Self awareness if a gift and a curse at the same time.
In my last post, "Summoning My Own Personal God" I tried to let my subconscious free to try and find some sort of organizing principal I can use to live my life without questioning and second guessing everything I do. We were able to discover a couple heuristics, the distinction between animal hominid and human, the relationship between power and masks, and the need for SILENCE.
What was that quote from Socrates, "the unexamined life is not worth living", ya this may actually be my first real attempt at examining my own life rather than just reflecting on it. The ritual I am trying to perform here is the examination of my own life, I hope you have done and are doing the same.
Earlier today I remembered that in Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules for Life" he deduces the existence of God from a set of principals at the beginning of Rule 7 "PURSUE WHAT IS MEANINGFUL (NOT WHAT IS EXPEDIENT)". The general idea being the ability so sacrifice in the present by sharing your Mammoth meat with others in your tribe allows for others in your tribe to help you in the future. This conceptualisation of sacrificing in the present to help the future has no constraints therefore it eventually gets delusional so people sacrifice babies and other humans to a unseen God rather than another human being. So I guess there is a hidden competence hierarchy here and God is at the top. Interestingly the number 7 is the number of God.
Jordan Peterson gives us an alternative examples of the Gom Jabbar performed by Paul Atreides in Dune,
There’s an old and possibly apocryphal story about how to catch a monkey that illustrates this set of ideas very well. First, you must find a large, narrow-necked jar, just barely wide enough in diameter at the top for a monkey to put its hand inside. Then you must fill the jar part way with rocks, so it is too heavy for a monkey to carry. Then you must to scatter some treats, attractive to monkeys, near the jar, to attract one, and put some more inside the jar. A monkey will come along, reach into the narrow opening, and grab while the grabbing’s good. But now he won’t be able to extract his fist, now full of treats, from the too-narrow opening of the jar. Not without unclenching his hand. Not without relinquishing what he already has. And that’s just what he won’t do. The monkey-catcher can just walk over to the jar and pick up the monkey. The animal will not sacrifice the part to preserve the whole.
I find this example displaying a distinction between animal and human to be fascinating. The lesson here is to escape the trap before the catcher comes to find you. The lesson of the Gom Jabbar is to stay in the trap in the hope of killing the trapper. Here is the exact phrasing from Dune,
"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap. There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."
I believe the key distinction here is intelligence. But what is intelligence, like axiomatically?