Sjewperpowers & genetic determination

Neurons failing, I put out a manic late-night rant on Noetic understanding, on what is a touchy subject for me.

Cochin Jews, of which my grandmother and great-grandmother can nominally be considered Halachically related to. Though this is really sham because Cochin Jews were paterlineally determined. My admixture falls ~10-15%, but my father only had contact with his grandmother – as the father is unknown. He was on communist sympathizer watchlist with local police, maybe higher. I’m not really Jewish. I’m not Jewish enough that I can consider this part of my identity, other than my father having the closest familial relationship be his grandmother (moreso than his parents), and my grandmother and grandfather being dearest to me. Genetic relationships, which bolster connectivity between generations of a similar phenotype are a solid way to my mind of determining lineage and propagation of genes through offspring. Even the most ‘solid’ findings in intelligence determine heritability of intelligence between siblings is ~0.4. I find this to be a bullshit statistic, insofar as it’s probably caused by an IQ differential between the parents.

But I have a theory to expound. Determining factor in Jewish identity (as in any identity, but magnified here) is perhaps, because of such deep exclusion and genetic differences. These factors are underdetermined now, based on random admixture samples which don’t really account for the impact of certain genetics on actual behaviour. Which might be more reliably or more accessibly traced through phenotypic closeness between relatives. The choices a single individual of the high impact group makes, is important to note. Of course, all ethnicity as traditionally conceived, % of DNA that comes from somewhere, is largely a sham and is based on self-identification. One should be wary of any sites which produce admixture proportions, if you are doing anything beyond identifying geographic and ethnic background. I do not trust or believe in any of the bullshit claims about boosting your IQ through a +4 IQ point gene ‘improvement’. First of all, IQ is a tradeoff in this circumstance. Are you increasing the phenotypic IQ, or are you increasing actually existent

Orthodox Jews do not consider someone Jewish if they are not religiously practicing. And this is an impactful factor to them in whether their genetic covenant continues — whether someone remains or continues to be ethnically Jewish. Reform Judaism is morally & metaphysically more Christian (see: how Reform Judaism was established based off of German Idealism and Kantianism by the original Reform Jewish theologians). Both accept gert.

But why? How could an ethnic group also see conversion as a reality? My thesis is that the cultural and civil practices of the Jews are a proven determination of how one can “become Jewish”, because they adhere to a long line of practices which solidify and codify the practice of being Jewish, which proviene then physically from them.

My grandmother, and my father, in many ways were ‘captured’ by the metaphysical ideas behind Reform Judaism. My great-grandmother, being a convert to Roman Catholicism basically to an Orthodox Jew had no relation to Judaism. Then, the ethnic component of Judaism to Orthodox is based around the religion.

Not so with secular Jews and Reform Jews, who obviously have “Jewperpowers”, given their outsized contributions and influence (can we get them to control the weather? Is Peter Thiel working on a Jewish space laser?) A central idea behind Reform Judaism (I can’t find the source I was working with, and Gemini longhoused me into believing this is false through AI summary), or some other progressive movement I forget, is that Jews have a form of divine intellectual capacity to understand both the divine, and therefore the world. I mention this idea in the section on 1 Corinthians, in which I posit that access to the Spirit as a method of revelation of the real world, is a real thing.

I don’t deny this. In fact, I even go so far as to affirm it. But I have many motivated reasons here, though for metaphysical reasons I don’t go discounting them as reasons not to believe in the reality of the fact. Abduction, post-facto reasoning, and the generation of novel theses (see Chomsky’s philosophy of science), are the essence of reasoning.

The nature of reasoning is less that you can justify what you’re saying, though this is an important aspect. It’s more about how you are able to exist within the preconditions for truth. What I mean is explained simply thus: You walk into a store, and you go into the aisle where there is salami. You state positively that this is the place where you find salami. Person B walks in and they say ‘there is no salami in this store’. Your reasoning behind why you found salami is not actually clear: ‘Oh, I found salami because this is where salami is kept in the store’. Okay, so you have preconditions for the truth claim you’re making. And the other person is lacking those truth conditions. You cannot really go about proving the reality of your claim without those truth conditions.

Let’s take another example. You go to a car mechanic, and the car mechanic says to you: ‘x component is defective’. You then say ‘no, y component which is affecting x component is defective’. In a sense, you are more correct, causally. But both statements are true. Person B then walks in and accepts the reality of what the mechanic says, but denies your Ontology of the situation. ‘No, there is only something defective with x. If there were something defective with y, that would be a separate issue.’ You have a truth condition which is incommunicable to the person which denies that x is subsumed under y. This is not just causal. This is about what the person thinks connects the two parts. Let’s say instead, that they then claim, above your own claim, that there is some other thing that connects x and y. Say, that both of them are worn down by the same process.

Okay, so you have stated something true, and they have stated a contending claim. In some cases, both will be true. In others only one is true. What gives? The idea is, how do you claim that something is the case, and justify it, within limited evidence, but also how do you prove that your preconditions for the truth claim are superior to theirs? Because the situation is not really here about x and y. It’s about the thing which connects the two. Is there a third ‘substance’? There are two competing claims here, even though they could be mutually compatible. Let’s return to the abstract idea. I have a claim which is true and makes sense about the provenance of the issue and defect in x. The mechanic then claims either that both of you are right, or that one of you is right. But either could fit the situation. There is no evidence to prove either of you right. Then, what matters are the preconditions for your form of truth. I try to claim that this is not purely subjective. It is a matter of what preconditions matter for each form of mutually compatible truths, in the situation seen in and of itself. But this sounds like bullshit metaphysics. So I will skip it.

The reason this applies to ideas about Noetic intelligence, and “Sjewperpowers”, is the idea of what things you hold to be prior. Do you think that x → y, or that y → x? Does the reality of y having a certain relationship to x rely on the existence of y as being in that relation, or of x as being in that relation? These are the toughest choices a metaphysician might make. And it’s why there is such a degree of separation between those people who are able to make interesting insights, which might seem both trivial, needlessly complex, and also extremely mind-bending at the same time. This form of Noetic intelligence, mediated by a relation not to the situation, but a list of possible truth conditions all of which are undecidable in the scenario alone, but are determined by a list of other variables which we have no knowledge of, is a really Hard problem? Why? You might say. Well, because in both scenarios, we can assume that neither of the people have actually experienced why x → y why y → x, or even why z → (y → x). All of you have the same knowledge, but the sets of priors you are working with don’t even really exist or have pertinence on the situation. Yes, you can just claim to be a Bayesian but this doesn’t always work, and where a system doesn’t always work, it is a failed system by nature. We don’t do halfway measures or silly theories here at Antigone & CO. We do theories which have explanatory energy, rather than those which require a framework which theorizes about the situation through a set of priors which are already determined. So, even if you take the Bayesian POV, you have to concede that the major priors in any real-life situation are either undefinable or so irrelevant to the actual situation at hand, that they don’t make sense to us. I could tie this to tokenization and machine learning but I will not be doing so.

How this related to “Sjewperpowers”? Well, my contention is that the shaping of those genetics was determined by this Noetic understanding, as well as observance of the laws and code which bound them together either necessarily or in a possibilist sense, persists genetically after the religion is left behind. The religion is the propagation system for these genes, which have now become detached, like free radicals, and left to work in the world on their own as little automata, but who can no longer self-replicate (under the Orthodox view) or can actually self-replicate (under the secular pseudo-Reform view, where Spirit determines things and gradual evolution of knowledge does as well). These don’t imply two different truths, they are separate mappings across the world which say that certain parts of Noetic intelligence, or culture, are what consists of being Jewish, rather than another. This is a personal question for me, as I don’t know how to consider my father’s existence in the context of this non-negligible input from another ethnic group and faith. If I’m going to be honest here, my child prodigy but Anglo grandfather who married said Cochin woman, had his genetics saved by her influence (which I claim is both genetic and cultural; and also genetico-cultural), and was saved from the fate of others in his family which was the genetic inbreeding of British peoples into some other neo-celtic savage group.

The nature then, of the various genetic components that make up your genetics and phenotype, are made up of the decisions of whom to marry, and how to raise your kids, that were created by the cultural environment, itself determined by genetics. Outsized influence from culture can create pre-conditions for certain genetic lineages (a la patriarch effect). Which have extreme impacts on how certain individuals turn out and ‘breed’. Now, the major contention here is that genetics determine everything. But my counter-contention is that the open space left open as to how certain genetics are randomized ought to be filled by culture. The randomization of genetics, actually comes from existing pre-conditions found within a cultural matrix. Which is of course also genetically determined. This is quack theory from me, but I believe it has some potent staying power against the misalignment between Darwinian theory and the actual reality of the patriarch effect. As I’ve mentioned before, genetic supremacists and evo-bio people think that the patriarch effect exists only now and everything before now was conceived by genetics which are pre-determined. Trapped in a form of shtupid determinism-free will, which cannot be overcome in any scenario, it is an antinomy of though, but in each scenario plays out differently according to certain pre-existing truth conditions [my claim].