From equal opportunity to equal outcomes: cognitive components in racial conflicts

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From equal opportunity to equal outcomes: cognitive components in racial conflicts

After passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Americans expected to see an end to discrimination, a legacy that many, especially in the North, found appalling from watching television footage of Blacks being beaten, harassed, and intimidated by groups of Whites in large cities and throughout the entire south. The Civil Rights Act was clear: discrimination was outlawed.

It didn't take long however for the Washington bureaucrats to realize that just eliminating discrimination would not be enough, Blacks would have to be given jobs based on quotas because they could not compete with Whites on ability. Therefore, a suit was filed contesting the use of high school diplomas or ability tests to hire and promote workers at Duke Power Company. They were sued for discriminating because all of the Black employees were only employed as laborers. This was unacceptable, and the case went to the Supreme Court, and in 1971, in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, a super statute ruling was established that would redefine discrimination based on statistical outcomes, while ignoring ability or fairness in the hiring and promotion of employees. Group rights would now trump individual rights, and merit would not only be ignored, it would be seen as a tool of oppression.

The Griggs ruling had the following impact:

Employers were assumed to be discriminating if they had too few minorities.[1]
Testing could not be used to determine the best potential employees if it led to disparate impacts.[2]
Discrimination was now redefined to protect groups rather than individuals.[3]
Discrimination was now redefined from an intentional act to an unintentional wrong as an outcome of group representation.[4]
The employer was assumed to be guilty of discrimination based on quotas alone.[5]
It established the idea of protected groups over individuals, and these groups would eventually expand to include 70% of the workforce.[6,7]
Businesses were now required to discriminate against Whites or face assumed guilt for discrimination. These laws were established by undemocratic courts and federal bureaucracies.[8]
It applied only to businesses that had in the past discriminated, but this was later ignored.[9]
It led to the lowering of standards and eventually to race norming, where different races were hired by the numbers.[10]
Discrimination was now defined as systemic or unintentional outcomes based on unknown mechanisms that could only be remedied by quotas.[11]
Individual prejudice was replaced by institutional racism, a vague and hard to define phenomena created out of whole cloth by the courts. America was declared over time to be a racist state.[12]
It was based on the hypothesis that there is no correlation between job performance and racial differences.[13]
It eventually led to the disparate impact argument being used towards issues like abortion, assisted suicide, genetic engineering (eugenics), health care and even the fairness of owning a sport utility vehicle.[14]

Griggs therefore set the ground rules for all future discrimination cases, it was the "high-water mark of judicial creativity."[15] From this point on, companies would protect themselves from litigation through extensive documentation of hiring practices,[16] that included using raced based preferences. Now, a whole industry was born: bureaucrats, lobbyists, lawyers, and educators would all benefit from the deep pockets of American corporations.[17] A simple statistical analysis could prove that any company was racist, or there would be equal numbers of people of every race represented. Companies would be assumed to be guilty unless they could prove otherwise. Group economic conflict was in play.

The racial spoils system took another leap forward in 1978 with Bakke v. Regents of the University of California. Though it was a victory for Bakke, who had charged reverse discrimination, a little noticed provision at the time was put forth by Justice Powell that said that race alone could not be a deciding factor in medical school admissions, but that diversity could be used as a valid reason for giving preferences to minorities. It took a number of years, but the diversity machine eventually took hold and a new national goal was put into playdiversity was a good thing for business and schools, even though no proof has ever been provided showing that it had any real benefits for either students or for organizations. The Left just made it their mission to assume it as a legitimate goal to bring back racial quotas.[18] (Lately, Republicans and conservatives have used the diversity argument to demand that universities hire a more balanced facultyones that are not dominated by Marxists, liberals, and egalitarians. We'll have to see how successful this new twist in diversity demands plays out.[19]) Nonetheless, the diversity argument added a new normative goal for the use of quotas.[20]

In 1979, in Larry P. v. Riles (1979), a case was brought before the courts challenging the fairness of using Eurocentric developed tests to determine which Blacks should be put in special education because of retardation. (Note that Blacks have had every opportunity to develop their own Afrocentric intelligence tests, but so far have not taken up the challenge.) Historically, the courts have relied on criterion validity [does a test correlate with performance? However, many occupations lack a single performance criteria] and content validity [giving tests that reflect the actual work to be performed], but have ignored construct validity [using thoughtful experiments from numerous sources to see if tests correlate with work performance].[21] In this case, Larry P., evidence of genetic racial differences were presented, but then retracted, "but its odor permeated the [rest of the] trial."[22] The courts hold tenaciously to environmental radicalism that has long passed in academic research, where differences in average intelligence between racial groups has long been recognized.[23]

In 1989 the Supreme Court in Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Antonio, finally rolled back some of the damage done by the Griggs decision. It changed Griggs in two fundamental ways: First, the plaintiffs had to show specific practices that produced an adverse impact (too few minorities) and the burden of proof became more balanced.[24] Second, it changed the allowance for using selection procedures such as written tests from business necessity to serving legitimate business goals of the employer. This shifted the burden of proof back onto the plaintiffs while allowing businesses to expand the use of merit selectionto the chagrin of quota advocates.

To try to reverse the conservative court's attempts at restoring merit in place of racial preferences, Congress passed the 1991 Civil Rights Restoration Act. This confused legislation was intended to both eliminate quotas, but also to restore affirmative action programs based on the Griggs decision. However, trying to reach a balance with regards to affirmative action programs, quotas were just too entrenched to be legislated away.[25]

The 1991 act was ambiguous: it tried to reverse recent court decisions, it restricted somewhat psychological testing for employment, and it banned race norming, where different standards were applied in selecting different racial groups when tests were used for selection. This practice, hidden from the public, was used to reach quotas where a strictly merit based system could not hope to do so.[26]

From 1964 to the present, attempts to eliminate discrimination were quickly turned into a means for racial groups to benefit themselves at the expense of others. Wherever one looks in the world, where oppression is claimed to exist, the intellectual elite is there to raise the banner not for justice or fairness, but for taking from one group to give to another. Affirmative action, nondiscrimination, justice and fairness were quickly abandoned for tribalism. The only real objective was to take more from society for yourself and for your race, even if it meant that merit had to be destroyed or severely suppressed. These racial conflicts are not unique, but are global in nature. They exist in every country, under every kind of government, and are an innate feature of human evolutionary strategiesquite often where an intellectual elite will become the champions for an ever-expanding list of oppressed persons.[27]

More importantly, the above absurdity of using disparate outcomes to show that we live in a racist society, followed by quotas for its remedies, while ignoring racial or ethnic differences in average intelligence, shows that within the government, academia, and the media, there can be no unbiased presentation of scientific facts. Everyone brings to the table to one degree or another, extreme biases when scientific inquiry touches on our hidden human emotionsespecially with regards to race. Everyone has a stake in the conflict, and everyone biases his or her presentation of the facts. Deception, lies, and false data are the norm for many who are committed to an egalitarian or Marxist agenda.

Ignoring empirical evidence and avoiding the testing of hypotheticals.
The advocates of representationism that deny that human merit has value, wanted people to be hired by the numbers: any job could be filled by any person because all humans are equally qualified. With this egalitarian dogma taking hold, other minorities declared "us too!"[28] Everyone wanted in on a good thing, handing out jobs by numbers rather than merit.

The General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) was developed by the Federal Government as a general battery of tests for employment placement. The National Academy of Sciences determined that the tests were valid at predicting job performance, after concern was raised that Blacks faired poorly on the testsa standard deviation below average.[29]

The Griggs decision however made it necessary to validate tests for each job tested for. The response by Black psychologists was to call for a ban on all tests, rather than to devise Afrocentric tests on their own.[30] Clearly, a failure by Blacks to devise their own tests shows just one thing: they know that Whites would still outperform Blacks on their own Afrocentric tests. All they could do was try to suppress testing altogether.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) tried to eliminate all professionally developed ability tests, and Griggs helped them in that direction. Griggs stated that for many jobs, intelligence, learning and a good education were of no value. Businesses had to prove that smarter employees made better workers.[31] One has to ask then, why does President Bush's No Child Left Behind program seek to educate every child? This is the contradiction that we see constantly flowing from the Left. On the one hand they claim that intelligence and/or ability are not that important, while espousing the importance of education for all. An inherent contradiction belies their legitimacy. They want to undermine the importance of intelligence, while trying to educate everyone to the same levelan impossible goal that flies in the face of everything we know about intelligence and learning.

Even after Griggs, use of the GATB was encouraged by the Feds to be used by the states for employment screening. The result of this conflict resulted in the implementation of race-norming, where placement was made by the top scorers from each racial pool, rather than just hiring the most qualifiedan illegal quota system. For years, employees were unaware that they were not judged equally for jobs, and many Whites, were denied employment opportunities while believing that the system was fair.

By the end of the 70's, the courts were slowly relaxing the "business necessity" criteria, and were allowing more testing. But with race-norming quotas taking place, job merit was still being denied to employees.[32] And in education, quotas were creeping in. In San Francisco Chinese students were being denied admission to magnet schools to make room for lesser performing Blacks and Hispanics, and in Los Angeles, Jews were often denied admission to magnet schools as well.[33] In general, test standards are now being lowered at all levels of education, placing all educational achievements in a "cloud of suspected incompetency."[34] Quotas are the only means that egalitarians have left to destroy merit to bring about the "classless society."

Since Griggs, companies have been amassing numerous tests that have been well validated,[35] as the evidence is overwhelming that general intelligence tests are valid for all jobs.[36] And after forty years of affirmative action, better schooling, and an enormous transfer of resources from Whites to Blacks, the standard deviation between Blacks and Whites has remained at 1.1+, or more than 15 IQ points.[37] The gap has never narrowed except when teaching-to-the-test temporarily raises knowledge scores from rote learning, a poor indicator of innate intelligence.

Businesses have reacted in two ways towards quotas. On the one hand, they want to hire the very best, and that includes testing and selection based on merit alone. On the other however, they want to avoid lawsuits, and it is sometimes easier for them to hire by quotas, even if it is illegal.[38] After all, it is not the top managers who are displaced by less qualified minorities, it is middle management and below. All upper management has to do is add a few more positions for themselves if necessary. The elite always take care of their ownracial solidarity means little to them.

The Left is fond of claiming that the New Right wants to eliminate affirmative action because then the rich can continue to concentrate wealth in the top five-percent.[39] This is rather absurd since probably about half of the richest 5% are a minority themselvesAshkenazi Jewswho were prime movers in bringing about affirmative action. A similar argument is that Griggs has lost ground because of the Right Wing's deteriorating economic condition from affirmative action (which it has not for the elitethe gap between the rich and the poor has widened).[40] It is never considered, that being a meritocratic society, as most modern states are, racial quotas are unjust. To accept that premise would be to admit innate inequality, and that is anathema to the Left, and frankly is rejected by most conservatives as well who prefer to believe it is a lack of hard work that keeps some people down.

Neither the Left nor conservatives rely on a scientific approach that is a rigorous application of testing all existing hypotheses, and then falsifying those that cannot meet scrutiny.[41] As shown above, when it comes to affirmative action and quotas, even the courts have not addressed the question of whether different groups are equally qualified; nor do most academics, bureaucrats, or politicians. The application of science, when it comes to sensitive issues that impact human emotional stances, are generally just ignoredto be fought out in deep confines of academic journals, only to seep out slowly as is deemed prudent.

Again, the tactic of Blacks and their apologists has been to formulate reasons for banning all psychometric tests (personality, ability, intelligence, religiosity, ethnocentrism, etc.of which there are over 3,000 now available). It is argued that since black behavior is so different than White culture, that any comparison between the two using Eurocentric tests causes invidious comparisons, leading to dissonance.[42]

Kevin MacDonald's recent article in The Occidental Quarterly is an eloquent summation of what happens when we do not understand how racial animosity can lead to escalations of conflict and eventually war.[43] Today we are witnessing a replay of the civil rights struggle gone mad in the Westwhere merit has been displaced by racial quotas and racial biases in almost everything we encounter. He outlines the rise of Zionism as a racist/xenophobic movement, which has now enticed the West (some) to help the Jewish state crush its Muslim neighbors. What it shows is, how dangerous it is when racial conflict is allowed to be played out on and emotional scale that cannot be defused through rational dialogue. War in the Middle East will only escalate, because we still do not have a scientific mechanism at resolving conflicts, thanks to our primitive minds.

The evolutionary basis of world views, tribalism, and irrational science.
Are humans capable of establishing a set of rules to be followed when it comes to settling disputes with regards to scientific investigations? Can there be an open and honest discussion of science, even when it touches on issues like race, without it degrading to name calling and derision of people rather than the facts? There is no clear answer to this question, but I will now try to explain why it is so difficult.

In 1993, the Daubert Standard was established by the Federal courts in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, and then reinforced in subsequent court cases. The Daubert standards "pertain to any [employment] selection instrument used or advocated by a plaintiff."[44] The criteria are:

1.   The theory must have been tested, or at least able to be tested.
2.   The theory (& expert) must have (been) published in peer reviewed publications.
3.   There must be a known or potential error rate.
4.   The theory must be generally accepted in the relevant scientific community.
5.   The methods for testing the theory must meet scientific standards.

The authors point out that concepts like tacit knowledge or street smarts advocated by Robert J. Sternberg, multiple intelligences advocated by Howard Gardner, or emotional intelligence advocated by Goleman, are all pseudosciencemeant to distract the public from Jensenist findings: that different races are in fact different in terms of average intelligence and behavioral traits. Science, to be meaningful, has to proceed by rules and not emotions. But is that the way our brains are structured? It doesn't appear so.

As one self-hating white puts it: "I call this the transparency phenomenon: the tendency of whites not to think about whiteness, or about norms, behaviors, experiences, or perspectives that are white-specific. Transparency often is the mechanism through which white decision-makers who disavow white supremacy impose white norms on blacks."[45]

Of course, there are numerous versions of these hidden versions of white racism, but like other pseudosciences, they fail to meet the Daubert criteria, especially number one: these theories cannot be falsified and therefore cannot be validated as even remotely credible.

Being No One is just one of the many recent books that deals with consciousness, and how the mind works.[46] It talks a lot about transparency, but not just for Whites. Being is a process for all species where the real world out there is not the same as the world inside our headsit is only a close approximation. In addition, humans being an especially emotion driven species, have difficulty facing facts when the facts are uncomfortable. So the only way that we can ever understand the real world around us is to let all of the hyperemotional sides to an argument have a say. But when it comes to intelligence and race, this has not been allowed. While one side does research and presents the facts in "peer reviewed publications" (the Jensenists) the other side produces an endless series of rationalizations that never are tested or validated (the Marxists/egalitarians). The Left has folded into a religion, where there is no more science to support their case. It is now a holy war for domination. (From this point on, unless noted, I will be discussing and quoting from Being No One.)

"This is a book about consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the, first-person perspective. Its main thesis is that no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a processand the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model. You are such a system right now, as you read these sentences. Because you cannot recognize your self-model as a model, it is transparent: you look right through it. You don't see it. But you see with it. In other, more metaphorical, words, the central claim of this book is that as you read these lines you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain."

"This is not your fault. Evolution has made you this way. On the contrary. Arguably, until now, the conscious self-model of human beings is the best invention Mother Nature has made. It is a wonderfully efficient two-way window that allows an organism to conceive of itself as a whole, and thereby to causally interact with its inner and outer environment in an entirely new, integrated, and intelligent manner. Consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective are fascinating representational phenomena that have a long evolutionary history, a history which eventually led to the formation of complex societies and a cultural embedding of conscious experience itself. For many researchers in the cognitive neurosciences it is now clear that the first-person perspective somehow must have been the decisive link in this transition from biological to cultural evolution."

All normal functioning humans then have representational states that not only allows us to interact safely with our immediate environment (don't walk off a cliff or get too near a female in the presence of an alpha male), but it also provides us a representational state that includes means of acting as coalitions, fighting wars, fabricating religions, and being able to use deception and self-deception to advance our genes over other genes. As vehicles for our genes, our representational state is our weapon in defense of our self interest.

"What does it mean if we say that a state described as a representational state fulfills a function for a system? This means that the respective physical state within the system only possesses its representational content in the context of the history, the goals, and the behavioral possibilities of this particular system. This context, for instance, can be of a social or evolutionary nature. Mental states possess causal properties, which, in a certain group of persons or under the selective pressure of a particular biological environment, can be more or less adequate. For example, they can make successful cooperation with other human beings and purely genetic reproductive success more or less likely. It is for this reason that we can always look at mental states with representational content as instruments or as weapons."

The representational state then of group conflict, where groups are accused of racism or antisemitism for example, are merely weapons used by one group against another for selective advantageto advance the genes carried in one group over the genes carried by the opposing group. That is, if racism is anything, it is merely the representational state of individuals who belong to different groups and it carries no more moral weight than does sexual urges or hunger. It exists for the systemyour representational self. It also means that if one group uses the weapon of accusatorial actions without proof, they mean to harm in some meaningful way the group being accused. That harm can be anything from a transfer of resources, power and prestige, social standing, sexual favors, or martial harm from one group to the other.

Humans are also capable of creating phenomenal models of not only existing states, but also entirely new possible worlds. We can create in our minds new religions, utopian forms of government, world governments, and all manner of social causes for our existing state of affairs. Science is neither needed nor desired when we are about fabricating these new social phenomenal models. Marxism, Christianity, democracy, fascism, etc. are all models established for the benefit of their advocatesand quite often these wonderful forms of phenomenal states are sold to others by the elite. (Few social movements or changes come from the underclassthe masses only supply the dissatisfaction. Their chosen elite leaders choose the changes and the new arrangements.)

This is also the reason I believe that so many Jews are involved in new movements like Marxism, Zionism, neoconservatism, objectivism, environmentalism, libertarianism, etc. It is not because they as a group necessarily lean to the Left or to the Right, though there may be group differences. As a group, they are simply far more intelligent on average, and tend to create ever-new fabricated realities. Whites also have their share of highly intelligent fabricators of new possible worlds, including my own neoeugenic vision (though I deny that it is utopian and insist it meet the Daubert criteria above in a systematic manner prior to implementation).

We are then a species not just of sexual or violent fantasies, but also fantasies of persecution by our perceived enemies. It is only natural then that if a group is indoctrinated into believing that perceived wrongs are afflicted on them by others, then all forms of creative scenarios can be fabricated (confabulations) to explain their dilemmas. All forms of social problems are then explained away in terms of human intent to harm, where in fact no intent is present. When it is observed that Blacks are less healthy than Whites, it is because of racism, not because Blacks have more difficulty following directions with regards to taking medicine, reducing risk, etc. When it is observed that Blacks pay more for their cars than Whites, it is always because of racism, not because Blacks are less able to understand how to cut a better deal or not load their cars up with unneeded accessories. The list of wrongs is endless, and the forms racism can take are about as long and constantly being recreated to fit the latest observations. Nevertheless, they are never verifiedreal discrimination is rare and it is as likely to be directed at Whites as often as at any other minority group.

"For instance, certain forms of self-representation can make successful cooperation with other human beings more or less probable, resulting in different reproduction rates. This finally leads us to a new and very unromantic, but telling, metaphor. It was first coined by Andy Clark: The phenomenal self can now be regarded as a weapon, developed in a cognitive arms race. Conscious selves are like instruments or abstract organs, invented and constantly optimized by biological systems. If an artificial system developed a rich and flexible form of self-representation, which, however, did not fulfill a function for the system, then it would not generate the kind of mental content which forms the epistemic goal of the current investigation. However, as we have seen above, the conceptual difference between artificial and natural systems has already ceased to be an exclusive and exhaustive difference.Under a teleofunctionalist analysis of phenomenal self-simulation we again discover that, for beings like ourselves, it is much easier to imagine states and activities of the system that are conducive to our survival and procreation; this is the familiar point about sexual and violent fantasies."

Self-representation then is naturally tribal, and we would expect cooperation within groups and between groups forming coalitions against other groups. Group evolutionary strategies for humans is a natural occurrence whenever groups interact with each other for scarce resources, as humans seem to have an insatiable desire for wealth, power and prestige. For reproductive success, wealth is only important when one has more of it than the otherthe absolute amount of wealth is irrelevant beyond basic survival.

Self-representation at the level of the group then is far more irrational than at the individual level. As individual entities, our brains provide us with a fairly accurate representation of our surroundings, little different from what a lizard would see, hear, smell and feel. At the group level however, accurate group-representational models are not necessarily advantageous. It would not be very reproductively beneficial for the male members of a tribe to display cowardice when threatened by a neighboring tribe, nor for the females to make themselves less attractive than the females of a neighboring tribe. Group self-representation models then would act to inflate the in-group's essence or stature over the out-group. Therefore, where groups compete, rational comparisons of different group's innate qualities such as intelligence, xenophobia, extroversion, integrity, etc. becomes especially difficult and in fact becomes a form of warfare. To admit to a lesser state or quality is to subjugate your whole group to another's.

Certainly, some people must have access to their own self-denial of observable facts? We know what we think don't we? Actually, we are very much removed from self- and especially group-representational models.

"Obviously, viewed as a computational strategy, transparent self-modeling drastically reduces computational load. In particular, it prevents the system from being caught up in an infinite regress of self-modeling. Why? It is important to note that self-modeling, in terms of its logical structure, is an infinite process: A system that would model itself as currently modeling itself would thereby start generating a chain of nested system-related mental content, an endless progression of 'self-containing,' of conscious self-modeling, which would quickly devour all its computational resources and paralyze it for all practical purposes. In this way the appearance-reality distinction becomes available (on the level of subjective experience); the difference between actuality and potentiality, the difference between what is real and what is only possible, is itself introduced into the organism's model of reality. The possibility of misrepresentation becomes available for the first time. The real trick however, consists in the fact that in standard situations the phenomenal simulation of possible worlds or situations is always firmly anchored in a comprehensive, transparent model of the world."

Simply put, when our brains evolved over millions of years, there was no need to have access to the mechanisms involved in creating the model of the world around us, nor could it be possible to do so. Likewise, we are unable to accurately model any group of people in relation to another group very accurately because our model is highly biased in our representation of our position within the group. No matter how much we study, men will never really understand female sexuality and vice versa. It was not required for sexual reproduction, and the brain simply did not need for us to have access to that information. All that was required was motivations on the part of women and the motivations on the part of men resulted in procreation. For lizards, this meant males raping females. For humans it is far more complex, but still highly transparent to both sexes. Emotions drive us, not a rational portrayal of the real world around us.

"For those inner states that have been developed early on, it is true from a phylogenetic perspective that they can be integrated into the spatial self-model quite easily. In particular, this is true of emotions: The conscious feeling of gratitude can be heartfelt, a sudden negative experience can shake us to the core, and thinking about our political leadership may turn your stomach. Emotions are always my own emotions, because they are diffusely localized in the body image. Emotions, in particular, confront the phenomenal self with its fundamentally biological nature. Emotions cannot freely be triggered by external stimuli; they need an internal context and a preexisting goal hierarchy to be activated. Biological systems, when subpersonally modeling their own current state and comparing it with certain internally defined goal states, can be confronted with rigid and hard-to-control forms of phenomenal content like panic, jealousy, or falling in love. The sudden occurrence of this kind of content in the conscious self-model, if it is cognitively available, demonstrates how it is bound by certain biological imperatives like the fight for survival and procreation, that is, how strongly it is determined in terms of its functional architecture. By possessing a conscious, emotional self-model we are not only given to ourselves as spatially extended beings, but as beings possessing interests and goals, which, to a considerable degree, are fixed. However low the degree of phenomenal plasticity associated with our emotional self-experience may be, it allows us to feel the degree of our own functional rigidity."

An emotional self-model then is a survival machine, one that is intended to deal with family, kin and neighborsany of which can pose a danger or be helpful. All humans evolved slowly over time to deal with others like themselves, not other races that are radically different. Ethnic hatred or xenophobia is well understood among Semites, and they interact accordingly. Europeans likewise have evolved mechanisms to judge how others like them will behave. We think other races will act with universal moral outrage as we do, and defend the downtrodden everywhere in the world. We can't understand that other races do not have the same "mirror neuronal" systems that allowed us to understand other Europeans. The further apart races are genetically, the less likely they are to understand each other. Third-person perspectives are lost when races that are not alike cannot "read" another's self-representation. Thus social science fails when theories are derived based on models that assume that all races use the same self-representations.

"Such metaphors may turn out to be highly fruitful. If, for instance, we should arrive at the conclusion that the way in which we are given to ourselves on the level of conscious experience has to be interpreted as a deficit, or even a "disease," from a nonbiological perspective, then we may suddenly appear as beings unable to discover our own mental impairments. Anosognosia demonstrates what transparency and autoepistemic closure actually are. It is interesting to note, however, that to a considerable degree we all live our lives under these two constraints, even in non-pathological situations. We might be unable to embody certain intentions we have already generated, and unable to consciously experience this lack. We might be subject to drastic and frequent rearrangements of autobiographical memory, and it would be hard for us to discover this factbecause of the transparency of our conscious self-models. Like anosognostic patients we might have persistent false beliefs de se while never being able to consciously experience this very fact, because they are rooted in the deep structure of our noncognitive model of reality. For this reason, third-person approaches to the structure of self-consciousness are valuable and important for anybody who has a serious commitment to pursuing the classical philosophical ideal of self-knowledge. For this reason theoretical intuitions about what is possible and what is impossible exclusively derived from introspectively accessing our transparent self-model or from deliberately generating phenomenal self-simulations are of little importance to those wanting to operate under a rigorous, rational methodology."

Simply put, unless we adhere to a scientific methodology, one that uses multiple perspectives from Marxists, racists, pedophiles, or the occultwe have no science. That is, no matter what odd beliefs any one individual or group may hold, as long as we hold to scientific principles, while ignoring individual's oddities, science will be stifled by individual and especially group conflict. It is difficult for one person to distort scientific facts for personal gain, but it is quite easy for say a racial group to collectively subvert science for pseudoscience in pursuit of group objectives and goals.

I remember discussing The Nurture Assumption with my sister-in-law,[47] where Judith Rich Harris first proposed that the shared environment was far less important in human development than the non-shared environment. My sister-in-law dismissed Harris's position on the mere fact that Harris was biased because she had adopted childrentherefore she had no credibility. I know my sister-in-law did not read the book, just a review. This invidious use by pseudoscientists of dismissing scientific data based on the "supposed biases" of those presenting the data must be rejected when the data presented is corroborated by others, further studies, and the inability to falsify the results. Harris has withstood these assaults, and her hypothesis is now accepted science: the shared environment diminishes over time for almost every behavioral and cognitive trait while the genetic and non-shared environment take over in importance as children mature. Children go from passive, to reactive to active involvement in determining how they will develop. The radical environmental position of social scientists no longer has any credibility. This is not based on ad hominem attacks of the advocates, but a methodical presentation of the facts.

What Being No One then states unequivocally, is that to know what is real takes multiple self-model perspectives to size up the elephant being inspected by the blind (human transparency). Some may just have to get a little dirty by feeling around the tail, while some will take the current moral high ground and inspect only the trunk, denying that there is any more to know about the elephant at all. Human knowledge cannot proceed forward by dismissing any part of knowledge that feels uncomfortable. This seems so apparent from past efforts to suppress scientific knowledge, and yet the new moralizing gods have again tried to push back progress by attacking the messengers.

The lingering question is then, do people like Gould, Lewontin, Kamin, Rose, Gardner, et al. really believe that there are no behavioral differences between races or are they being deceptive rather than self-deceptive in promoting their moral agenda? Does a tribal adherence to falsifying data give them the moral fortitude to subvert science for a group evolutionary strategy? It seems plainly so, because otherwise they would not be able to sustain the ridicule they endure from mainstream scientists. Being No One explains:

"[I]n biological and social contexts it is frequently advantageous to deceive other conspecifics, as in playing dead or pretending not to notice the presence of a certain desired object, say, a fruit or an attractive male. Deception strategies will be most reliable if they include self-deception, that is, an adequate and appropriate phenomenal self-model. Due to the transparency of the self-model, the correlated phenomenal experience will be one of certainty, of knowing that you know. As many of the case studies in chapter 7 demonstrate, unnoticed and unnoticeable phenomenal misrepresentation can occur at any time. This is particularly true of higher-order or self-directed forms of representation. It is important to understand how such states would not be instances of self-knowledge, but could satisfy constraint 11. If, in addition, my speculative hypothesis is true, that the emotional self-model also functions to internally represent the degree of evolutionary optimality currently achieved, then it follows that certain classes of delusional states will even be emotionally attractive to beings like us."

I have to assume then that many Marxist/egalitarian stances are in fact delusional states that come about because they are evolutionarily attractive from an emotional stance, as are religious, moral and many current value systems. Therefore, in the pursuit of knowledge, it becomes necessary to find a means of setting aside any current barrage of ad hominem attacks against any scientific presentation of data, no matter how much we do not like the results. In fact, eugenics may be the only means of escape from delusional states, as we now understand consciousness:

"There is one obvious field of research at which this question is aimed: the now strongly expanding domain of the mind sciencesscientific psychology, cognitive neuroscience, AI and robotics, philosophy of mind, and the like. More specifically, could it be that the conscious experience of being someone itself hinders growth of knowledge in these disciplines, by making certain theoretical positions or solutions of problems look utterly implausible, dangerously provocative, absurdly humiliating, or simply inconceivable to beings like ourselves? A lot of today's physics, for example, describes the world in a way that is extremely counterintuitive, and certainly hard to conceive of. Yet most of us believe that these theories are among the best mankind has so far created. Basically, we trust those physicists. In the mind sciences things are different, and in an interesting way."

Clearly then, we have the capability to understand extremely unintuitive science as long as it does not intrude upon our preferred moral stance, but are unable to untangle our emotional selves from issues like racism, abortion or genetic engineering. It seems that as humans, we are severely limited in our rationality when certain areas of research are undertaken. Being No One touches on a eugenic solution:

"As we have already seen, there is more than one answer to the question of why this book has the title it has. If it is true that we are neurophenomenological cavemen, then it is also true that mankind is still in a prehistoric stagenot in terms of theoretical knowledge and technology, but in terms of phenomenological knowledge and technology. One more general question is if, in the long run, we want to use our new insights into the nature of consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective to change our own minds. Is it better to be someone or is it better to be no one? Is the current neurophenomenological configuration of Homo sapiens really a good in itself? Is this really something we want to perpetuate and multiply indefinitely? Or should we start to think about improving our conscious model of reality, particularly our phenomenal self-model? Put crudely, we have better theories and we have better computerswhy shouldn't we have better phenomenal selves as well? Traditional notions like 'intellectual integrity' and 'moral integrity' now suddenly possess new and obvious interpretations, namely, in terms of a person having a highly consistent self-model. Ethical behavior may simply be the most direct way of maximizing the internal coherence of the self-model. It could therefore be directly related to the concept of mental health. And it may even be compatible with an intelligent, neurophenomenologically optimized form of rational hedonism."

I interpret the above as an invitation to consider a eugenic solution to integrating the mind into a more rational whole, where our phenomenal self-model has more insight into our emotional and tribal stances. That is, an increasing rationality that can separate our feelings of love, hate, disgust, fear, and loathing of others because of who they are, or what they believe, from our understanding of how they differ from ourselves. At present, this seems to be a difficult task for humans, and conflict is always the result.

"Rage" against the other is never rational, but its use satisfies our lowly humanness, such that we are unable to separate ourselves from highly charged emotional stances. We are "cut off" from the real causes of blind adherence to irrational dogmas. Fortunately, until we can integrate our minds more fully genetically, we can forcibly bind ourselves to principles of scientific investigation as long as we reject personal attacks, and follow the principles of letting the data determine truth.

Matt Nuenke
January, 2004.

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From equal opportunity to equal outcomes: cognitive components in racial conflicts

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