I consider reflexive consciousness (the capacity to be a conscious Self, to think about Self) to be conditional on socialisation but only in an evolutionary sense: the development of consciousness is coextensive with the development of meaningful socialisation. The more conscious we are the more socialised we can be, and the more conscious we become the more socialised we can be. The process is incremental, just like the evolution of life. We could posit the lowest degree of socialisation as the reproductive interaction of the lowest, sexually differentiated life-forms. Their reproductive mechanism brings them together as a social kind. This must be associated with a degree of biological recognition that can already be classified as proto-consciousness, albeit not yet reflexive. With higher degrees of biological complexity there come more refined mechanisms of mutual recognition, which at some point allow for self-reflection. The threshold of this ‘elucidation’ is difficult to formalise, but the reverse process, the loss of reflexivity, is easier to imagine. A person traveling alone in a space ship, with no radio contact with anyone else but possessing automated technology for indefinite life preservation, would eventually lose their language, self-image and the capacity for self-conception, because it would lack experiential referents to sustain these meanings. Words/concepts without experience and context lose meaning. On this view, the loss of socialisation is bound to lead to the loss of reflexive consciousness (because of the absence of reflection/image of what one is alike). This brings us to the concept of Anthropos: of human likeness, one who is alike.

Reflexive consciousness is necessarily apparent to one another as consciousness (this is what makes it reflexive), and manifests through meaningful two way communication. Since this awareness is absent with animals, except in a minimal sense when the animal is socialised by being raises among humans who attempted to communicate with it and some rudimentary communication is possible, but this is not inherent in their animality but an effect of humanity. In these cases the animal can become marginally human, by human socialisation.

Follow-up Email to the Australian Human Rights Commission (18.01.2023)

(My initial inquiry: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/email-to-australian-human-rights)

ATTN: Communication Unit

I did not receive any response from the Commissioner to my email dated 17 Aug 2022.

Could you please advice whether this non-response was intentional or just an oversight?

Regarding another matter for the attention of the Commission, I noticed the following statement on your website at https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/rights-and-freedoms/human-rights-considerations-vaccine-passports-and-certificates:

“Vaccines are effective in saving lives, and the right to life is a human right.”

In the context of vaccine mandates this statement is misleading, since the opposite is also true: vaccines are known to kill a small percentage of people. Vaccination mandates, by applying significant economic and social-opportunity coercion to vaccinate, are expected to cause a percentage of vaccine-related deaths, thereby extinguishing some lives, and the right to life is a human right.

For the sake of fair characterisation of the impact of vaccine mandates on human rights, I suggest informing the reader of the likelihood that the right to life may also be violated by mandatory vaccination policies.

Regards,

Michael Kowalik

Join NORMAL

Some narratives are too socially damaging to be simply ignored. It is important to identify the implications and consequences of Nativist Supremacism, which underpins the concept of First Nations and tribal sovereignty. The underlying toxicity needs to be unpacked and contextualised, so that people have the right vocabulary and understanding to deal with the associated social pressure and resentment. Those who live in Australia face this narrative and are forced to choose (to collude or to dissent) on daily basis. When they do dissent they need to be able to defend their position with more than “it is divisive”. If they fail this, they will become more resentful, and the narrative of resentment will still succeed in its aim. My approach is not merely to defeat the narrative of resentment but to replace it with a higher order sense of unity: All humans share the same ancient ancestors, we are all related, we are all the original owners of the Earth. Reason unites us.

Letter to The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (19.01.2023)

Dear VCAA,

I propose including the fundamental laws of meaning/sense, otherwise known as the laws of thought, as a new cross curriculum priority.

There are more than 100 recognised logical fallacies, but they are all reducible to just 3 laws: the law of non-contradiction (two opposite claims cannot be true at the same time and in the same respect, or, no claim can be both true and false at the same time and in the same respect), the law of excluded middle (a claim can be either true or false with no intermediate possibility), and the law of identity (everything is identical ONLY to itself, or, no two things are identical in every respect). The 3 laws are in fact just different articulations of the same One law of logical sense/meaning, and one could simply rely on non-contradiction to reach the same conclusions. For example, the ‘principle of sufficient reason’, which dictates that we ought not to assert anything as a ‘known’ fact without a proof, is reducible to the law of non-contradiction.

Including the laws of logic as a cross curriculum priority is the only effective antidote to misinformation. It would teach both the students and the teachers how to be more rational in every context. I suggest that making logic a cross-curriculum priority would dispense with the need for any other priority.

I can help you design and implement the proposed cross-curriculum priority.

Regards,

Michael Kowalik

Members of the militia loyal to the “sovereign citizen” who goes by the name King Charles III are really getting out of hand:)

Tribal supremacists commit a hate crime against everyone else.

Countess media sources who were claiming (and still claim) that covid vaccines contain nano-bots and Graphene Oxide are now comprehensively discredited. https://geoffpain.substack.com/p/fifth-column-promoting-graphene-fantasies

Sorry to disappoint all the nanobot people - Geoff Pain shows just what is in those vials of vaccine, and corroborates Kevin McCairn's analysis.
https://geoffpain.substack.com/p/relative-lethality-of-covid-19-vaccines

Let’s play a game called ‘Diversity of Platitudes’. Let us see how many “diverse” platitudes you can collectively come up with!

“A platitude is a trite, meaningless, or prosaic statement, often used as a thought-terminating cliché, aimed at quelling social, emotional, or cognitive unease.” (Wiktionary) A platitudinous statement is typically true but trivial and uninteresting, and often involves a tautology. For example, ‘beautiful puppies are so sweet’, ‘we have to defend and encourage what is good and right’, ‘Ukraine has the right to defend itself’, ‘corruption is just wrong’ etc. Let us show WEF and those DAVOS muppets what “diversity of thought” is all about, shall we?

Some logical problems with individual sovereignty

Individuals who claim to be sovereign (as individuals) and ‘therefore’ exempt from the laws of the State, tend to present contestable legal opinions as legal conclusions, which implies that they have the authority to subjectively make legal determinations. This is false. Without a common standard of adjudication no legal determinations are possible.

Moreover, even if one were logically correct in refuting the alleged authority of the State, the dominant power will assert itself with or without legitimate authority. Little people cannot argue their way out of submission to the dominant power.

The dominant power cannot be eliminated, only replaced, which can cost many lives and does not guarantee an improvement.

The optimal solution to the injustice or moral wrongs of the State is to continue deliberation, endure, reason, persuade, and this can only be accomplished at the level of society, because power is enabled, sustained and mediated by society as a whole.

Joe Hildebrand is promoting Nativist Supremacism, the core element of Nazi ideology. He is replacing the equality of Man with a moral hierarchy based on the alleged degrees of belonging: who was first, second (third? last?). Even calling aboriginal people THEY (let alone “wholly unique”) is a misrepresentation; “they” are US, our brothers and sisters, descendants of our common ancestors. WE were here first, WE were first everywhere. If Joe really believes in nativist supremacism he should greet all incoming migrants with a lecture on his unoriginal moral theory, waving the inverted Blood & Soil flag with a yellow circle in the middle to disguise its history (right wing extremists typically use the symbols of the Rising Sun (new dawn) and Blood and Soil separately, and the “aboriginal flag” is the first time these two Nazi motifs were integrated). https://www.news.com.au/finance/single-sentence-that-could-end-the-debate-over-an-indigenous-voice/news-story/0679bf5b9127d1f4a182ffb128e16d9d

Asking a child whether they identify as transgender is like asking them whether they want to have sex. The response of a minor could not be construed as valid consent, but asking implies the intent to elicit consent, therefore grooming for rape or sexual mutilation, as the case may be.

The Failed State and Moral Improvement

Any argument that the State is illegitimate is moot; the alleged authority of the State is always illegitimate, just like the alleged authority of kings was always illegitimate. The premise of legitimacy is a mythic fulcrum of state power, nothing more. This does not mean that replacing the State or the King by force with something or someone else would improve human situation. I suggest that illegitimacies of society are reflected in the illegitimacy of the State. Crucially, even a legitimate State can be oppressive (by whatever standard people believe is ‘legitimate’), while an illegitimate tyrant can be the best and fairest manager of the nation. So perhaps it is not legitimacy that matters the most but something else.

When the State becomes too corrupt for people to endure, and there is little hope of a remedy emerging from state-approved processes, what is it that prevents people from replacing the State with something better? The most obvious answer is: the fear of violence, dispossessions, persecution. The next relevant question is: what makes the State so proficient at violence? I suggest the State has superior organisation that can utilise mostly stupid and some smart people towards common ends, who, despite being an overall minority, can project power more effectively than the disorganised majority. Nevertheless, the principles on which even a modern State is organised are amazingly simple, indeed primitive: top-down authority, a myth of legitimacy, the carrot (rewarding loyalty) and the stick (penalising dissent). When a corrupt State is occasionally overthrown by the majority, the new State is still premised on violence, fear and collusion, merely reproducing the old State-organisation with new, equally corruptible beneficiaries in place. Conversely, whenever ‘enemies of the state’ reach a meaningful organisational level, the State becomes less violent towards them and more willing to ‘negotiate’. Typically it does not matter how immoral, terroristic or criminal the enemies are; any State premised on violence and collusion will make deals and seek a new ballance of power if the challenger is also wiling to make a deal. Now imagine what you could accomplish if, instead of violence, you organised yourselves according to more sophisticated principles than those of the militarised welfare State.

The limiting factor for organisational sophistication is the development of society itself; that means YOU. For this reason I suggest that focussing on the development of society, prioritising rational deliberation and good faith for mutual understanding and common interest instead of manipulation and force is nowadays the optimal (perhaps the only) path for moral improvement of the State.

Digital Idenity is not YOUR identity

There is no “true” identity apart from just being oneself. Everything is alway only identical to itself (the Law of Identity), and any additional feature (like a number, microchip, tattoo etc is necessarily not you), nor is any part or feature of your body (like fingerprints or a retina scan) your identity. What the authors of the linked page are trying to assert is that there is a human right to assume a false identity, which is a very strange proposition. In short, a Digital or biometric ID is a false identity, a fundamental lie, a violation of the law of identity, therefore nonsense.

https://id2020.org/digital-identity

Human rights are universal birthrights. Making them conditional on altering your inborn constitution denies your birthrights, therefore violates human rights.

Cash is an insurance policy against cyber-crime and digital systems malfunction. During natural disasters cash is typically the only possible means of payment.