If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal by Gregg
Ref: Justin Gregg (2022). If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal. Hodder & Stoughton.
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Summary
This is a book about the problem of intelligence, and whether it’s a good or a bad thing. I think most of us believe that intelligence, whatever that word means to you, is inherently good. We’ve always looked at the world- and the value of the nonhuman animals in that world- through the prism of our own brand of human intelligence. But what if we quiet down that voice shouting about the exceptionalism of our species and instead listen to the stories that other species are telling us? What if we acknowledge that sometimes our so-called human achievements are actually rather shitty solutions, evolutionarily speaking? Doing that turns the whole world upsides down. Then, supposedly less brainy animals- like cows, horses, and narwhals- seem like geniuses. The animal kingdom suddenly explodes with beautiful, simple minds that have found elegant solutions to the problem of survival.
All animals have consciousness: subjective experience that helps them make decisions and generate behavior. Animals understand something about the passage of time and make plans for the future- often just moments ahead, but sometimes a few days down the road. Animals understand something about death. They learn how the world works by accumulating associative information about what happens when, although probably not why. Animals do not produce behavior through inflexible instinct, but by a combination of in-built propensities and expectations modified by exposure to the environment and learned information. Animals can be deceptive. Animals have intentions and goals. Animals have norms that guide their social behavior, which gives them ideas about what’s fair and how they (and others) deserve to be treated.
I hope this book will help readers entertain the idea that animals have little qualia-filled minds that are worth taking into consideration. And that your mind is not quite the end all and be all of awesomeness, as if our perceived intellectual superiority justifies indifference to animal suffering.
Nietzsche both wished he was as stupid as a cow so he wouldn’t have to contemplate existence, and pitied cows for being so stupid that they couldn’t contemplate existence.
Instead of looking at the cows and chickens and narwhals in your life with pity because they lack human cognitive capacities, think first about the value of those capacities. Do you experience more pleasure than your pets because of them? Is the world a better place thanks to our species intelligence? If we are honest about the answers to those questions, then there’s good reason to tone down our smugness. Because, depending on where we go from here, human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened.
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Intelligence
Intelligence: Adapting to the environment while working with insufficient knowledge and resources.
An intelligent system should rely on finite processing capacity, work in real time, open to unexpected tasks, and learn from experience (AI Researcher Pei Wang).
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Why Specialists?
The world is full of animals making effective, beneficial decisions all the time- and hardly any of it involves contemplating why the world is the way it is.
Humans are the why specialist species. Does asking why give us a biological advantage?
‘Why’ questions underpin our greatest discoveries.
There are only two ways an animal can interpret the significance of a sudden noise. The first is to learn through association that a loud noise emanating from behind a bush precedes the appearance of a living thing. The second is to infer that a noise is caused by a living thing. It may be subtle, but this difference- between learned associations and causal interference- is where non-human animal thinking ends and being a why specialist begins.
Humans why specialist thinking offers us two cognitive skills that animals lake: imagination and an understanding of causality.
Causality
If causal understanding is such an obvious advantage over other ways of thinking, why did it take our species 200,000 years before we began using this ability to begin the spread of modern civilization? The answer is that sometimes, being a why specialist leads our species toward unexpected ludicrousness that is so bad for our species (evolutionarily speaking) that it makes you wonder if we’d actually be better off relying solely on learned associations.
Our ancient knowledge of plant medicine was based on a combination of learned associations and causal interference.
Sometimes our need to look for causal connections creates more problems than it solves. It creates the illusion of causality where there is none.
Clinical Trial: A technique fundamental to discerning the difference between correlation and causation. With it, you can take an inference for causality and subject it to verification.
Humourism
500 BCE: Rise of Humourism in Greece, which becomes the dominant medical paradigm in Europe for close to 2,000 years. The world humor literally means sap. It was the Greek physician Hippocrates who is most associated with the popularization of the idea, which he described as follows…
“The Human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pains and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. Pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separates in the body and not mixed with others.”
The 2c and 3c Greek physician Galen and the 10c Persian physician and polymath Avicenna are credited with expanding upon these ideas to create the then modern form of humourism.
Imbalances in the humors described how disease arose. The humors themselves- blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile- were made up of four contraries: hot, cold, wet, dry. Yellow Bile was hot and dry, blood was hot and wet, phlegm was cold and wet, and black bile was cold and dry. These four contraries were responsible for forming everything in the universe, including the four elements: fire, water, air, and earth. Fire, for example, would be hot and dry, whereas water was cold and wet. Knowledge of these opposing forces could be used by a physician to cure any ailment. Someone with a fever would be too hot and too dry, throwing their humors out of whack (creating an abundance of yellow bile). Treating the fever thus involved exposing the patient to something cold and wet- like lettuce- to restore the balance of the humors.
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Communication
Communication: A method for transmitting a signal containing true information to another creature with the goal of altering the behavior of that creature.
Aposematic Signaling: (apo- away, sema- sign; Greek) Coloration or markings used to repel or warn predators.
Batesian Mimicry: A form of mimicry where a harmless animal evolved to mimic the aposematic signaling of a dangerous animal.
Deception: A method for transmitting a signal containing false information to another creature with the goal of altering the behavior of that creature.
Tactical Deception: When an individual is able to use an honest act from their normal repertoire in a different context to mislead familiar individuals.
Animal communication involves signals that convey information about a small set of subjects, whereas human language can convey information about any subject at all.
Nonhuman animal communication is typically limited to letting the world know about an anima’s emotional state (like angry), their physical state (like what species they are), their identity (like which dolphin they are, based on a unique whistle), their territory (like dogs markings theirs by peeing on trees), and sometimes- but not often- the presence of external objects of interest in their environment (like prairie dog alarm calls that can convey the location, size, color, and even species of approaching predators).
Theory of Mind (Mind Reading, Mental State Attribution): The ability to generate a theory or a model of what we expect is going on inside the minds of other creatures.
Try observing the animals in your life and ask yourself if they are interacting with you because they are making guesses as to what you are thinking/believing/feeling, of if they are simply reacting to your outward behavior.
Lying
All the animal communicative strategies I’ve mentioned- intentional communication, intentional deception, and tactical deception- form the building blocks upon which the human capacity for lying is built.
When humans lie, we do so with the intention of altering not just the behavior of the intended receiver, but their beliefs as well. This is a key distinction- and one that makes us unique. Manipulating someone’s beliefs requires us to know (or at least guess) that other humans/animals have beliefs in the first place, to have minds filed with thoughts, feelings, desires, intentions, etc.
Truth-Default Theory (TDT): Despite our obvious capacity and propensity to lie, the default setting for our species is to accept the things we hear as being true (Levin).
“The tendency to believe others is an adaptive product of human evolution that enables efficient communication and social coordination.”-Levine.
Pathological Liar: A person who tells, on average, 10 lies a day.
Bullshitting: Communication intended to impress others without concern for evidence or truth.
Lying: Knowingly creating false information with the intention of manipulating others behavior.
Truthiness: The quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true (Colbert).
Being a better bullshitter is correlated with being smarter.
Bosses rated their less honest employees as the most politically skilled. But, importantly, also rated them as more competent than their honest and humble workmates.
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Time
Explicit Concept of Time: The understanding that there will be a tomorrow, a day after, and a day after.
The main benefit of the explicit knowledge that time marches forward is that you can plan for the future.
Sleep
As the light fades toward the end of the day, our pineal glands produce the hormone melatonin, which serves as a signal to our brain that its time to sleep. This coincides with a buildup of a chemical called adenosine, which accumulates slowly in our brains throughout the course of the day and reaches critical levels soon after the sun goes down, generating that feeling of sleepiness that ultimately obliges us to go to bed.
This internal clock system is regulated by clock genes in our DNA. Once activated, these genes begin producing proteins- called PER proteins- that trickle into the cell during the night. Eventually, enough proteins will be produced that a threshold is reached and the clock genes stop making proteins. The PER proteins then slowly break apart until their numbers are so reduced that the clock genes turn back on and start making proteins again. This process takes almost exactly 24h. This mechanism, called the transcription-translation feedback loop (TTFL), is found in the cells of most living things, from plants to bacteria to humans.
Crepuscular: Most active at dawn and dusk.
Mental Time Travel: The ability to recall the past and think about the future.
Episodic Foresight: The ability to mentally project yourself into the future to stimulate imagined events and potential outcomes.
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Death
Death Wisdom (‘Mortality Salience’): The ability to know that you- and everyone else- will one day die.
Death Wisdom relies on cognitive skills that are hugely beneficial to the human ability to understand how the world works (mental time travel, episodic foresight, explicit knowledge of time).
Capacity for Denial: The ability to compartmentalize thoughts of mortality.
Comparative Thanatology: A field of scientific inquiry attempting to understand animals’ death-knowledge. Comparative Thanatologists want to know how an animal knows whether something is alive or dead, and what death means to them.
Hypothesis of the Origin of the human mind: “Such an animal (that was cognizant of their inevitable death) would already have built-in reflex mechanisms for fear responses to dangerous or life-threatening situations. But this unconscious fear would now become a conscious one, a constant terror of knowing one is going to die, and that it could happen anytime, anywhere. In this model, selection would only favor the individual who attains full ToM (Theory of Mind) at about the same time as also achieving the ability to deny his or her mortality.”
Psychologist Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer for his book “The Denial of Death,” wherein he explains that much of human behavior- and most of our culture- is generated in response to our knowledge about our own deaths, and subsequent attempts to create something that is immortal, something that will live on after we have died, and thus has meaning and value. Humans create systems of belief, and laws, and science so that we can find ourselves what Becker described as “a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning.”
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Morality
Moral: The ability to produce beneficial behavior and minimize pain and suffering.
The fact that sociocultural and historical context has such an enormous influence on what we consider right or wrong behavior suggests that our moral sense is not a monolithic code bestowed upon us by external, supernatural forces. It appears more like a set of inherited prescripts that get tweaked by culture. If that’s true, then our capacity for morality is something that evolved like any other cognitive trait.
Human moral reasoning often leads to more death, violence, and destruction than we find in the normative behavior of nonhuman animals.
Norms: The implicit rules determining which behaviors are allowed or expected within an animal’s social world.
Normative Regularity: The kind of norm-based system that governs animal societies, which they define as “a socially maintained pattern of behavioral conformity within a community.”
Equity and fairness are not high-level moral judgements in the human brain, but emotion-driven norms lurking in the periphery of our consciousness.
A sense of fairness leading to moral codes is the bedrock upon which human justice and legal systems are built.
“Human morality is a form of cooperation that emerged as humans adapted to new and species-unique forms of social interaction and organization, resulting in Homo Sapiens becoming an ultra-cooperative primate.”-A Natural History of Human Morality by Michael Tomasello.
Joint Intentionality: An understanding that another person has a goal that is the same as yours (eg. Kill an antelope). This understanding is a precursor to Theory of Mind (ToM) (which gives you an understanding of beliefs and not just goals).
Collective Intentionality: An understanding of the goals, morals, and norms of the larger animal group. Coupled with language, collective intentionality begins to spawn formal rules and laws governing the behavior of individuals within a larger social group.
Divine Moral reasoning that justified cultural genocide: Jesus said: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the sone and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”-Matthews 28: 19-20.
Human moral reasoning might be a bug and not a feature- an evolutionary spandrel that cropped up as our unique cognitive skills blossomed, but not itself a trait that natural selection selected for.
“Most of our ideas are not particularly well considered or derived from some complex ethical calculation. Most of us learn to treat animals from the culture around us, be it social or familial. We live by unexamined norms.”
“I have no uniformly consistent moral framework that outlines my relationship to animals across the board. At times, my convictions are in direct conflict, and seemingly hypocritical.”
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Homosexuality
“Homosexuality in humans is to a very large extent, if not exclusively, determined by biological factors acting prenatally or soon after birth.”-Biology of Homosexuality by Jacques Balthazart.
In other words, people’s sexual orientation is largely determined at birth. He arrives at this conclusion through the study of same-sex sexual behavior in animals, where there is a mountain of evidence showing that not only is homosexuality not unique to humans, but its rather the norm for most animal species
In one study of Laysan albatrosses living on Oahu, one-third of the life long pairs were female same-sex couples. In many of these cases, however, one or both females would make with a male at some point, resulting in fertilized eggs that the female pairs raised together.
In domestic sheep, its estimated that 10% of rams (males) are only interested in mating with other rams.
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Consciousness
Consciousness: Any form of subjective experience; it is what happens when your brain generates a sensation, feeling, perception, or thought of any kind that you are aware of.
“Convergent evidence indicates that nonhuman animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”-2012 Cambridge Declaration.
Metacognition: The ability to be conscious of your own thinking/cognition; the bedrock of human thinking.
Subjective: Something understood or experienced by someone from their perspective.
The Problem of Other Minds: The inescapable fact that the subjective experience of other minds will always remain hidden inside a black box.
Qualia: The properties of conscious experience.
Humans have a much larger number of cognitive processes that are potentially able to step into the spotlight of consciousness and generate qualia for us. We’re not more conscious, we’re just conscious of more things.
All animals’ live qualia-rich lives, regardless of the complexity or number of cognitive processes they have available to them that could stand on that improve stage and be illuminated by the spotlight of conscious, subjective experience.
The one thing that seems universal in all animals: the pursuit of positive qualia.
Intentional Behavior: One where an animal has a goal in mind, and actively monitors the situation to determine whether that goal has been achieved; this assumes subjective awareness of a goal; keeping something “in mind” means being conscious of one’s intentions.
Affective Neuroscience: The study of the underlying neurology that generates emotional states in the animal (and human) mind. Seven classes of emotions have been identified- seeking, lust, care, play, rage, fear, and panic (Jaak Panskepp, Neurobiologist).
Emotion: From emovere (Latin); to move out or to agitate.
Feelings: Occur when emotions bubble to the surface so that we become aware of them.
Self-Awareness: Split into three main categories;
Temporal Self-Awareness: The mind’s capacity to understand that it will continue to exist in the (near) future.
Body Self-Awareness: Awareness of one’s own body as being a thing that exists in the world and is separate from other things, and that can be controlled by the mind.
Social Self- Awareness: The ability to be consciously aware of your relationship to others in your social world when it comes to social status or the strength or nature of your relationships. It gives us the ability to see ourselves as others might see us, allowing for theory of mind to take root.
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Heuristics
Heuristic: A mental shortcut or rule of thumb, often unconscious, that helps us make quick decisions.
Brains learn quickly that generating certain behaviors will result in immediate positive (or negative) consequences.
“Decisions we make automatically (without conscious thought) are often better than ones we spend hours or days pondering.”-Blink by Gladwell.
“We often rely on our fast/automatic/unconscious S1 brain to make decisions vs. our slow/calculating/conscious S2 thinking brain. Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake. S1 runs automatically and S2 is normally in comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. S1 continuously generates suggestions for S2: Impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by S2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, S2 adopts the suggestions of S1 with little or no modification.-Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman.
“Humans are not the kind of rational, conscious decision- makers that we’d like to think we are. We are pushed- unconsciously- into making decisions by the structure of the environment around us. It’s the external environment that triggers heuristics and cognitive biases that generate our behavior without any need for conscious rumination or rationality.”-Predictably Irrational by Ariely.
Humans have an unconscious bias towards sticking with the status quo. When we are tasked with taking action to change the status quo v. maintain course, we will go with the path of least resistance.
You are more likely to buy jam if you are looking at six varieties of jam stacked on a shelf than 24 varieties. Why? Because human minds experience choice overload when there are too many options to consider.
Even when we think our conscious decisions are arrived at via slow, deliberate, rational thinking, they are often the product of- or at least influenced by- a whole lot of unconscious processes bubbling away outside our awareness.
Telling your tween to “stop being so negative” is pointless. Instead, why not try an old-school behavioral manipulation technique: operant conditioning. The basic idea is that “she” would get an immediate, positive reward every time she produced a desired behavior. Her brain would make an indelible association between saying nice things and getting a treat. Her subconscious mind would then prompt her to generate positive statements to get the endorphin hit that comes with treat consumption.
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Prognostic Myopia
Prognostic Myopia: The Human capacity to think about and alter the future coupled with an inability to actually care all that much about what happens in the future. It’s caused by the human ability to make complex decisions availing of our unique cognitive skills that result in long term consequences. But because our minds evolved primarily to deal with immediate, not future, outcomes, we rarely experience or even understand the consequences of these long-term decisions. It is the most dangerous flaw in human thinking.
Humans have an amazing ability to justify our actions even if there is evidence that there will be negative consequences in the future.
Humans have several unique cognitive abilities that can step out onto that improve stage and receive the spotlight of subjective awareness when we are making decisions, including causal interference, mental time travel, episodic foresight, and temporal self-awareness. But there is a plethora of unconscious cognitive systems that also contribute. These two systems- the conscious and unconscious- work in tandem to generate our decision-making behavior. And ultimately lead to prognostic myopia.
Our decisions are often the product of unseen emotions and heuristics in our minds, even if we are still consciously pondering a problem. And because these emotions and heuristics are designed exclusively for solving immediate- and not long-term future- problems, there is space for prognostic myopia to take root.
Unconscious processes are not designed to understand the future. That’s the paradox of prognostic myopia.
Prognostic myopia in action: I was able to know exactly what staying up late would do to my future affective and physiological states on an intellectual level, but my mind justified doing the wrong thing because I couldn’t feel the consequences of my actions in a way that was meaningful to my decision-making process.
“Indifference to my future suffering, thanks to prognostic myopia.”
Urgent Survival needs (believed to be mediated by older brain systems that we share with many other animals) mean that we still engaged in impulsive behaviors. And those behaviors, which once promoted our survival and reproductive success, are now suboptimal because we live in an environment in which long-term contingencies play an increasingly important part in our lives.
Humans alive today are making decisions whose negative consequences won’t be felt by other humans until many years from now. Often, many generations into the future. Yet, we simply don’t have minds designed to feel these consequences.
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Pleasure
Pleasure is the beating heart of utilitarian philosophies first described by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”-Jeremy Bentham.
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Human Exceptionalism?
Exceptionalism Paradox: The idea that even though humans are indeed exceptional when it comes to our cognition, it does not mean we are better at the game of life than other animals.
Language falls victim to the Exceptionalism Paradox: It is the ultimate symbol of the uniqueness of the human mind, and yet despite its wondrousness, it has helped generate more misery for the creatures on this planet (including ourselves) than pleasure.
There is no evidence to suggest that my life- as privileged as it is- is filled with more pleasure than the lives of my chickens.
Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction, which is exactly how evolution gets rid of adaptations that suck.
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Animalia
Bedbugs
Bedbugs are attracted to our body heat, our body odor, and the CO2 we exhale when we breathe. There are three species of bedbugs that feed on humans when we are sleeping: Cimex lectularius, Cimex hemipterus, Leptocimex boueti.
Honeybees
Drones: Male honeybees whose sole purpose is to mate with new queens from other colonies.
Termites
Termite mounds form slowly as termites come to the surface to toss out the unwanted dirt from the network of tunnels excavated for transportation and their living quarters.
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Humans
Humans have far fewer hair follicles and more exposed skin, designed for seat to evaporate quickly and keep the body cool as they wandered under the blazing sun. Humans also have longer legs with relatively more muscle in their lower limbs, another adaptation to support our ambulatory (walking) lifestyle.
No other hominid species throughout history evolved chins before Homo sapiens came along. Remarkably, scientists still don’t have a clear answer as to why we have chins.
Human heads are round, looking like an overfilled water balloon. That extra cranial space is stuffed with brain tissue- 3x the size as our chimpanzee cousins.
Average Global Life Expectancy: 72.6.
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Climate Change
“Our Political-legal system was developed to address structured, short term, direct cause and effect issues (the exact opposite of the climate issue).”
Land Use Change
Grass Lawns
There are 163,812 sqkm of domestic lawns in the US; equivalent to the size of the state of FL.
75% of the 116M households in the US have a lawn of some kind.
Americans use 9B gallons of water a day on lawns alone (1/3 of all domestic water usage). About half of that is wasted, never reaching the roots due to evaporation, wind, and runoff.
Using a gas-powered motor for 1h is the equivalent of driving 100 miles in a car.
The EPA estimates that lawn maintenance accounts for 4% of annual total CO2 emissions in the USA.
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Misc Quotes
“The Great arbiter of usefulness: Natural Selection.”
“The Future task of philosophers is…to determine the hierarchy of values.”-Nietzsche.
“Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”-Nietzsche.
“Humans have the capacity to both rationalize genocide and the technological competence to carry it out.”
“Natural selection doesn’t care about the level of complexity that gave rise to our vigilance, only whether it is effective at keeping us alive.”
“Humans have the power to create a life of pleasure maximization for chickens. But we typically use that power to create far more misery for them than you would find for an “average” chicken living in the world.”
“When it comes to generating complexity, it’s not the number of neurons that matter, it’s the way they wire together.”
“People who reliably make money from the market are those who own a diverse portfolio of different kinds of investments (stocks, bonds, annuities), which spreads out the risk, with the broader that the market, over the long haul, will eventually increase in value.”
“The moon drifts farther from and closer to the Earth throughout the course of a day. This means that the moons gravitational pull on Earth is not constant, which in turn means that the Earth’s rotational speed is always in flux. On average, the moon drifts about 2” farther from the Earth each year.”
“What your great grandmother was exposed to during pregnancy, like DDT, may promote a dramatic increase in your susceptibility to obesity, and you will passe this on to your grandchildren in the absence of any continued exposures.”-Michael Skinner (WSU Epigenetics Expert).
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Terminology
Anthropomorphizing: Attributing humanlike emotions and cognition to animals unjustly.
Aphantasia: A disorder in which people are not able to see an image in their minds eye.
Conspicuous Consumption: The purchase of goods or services for the specific purpose of displaying one’s wealth (Economists Thorstein Veblen).
Dead Facts: Facts about the world that an animal would not have any use for in its daily life. Humans accumulate endless numbers of them.
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT): A potent insecticide, originally used to kill mosquitoes, and deployed widely during WWII to stop the spread of mosquito borne diseases like Malaria and Typhoid.
Enlightenment Thinking: Reason applied to human betterment.
Polygenism: A 19c theory by American physician Samuel George Morton that different populations of modern humans either evolved from separate lineages of early hominids or had been separately created by God.
Ponzi Scheme: Investors are paid returns on their investments using money that comes in from new investors. Ponzi schemes require a constant stream of new investors or else there’s no money to pay the interest that the existing investors are expecting.
Short Squeeze: If a stock prize starts to go up, investors with short positions try to offload their stocks quickly to cut their losses. This mass selling causes the stock to rise even faster, creating a squeeze, and making anyone smart enough to have bought stock when it was worth next to nothing a lot of money.
Therianthropes: (theri- beast, Anthropos- man; Greek); Half human, half animal figures.
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People
Capability Brown (1716-1783): Born Lancelot Brown in the UK, a lead advocate for “naturalistic looks to gardens: replacing the heavily manicured hedges, stone pathways, and grand fountains typical of 17c formal French gardens with grand vistas overlooking lakes, groves of statuesque trees, and sprawling lawns.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): German philosopher.
Nietzsche’s psychiatric problems were compounded by his intellectual genius, which spurred him to seek meaning, beauty, and truth in his suffering at the expense of his sanity.
Nietzsche embraced suffering as a path to meaning. Misery was, for him, a worthy teacher.
Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche (1846-1935): Sister of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; used her brother’s philosophical writings to validate a worldview that led to the deaths of 6M Jews.
After Nietzsche’s death in Aug, 1900, Elisabeth took full control of his estate, and was able to retcon his philosophical writings to fit her white-supremacist ideology. In a bid to make herself popular with the rising fascist movement in Germany, she combed through Nietzsche’s old notebooks and published a posthumous book titled “The Will to Power” in which she espouses her ideologies involving the subjugation (and eradication) of the “weaker races.”
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Resources
Media Literacy Index: Measures how susceptible a country is to fake news.
Search for Intelligence Life (SETI): Inspired by a 1959 article in ‘Nature’ published by Philip Morrison and Guiseppe Cocconi, two Cornell scientists, who suggested that if alien civilizations were trying to communicate, they’d most likely do it through radio waves. This led to a gathering of scientists at Green Bank, WV in Nov, 1960 where radio astronomer Frank Drake introduced his famous Drake equation, an estimate as to the number of extraterrestrials civilizations in the Milky Way intelligent enough to generate radio waves.
The internet Research Agency: A Russian disinformation company that has been sowing disinformation online since 2013. The company employs >1000 people to create fake online content on social media to bolster the interests of Russian businesses and the Russian government. Their preferred method is what political scientists Rosenblum and Muirhead call the firehose of falsehood- repeating conflicting disinformation as often as possible through as many different social media accounts as possible to create an impression of discord.
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Chronology
2015: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) lays bare the horrors of the Canadian Indian Residential school system in a report documenting cultural genocide.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
2012: The Cambridge Declaration qualifies consciousness stating “Convergent evidence indicates that nonhuman animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
1999: NASA’s $125M Mars Climate Orbiter burns up in Mars’ atmosphere. Engineers at NASAs JPL used the metric system to calculate the orbiters trajectory, but the engineers at Lockheed who built the software used the English system.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
1978: NASA’s Director for the Institute for Space Studies, Dr. James Hansen, testifies to the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resource, confirming that Robbins and Robinson had warmed about was in fact an undeniable reality. He stated that “global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the GHG effect and observed warming…”-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
1972: The USG bans the use of DDT.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
1968: Stanford Research Institute’s Robinson and Robbins present a report to the American Petroleum Institute on Atmospheric pollutants in which they outline the dangers of CO2 being released by the burning of fossil fuels. In it, they warn that “CO2 plays a significant role in establishing the thermal balance of the Earth” and that too much CO2 in the atmosphere would result in a “GHG effect,” which would result in “the melting of the Antarctic Ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of the oceans, and an increase in photosynthesis.” They conclude that “man is now engaged in a vast geophysical experiment with his environment, the earth. Significant temperature changes are almost certain to occur by the year 2000 and these could bring about climatic changes,” and that “there seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.”-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
1956-1957: Canadian residential schools saw peak enrollment at 11,539 children. All in all, 150K children attended residential schools in Canada until the last school was closed in 1996.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
1883: The Canadian Government authorizes the residential school system goal of “separating Aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and to indoctrinate children into a new culture- the culture of the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian Society.” By 1896, there were 40 schools across Canada. In 1920, attendance was made mandatory for all Indigenous children ages 7-16.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
1876: The Canadian Government passes the Indian Act, outlining the governments approach to assimilating First Nations people into Western European culture, including the banning of indigenous religious and cultural ceremonies.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
1830: Invention of the lawn mower by Edwin Beard Budding. Over the next century, lawns become the symbols of personal- and national- prosperity.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
1740s: Capability Brown (born Lancelot Brown in the UK) advocates for “naturalistic looks to gardens: replacing the heavily manicured hedges, stone pathways, and grand fountains typical of 17c formal French gardens with grand vistas overlooking lakes, groves of statuesque trees, and sprawling lawns.”-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
500 BCE: Rise of Humourism in Greece, which becomes the dominant medical paradigm in Europe for close to 2,000 years. The world humor literally means sap. It was the Greek physician Hippocrates who is most associated with the popularization of the idea, which he described as follows…
“The Human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pains and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. Pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separates in the body and not mixed with others.”-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
2686-2125 BCE: The Old Kingdom Period of Ancient Egypt; highlighted by mummification, in which elite members of society had their organs (stomach, intestines, liver and lungs) placed in canopic jars, and preserved the body in linen bandages, leaving the heart untouched and the brain removed and discarded.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
23 Ka: Evidence form a small group of humans living in current- day Israel suggests humans have figured out how to plant and harvest wild barley and oats in little farm plots.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
25 Ka: The first evidence of a human wearing a hat is found from the Venus von Willendorf statute, a limestone carving depicting a female figure wearing a beaded headdress.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
44 Ka: A group of humans living in Sulawesi, Indonesia, walk into a cave on the islands SW tip and, using red pigment, draw various hunting scenes- humans (with the head of animals) chasing wild pigs with ropes and spears. The Sulawesi therianthropes are the worlds earliest known evidence for our ability to conceive of the existence of supernatural beings.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
100 Ka: Evolution of collective intentionality as humans begin gathering in larger groups. Coupled with language, collective intentionality begins to spawn formal rules and laws governing the behavior of individuals within a larger social group.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
126 Ka: End of the Chibanian Age; humans trek out of Africa to Europe, where they encounter Neanderthals and Denisovans.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
240 Ka: Middle Pleistocene (Chibanian Age); Humans and chimpanzees’ live side by side in the East African Rift.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
2 Ma: The common Hominid ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans depart Africa for Europe and Asia.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
7 Ma: Evolutionary divergence of Humans and Chimpanzees from their common ancestor Sahelanthropus tchadensis.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
95 Ma: Evolution of Crocodilians, the ancestors of modern crocodiles, alligators, and caimans.-If Nietzsche were a Narwhal by Gregg.
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