Tuesday, 4 June 2024 ------------------------ Hello. All is well. God is love. Why do humans dominate the planet? What makes us superior to all other living things on this planet? When I say dominate, I mean in terms of agency to move and use matter. I gues you could say some forms of bacteria are quantifiably more dominant in terms of numbers. Our cognition and physical bodily mechanics to express it are the obvious answers to this; it's not really a revelation. However, I'm interested in looking into the specifics of cognition that promote agency. Continuing with cognition, we can say it's our ability to imaginatively conceptualize reality. We can perceive reality beyond the physical. It allows us to make stuff. We combine things to improve our agency. But in which way are we the creators of the driving force, the motivator, to expand our agency? If we look at other animals. It seems survival and reproduction are the key drivers that promote agency. It motivates the living thing to sustain itself and care to reproduce so offspring can continue their agency. I'm probably going to look more into understanding animals as they are very varied in function. Especially in social function, which is what I'm mostly interested in understanding for humans' cognition and superior agency. On a personal level, our social function interests me a lot. I often see myself as an outsider trying to understand how humans socialize. I may be autistic. But how does autism affect sexuality? That I should look into. I don't really know other than I've read that people with untypical sexuality or sense of gender are usually also on the spectrum. Personally, I see myself as a biological male with a mix of masculine and feminine traits. Of course, we have to recognize that our understanding of masculinity and femininity is influenced by our imaginative cognition, but I think it's fair to say there are biological patterns. I imagine our physical body and its components, like hormones, will impact our conceptualization of gender. It's something I'd like to look more into. It's fascinating that we can be sexually attracted to the same sex without it serving an obvious functional purpose like reproduction. How much of that is influenced by nature and nurture? My gut feeling is that it must be highly influenced by nature. I can't imagine nurture being able to influence that? Another thing I'd like to look into. Taking from my own experience, I have a repulsion when I think of sexual intimacy between two men, similar to if you don't like a particular food, so I at least figure I'm heterosexual, as I don't have that when I think about a man and a woman. I think NSA would conclude something similar. But I wouldn't say I'm typical when it comes to being heterosexual, either. It's not a driving force of mine when I think of how other peers my age were seemingly obsessed with it. Indulging in sexual activity in itself is comparable to indulging in eating sugary foods for me. I'm only talking of sexual activity alone, as I've never been drawn to have physical intimacy with someone else because I find that somewhat gross. I understand its bonding and reproduction purposes. I'm just not as drawn to it to the degree I find others to be. I'm sexually attracted to women, but I may be a bit of a germaphobe? For example, I avoid touching door handles in public restrooms or in general really. I can only overcome my fear of germs with a little bit of dissociation. I can do anything in that state, I've learned after regularly cleaning toilets in boarding school. I would say I'm a rational germaphobe, a bit oxymoronic, yes. I did spend some time in the hospital at a young age. Those are many of my earliest childhood memories, so that may have some influence on that. Pure speculation. I went a bit off a tangent. What I was trying to figure out is how much our sexuality is physically or socially driven and how it motivates agency? Something I want to look more into. What I typically hear of about this is that dominance hierarchy is driven by sexuality in terms of being a selection thingy for reproduction? This may be a pattern in nature, but how can our imaginative cognition transcend this? I don't know if this is because I'm autistic, but I see people are highly driven by social status. I'm not inherently driven by that. I see it as a means and will reduce my perceived status if it serves my end better. I'd consider that to be one significant factor in my success. If I give people social status, they're happy to give their time or money to me. If I was driven by social stuff like this, would I've been able to do that as effectively as I did? On my Minecraft servers, when talking with random players, I kept being asked why I didn't have an owner title if they found out. At some point, many people thought it was someone else who was the owner of one of the servers. How am I socially driven? I seem to have little intuitive understanding of social hierarchies. I don't identify as being somewhere on some hierarchy ladder. Is this an advantage or a disadvantage? If I couldn't intellectually understand it, I think it could get me in trouble. With some intellectual understanding, I see it sorta as advantageous in our current technological society. It gives me agency. However, it can also lead to confusion as to what one seeks. Hmm. I remember in physical and social settings like school, I always sensed some difficulties, as I would sometimes be dominant or submissive depending on the setting and my goal, which, thinking back on it, I must have been very weird to be around. Perhaps that is why I didn't really get bullied much, but people mostly just left me alone. I'm not sure. Perhaps my sense of what will serve agency is more malleable. Does it allow me to either perfect my intentions or become extremely confused? I don't know. I'm just speculating. At the start, I sensed that money would give me agency. I wasn't wrong. Money is basically a store of social power, but I realized it wasn't the ultimate form of agency. It was limited to a context. I wonder if going beyond seeing one context is another autism thing? What I find is that more normal people intuitively form absolute contexts? A difficulty to switch between contexts in terms of their perceptual experience. I think this is also what causes my insanity, but it has advantages if you have time to go through things. I googled love in religions, and I saw love is a big part of it. I sense the idea of love in Christianity is similar to what I'm looking into. I think love is next level agency. Selfish driven agency is kinda limited. The practical difficulty is how to make the gap between them. It seems it failed along the way. I think one issue is that we forgot the power of love because we got hung up on the flaws in stories used in religion and selfishly driven people corrupting it. If one could make god purely about love as an emergent force could religion function better in a more advanced society? Who knows? Like this is how I've been able to adopt a sense of god, at least the spirit where the true agency is, and I'm a person that doesn't understand absolute knowledge. I guess there is a fundamental gap I may be missing in terms of social considerations, as I have to remember that I don't see social stuff in the same way. How do you make one understand the power of love when they can't feel it? That's a difficult thing because people will look at it from an intellectual perspective, but they have to connect with it fully, integrating it with their feelings, their value or belief system thingy. Another thing is that love requires a ridiculous amount of competence to wield. I think that's why religion also failed because if you corrupt love, you can make people commit great atrocities. Will humanity rise to the agency of godly love or stay at limited selfish kin bound love? In any case, I find this interesting and I think I will focus my learning around understanding this. Perhaps I'm completely wrong? Who knows? A dream I had as a kid before too much money obsession was to be part of doctors without borders but I may have to accept I don't have the competence. I've at least committed to 1000 writings before deciding on anything. I've also realized that one must consider more abstract love in order to make love competent. This is not something I really understand yet though. It's incredibly freeing when you're driven by love. But as I said it requires care as you have to understand your possibilities in reality to act in love competently. To feel love and act in love are a bit different I think. I don't fully comprehend it yet, especially with consideration of divergences in cognition. Simplified, you could say godly love is unbounded rationality in some sense, which we obviously don't have, but if we want to expand agency, it seems worth looking into.