If we're willing to do it we can produce a societal system that's far more harmonious than the current system. — Barkon

As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The moral aspiration behind communism produced a lot of failed states, both domestic and international conflicts/tragedies . Breaking apart the status quo by any meaningful degree with an ideal picture of how things ought to be risks instability and possibly greater harms. No one could come to agreement about the details of the system which we should strive for. There would always be a war between the majority rule and the minority dissent.

There should be no suffering and no forced sacrifices. — Barkon

In other words, we shouldn't exist as we are at all.

The needs and desires of humans, as individual and group pursuits yield their consequence in mass, may be in the long term anti-life-force. If our actions are unintentionally driving us toward our own and other's extinction, yet locally we consider them moral relative to our culture's demands, maybe we need a higher/universal vantage point for our moral aspirations.

But this could be an impossible or impractical project. You can reason to yourself about what you ought to do, but what makes you do what you ought to do is often just local moral pressure, the fear of being excluded, shamed or punished by your peers for wrong conduct.

AI

AI LLMs are not to be used to write posts either in full or in part (unless there is some obvious reason to do so, e.g. an LLM discussion thread where use is explicitly declared). Those suspected of breaking this rule will receive a warning and potentially a ban.

AI LLMs may be used to proofread pre-written posts, but if this results in you being suspected of using them to write posts, that is a risk you run. We recommend that you do not use them at all. — TPF Site Guidlines

We can use AI to clarify/explore ideas to ourselves, it's just recommended that we don't use them at all.

There is a huge problem of trust with LLMs. If you ask a complicated question you don't know the answer to, you don't know whether the answer is complete bullshit. I asked for a summary of some Chapters of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and it gave me wrong garbage. It should of said upfront that it couldn't because it doesn't have access to the text.

LLM's are just more fuel for eroding trust in information in our post truth era.

Superficial beauty is often just about what triggers sexual lust, which is a hugely powerful instinctive force.

The flaccid noodle becomes a turgid rod and the desire inside you aches for the fantasy some passing image creates.

That still dwarfs the number of atoms in the universe, but is utterly dominated by the number of random texts. If the number of possible books was represented by all the atoms in the universe, the number of coherent books would be far, far, far, far less than one atom's worth! — hypericin

:up:

Good luck on gaining any insight into your original problem. Let me know when you've figured it out. :sweat:

@hypericin

On average the number of unique words used only once in any written work is 40-60%. This is a problem for translators if they don't have other works in which the same words appear to help them infer meaning.

An interesting easy exercise would be to scrub any book of its hapax legomena (unique words that appear only once) and see how much meaning is lost for the reader. How much work does the remaining context do to interpret the missing 40-60%?

If the alien codex was actually a version of English gibberish with fine sytnax and was entirely original (had no other copy or translation on Earth), even with a known sentence with incontrovertible meaning, I still believe it's fully untranslatable. The ratio of known meaning to unknown is really vital to the possibility of deciphering/translating language.

J.L. Borges wrote a story inspired by the thought experiment of the set of all possible books given a certain text length and symbol set. The combination output exceeds the estimated number of atoms in the universe and that can easily grow (exponentially) by increasing the length of text and symbol set. I've always wanted to know about specific qualitative sets within the space of all possible books given those stipulations. Using the English alphabet, what percent of the set of all possible books would be complete and comprehensible for any reader today? These question is unanswerable but I intuit the proportion is tiny, maybe the number of atoms in the solar system or galaxy out of the number of atoms in the universe. The mystery makes for an itch that can't be scratched.

How big would be set of the translation variants of Moby Dick in English? Can we replace the whale with a small land animal and consider it a variant of Moby Dick?

If that conscious periphery gave us enough information about the body I’m sure consciousness wouldn’t be a such a mystery — NOS4A2

I don't understand what you're getting at here. As if a person had thousands of diagnostic lights on their phenomenal user interface, where the pancreas can call up the conscious user to say 85% of the insulin cells are off line, why would that make consciousness less of a mystery?

One can imagine a future of augmented reality, where everything we need to know about what is happening in our body occurs to us. The sky isn't the limit in this regard. But maybe we wouldn't know what kinds of new experience this technology of networks could be giving rise to.

Think Maw is just considering translation from an insufficient sample of text with known (incontrovertible) meaning.

The Rosetta stone would probably be an interesting case to read up on. Modern day Coptic was a vital source for deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics because of the strong phonetic correspondences between the two languages. If they had the Rosetta stone but spoken Coptic was extinct, would they still be able to crack the hieroglyphics? Possibly not. Coptic furnishes most of the clues to reconstructing the meaning that the Rosetta stone translation does not contain.

Trying to reconstruct a foreign dictionary with just a handful of entries sounds impossible and absurd, as would be finding meaning in the alien codex.

I guess I'm still confused as to why one would make the assumption of incontrovertible meaning.

Suppose there are 10 different civilizations similar to ours in their intelligence/knowledge/life, that all receive the same hoax codex, and the syntactical nature of the codex serves perfectly as any language emptied of original meaning might. Each of these civilizations go to work at imposing meaning onto the script in a way that achieves a compelling level of coherence such that they have, in their expert opinion, reached a stage of incontrovertible meaning, which really just means they've achieved a remarkable coherence/intelligibility that seems indisputable.

What is the likelihood that the meaning of these 10 different efforts in different parts of the universe yield the same understanding? My intuition is that every completed codex would be radically different in meaning, yet perfectly intelligible and complete. The attitude that forms as to why the text's meaning is incontrovertible comes simply from the fact that it is way too difficult to try again afresh on any planet. Therefore there is no absolute incontrovertible meaning of any version, except with regard to all the work already done. It is only deemed incontrovertible because the meaning created "out of whole cloth" works but that fails to take in mind what else could work.

Is there any way we can ground our speculation as to whether there are many possible perfect impositions of meaning of or just a few or only one that works for the codex?

That is to say that if we could, across the distribution of meanings the codex could take on, narrow down the likelihoods of certain interpretations over others, there is probably one that is most likely — ToothyMaw

The likelihood of arriving at one meaning might be a consequence of how difficult it is to make the codex coherent though. If you had the set of all possible coherent meanings, which might be numerically staggering, what exactly would help you to pick the "one that is most likely"?

So yes, given enough time and computing power, a meaning can be imposed on the codex, I think. — ToothyMaw

Couldn't it be possible that there are actually hundreds to billions of variations of meaning that can be imposed on the codex that satisfy the level of coherence hypericin/humanity is looking for. If this was known to be the likelihood, the meaning of any can be disputed within/against that set of all possibilities. What exactly makes the manufactured meaning of the text incontrovertible? Are we assuming only one meaning can fit the codex?

Humanity must assume that the codex has a single, incontrovertible meaning. — hypericin

I don't understand this assumption. Does every novel have a single incontrovertible meaning? Take for instance idioms/metaphors, which bring forth the issue/conflict of literal versus figurative meanings. Both the following passages are coherent on two levels (?), but they have two different meanings based on whether or not you have knowledge of what the idiomatic content actually means.

I decided to bite the bullet and hit the road early, hoping to beat the clock, but when push came to shove, traffic was a whole different ball game. By the time I made it to the office, I was running on fumes, yet I still had to jump through hoops to get the project off the ground. At the end of the day, though, we pulled it off by the skin of our teeth. — ChatGPT paragraph in Idioms

It gets even more bizarre if you translate foreign idioms:

I woke up feeling like I had an octopus on my face, but I decided to tie my stomach and head to work. The meeting was chaos — everyone was watering their salad while the boss was trying to give birth to a mountain. When it was my turn to speak, I almost dropped my face, but somehow I managed to hang noodles on everyone’s ears. By the end, we were all pressing the cucumber, pretending everything was fine. — ChatGPT paragraph in foreign idioms

If alien codex were an idiomatic prank that was deciphered at a literal level, the meaning would still be lost. This would be compounded by the gulf between what is universal between species and what is hopelessly local and perhaps untranslatable.

There is a lot of structure and repetition in a language, whereas noise has none. — hypericin

But your alien text has structure and repetition, plausibly functions like a language as a carrier of information, like the Voynich manuscript. Otherwise it wouldn't be interesting to the experts.

If I was sitting in a classroom in which everyone was talking and I was trying to understand what the lecturer was saying over other discussions, the unwanted interference of other coherent conversations could be considered noise, even if the only thing I could understand was the very thing I didn't want to listen to (the noise).

Noise is relative to the receiver, as what interferes in the transmission/reception of a message. A concern for random noise (if that is how you are defining it) isn't that relevant to your hypothetical text because if it looked like random noise to begin with no one would consider whether it could carry meaning.

It is complete nonsense, random gibberish, imbued with enough regularity to look like a plausible language, but no more. — hypericin

With respect to using the text as the basis for the creation of a language, which could possibly make original text arbitrarily coherent in some new meaning, the syntactical/structural content is all that matters. The semantic content is gibberish (or lost) but the syntactic content could be useful and is not random.

In any case, we could use a machine learning expert who is also a linguist to weigh in.

The question is this: given enough time and computing power, can humanity eventually "discover" an interpretation that renders the text coherent? While in truth, inventing one out of whole cloth? Or will the text remain indecipherable forever? — hypericin

Isn't imposing a false meaning on the text achievable with a considerable bit of work? It's just mapping a known language/meaning onto a novel set of symbols. The text could probably serve as code for innumerable different meanings. I guess it really depends on the patterns/regularities of the text in question.

It is not possible to derive a message from noise. But that is just my intuition. — hypericin

Apparently you can encode information in noise. Binary code looks like digital noise. In your story there is the sense that there is no original message in the noise anyway because it is in truth a practical joke, so there is no deriving a message, only imposing/inventing one.

I'm guessing if the text contains what could be construed as universal patterns, then maybe that could be used as a basis for discovering more complex meanings. The work would have to contain an attempt on the alien's part to assist universal translation. Mathematical regularities would be encoded from the most basic counting system.

*, **, ***, ****, *****

I wonder if intelligent aliens would find this universal, along with demonstrated basic arithmetic operations.

Moving from the universal to local meanings seems like it'd be supremely difficult if not impossible, if alien life is nothing like human life.

why the gold is not growing as fast as bitcoins? — Linkey

No physical asset backs bitcoin which makes trading it easier than gold. Am not sure how crypto backed by gold works really but I'd assume some work needs to be done to secure gold reserves through another company. The limit of that reserve would in theory limit the ability of a company to sell tokens representing it. This might substantially slow the speed at which it can be traded.

The speed at which bitcoin can gain or lose value probably is part of its appeal, allowing folks to try to make substantial return by gambling on its volatility (buy lows, sell highs).

The gold if an example of such pipyruses - it is nearly worthless in regard of its current price. — Linkey

I guess I missed your point, that gold like crypto, and many other assets, are limited in their inherent use value, so they share that in common. I can do more with a sack of onions or a gold coin than lines of code in a crypto wallet. Market supply and demand for assets/currencies makes it all moot however.

If there is a demand for pipyruses and they serve as a store of value, how can they be worthless? The value of other assets and currencies, influences the demand for pipyruses and so it is with cryptocurrencies. So far cryptocurrencies are the 'most volatile assets in modern finance' and as such they don't really resemble stable currencies.

They are still subject to capital gains taxation.

If you have to trade cryptocurrencies for fiat currency to actually buy stuff then inflation does actually affect the price of what you seek to buy in the future.

These programmers loan the money from each other more honestly, than the banks do. — Linkey

What recourse do those that loan cryptocurrencies have to insure that their investment is returned to them? How do you minimize the risk of lending cryptocurrency in its current form? Sounds complicated to say the least.

But if my colleague died yesterday and I am still alive. Today our presents are the same present. Why do I have no knowledge of my colleague today? — Punshhh

You do have knowledge of your colleague, that he is dead. If you have no knowledge of your colleague, how do you know that he is dead and a colleague? If he is dead, he is no longer present.

Religions posit an afterlife of a kind and then skeptics must ask, while if there is that kind of afterlife which provides a bridge of memory to present life, then why is it hidden? The burden is on those who claim to know to find support for opinion/dogma. They can't.

Discontinuity by the erasure of all memory is unpalatable, because folks do not want to thrown again into circumstances of someone else's existence without intelligible cause. We also lose a lot of memory as we live and yet don't feel that we've lost an essential aspect of ourselves by such natural forgetting.

Since we know so little as individuals anyway, maybe we can say the world is mostly hidden. Yet everything we do know, focus on and remember and see takes up the entirety of our being and constitutes what is revealed.

Why is the afterlife hidden? Because it hasn't happened yet. Tomorrow morning is as hidden as the afterlife. It'll be absurd that when we do find ourselves in the afterlife (the present) we will still be looking forward to the afterafterlife. In any present time, if it is some other time's afterlife, our imaginations will be occupied with the future.

So... we have arrived. This is the afterlife. It is now. And there will be coffee again tomorrow, maybe.

Reminds me of the pothole formed by the Air Ambulance plane that crashed on the streets in Philadelphia. If ever a pothole could be symbolic of death, it's that pothole. May the crew RIP.

You can argue for eternal oblivion or eternal consciousness, depending on what has been lost or gained. Without memory there is no way to know what has already occurred, if that occurrence technically does not belong to you.

You can't read the same book twice if it has been erased before the second reading.

You can't step in the same river twice, unless the river suffices as the same river you remember stepping in.

You can't remember stepping in a river you know you've never stepped in.

I guess it means people either love or hate Trump no matter what he does? — TiredThinker

TDS always sounds like it should describe die hard Trumpers, or Trump himself, rather than detractors. If absolute opposition to Trump is irrational, then why is total and slavish endorsement not a form of derangement?

We can diagnose two forms of TDS. The red version of TDS is the one destabilizing the country/economy, as it is causing blue TDS. Just throw it back and tell Trumpers they are also suffering from TDS. TDS springs from patient zero: TRUMP.

Having hope is like drinking salt water. — Bob Ross

These stoic aphorisms are kind of annoying. Drinking salt water is ok, assuming the concentration is low, but maybe we are intended to think of someone who is drinking only sea water as opposed to broth, which is a death sentence. Drinking salt water is ok if you have the means to dilute with fresh water in alternation.

I'll fix it absurdly:

Having some hope, like salt, improves the soup of life.

If hope is salt, you can't live without it.

If one is overcoming, suffering for the sake of transformation, isn't there always hope for the object of achievement. Or are we imagining an absurd hope, like wishing for God to grant us our prayers in the absence of any action to pursue the object of our hope? Even this kind of hope might have unusual power to protect the individual from nihilism (hopelessness). False beliefs (or philosophies) may actually protect people.

What motivates the stoic to overcome if he can't rely on his/her own desire? People do not act from reason alone, as reasoning always has a state of future preference, one preferable by some measure to another.

I think is it preferable to have hope (the feeling that something desired can be achieved or will happen) than to have no hope.

Thanks for unwrapping the aphorism. Sounds like a very tall order all the same, to become immune to worry and the torments of the mind by whatever means. So many people don't have a hope in hell. You must be one of those everyday Joe Buddhas, a non-fancy stoic kind.

"Suffering is a choice."

This is cruel and simplistic. While there is plenty of suffering that might be avoidable if one could muster the courage/will to act rationally, there is plenty of suffering that is not avoidable. Tell that to the soldiers/victims of war, gang violence, rape, addiction, depression, illness and other gnarly incidents of nature.

Maybe this means we can justify harming others more if all suffering is an individual affair.

Science, similarly to religion may be embedded in mythic understanding. What do you think, especially in relation to the concept of myth? — Jack Cummins

For Joseph Campbell, myth was somewhat like the educational operating code for integrating folks into their culture. He had used the metaphor of a womb often to refer to cultural providence/support structures. The stereotypes we value, the stories we tell about those types, help to guide the development of persons to be functional members of society. I think Campbell conceived of the informational global age as producing a kind of wasteland of shattered or diminished cultures which poses new adaptive challenges to individuals trying to make their way in world.

Ideology is likely a good stand in for the word myth. Do we need ideologies to live healthy lives? Which ones ought we accept and embrace?

However, certain human behaviours’ (such as starting wars, resisting diversity, or fostering political confrontation) interfere with these trends, hindering their consolidation and putting humanity's peaceful progress at risk. — Seeker25

How often in history was the motivation for war to acquire resources on one side and to defend those resources on the other. If we go back to the cod eating capelin predatory event, it is a conflict driven by the instinct to eat. Why isn't this tantamount to a kind of war in nature?

Our consumption, the effects of a vast amount of free energy exploitation, is a trade-off we don't easily control as a species anyway.

Folks in my locality are pursuing a solution to slow down another great predatory event of Oryctes rhinoceros, an epidemic of massive horned beetle. The beetle eats the hearts of large palms. I have to inject palm trees with imidicloprid (neonicatinoid) to try and save them. Funnily enough, palm damage almost looks like the palms have been shot up by a gun (burrow holes everywhere). My intuition is that insecticide is bad idea because all pollinators that visit palms (principally honey bees) will be negatively impacted, leading to a further loss in bio diversity. Or we could see this as a kind of new selection pressure which these pollinators will have to overcome. Many insects can successfully gain resistance to insecticides via natural selection, but an empirical picture of what is going on is not gathered by anyone who is fighting to save their palms.

The anthropocene is an age of extinction caused by the human need to conserve and expand itself (in all dimensions we desire to conserve and expand). For nature to even picture itself, as if we could be a steward of control, perhaps required a tremendous level of energy exploitation. The trade-offs and fall out of that event are ongoing.



I've been dragged into war by these magnificent bastards. They are discussing where to find the best palms (anywhere they find them). Luckily our family members do not include species of palms. Are you team palm, or team beetle, or is this a parochial problem which you have no solutions for? How does your GETs help guide my decision and how will it convince my boss to incur a financial loss for a moral cause? If you had an optimal solution, I wouldn't have the power or incentive to implement it anyway.

That anyone has any hesitation to fully condemn the shooter and to refuse to use his actions to promote any outstanding agenda reveals someone just terribly misguided without any moral compass. — Hanover

Trump is the president elect. A wonderful magnetic pole for the calibration of our moral compasses.

that 'believing' in a principle is absolutely not sufficient to make it exist — Clearbury

And thus on grounds of simplicity, we should conclude that though humans are disposed to believe in the reality of moral principles, in reality there are none. — Clearbury

Isn't an alternative perspective permissible also, that belief is sufficient to bring all kinds of social constructions/facts/actions into existence? The degree to which belief has power as an established norm is relative to the number of people who hold that belief. We don't need necessarily hold to whether moral principles "exist" but whether they have any power to justify/guide action/inaction as codes of convention.

Believing that you and everyone else should stop at a traffic intersection permits a kind of organized reality that wouldn't happen without a consensus.

Your philosophical position is the attempt to either represent a convention/standard or establish one in the way Seeker is trying argue for the adoption of vague principles cherry picked from a picture of evolution.

Individuals have the right to choose what they want to know and not. Revealing the truth without their consent would be an infringement on their autonomy. Ignorance, in many cases, can be a blessing. — Alonsoaceves

We will be withholding information about the upcoming coronavirus epidemic so that business can happen as usual. Oops! Cat is out of the bag.

The passage of information, whether true or false, is always then infringing on your autonomy then, unless you are always implicitly consenting.

When I choose to read a topic on the basis of a headline, I don't have the power to erase/negate its possible influence on me. I can't unwatch film and unread books.

You have no idea what anyone is going to say to you in the next moment. You can't make them unsay it.

It's the idea that truth is somehow objective, neutral, and completely independent from the person who utters it that is problematic. — baker

Well maybe we could shift to the notion to international human rights. This is something you may not agree with but if all human beings ought to have universal rights, do we not owe every one the education to understand what those rights are. Or do we withhold that information on the basis of avoiding potential harm, interfering or destroying cultural forms, processes, identities.

Is this just more idealistic naivete, bolstered by some futile Western minority consensus.

Liberated from what? Liberated into what? — baker

The Western, and specifically, American, savior complex ... — baker

Point taken. It is naively idealistic for sure and the realistic political motivation is never just about improving the lives of anyone. I've heard there are North Korean defectors who find life in South Korea very hard, as they can't really integrate into its highly competitive capitalist society for many reasons. Some express the desire to return to North Korea.

In the U.S., folks leaving a long stint in prison, or the social structure of the armed services, cannot easily integrate as a civilian. Not to mention many Americans are frustrated with their own way of life (which is seldom as anyone might wish it to be).

My hypothetical is likely too far afield from Benj's pattern: 'is truth owed if it diminishes free will'.

What is permissible under the banner of postmodern monkey business?

Whatever you can get away with. :snicker:

Jokes on you!

Western society is no longer an example worthy of emulating. It provides nothing in the way of spiritual fulfillment, no role models, no worthy causes, etc. — Tzeentch

We could get weirder in America. I propose a permanent flash theater mob of folk dressed up as Trump doing Trump like things. We will bath in the energy of universal narcissism as we dance in orange wigs and oversized cheap suits, have mock Trump sex with mock Trump prostitutes in the public square. We will take shits on the graves of men and women who have given their lives in service to the country while selling bibles. We'll sing the country's greatest hits: "Grab them by the Pussy" and "Love Me, I'm a Strong man with Large hands".

If we get shot and lose our jobs while doing it, oh well. It's hard to have fun adventure without taking a risk. We can just pretend we've got presidential resources.

When the malaise of senselessness has reaches its last tipping point, many of us will have died in service to the great Trump dance.

It will be a dancing plague for strong bastards to become weak bitches, to exhaust and draw down the devils of our desires, in a communion of becoming One with Trump. Once our bodies are used up and broken, we can lie down on the side walk and stay there until we perish from lack of purpose.

:fire:
:death:

• Equilibrium, the propensity for life, and freedom are three evolutionary trends which, according to my thesis, shed light on how we should act. — Seeker25

Stable relationships between species over time may include warfare/conflict or large acts of predation . Eusocial species, like ants, may develop means to distinguish between in-group out-group individuals of their own species and have conflicts on that basis. Sometimes it may be purely down to dietary source creating a pheromone signature.

Chat GPT says that evolutionary equilibrium is compatible with an arms race, such that perennial pattern of territory dispute between species could continually evolve together in a kind of reciprocating balance of adaptations.

The development of the human cognitive capacity probably emerged in part from endless conspecific war, resource/territory conflict. Such resource competitions are ongoing under the rules of a national/global Capitalist paradigm. We sink our savings into the stock market because we want to preserve the 'freedom' it gives us despite ridiculous, excessive and destructive aspect of a lot of consumption, which is about individuals collaborating/competing to acquire resources (economic warfare/game). One might question the ethics of a lot of economic relationships which serve us insofar as one would rather remain ignorant of their unwholesome reality.

Is it ethical to own stock in Coca Cola? Why aren't they just a culturally sanctioned version of harmful drug dealers? Shouldn't we be free to sell coca cola? One person's benefit is another person's harm but such a trade-off is acceptable if we value the freedom at the cost of such consequences.

However, neither aggression nor genocide are responses aligned with evolutionary trends. — Seeker25

There are probably plenty of occasions in evolutionary history where the overgrowth of a species occurs due to some kind of environmental accident, or new adaptation via the mechanism of selection. Entire species, as an energy source for another, become reduced in population, some go extinct.

Oceanographers record the largest predation event ever observed in the ocean

Here 2.5 million cod ate 10.5 million capelin, 4.2 capelin eaten per cod.

Are predatory events acts of "aggression." If capelin populations can recover, does that excuse the fact that 10.5 million individuals were killed?

In value neutral terms, maybe capelin are just transforming into cod here.

You are just cherry picking "trends" that align with some sense of life/diversity conservation. Nature's means of limiting growth may not be fun. They may appear to us as cruel accidents, if we as a unique species have a sense/duty/forsight for limiting gratuitous harm, while maintaining biodiversity.

Really? If you were to tell the North Koreans about, say, the homeless in the US or the suicide rates in Switzerland, the government there would punish them?

What would be that "truth" you would tell them, and how complete would it be? — baker

If we were to believe that the North Korean peoples ought to be liberated and nations endeavored to do so, information of all kinds about the outside world might be helpful. Flash drives, if they have the ability to view contents, could contain a lot of miscellaneous content, including documentaries on suicide and homelessness in other countries. Flash drives are probably taboo, no matter what content is on them but I don't know.

Am not saying that we should, but we are not being hard pressed to convey "truth" (truth bearing information) to North Koreans for the sake of potentially expanding or eroding their free will. The problem is the consequences of reorganizing a state, waging war, fomenting coups, changing social identity, are likely always worse than leaving it be.

Is the truth still owed even if it erodes free will?

That the "truth is owed" becomes a pressing consideration for whoever can tell or withhold it, as a dilemma or trade-off, brings up the concern as to whether whoever is deciding has much free will in the matter.

We could use is a long list of interesting real world dilemmas or hypotheticals which could give us something to work with.

If there was a collaborative effort to drop informational goods, flash drives and pamphlets over North Korea to inform North Koreans about how life is elsewhere as "truth owed", that effort might come with considerable state backlash (harm to its citizens).

Why shouldn't we meet and educate the isolated tribal peoples of the Sentinel Islands? Would educating them about what lies beyond their own way of life increase or erode their free will? We need a lot more information for a harm-benefit analysis. Maybe life is awful there from our perspective.

Is it ok to be an invisible voyeur for data collection, like in Star Trek when they observed technologically limited cultures.

Evolution generates diversity. Silencing, re-educating, or imprisoning those who express a different opinion goes against evolution. We must facilitate the integration of diversity, not reject it. — Seeker25

Consider any organized structure, whether machine or organism, and its functions. In order to conserve that complex function/structure you have to protect is from forces that undermine/degrade/destroy it.

The body is pretty good at keeping out all that diversity which would get in the way of its self-preservation.

The global capitalist paradigm, preceded by state conquest, has done much to eliminate cultural and biological diversity. Why isn't this just another trend of evolution? Any form of complex life that collapses leaves behind space for new diversity. Nature is indifferent to what comes next, even if the long term universal evolutionary trend is increased complexity.

In Hawaii we've constant waves of types of biological epidemics, since new organisms are being introduced all the time. Displacement of species occurs all the time. Right now the Coconut Rhino beetle is pretty much destroying a range of large palms. If we're impartial to species, we could analogize this as a plague which may end up killing a majority of individuals.

The introductions of new molecules (PFAs/PFOs/plastics) to the evolutionary playing field is the generation of new kind of diversity but it comes at the trade-off of current biological function (human health). If we poison ourselves too much, we're forced to evolve by either artificial or natural selection.