a means, there is no sense in which you can continue to treat them as an end. The basis of most Tetrad relationships is transactional, i.e., what can I get out of you? This is emotionally and potentially, financially draining and for your own sake, you have to cut this person out of your life.

What if instead you’re a CEO with a department full of employees near retirement who are less productive than a department full of upstart, younger employees? On a business analysis, firing the former group who presumably earn higher salaries or wages makes the most sense. Despite being a Kantian, I can see here that a utilitarian approach makes sense. Which group is harmed less? The former group is near retirement and is less capable of pivoting if I were to lay them off while the latter group is more capable of pivoting, of picking up the pieces, and finding a way to continue their careers. So in the interest of causing less harm, my attitude in this case assumes the character of a utilitarian.

This is the essential hallmark of moral pluralism. It isn’t relativist nor does it have any pretense of objectivism. It is like the Laoist sayings in the Tao Te Ching. It is the undertaking of an attitude that either assails conventional wisdom or opens up the mind to other possibilities. It is the old “slow and steady wins the race.” This isn’t to contradict the prevailing objective fact that the faster participant usually wins, but that it is entirely possible to win a race strategically and methodically. It is to take a certain attitude toward a tradition or norm.

Eastern philosophy has the potential to disabuse the West of its infatuation with binaries. I can identify as a moral objectivist and in a given situation make the most nihilist of statements: at bottom, there’s no such thing as good and evil. For human purposes, it is perhaps necessary to proceed as though a moral act is a universal law; this is the perspective of any Kantian. However, absent human minds or minds roughly equal to our own, there is no sense in which we can call a supernova evil because it wipes out a solar system and causes the extinction of fish on a planet 65 lightyears away (which is actually a strong theory scientists have with regards to an extinction of massive fish during the Devonian period, about 360 million years ago). We can’t call a blackhole evil for spaghettifying a cornucopia of celestial objects. Likewise, we can’t call a star good for eventually providing warmth to a solar system, even on the assumption that the system is life-bearing. For non-sentient purposes, qualifications of good and evil are simply vacuous. It is no doubt a nihilistic attitude, but it says nothing about my approach to sentient ethics.

Attitudism is inherent in moral pluralism and elsewhere, but it should be allowed into the philosophy of the West. Binaries, either-or, all-or-nothing, my way or the highway, present no solutions whatsoever. Binaries create more problems than they solve. In politics, I assume right-wing attitudes all the time. I have never been a proponent of the vacuous “Defund the police,” for it is a simple fact that Police Reform will require moregovernment funding and that even defunding the police to divert funds to other causes like education or mental illness awareness guarantees complacency with the same, corrupt, failing system of policing currently in place across many inner cities. I think the call to defund the police has harmed left-wing candidacies, which is the same thing right-wing politicians say. Does that make me right-wing? Absolutely not. Yet it is the case that I have adopted their attitude for this specific situation.

Upon closer analysis, my readers will realize that they do this sort of thing often. Lack of civility, charity, and a penchant for being disingenuous describes today’s dialogue, especially in the United States. Leave it to an opponent to accuse you of a position you don’t espouse. Christians often assume that every atheist in the world is a moral relativist, leaving no room for the possibility that an atheist can be an objectivist. This happens because of attitudism, namely an attitude an atheist shares about a specific situation or even a general state of affairs. Richard Dawkins, famous for pointing out the universe’s blind indifference, was speaking about the general state of the universe and this is now taken to mean that Dawkins is a moral nihilist. I share his attitude with regards to the universe, but I don’t share that attitude as it concerns human relationships and society, nor do I share that attitude in matters concerning the Earth like Climate Change, the humane treatment of household pets, hunting and poaching, discussions on the personhood of non-human animals like primates and dolphins, and so on. 

For Western philosophy to progress beyond where it is, it needn’t fear relativism. It should also allow for attitude-based statements speaking to pertinent scenarios. It should renounce binary thinking altogether and accept gray areas, incorporating the insights of thinking in a more diverse manner. Western philosophers also have to stop categorizing thinkers into traditions not robust enough to honor the thought of given philosophers. For purposes of ethics, situational and contextual approaches have to be included as well. 

Readers, do you think Western philosophy’s obsession with binaries is not as detrimental as I think? Is it possible that it is beneficial?  

afutureworththinkingabout:

So, as you know, back in the summer of 2017 I participated in SRI International’s Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series. This series was an eight week program of workshops the current state of the field around, the potential future paths toward, and the moral and social implications of the notion of conscious machines. To do this, we brought together a rotating cast of dozens of researchers in AI, machine learning, psychedelics research, ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, cognitive computing, neuroscience, comparative religious studies, robotics, psychology, and much more.

[Image of my name card from the Technology & Consciousness workshop series.]

We traveled from Arlington, VA, to Menlo Park, CA, to Cambridge, UK, and back, and while my primary role was that of conference co-ordinator and note-taker (that place in the intro where it says I “maintained scrupulous notes?” Think 405 pages/160,656 words of notes, taken over eight 5-day weeks of meetings), I also had three separate opportunities to present: Once on interdisciplinary perspectives on minds and mindedness; then on Daoism and Machine Consciousness; and finally on a unifying view of my thoughts across all of the sessions. In relation to this report, I would draw your attention to the following passage:

An objection to this privileging of sentience is that it is anthropomorphic “meat chauvinism”: we are projecting considerations onto technology that derive from our biology. Perhaps conscious technology could have morally salient aspects distinct from sentience: the basic elements of its consciousness could be different than ours.

All of these meetings were held under the auspices of the Chatham House Rule, which meant that there were many things I couldn’t tell you about them, such as the names of the other attendees, or what exactly they said in the context of the meetings. What I was able tell you, however, was what I talked about, and I did, several times. But as of this week, I can give you even more than that.

This past Thursday, SRI released an official public report on all of the proceedings and findings from the 2017 SRI Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series, and they have told all of the participants that they can share said report as widely as they wish. Crucially, that means that I can share it with you. You can either click this link, here, or read it directly, after the cut.

---

Read the rest of 2017 SRI Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series Final ReportatA Future Worth Thinking About

alchemisoul:

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.”

- Aldous Huxley

"The only revolution worthwhile was the one-man revolution within the heart. Each one could make this by himself and not need to wait on a majority.”

– Ammon Hennacy, The Book of Ammon

The common translation by Christians in China for the concept of Logos, a Greek word and concept referred to as “The Word” in English transcriptions, as it appears in John 1:1, is TaoorDao: “The Way”.