Difference between revisions of "A guided tour through the Omega Research Wiki"

Revision as of 16:55, 20 February 2011

The easiest way to get to know the essentials of this Wiki, the easiest way to satisfy your curiosity, starting on the level you prefer, is using this Guided Tour. This page is for your efficiency and for your comfort.

The contributions on this Wiki greatly differ in detail, in length, in depth and in thoroughness of scientific underpinning of arguments and proof. This Guided Tour helps you to choose the sequence of articles that best suits your desires of the moment. Do you want a better overview first or are you looking for a better underpinning of arguments and of the presented data. You can follow your preference at any spot during the Tour. You may decide to dig deeper into the subject you are immersed in or reversely you may return to the surface and look for a better and broader overview. The Guided Tour will give you such moments of choice during your reading. For your convenience we have marked the articles and contributions with asterixes (*), (**), (***).

• (*) Stands for an overview article, short, superficial, quick and efficient. These articles are best to start out with. They are the ones that the Guided Tour brings you first.

• (**) Stands for reading one level more deeply. These articles give more thorough argumentation, but do not lead you into the depths of scientific corroboration and lengthy underpinning of presented data.

• (***) Stands for articles with so much detail that you might also find them in scientific publications and papers. The arguments given in these articles are best suited to help you decide whether you buy the viewpoints given or not, but they require more time and scientific patience from the reader. They contain more references to other sources of information. They are less efficient reading, but in the end these are the articles that decide where we stand at the end of the day. In the Guided Tour these are the articles that you are guided to in case your curiosity keeps pressing on and doesn't let you "off the hook".

This Wiki is about the way humanity will survive this nuclear era, survive the methods and tools for mass destruction that have become available and how humanity will manage to enter the next phase in its evolution, a phase with less mass unhappiness and suffering, a phase in which the need for large scale wars and the all overruling need for the systematic suppression and neurotisation of the masses has disappeared.

However, whereas this Wiki does provide a lot of data that have not yet been known before, data that point out to us how to survive and how to create a more agreeable world, this Wiki does not serve as kind of "saviour" tool. It is shown on this Wiki that humanity will discover these data, these truths, unavoidably and automatically by itself anyway, whether they are presented at this place or not, and why this is necessarily and unavoidably so. The only thing this Wiki is doing for you is to bring understanding at a timely moment, to make adaptation to the new situation easier and make it happen more smoothly. This Wiki can serve as a midwife, making the birth of a new era easier and on a personal level help you find your way out of the clutches of the old power structures that made the lives of all of us so miserable for thousands of years.

Before following your curiosity and dive into the contents of this Wiki, it is good strategy to first check if these novel insights are what you personally really do need, if this is what will suit you. If you have been reading already the pages with the "Disclaimer" and you have decided you want more, please continue, otherwise we advise to first read the Disclaimer now (click here).

Why visit this Omega Research Wiki ?

You may visit this Wiki because you are concerned about you personal well being and you have searched the label "enlightenment".

Or, you may have heard of the novel scientific insights (Reversal Theory) about our emotional and motivational make up and wish to find out what advantages these insights might have for you, overcoming the usual human blindness for the self and for our own functioning.

Also, you may be concerned about the dangers of nuclear self destruction by mankind and want to find out about the roots of war and conflict.

Whatever the reason of you visiting this Wiki, all these subjects are dealt with on this Wiki and you will see that neither of these issues can be understood without understanding the others as well at the same time. It is the total, coherent picture that brings clarity and understanding, an understanding that neither of the separate parts of information could possibly bring.

As a start you might read the 4 pages summary "Point Omega". Without going into details that summary indicates how four very different phenomena hang together, forming one grand coherent picture explaining the why of the present human situation, personally and collectively.

• The first point is that in general we are very little aware of how we function, how we feel, how our emotions are triggered and why and how we interact with one another. There is an avalanche of scientific psychological research data showing the existence and the working of these blindnesses in detail. It is indicated here why it has been an evolutionary necessity in us humans that such blindnesses evolved and are ruling our lives until this day.
• The second issue addressed is one of the basic and very important characteristics of our emotional and motivational system, which is the phenomenon of emotional "Reversals". Whereas one of the most basic parts of our biological make up, we are in general fully unaware of these mechanisms. That is highly peculiar for a species that prides itself for its "superior" intelligence, but it is easy to understand in the light of the above mentioned all overruling need for Self-blindness.
• The third issue is the finding that the world of Homo sapiens is not ruled by human persons, but rather by meme level power structures and the consequences this has for us human beings.
• The fourth issue summarizes the changes that can be expected to happen in the near future and the reasons why these changes are going to happen. These changes can only happen together, not separate from one another. The occurrence of these changes together is indicated with the term "Point Omega".

In case you want to read this 4 page summary now, click here.

Otherwise, just read on.

Putting the jig saw pieces together

There are very good evolutionary reasons why humanity up to this moment in time has never been able to solve the most pressing questions and riddles that have presented themselves to us during many thousands of years. Once we have understood the grand picture and once we have studied and checked also the details to make sure, it will be understood why this is so, that the things that really mattered to us, all the time stayed hidden from view, hidden from our capacity to understand, covered by superstition and misunderstanding. To give an impression of why this is so, let's make a little tour through the different realms of human problems.

A major problem for humanity has always been the issues of war and peace. Some philosophers have pointed out that a well oiled and fair operated society that manages to maintain peace within its realm, basically is a project postponing evolution. What is meant is that human beings, just like any other animal species, is subject to processes of natural selection and that without being subjected to such evolutionary selection processes a species cannot survive. Genetic drift and genetic pollution would in that case reduce the quality level of that society's members to such an extent, that eventually it would not any more be able to meet the competition with neighbouring societies and sooner or later be overwhelmed and replaced by another societal structure that is still backed up by more genetic vigour. In other words, the longer and more just the peace has been, the more the average quality level has dropped and the sooner competing societal structures will take over. And when that happens, we are facing war, starvation, mass destruction, enslavement, genocide, or any combination of these phenomena.

If we want to get to grips with issues of war and peace, we will at least have to understand how all this works. Many issues of such selection and competition mechanisms are well known and investigated at length in scientific areas like (behavioural) genetics, population genetics, economy, etc. However, this type of knowledge has rarely been applied to thinking about the fate of mankind itself. For instance, population genetics theory has quite successfully been applied in matters of cattle breeding and such, but the implications for the human species has always been kept in the taboo spheres. These are issues one "should not speak or even think about". So, many notions and tools that we would need to get a better understanding about matters of war and peace are in principle readily available, if we only put ourselves to simply use them, breaking some taboos where needed.

Genetic pollution is one such issue. It can easily been understood and estimated as to quantity of damage, what genetic pollution is doing to any society that has managed to establish a certain measure of fairness and justness and peace. What is not generally known yet, also not in scientific research communities on these subjects, is a certain type of selection pressure, operating within any socially living group of mammals, that causes certain specific social selection cycles with a certain life span. In other words, this specific type of internal social selection pressure works as a built in time bomb in any social structure in mammals. The evolutionary advantages can easily be understood, but here we will limit ourselves to just mention the phenomenon and point out that elsewhere on this Wiki this social selection mechanism causing cyclic changes in social structures is described in more detail, including arguments from scientific research.

In short, two major factors that are often overlooked when investigating issues of war and peace are these two factors: genetic pollution and the life cycles of social structures by the internal social selection forces.

The latter mechanism is producing the quickest limiting effects on the life span of any project trying to maintain peace, fairness and "justice". The effects of genetic pollution work a bit slower. So, here we have one population genetic mechanism, that is virtually unknown yet, even in circles of professionals (although these mechanisms have already been published more than 30 years ago), but that is rather easy to understand. However, if we want to asses its effects on human society and on our own lives, we have to dive into the mechanisms of our own social interactions and social reflexes that motor the selection processes in question.

For a complete understanding we therefore also need to know how human beings deal with their own social relationships and what is triggering which effect. We also need to know to what extent such social reflexes are similar or different from those in other animal species. Looking into that matter, we quickly stumble across another issue that is crucial to our understanding and that is the quite peculiar human capacity to be blind for one's own and to a lesser extend be blind to other people's behaviour. It can be shown experimentally that human beings have a conspicuous incapacity to asses one's own and other people's behavioural intentions, qualities and capacities. This in turn has consequences for the workings of the above mentioned involuntary internal social selection pressures in human social structures, causing only limited lifespans of any social structures involved and with the concomitant turn over catastrophies going with it.

So, we need to know also about the specific blindnesses humans are saddled with, that make the eons old and still unhampered selection pressures possible in spite of humanity's high level of intelligence. Therefore this Wiki contains also contributions about Amathology or the science of ignorance. Without an understanding of the mechanisms of ignorance, innate as well as imposed from without, we cannot hope to come to grips with matters of war and peace, nor with matters regarding human unhappiness and suffering. We need all the bits and pieces.

Investigating these phenomena, we also want to know how human understanding can enhance or moderate or change the various mechanisms studied. Therefore we need to know how human learning and development can be of influence on such selection reflexes as mentioned above. To what extent can human beings overcome the innate and culturally amplified blindness and ignorance and start to come to grips with social reflexes that lead to mayhem and disaster ? This Wiki contains the details of a still rather novel and little known theory of learning (although already published more than 30 years ago), based on Reversal Theory and explaining how the contageousness of human development as well as of human neuroticism works and how human development and growth is socially influenced.

The understanding coming forth from the novel theory of learning, the CEL (Cognition Energy Learning model), indicates that human development and learning is ruled by very strong positive feed back loops. Such loops do cause so called "developmental traps". That is, once a person has entered a series of positive learning spirals, his or her development is becoming more likely to develop positively in the future also. And reversely, once a person has ended up in a series of negative learning spirals, his/her further development is likely to become more and more hampered. This is a mechanism within persons. A similar effect can be found between people, mental and developmental health in a group of people having a strong positive effect on the developmental chances of individuals dealing with such a group of people. But the reverse also holds. In summary: "Unpersons unperson persons" and "Persons re-person unpersons". These positive feed back loops in human learning and development, and the concomitant developmental traps, do have strong implications for societies that have ended up in structures of repression and misery, which is mostly the case, and reversely, for societies that have managed to organise and escape from collective unhappiness and disaster (very rare). Thinking about war and peace, it is clear that we also need the information from these lines of research.

Having touched upon the mechanisms of human learning and development we also have ended up dealing with human suffering and misery on the one hand and human enlightenment and liberation on the other hand, either in individuals or in whole populations. It is argued on this Wiki that, once we have acquired a rather complete overview of all these different but intertwined mechanisms, we discover the likelihood of a transition in the functioning of the human species, that is somewhat looking like what the catholic scholar and priest Teilhard de Chardin was writing about, "Point Omega", a transition point that is estimated to be rather near in time. That's why we have borrowed his label for this Wiki.

Looking at these issues about human learning and development and about the peculiar and specific human blindnesses, the question arises how these states of affairs have ever been able to be ESS (Evolutionarily Stable Strategies). How can it be that a certain species, Homo sapiens, does have certain capacities for learning and development while most of the specimens in most large societies do not "realise" those potentials, but only grow into truncated, limited phenotypes, neurotic and miserable ? In this Wiki it is postulated that this is indeed a phenomenon that is highly unusual if not for evolutionary reasons generally impossible in the animal kingdom, but that in the case of human evolution we are facing a unique species in that Homo sapiens has escaped the "upper intelligence limit" that usually limits the evolution of intelligence in any phylum in the animal kingdom until at a certain functional level. Any intelligence above that level becomes self-defeating and stops being an ESS, because intelligence above that level usually bites its own tail. It enables intelligent individuals to find short cuts to proximate behavioural gratification loops, bypassing the more simplistic, but more costly, behaviours that ordinarily were designed by evolution to gratify those needs. Thus intelligence above a certain level causes a mismatch between proximate and ultimate behavioural systems. They stop running parallel. Intelligence enables an individual to "misuse" or "shortcut" proximate need-gratification loops, creating more easy gratification methods, but thus avoiding the risky or costly behaviours that evolution had meant to be be triggered by the innate needs in question in the first place.

The fact that Homo sapiens escaped this intelligence boundary explains why we have such conspicuous awareness blocks regarding our own behaviour. This type of "blindness" must have been introduced in our genome before the high growth of intelligence could take off. So, it is probably an adaptation that is millions of years old. This peculiar characteristic of us humans plays a crucial role in a number of other mechanisms that we need to take into consideration when we want to understand the present human situation. This specific blindness for the self is a strong moderating factor for a number of the other mechanisms discussed on this Wiki.

Another important factor on the level of human awareness is the selection pressure in favour of docile behaviour and against intelligent enquiry that started some 10.000 years ago at the beginning of the agricultural revolution. From that time on the ordinary (human) autonomy was gradually replaced by the influence of meme level power structures. All mechanisms as discussed above must be seen in the light of the evolutionary struggle between impersonal power structures, a struggle in which we human beings are merely the carriers of the meme sets struggling for survival and supremacy. In this struggle the main requirement for us humans is to be docile and reliable carriers of meme sets, cultural sets of ideas and recipes "making" a culture.