Category Philosophy

The very wide field of philosophy

The realist versus the optimistic idiot

Geir Isene 10 Comments

From a discussion on the ITIL Alumni LinkedIn group:

Brendan Martin:
Geir and me have several ideas a week for possible projects. Some of these ideas are tested, some succeed but most fail. We don’t mind. If you don’t shoot, you will never score.

Our latest idea is different. It is so simple. I still however believe that maybe 1000 people around the world were thinking of the same idea at the same time we sang “Eureka!”.

But first, what makes simple ideas succeed. I wonder why Dropbox succeeded, why Twitter succeeded, why Facebook succeeded, why the ipod succeeded. All of these ideas had competition. Maybe they all had great business plans but few actually got the idea “in the zone”. Learning to put your ideas “in the zone” gives them energy. Along with perseverance, simple ideas may succeed.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” Mark Twain.

Geir Isene:
The nay-sayers are almost always right; “No, no that idea will never work”. Because most ideas fail in execution. This is also how they treat their own ideas before they even get spoken. And that is why they never try. And to prove their own rightness, they will try to convince everybody around them that their ideas will also fail.

But our creative fellow, the yeah-sayer, is a hopeless optimist, never giving up – even after a thousand ideas have been shot down, he still musters the stupidity to give it another shot. And once in a blue moon, a crazy idea does succeed – sometimes against all odds, sometimes because it slips by before anyone could see it to shoot it down.

And then you get real change. Real positive impact.

A radical new view of the upper Scientology levels; OK here goes…

Geir Isene 1,255 Comments

With reference to my previous article titled “A radical new view of the upper Scientology levels”, and with the recent “cat-out-of-the-bag” in a comment section of this blog, I have decided to drop the bomb.

I could have made this a short story or included anecdotes and fluff in order to make it all more interesting. Instead I go for the straight-to-the-point-approach for the sake of brevity, letting your comments do the rest.

  • If the theory behind the OT levels as laid out by LRH is true, then we would have a large number of beings turning up for auditing that were ready to run a very different process than the ordinary Bridge (as covered in OT VI material). But we do not see that. Except for some loose rumors, not one single being has been verified as having showed up out of the estimated more than 200 million. This is a discrepancy like no other.
  • I am often very conscious when I dream, and I find myself creating scenery and people in order to create a game when I sleep. I create people that I then let run on their own, and from that point on, they are uncontrollable by me in order to make the game real.
  • The reactive mind is a collection of stuck viewpoints (engrams) that remain outside of a person’s control until inspected thoroughly. What if there were old, forgotten analytical viewpoints similar to the people of my dreams? Viewpoints that I created and that I no longer take responsibility for and when I through auditing do take responsibility for them, I would conclude that the one creating them was “ME”.
  • If the above is the actuality, then one could dispense with all the confidentiality or sci-fi and treat the Bridge as a continuous handling of reactive and analytical viewpoints in order for the person to “collect himself” and “become whole”. The processes would be just the same, but the whole perspective would be dramatically different. It would make the whole Bridge less mystical or intriguing, less controversial or sexy. But it would also make the whole Bridge an exercise in 100% Responsibility.

There are more reasons why I believe this to be a more factual description of what is really going on when doing the Scientology OT levels, but this should suffice to start the discussion.

Note: The readers’ comments contain confidential upper level Scientology material. If you believe that any such material can hurt you (which may be a self-fulfilling prophecy, a sort of reverse placebo), then do not read the comments to this blog post.

Sailing in Greece

Geir Isene 33 Comments

Back to sailing in Greece – and this time for real 🙂

The amazing Hydra

With our newly acquired sail boat, we are now sailing all on our own among the Greek islands, my wife an I and our three boys. The word Tranquility comes to mind. It’s something else to be so close to the forces of nature and not go against it like with a motor boat, but instead be one with those forces.

Being at sea is great, being on the islands is great. Handling the boat goes better than expected. It’s pure pleasure. This easter is a family-only trip. During July, we will have several friends visiting as we take the boat for a four week stint. The rest of the time, the boat is hired out to anybody wanting to go sailing in Greece (with or without sailing experience). Yeah, tell me if you want a piece of Tranquility.

The Oceanis 473

The inside

The boat’s name is Orama – a dream almost out of reach that is nevertheless reached. She’s a 47,3 foot beauty, majestically gracing the seas. Although my father was a seaman all his life, I never previously envisioned myself as one. I never knew what I missed out on. I am having realizations about life and the universe as I contemplate Quantum Mechanics while looking out over the ocean. Coupled with love for family, friends and Nature, this experience gives rise to another book project.

I am a work in progress and I gather inspiration from anywhere I can. From comments on this blog included.

Thank you for participating in the creation of this blog by simply reading it.

WOIM version 1.3 released

Geir Isene 8 Comments

WOIM is a methodology to describe anything – any state, item(s), pattern, action, process, transition, program, instruction set etc. So, you can use it as an outliner, a ToDo list handler, a process design tool, a data modeler, or any other way you want to describe something.

I just released version 1.3

A few minor errors were corrected and one important feature was added; The ability to reuse any part of a WOIM list based on context. It is now very easy to write a process that can be reused without using a reference or duplicating the process. An example would be if you wanted to tell someone to first do something with “apples”, then do the same sett of actions with “oranges” and then with “grapes” (like peeling them and cutting them to small pieces or something). You would simply write the procedure like this:

[apple,orange,grapefruit] Make ready for putting it into the cake 
 Peel 
 Cut into small pieces 
 Sprinkle some sugar on the pieces

The document describing WOIM in detail is available at the usual place.

Scientology & scientific standards

Geir Isene 511 Comments

Home town of Galileo

Galileo Galilei has been rightfully called the Father of Modern Science. He broke with the long standing tradition of belief through authority, something he was severely punished for by the Church.

Until Galileo introduced the standard of “proof by experiment”, scientists would believe something to be true because it conformed to the belief of the Church or because enough consensus could be gathered.

By modern scientific standards, a conjecture remains as such until it can be proven by experiment to be true or false. This is aptly summed up in the motto of The Royal Society of London; “Nullius in verba” (take nobody’s word for it)

By Galileo’s standard, nothing is true or false because some authority says so, or because the source of the theory is an honorable fella or because he is a liar. A theory has to be proven true or false by actual experiment.

Now, why should Scientology get a free pass as regards to this scientific standard? Why should we believe L. Ron Hubbard when he says that his Auditing Technology works? We shouldn’t. It must be tested.

Why should we believe a critic of Scientology when he says “it is all crap” because “Hubbard is a liar”? We shouldn’t. Again, it has to be tested.

I remain befuddled as Church staff counters a question with “because Hubbard says so” or a critic tries to “prove” that Scientology is a fake by pointing to Hubbard’s personality or life. It boils down to intellectual dishonesty, emotional knee-jerk reactions and sloppy judgments.

A radical new view of the upper Scientology levels

Geir Isene 400 Comments

I have recently reached an epiphany about the Scientology OT levels. I have come to a new conclusion as to what is actually being handled and why the processes work. Having gone all the way to the top of what Scientology can offer in spiritual improvement, I can see an interesting pattern that puts the upper levels in a new perspective.

As I have written before, I have had excellent gains on these spiritual levels. But with my new viewpoint, there are reasons to believe that my gains could have been faster.

With my new take on these levels, there is no need for the confidentiality or mystique or any of the sci-fi.

However, I am hesitant to publish my views because it would include getting into the confidential materials of the OT levels as they are described by Hubbard.

I invite your views on how I should proceed here.

Update: The post where I revealed my views on the OT levels generated more than 1200 comments: A radical new view of the upper Scientology levels; OK here goes…

Religion and science

Geir Isene 102 Comments

There has been numerous efforts to bridge the domain of religion with the domain of science. But are they in need of bridging?

I would like to offer a definition of these two domains for your digesting:

The domain of science covers what can be objectively falsified.

The domain of religion covers what can be only subjectively falsified.

Given these two definitions, I am not sure whether they need any bridging except for pure tolerance of each other.

A proof against determinism?

Geir Isene 52 Comments

Could this actually hold?

Please disprove the following:

  1. For a system to be deterministic, its underlying rules must be consistent.
  2. For a system to be deterministic, its underlying rules must be complete.
  3. No system of rules can be both complete and consistent per Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.
  4. Thus no system can be deterministic.

FYI: This proof dawned on me while researching Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems – but I realize that points 1 & 2 above may perhaps be invalidated by presenting cases for deterministic systems with incomplete or inconsistent rule sets. Can such cases exist?

Update (2011-01-30): After some good comments, I offer this:

  1. Thesis: The universe contains all there is and all there ever will be, it is a complete and closed system and causally deterministic (Laplace’s demon)
  2. According to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, such a system would have to contain paradoxes (inconsistencies), potentially rendering the system indeterministic.
  3. To prove the thesis of a causally deterministic universe, one would have to prove (why) the universe would never encounter any such paradoxes breaking the determinism – and prove why the universe itself would never encounter Turing’s Halting Problem when deciding any effect ever in the universe.

Triangles in Scientology

Geir Isene 86 Comments

Many years ago a friend and I started mapping out all the triangles in Scientology and started adding many more.

You may know the ARCU triangle where “Affinity”, “Reality” and “Communication” equates to “Understanding”. There is also the other triangle making up the Scientology symbol (the “S” with two triangles) – the KRC-triangle: “Knowledge”, Responsibility” and “Control”. Even though we didn’t find any references from L. Ron Hubbard as to what those three interconnected elements would equate to, we figured out it should be “Ability”.

Then there is the “BE”-“DO”-“HAVE” witch should equate to perhaps “Existence”. Then there are the three properties of a thetan described by LRH in the book “Science of Survival”: “Power”, “Intelligence” and “Tone” (equating to Beingess?). Thetan-Mind-Body equals a person. Past-Present-Future is time. And there are many more.

Let’s see if we can map more of existence in this fashion. LRH was onto something with this concepts of triangles – there are obvious parallels in the physical sciences such as three spacial dimensions and three quark colors.

Want to pitch in with a new triangle?