Questions/Answers

Short and sweet.

Why would consciousness evolve to perceive and, analyze, judge and choose if all were determined and all choices are inevitable?
Rhetorical.

Does nature change depending on your upbringing and your beliefs?
Does reality adapt to your ideology?

No.
It only alters your relationship with the world, and the consequences are all yours.

Do concepts like consciousness, intelligence, will, intent, value, love, fear, creativity have meaning independent from living organisms?
No. Just like the term "life" only applies to a particular kind of existent, these terms refer to life, distinguishing and identifying it as distinct within existence.

1-These concepts are in reference to organic life and some only apply to those with a sophisticated nervous system and a central processing hub we call a brain.
2-There is no mind without a brain.
3-Will refers to its focus.
4-Intelligence evaluates its qualities, e.g. processing speed, pattern recognition, detail perception etc.
5-Consciousness refers to its awareness.
6-Love, fear...emotions refer to its evolved automated reactions.
7-Creativity refers to its ability to combine abstractions.

Why believe in race when it is so hurtful?

1-Emotion should never affect awareness.
2-Evolution does not work without this subcategory.
3-If we are to exclude homo sapiens from this evolutionary factor we ought we not to include all other species, or the very concept of species using the same exact reasoning, if we wish to preserve our intellectual integrity.
4-If divergence is truly a strength then it ought not be superficial unless we wish to imply that our strength is also superficial.
5-If evolution only produces physical divergence then how would intelligence evolve, and how would speciation happen?

Is reality always comforting, flattering, and inspiring?

If it is then you are not seeing it as it is but as you wish it were.

How does sex/gender affect an individual?

1-By hormonally adjusting its inherited potentials.
2-It affects brain, mind, demeanour, psychology, creativity, in the same way it affects the body's muscle mass, height, size, strength etc.

Is appearance other than essence?
No.

1-If it were then how did life mange to survive and flourish using only its perceptions of the apparent?
2-Why evolve the ability to perceive if what is perceived is illusory or the other than what it appears to be?

What is objectivity in relation to subjectivity?

1-That which is independent from all perceptions and interpretations of it.
2-That which is present.
3-That which is - even if dynamic and fluctuating.
4-The interpreted, with the subjective being the interpretation.
5-Objectivity is to subjectivity what omnipotence is to strength/power, and omniscience is to knowledge/understanding.

What is Energy?

1-That which is dynamic, interactive, fluctuating.
2-The force of attraction/repulsion, i.e., interaction.
3-Existence.
4-Vibration (in four-diemsinoal space/time); oscillation, in multi-dimensional space/time)
5-A state of continuous Flux.
6-Nature.
7-Both order & chaos, i.e., patterned energies and non-patterned, random, energies.

What is Nature?

1-Usually - conventionally - a reference to order or to life.
2-Order - the perceptible, knowable.
3-Unconventinoally, all that exists, i.e., energy.
4-Both order & chaos - the knowable and the unknowable.

What is gender?

1-The social adaptation of specialized reproductive roles.
2-Cultural - memetic - application of naturally evolved sexual types - genetic.
3-Cultural extension of a reproductive type.
4-Sublimation of reproductive types.

If upbringing affects convictions and beliefs does this alter reality, world, natural order?
No.
What does it affect?

1-Only the individual's performance within a world independent from all beliefs and convictions.
2-An individual's fate.
3-An individual's cultivation of his/her inherited potentials.
4-An individual's awareness and understanding of the world he/she finds himself/herself in.

What is Intelligence?

1-Quality/quantity of perception.
2-Memory. First- second-hanmd experiences abstraction and storage.
3-Pattern recognition.
4-Recombinaiton - re-synthesis - of stored memories in novel ways.
5-Effective/Efficient reactions to stimuli - particularly to the unforeseen, unprecedented.

What is Life?

1-Iterating organization of patterns/energies; interactivity informed by stored interactions.
2-Intentional unity of patterns, i.e., energies belonging to a self-perpetuating continuum.
3-Emerging unity that can self-maintain and self-improve.
4-What has an objective in a cosmos with none.
5-What can follow path-of-more-resistance.
6-Focused aggregate energies - willful.

What is need/suffering?

1-Need is the experience of constant loss of energies due to interactivity; suffering is need left unsatisfied for a period of space/time exceeding the organism's constitution/endurance.
2-Experiencing the state of existing.
3-Temporal attrition.

What is conviction when omniscience and certainty is unattainable?

1-Gradual construction of belief based on first- and second-hand knowledge/understanding.
2-Scientific methodology - bottom<>up reasoning - empiricism.
3-Gradual increase in the evaluation of probability; decreasing all alternative possibilities.
4-Precedent used as a foundation to construct a hypothesis.
5-Perceptions tried and tested across time, cultures, and individual experiences.

What is free-will and how is it evaluated?

1-Choice.
2-Awareness of options is an indication of possibilities; ability to choose from the available options is an indication of probabilities, i.e., power/strength.
3-To will is to move towards a specific objective rather than another.
4-To choose is to identify an objective.

What are memes in relation to genes?

1-Memes are extensions, addendums, sublimations of genetically evolved impulses, behaviours, potentials.
2-"Gender" and "ethics" are memetic sublimations of naturally selected and genetically established reproductive and social behaviours.
3-What we call "moral" are behaviours that are naturally selected because they contribute to particular reproductive and survival strategies.
4-Moral behaviours are common among species that have evolved a cooperative survival and reproductive strategy because it multiplies survival and reproductive probabilities.
5-Ethics is a term used to differentiate naturally selected moral behaviours from man-made additions/adjustments in order to facilitate manmade socioeconomic environments.

What is morality?

1-Morality is to Ethics what sexual roles are to gender.
2-Morality is the emotional experience of what multiplies the probability of survivability and reproduction.
3-Moral behaviour is a attitude, naturally selected because it offers an advantage within a species survival and reproductive strategy.
4-Good/Evil correspond to good/bad in relation to a cooperative reproductive and survival strategy.
5-Morality is a term used to refer to a particular demeanour and behaviour - usually found among species that have evolved cooperative survival and reproductive strategies.
6-Moral behaviour becomes innate when individuals are naturally selected because these behaviours multiply survivability and reproductive probabilities.
7-Ethics are human addendums to naturally evolved behaviours facilitating socioeconomic stability within manmade social environments.
8-Morality is not independent from organic life.
9-Nature has no moral or immoral rules. Nature only works on what increases/decreases survivability and reproduction.

What is bottom<>up reasoning?

1-Basic logic: you begin with what is sensually perceived.
2-Advancing from the perceived to what is not perceived without misaligning with what is perceived.


Examples:
Do we perceive nothingness?
No.
Therefore the idea that "something can come form nothing" is absurd.

Do we perceive beginnings and ends?
No.
We perceive process and creation from what exists.
Therefore to assume absolute beginnings and final ends is absurd.

Do we perceive singularities, i.e., absolutes = indivisible, immutable, atoms?
No.
Therefore to assume absolutes independent form mental abstractions is absurd.

Do we perceive consciousness, or intelligence, or morality independent from brains?
No.
Therefore to declare such a thing is absurd and hypocritical.

Do we perceive choice, expressing will, intent?
Yes.
Therefore to presume that it is illusory or controlled by an external agency is absurd.
Causality includes living agency and its willful choices - existence is not what happens to life - life is part of existence.

Do we perceive life as being born a tabula rasa, with no impulses, no a priori methods of interpreting and gaging existence?
No.
Therefore assuming that life is a blank hard disk which is programmed after birth is absurd and shows no understanding of what life is or how it evolves.

Do we perceive reality existing prior to a life being born and after it perishes?
Yes.
Therefore to assume that reality is dependent on brains and minds to come into existence is absurd and idiotic.
Existence precedes the emergence of life and will continue after all life is extinguished.
What is erased with the organism's death is its interpretations of existence and its memories of it - DNA and experiential.

Are all value judgements all perceptions equally valid?
Of course not.
If they were then this would negate natural selection and survival of the fittest, and we would be left wondering how life evolves and how intelligence emerges and develops if all is subjective and nothing is wrong.

That I have to make this point only points to the levels of degeneracy sheltering has produced in the human herd.

Does existence work on moral standards?
[see #19]
Of course not.

1-Morality is a method of increasing the probability of survival and reproduction.
Evolution is about propagating mutations that offer an advantage, and morality offers an advantage to species that evolve a cooperative reproductive and survival strategy.
2-Morality is significant for a species, like man, that has evolved such reproductive and survival strategies, i.e., dependence on a group.
3-The size of the group is what is debated in politics: out it to be universal, all inclusive, encompassing all humanity, or ought it remain what it evolved to be, discriminating, in-group oriented, exclusionary?
Ironically, even the universalists have adopted a broader exclusionary in-group identifier.  
4-The significance of morality - ethics - to the human species is due to the fact that individuals men cannot survive, nor reproduce, if they are excluded from a group.
5-Big brained life can only evolve within group dynamics.
6-Specialization is the foundation of genius and philosophy.

Can we begin, as an indubitable given, with what cannot be observed, or that is contradicted by experience?

If so, then anything and everything can be proven.
We begin with the sensually perceived - experienced - and work our way upwards and downwards, towards the ideal and the metaphysical.
Using language to represent mental abstractions implies that how we define and express the words we are using exposes how we understand our own ideas, representing our knowledge and understanding of the world.

Ergo, a clear and precise definition of words is a essential part of thinking.

In my case the term "absolute" has been defined as that which is immutable and indivisible, i.e., complete, whole, a singularity, one/nil...
As there is nothing in experience that is immutable and indivisible we cannot assume that there is such a thing in existence.
Just as there is no intelligence, or mind, independent from a brain, and a brain independent from an organism.
we must adapt our definition of "intelligence" to what we perceive.

Now....can we perceive order/chaos which is complete, indivisible, while, immutable, i.e., absolute?
No, therefore we cannot presume it.
We may like to believe the cosmos is perfectly ordered, because we can only perceive patterns, but until we discover the all-encopassing M-Theory we can assume that it is so.
If it is then we are nothing but bystanders, stones, watching existence as it occurs to us, while we, hopefully, are determined to realize the depth of our impotence in doing anything about it - we exist in a sadomasochistic dream we can only hope we can learn to cynically laugh at - if it has been determined that we be so fortunate.
There is nothing to complain about and nobody to accuse or blame, because all is determined and cannot do other than what it was determined that it ought to do.
A Biblical account. Despite being sadomasochistic is also comforting because it absolves us of all culpability.
we are innocent of all we do, just as others are innocent of what they do do us.
A creator creating ignorance to watch it struggle to gain gnosis describes a sadistic creator entertained by suffering - or, to be more precise, a masochistic creator enjoying tis own suffering via the suffering of its creations.

The only reason for consciousness and big brains to evolve is if they offered an advantage - which is not the case if all is determined and inevitable, or part of a plan. There would be no necessity, no advantage, to being able to perceive, analyze, understand and choose, since all would be inevitable in a totalitarian universe.
This is, also, comforting, to those who cannot perceive, analyze and judge accurately.
A postmodern ideal equalizing all as "victims" of universal totalitarianism describes a jealous one-god of the Old and New Testaments.

The alternative - absence of absolute, perfect, complete, order - would necessitate a brain able to deal with unforeseeable events, in real-time circumstances.
It would be the only reason for higher consciousness to evolve - to be naturally selected as advantageous to survival and reproduction of life.

What is Time?

1-Exprience of change, i.e., interactivity, Flux.
2-Measure of change using multiple human methods that standardize the time.
3-Since existence is dynamic - interactive - time is how existence is measured in relation to organic life - linear.
4-Experience of increasing entropy, chaos.
5-How a conscious organism experiences flux - attrition of interactivity experienced as need/suffering, i.e., temporal attrition.
6-Movement/Momentum of probability within an expanding field of spatial possibilities.