Godel's Proof and The Human Condition - The Basic Essays

Kernel Properties of The Hominid Organism


[This essay is directed to the identification of the 'phenomenological kernels' that account for the mental and physical constitution of 'the human phenomenon and things human' -the etiology of 'the human condition' therein. Necessarily then, they consolidate various characterizations of 'human properties' and bridge some of that soft-science theorization into the 'phenomenology of human-being' as -critically, yet to be commonly and properly understood and accommodated into 'meliorating' that condition.]

CONGREGATIONAL SEXUALITY is a primary property of human evolution, two people 'communing', even homosexual and allowing for no reproduction otherwise, generally 'superceding' two non-communing in one way or another. A genetic property we identify with anthropoids in general, congregational sexuality(*1) is critically underrated as the basis of and permeating everything we identify with humanity: directly or indirectly, 'the human phenomenon and all things human' are consequent, sustaining or promotional of some aspect of sexual expression.

Thruout the world however, sexual expression today is 'little better than of primitive communion': despite civilizational advances -science and technology greatly transforming and influencing that expression, the operations of neither gender reflect a relatively coherent understanding and assimilation of the physiology of either sex and its roles in what is essentially hominid-being sexual expression (Feminism, Male Sex, Evolution and Jail). The thesis here is that insofar as that expression continues to manifest the more or less mechanical mental and physical cast of 'primitive-vertebrate-pecking-order', it will continue to be a major source of 'noise as human condition': however seemingly removed from sex or 'intellectually esoteric', there is no aspect of 'the human phenomenon and things human' that does not reflect evolutional progression in 'sex, cerebration, warm-blooded pecking-order and (the) deliberative capability (next) that makes this statement possible.

(*d) DELIBERATIVE CAPABILITY -'registering and assimilating various stimuli into increasingly complex, hierarchic cogitation', is a property we typically associate with humans and certain primates. Perhaps best identified with our relatively open-ended capacity for mentation and, eventually, reification -'making the abstract concrete', it is this property that distinguishes us by our 'humanity and generation of things human' thru which we are able, in effect, to 'consider these such items and their consequences and implications'(*3). It is in this respect -humans having this capability, that we 'might do better' to advantage ourselves of information we have regarding the physicality of 'how we are constituted' and 'how we have come to be this way': that the existence of any and every organism has come about solely thru the evolution of 'a form more primitive than itself', a consequence of the solely physical properties, circumstances and juxtapositions of matter:

1 - Deliberative capability is the purely physical and only mechanism thru which 'the human phenomenon and things human' come to exist -not 'special insight', nor 'soul', nor 'creative spirit' nor something 'extra-hominid'. Solely 'the nature of matter', we are literally (and physically) 'evolved out of and born into ignorance' -everything evolving out of ignorance alone except (obviously) as influenced by and influencing other -but still purely physical, phenomena and factors likewise assimilated and deliberated out of ignorance.

2 - There is no way for an organism to exist other than experientially, physically registering 'statistically qualifiable, evolutionally significant operation of, by and upon physical-sensation-and-phenomenon'. It is the nature of this still-evolving property consequently, that-

(a) We are destined to continue discovering and 'correcting' misinformation -'The machine goes by itself'(*4) and
(b) It is to our 'benefit' to promote that process. (More in life-style-and-quality -below.)
(*g - on 'inevitable usefulness to the life-form')
[It is inherent of deliberative capability that the mass of new material to be assimilated out of advancing hard science and mathematics increases with time. Because of organism physiological limitations however (The Unemployability Conjecture), practical assimilation naturally lags intellectual hierarchically top-down, thus the effect of this assimilation may eventually result in a significantly different kind of socio/civilizational organization than thus-far known, one perhaps not unlike that of ant or bee colony operational structures and interdependencies -one in which, altho we may understand 'some natural right and freedom of the individual to do his own thing' more or less independently of the system (occupation, life-style-and-quality et cetera), we may also have to 'deliberate what one must do for the organism-whole' (heuristically) regardless of how he feels about it personally. -Nor is this an appeal to socialism, communism or any other 'ism'.]

(*b) 'IDLE-MINDNESS' - There is nothing 'naturally ready-and-present' to occupy 'the unoccupied mind' other than what experience has caused, precipitated or -critically, what someone-or-society may have 'deliberated' to be registrable and registered there. As essential antithesis of 'deliberate' (or even inadvertently 'captive') mental occupation, the 'idle-mind state' is the state of potential occupation 'out' of which deliberative capability operates in the generation of 'knowledge'. It is thus, the physicality of circumstance, situation and the 'idle-mind-state' in particular and alone that underlie the 'freedom of choice' of one's persona and out of which, consequently, 'life-style-and-quality' and the culture of a people evolve. The 'idle-mind state' in this respect, goes unappreciated for the fact of its transiency -that it is occupied immediately by anything from 'physiologically internal' to whatever situation circumstance happens to present -'naturally, deliberately and/or serendipitously' -even to graffiti and 'mindless vandalism'.

[Anyone doubting the existence of 'idle-mind time' and 'idle-mind occupation' need look no further than Dear Abby or Ann Landers for example -for the complaints of wives about retired husbands who, 'having nothing better to do', follow them around the kitchen, the laundry and anywhere else either babbling or telling them how to do their work. Be that what it be, one might also consider the role this property plays in economics today and our use of the resource/environment -GameBoy playing, cell-phone chatting, flicking-on the TV ('nothing better to do'), The Scorpion King? -see 'Business' and 'Making money'.]

What occupation there is, 'genetically speaking', is only whatever 'indefinable primitive idiomatics' there are that attach basic evolution of 'a sexually congregational organism of deliberative capability' -neonate sucking, hand-to-mouth motions, certain imprintings and, growingly, physiological sensitivities and capabilities registering experience thru genetic disposition -learning mechanisms and eventually evolving companionship and sex. What occupation ultimately depends upon then (learning, knowledge), is its physiologically material constitution and the 'dimensions, mass and quality of experience entered and entering that constitution', the antithesis of which is sensory deprivation. -It is the 'how' and 'by what' of that occupation that is a major factor in the human condition. Idle-mind-occupation, consequently, goes unappreciated for how it plays into 'the nature and constitution of human-being'; present-day life-style-and-quality, persona and culture, consequently, continue to be based largely upon 'hominid-being survival-of-the-fittest' pecking-order(*5).

[Primitive and early man had little 'idle-mind time', taken-up as all time was either by just trying to stay alive or recovering from that -largely a matter of where one stood in 'the pecking-order of things'. But one has only to observe someone with 'nothing to do' -clinically, to understand the importance of 'meritable experience' in life-style-and-quality. In the absence of viability-related or motivating circumstances, the idle mind is occupied either 'best as can out of experience' or it defaults: the 'financially able to indulge themselves' do so, for example, and the destitute or unemployable beg, steal, vandalize, drink or drug-out. It remains the 'how' and 'by what' of that occupation that is a major factor in the human condition.]

The thesis here is that it is not true that we 'know' 'how' 'what kind' of 'idle-mind occupation' should or can play into 'life-style-and-quality and what the system can bear' -except deliberatively and heuristically. In terms of such an organism and its increasingly complex society, it is rather 'a poverty of progressive, communal experience' that leads to 'an impoverished communal presence and response', and it is the 'human-organism-advancing occupation' of this idle-mind state by physically experiential knowledge (-there is no other) that determines the meaning and content of 'hominid-being', 'the human condition' and 'the nature and constitution of human-being'.

(*2) THE IDIOMATICS is 'the body of generalized beliefs, thought processes and modes of confrontation and expression variously common to most peoples of the world'; essentially 'what it is the nature of things to be' (especially men and women: 'You can't change human nature') or 'what they ought to be' -a kind of hominid-being ethos. It includes for example, both the 'inner rights' of 'looking good' and 'having fun' and the outer but universal interrelationships and expressions of 'nurturing (soft) womanhood', 'provident (strong) manhood' and the 'propriety of having children', of 'belonging' and the 'primacy of one's kind and ways' (-expressions of shame and insult -'saving face', machismo, 'gay pride', 'self esteem' etc), of practices in 'powers unknowable to us' (religion of any form) and of various work and play criteria and ethics -'merit', 'worth', 'ownership' et cetera. (See Organizational Aspects of 'The Human Phenomenon and Things Human' and Roget's Thesaurus and 'The System of Human Experience').

What the idiomatics 'do', in effect, is constitute a vocabulary and structure -society and government, for manipulating 'daily-essential situation and circumstance'. Little more than 'communicational glue', they inherently lag 'timely assimilation of the phenomenology'. It is this logical softness, consequently, which accounts for the relative ease with which people factionalize religious, political and other 'truths' -'the human condition'. -There is no mystery in the observation that discussion, territoriality, disagreement, manifest pecking-order and even violence, for example, and the various governmental and other organizational structures under which they exist, all have certain universally common developmental, procedural, 'textural' and inherently non-resolutional elements about them.

'The idiomatics' then, invest the persona and 'momentum' of the human condition in such a way that internal differences and even small factionalisms that may be relatively unobtrusive in the general sustenance of isolated peoples invariably become the first and major source of 'disharmony' as those peoples 'overpopulate' against each other -incompatibly, under 'what the system can bear', and they are important -in a 'pejorative' sense, because they predispose communication to failure by belief in 'phenomenology that isn't'. -'Melioration of the human condition can be expedited', consequently, only to the extent that that 'phenomenology' is corrected.

(*c) MOMENTUM - We are 'physiologically disposed' to the daily routines that characterize us, and there is therefore, very much an equally physical momentum in 'the human phenomenon and generation of things human': it is only under some system of atoms disposed to the survival and propagation of the human organism that an automobile exists and is driveable and driven. What is important here is the understatement of momentum in 'the mass of humanity and its million-and-a-half-years nature-of-evolution-driven idiomatics' -day-to-day, generation-to-generation propulsion of the human condition. 'You can't change people' and 'That's the way people are', but 'the nature and constitution of human-being' is increasingly and ultimately a matter of 'the heuristic determination of life-style-and-quality under what the system can bear'. The only question then, is to what urgency this momentum may be understood and reconstituted so as to 'meliorate various otherwise inherent disasters'.

(*f) [PAIN AND LIFE-STYLE-AND-QUALITY - It is intrinsic of warm-blooded vertebrate evolution that pecking-order is based on pain and that 'successful peckers' consequently enjoy something of 'an accordingly convenienced viability'. Given that, 'deliberative capability' and certain other mutations, hominid evolution is generally marked by 'peckers one-upping and superceding each other by successive assimilation of ecosystem constitution' -idle-mind-time eventually, and 'life-style-and-quality' -the whole of such evolution, 'a machine that goes by itself'.]

PAIN constitutes a major 'tool and criterion' underlying the hierarchization and generally upward complexity of vertebrate evolution -what one animal learns to avoid in the course of its basic survival -and what 'one hominid applies another in the deferral of pain to himself and his own'. Whatever our interactions, their evolution reflects this 'survival-based, downwardly-exacted facilitation of viability. (-Nor should the 'physical discomfiture or depression of absent sex-and-companionship' be considered less than painful.)

But because pain is not 'usually encountered or acceptably used' in general daily life, it is not appreciated how critically integral that 'primitive application of pain and avoidance of possible pain' were to our evolution, and how, consequently, pain continues to underlie 'the human phenomenon and all things human' -that it is only thru 'further deliberative capability' in addition (that) we have constructed upon 'relatively mechanistic pecking-order and survival-of-the-fittest', the personas, culture and life-style-and-quality, the family, government and all other structures we presently associate with 'human-being'. (See Pecking Order, Competition, Institution, Government and Economic Policy.)

It is increasingly 'the nature of man' however, to find his pain-and-pecking-order-based institutionalizations constraining his life-style-and-quality and to find it 'increasingly practical', consequently, to degrade them in that progression. What this means is that despite 'a certain usefulness of societal and civilizational structures primitively based in pain, those structures will continue to be superceded under increasingly phenomenological, inherently broader-based and 'better intellectualized' criteria(*6).

LIFE-STYLE-AND-QUALITY is a personal holding more or less defined by the whole of 'idle-mind-time, the substance of that occupation and the potentials for both', and it exists, essentially, as 'the substance-and-measure of idle-mind-occupation in excess (or deficit) of occupation towards some basic viability'(*7).

Humans generally supercede each other not by 'reinventing the wheel' or by arbitrarily adopting the idle-mind-occupation of others, but by assimilating routine mechanisms of viability and, more generally, by learning, optimizing and exploring-for (oftentimes unknowingly) other 'viability-advancing properties of econiche constituency' -essentially increasing knowledge: the greater the assimilation of the phenomenology, the greater the configuration space entering both viability and life-style-and-quality(*8). -Whatever the course of human evolution 'appears' to be or have been in the past then, it is the nature of life-style-and-quality -superceding existing 'propriety', 'value' and other idiomatic expressions of 'human nature' basis and development, to be increasingly determined by 'phenomeknowledgy'.

(*e) ARISTOCRATIZATION AND VIABILITY - The supercessions of mankind -one genus or strain of hominids by another, false starts and dead branches included, is characterizable as an 'aristocratization' in that each such hominid is 'increasing-potentially capable of manifesting a more phenomenologically knowledgeable viability and idle-mind-occupation' -a more sophisticated life-style-and-quality. In this respect, 'aristocratization' naturally entails 'an optimization of its physiological constitution and viability under what the system can bear' as, ultimately, an only way of 'optimizing life-style-and-quality'. -Thus despite having no way of knowing how life-style-and-quality might be 'better constituted' than thru (present example) 'materiality', to some aristocratization it will forever be 'increasingly and heuristically determined by knowledge -and what materiality develops from that'.


Human-being, lifestyle-and-quality and 'the heuristic determination of their nature and constitution' are a matter of 'taking these kernels into steward- and arbitership', a matter of upon 'what knowledge' aristocratization is to determine its fit into this 'black-box-of-an-earth ecosystem'(*a). This depends first upon the physical nature and constitution of the human organism (black-box limitations and requirements, population size et cetera) and consequently upon our 'sophistication for deliberating life-style-and-quality out of that physical nature and constitution': the 'better' we understand the implications of a human organism in earth-system dynamics, 'the better we are able to deliberate life-style-and-quality under what the system can bear'(*9). -Rhetorically then, as 'properly phenomenological' questions-
  • What is The 'Black Box' Nature and Course of a human-organism living in relatively stable harmony with 'what the system can bear' (-size, distribution, constitution -age, health, physical and mental capabilities, life-span et cetera)? -one whose idle-mind-time is not occupied in 'arbitrarily exploitational mechanisms disturbing such stability'? -Within some 'envelope' of physical and mental necessities -including minimal but not 'pejoratively exploitational life-style-and-quality', what is the 'measure' of man-hours-labor-per-capita required for such basic viability?

  • -And given such 'reasonably normalizing (black-box) constraints', 'what is the number of only such normally constituted and accordingly occupied human-organisms upon which a continuing, stable progression of mankind may be deliberated?' -What is 'the unit of basic human-organism viability'? -What are the black-box criteria upon which one might begin the heuristic determination of the nature and constitution of human-being out of its inseparable 'earning the right to what' of life-style-and-quality?

[The material of these two questions is the subject of Unemployment and Economic Policy. See also, Evolution, Autonomy and Aristocratization for further discussion regarding 'congregational viability' and (eventually) political and economic implications.]


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First posted: November 7, 1995; Last modified May 27, 2010

*1 - Companionate sexuality and deliberative capability reflect a coevolution towards thinking-and-doing beyond the physical limitations of one body alone to the evolutionally and progressively expeditious cooperation or co-use of another's. It is only thru broad and pervasive present human confrontation and interaction that the phrase 'congregational sexuality' (here) effectively supercedes what was, even into relatively modern times, primitive sex-and-companionship (which, uncoincidentally, need be either monogamous or 'harmonious'). -As to communion the frontal sex of humans and chimpanzees says it all. (See also The Etiology of Homosexuality (and Divorce)
*3 - (Regarding 'these such items-') We have accumulated an understanding of ourselves and our universe that has at least several thousand years misinformation evolved into it; the conjuration of spirits, for example, as at any 'primitively evolving (and ignorant) deliberation', surfaced first only as an unperceived coalescence. Eventually however, such perceptions did and do still evolve, 'reifying' for contextual or paralogical manipulation, sensations unexplainable thru otherwise 'better known' physical phenomena.
There are, further, 'limitations to human thought', and it is not true that 'man will always find a way' for resolving his problems, except within those limitations -most certainly not all we identify with 'the human condition'. God, economic theory and 'music appreciation' for example, are physical products of genetics and experiences in 'speed and depth of process' physically registered and relatively fixed by properties of physical matter: contrary to common belief -especially in 'creative' professions (and allowing for genetic and other imprinting), nothing develops except out of purely physical basis, registration and mechanism.
In effect, deliberative capability is absolutely defined in and limited by purely physical phenomena to 'assimilation or conjecture' of such and only such as 'of that phenomenology' -a 'faculty' and nothing more, an assurance of nothing except as a function of 'what' phenomenology registers and how it is assimilated.
*4 - Evolution being what it is, there is of course always some possibility that some 'lesser' next hominid will stamp us out -only to have his deliberative capability eventually operating under some similarly general mechanisms.
One might consider further, what fills the minds of children sensory-deprived of 'civilization' by poverty, drugs, unemployment and war, children who have little sense of direction but to grow up into the lessers, outcasts or criminals of society. -Or how about the slot-machine-playing for hours by old people with money who have nothing better to do?

*5 - One might ask what 'the nature and constitution of human-being' is (or life-style-and-quality for that matter) given a science-and-technology continuously increasing idle-mind-time, but still only fixed-rate-physiologically-able to create idle-mind occupation. 2nd and especially 1st-world countries for example, reflect an increasing mass of population and 'substance' of occupation (life-style-and-quality) of questionable (if not 'inordinate') consumption seriously affecting 'what the system can bear': one need only consider the etiology of such phrases as 'throw-away generation' and 'functionally illiterate'.
*6 - Apart from a pecking-order 'texture' easily discernible in virtually all institutionalization, there is in the matter of abortion, an excellent example of the role of pain in human affairs: fetal 'pain' or 'life' ('soul' thankfully disconsidered) can be, but are not, typically, qualified to anything of a 'phenomenological integrity' in 'pro-life' rationale, whereas 'pro-choice' and the consequences and implications of abortion on the other hand, can easily be determined to have properly phenomenological substance. (Nor does tearing the wings off a fly 'hurt' it ['How do you know what hurts a fly?'] -forensic integrity is all.)
Mental' pain or 'hurt' on the other hand (that is, other than related to sex-and-companionship), is almost entirely a matter of one's idiomatics and circumstances or situations of life-style-and-quality -financial or religious for example. -And therein is another problem, that it is idiomatics and noumenalisms, with their primitive origins to some great degree, pain, that obscure or divert the 'properly phenomenological consideration' of pain in human affairs.
*7 - Life-style-and-quality must be understood not for 'materiality' (generally hominid-being) by which it is commonly 'measured', but as a 'mentally and physically manifest sophistication appreciating the phenomenology and its system-of-human-experience relationals'. 'Sophistication' as used here derives from Webster's Third New International Dictionary definition-
sophisticated : deprived of native or original simplicity: as a: highly complicated : many sided : COMPLEX ... b: WORLDLY-WISE, KNOWING 3: devoid of grossness : SUBTLE: as a: supremely cultured : finely experienced and aware b: intellectually appealing : devoid of obvious traditional or popular appeal.
*8 - It is 'the nature of life-style-and-quality' -convolutions of the hominid brain, 'connections' potential of threading ever more connections in nature, breadth and depth of the phenomenology of the configuration space- that identifies and determines 'sophistication' as an ultimating criterion of human-being. Science or technology or 'art', it is this sophistication by which one hominid 'understands' the inability of another to grasp something of another aperture into the further phenomenology of matter and, essentially, supercede him. -It would be presumptuous in the highest degree to identify 'the flights into phenomenology unknown' of either Kristoff Penderecki (De Natura Sonoris) or Kurt Godel (Godel's Proof) for example, as other than manifesting the continuing evolution of hominids by supercession thru deliberative capability.
*a - That any aspect of 'the human phenomenon and things human' is construable as 'black-box' (inevitably to be so, it turns out) is developed in The 'Black Box' Nature and Course of Human Existence
*9 - It is a fact of life today that few of us have realistically based ideas about our 'minimal requirements' -that 'some of us just have to have 8 hours sleep' is never 'clinically established' for example (-and how do coiffures fit in?); how is it furthermore, that so much of 1st and 2nd world populations are not only 'good-life stuffed' (food, living accommodations etc) but cannot in addition, seem to be able to do without 'relegating' menial work and lesser jobs to masses of the 3rd world effectively proliferating beneath them more or less to that end? This such substance is the material of two very short essays, The Base-domain of Human Requirements and Pecking Order, Competition, Institution, Government and Economic Policy.