Nightmares.
What does an ethically challenged, cheating hypocrite who brought the country near ruin for political advantage have to do with
this man?
In: observations, society
Our community media project
Here’s what some friends of mine and I have been working on for a couple of years now. We’ve got it all nailed down and we’re looking for funding and other kinds of support:
That’s our TEDx talk about the basis of the idea. If you want to read more, and especially if you want to be part of it, then take a look here.
And if you like the idea, spread the word. We need somewhere between one and two hundred thousand dollars, and about 6 months to get to the point where we can launch the beta. At that point we need contributors, testers, and all sorts of more hands on help. But it’s a great idea, a really important idea. I truly think it can make a difference in empowering people and building community feeling and enabling real social change.
In: net, society, theory · Tagged with: asheville, citizen journalism, community media, ponderwell
Ötzi the iceman had a full stomach
The 5300 year old ice man found in the mountains between Austria and Italy has had his stomach contents reexamined. Previously scientists had mistaken his colon for his stomach and thought it empty. Now they say he ate a large meal of Ibex meat 30-60 minutes before he was killed by an arrow in his back.
Apparently he ate a lot of red meat, since he had 3 gallstones and fatty arteries at the time of his death. He was 45 years old and 5’ 5” (165cm) tall and weighed 50kg. His diet was also high in grains, eaten as bread. He had whipworm, lyme disease, dental cavities, spinal problems (which it seemed were treated with acupuncture) and had been sick three times in the 6 months before his death, on the last occasion this lasted two weeks.
His equipment included shoes of complex construction, possibly snowshoes, a copper axe, a knife, a bow and 14 arrows, an antibacterial fungus, and a flint and tinder kit.
Islamists win in Egypt
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/03/political-islam-poised-arab-spring
Argh.
In: observations, world
California Penal Code Section 12403.7 (a) (8)
(g) Any person who uses tear gas or tear gas weapons except in self-defense is guilty of a public offense and is punishable byimprisonment in a state prison for 16 months, or two or three years or in a county jail not to exceed one year or by a fine not to exceed one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both the fine and imprisonment, except that, if the use is against a peace officer, as defined in Chapter 4.5 (commencing with Section 830) of Title 3 of Part 2, engaged in the performance of his or her official duties and the person committing the offense knows or reasonably should know that the victim is a peace officer, the offense is punishable by imprisonment in a state prison for 16 months or two or three years or by a fine of one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both the fine and imprisonment.
Occupy Wall Street Arrests
Neutrinos faster than light result repeated
In: observations, science
Giving it away
There’s no privacy
Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers – that’s the social graph.
Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook. [source]
via the wonderful Making Light
And of course this all relates to this:
If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
But the level of evil involved has become crazy-high. I’m feeling not just indignant but sort of sore of ass and can’t remember getting home.
For example: Facebook “Like” buttons track your movement to any page containing one on the web, even if you’re logged out of FB. G+ “+1″ buttons do the same. Well, potentially, it’s up to the goodness of these organizations’ hearts to say the pinky promise not to.
For example: Use Google’s blindingly fast DNS servers on 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and they have the capability to know every place you request an address for, which is, effectively, every place you visit on the web.
We’re not just being sold. They’ve installed cameras in the bedroom and they’re selling the tapes to that sketchy video store on the corner.
In: law, society · Tagged with: facebook, google+, privacy, social-graph
Writings on the cloud
Rory
Writingsonthewall has a new server, a Rackspace cloud server we’ve named Rory after the Dr Who character.
The City of London – secret power within the British State
Seriously, so much more medieval and Machiavellian than you would believe. Parliament has no authority over it but it appoints a “Remembrancer” to keep Parliament in line. Corporations and a few guild members get to vote for who rules it, but almost no residents. It acts to subvert international regulation of the financial industry.
In: observations, society, world
Why not space?
This by Tom Murphy is a must read. Read it right to the end, though, or you’ll miss his point.
tl;dr?
He’s saying: getting humans into space is not a way to save Earth from its resources and overpopulation crisis. It will take technology and resources well beyond what we can marshall at the moment to reach some sort of interstellar future. Don’t drop the ball on the making this planet a good place project, because space won’t save us. But, even so, space exploration is a wonderful scientific necessity.
I agree, pretty much. We’re not going to travel a few tens of light years and find another Earth. We may find potentially terraformable planets which with hundreds of years of robotic resource gathering (much of which would be spent with mining robots building more robots, probably in the asteroid belt) we could, eventually, turn into nice places to live. That’s a 500 to a thousand year project. I really hope we get to do it. But we never will if we render this Earth uninhabitable first. We have to explore, learn, fix this planet, and then, (maybe) colonise.
In: environment, science
Fear, risk, and investment
NYT headline today: US Panel advises that prostate test may do more harm than good.. Here’s why, briefly: around 70% of elevated readings from the test are false positives – they do not indicate cancer. Men who get a positive reading, and the urologists who treat them, feel constrained by a positive reading to get invasive follow-up tests or even prophylactic treatment. This follow-up has generally worse health outcomes, including incontinence and sexual dysfunction, than if the test result had been ignored. But faced with that positive reading few men will accept that they may be better ignoring that 30% possibility that they have cancer, however slow growing. Urologists have a lot to lose if they recommend against treatment and nothing much to lose if the treatment has a bad outcome. So it would be better to not even know, because you don’t really know anything useful, there’s just the illusion of control in a situation which can’t, with current medical technology, be controlled.
The other side of this is interesting, too. When the same panel recommended in 2009 that mammograms be used only every two years and only for women between 50 and 74 there was a furor. Doctors groups and cancer victims advocacy groups strongly disagreed. The same thing is happening, with even more heat in this case. It’s not just that doctors stand to lose a lot of income. Probably more important is that doctors and cancer advocacy groups have a huge emotional investment in their treatment of past patients. It’s not easy to admit to yourself that you have caused large amounts of unnecessary suffering from overtreatment. Patients have an investment in believing that their treatment was justified and necessary.
The logic of the US Preventative Services Taskforce‘s case is clear, but it runs up against the emotional argument “if even one life is saved it’s worth the cost.” When that cost is suffering and worse quality of life for many, it may be a bad bargain. The problem is that risk is badly weighted, psychologically, when there’s fear involved. If you have an elevated PSA reading, do you say “I accept the risk because the balance of value goes this way” or do you say “I’ll endure the suffering to feel safer” – even if that feeling is largely an illusion.
We see this problem everywhere, it’s Pascal’s Wager. But Pascal’s wager is a bad bet; he phrases it as “I have everything to gain and nothing to lose” but ignores the costs – society warped by superstition and time wasted in church, for example. Look at the TSA’s Security Theatre. Failure to understand risk. It’s why so many people are stuck in a job they hate, or personal relationships that are unsatisfying. But it’s also why people will so strongly defend their risk-averse bad decisions. If you want to design a cult, take advantage of that. Get people to cut off a piece of themselves, metaphorically or literally, as the price of joining. I’ve met so many people who hated school but insist their children go to the same one. Remember the argument that we can’t leave Iraq because it’s cost us so much already that it would be disloyal to the fallen?
Asheville Occupy Wall Street
Asheville’s Occupy Wall Street, day one. The story, with images and statements from protesters, is here on Image Asheville
The connection between health, fat, and exercise
Why is it so easy to get fat and yet being fat predisposes one to heart disease, cancer, and adult onset diabetes? It seems like a maladaption to the presence of plenty of food.
First of all, it’s not nearly so bad if you exercise. For each condition, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, being sedentary is as much or nearly as much of a risk factor as being overweight. It’s also the primary reason people put on weight. So weight may be as much a symptom as a cause of increased morbidity. People who appear thin because they diet may not get the health benefits [source]. It’s just that weight is an easy thing to measure, and it’s an easy thing to discriminate against, so it’s been the factor a lot of studies have examined.
Imagine our hunter gatherer ancestors. Any healthy animal is active, either finding food, socialising, or just being curious. You’re sedentary when you’re sick or when you’re starving. At the end of winter or when food can’t be found the tribe expends as little energy as possible while waiting for things to improve. When there’s an abundance of food it’s stored as fat, within reason. There’s a huge gene-survival advantage in being one of the few in your tribe to survive a bad famine or a bad winter. When food returns and the other homo-sapiens aren’t competing for it, the remaining individuals’ children and grandchildren are going to thrive.
To get that advantage, humans are adapted to
- put on as much fat as won’t interfere with their normal activity and
- quickly slow down their metabolism (including losing energy-expensive muscle mass) to burn energy slowly when they don’t need to be active
The 21st century human evolved primarily before agriculture and definitely before computers. So being inactive pushes the body into a high-risk strategy. Slow down the metabolism and conserve energy. It’s high risk because a slow metabolism easily gets sick. It’s high benefit if you’re the famine survivor. That’s not a big problem for the average hunter gatherer, who isn’t sedentary without good reason and doesn’t live long enough to suffer most of the downsides. Things are different now. We’re very well adapted for things which just don’t apply in the modern west.
SETI, Life and the Rate of Change of Entropy
Here’s a reasonable working definition of life – a process which produces localised entropy decrease. Intelligent life doubly so.
Think about it like this: light from the sun hits the moon and turns to heat. No life involved. Light from the sun hits Venus and creates an enormous amount of turbulence in the atmosphere, also heat, eventually the turbulence generates heat too. So there’s a more complex process turning low entropy energy (light) into high entropy energy (heat). On Earth the process is, in places, even more complex. The sunlight might hit the leaves of a plant which turn certain chemicals into other chemicals, later eaten by a herbivore then shat out onto the forest floor and breaking down into, once again, heat.
So what’s involved? There’s a complex system – life being localised order bought at the cost of generally increasing disorder. In our case the concentration of energy in the Sun makes an entropic gradient on Earth, between sunlight and heat. That gradient generates order. Not just any order. The storms on Venus are both very simple in their general description and utterly chaotic in their detail. We can say that winds form at such and such a speed in weather patterns like x. But the movement of any particular set of particles within that doesn’t have a pattern, it’s simply a stochastic process. Look at life and you get patterns from top to bottom, from cells and DNA up to migrations of species and evolution of behavioural traits over time. Everywhere are patterns, the intersection point of simple order and simple chaos, maximal information density.
But life arises and exploits that entropy gradient. Thermodynamics notes a variable beta = dS/dE, the rate of change of entropy with respect to energy. Energy will tend to flow from systems with small beta to systems with high beta. As it does so the total entropy of the combined system will increase. Actually temperature can be defined as 1/beta, or dE/dS. Thus for constant pressure and volume dE is TdS. Greater rate of change in energy, in other words more energy available as work, where there are high temperatures and the rate of change of entropy is high.
For this reason we would expect to find life in steep entropy gradients and high temperatures. But life arises as complexity and high temperatures make structure unlikely. True, there are weather patterns in sun spots and they seem complex, they might be good places to look for life. By the way I’ve always thought that the red spot on Jupiter is a good candidate. But prima facie we should be looking in entropy gradients where complex structures are more easily possible. It’s all about that border between chaos and order.
Here’s my proposal for SETI. If we’re not finding attempts to communicate perhaps we should look for large-scale exploitation of entropy gradients at moderate temperatures. Perhaps these can be detected through observation of complexity, but it would be enough to see heat signatures indicating unexpectedly slow entropy changes in places which should have steep gradients. Or piles of waste heat being pushed out of the way so as to maintain the steep gradient and high exergy. If this sort of thing exists at the scale we can see from far off with crude instruments then I’d start to think we’re seeing intelligent life. Life that can get outside its initial ecosystem. Wouldn’t that be lovely?
In: philosophy, science, theory
A Cosmologigram
I firmly believe in the present. There literally is no past and no future, just the changing now. Sure, it contains evidence of things that have been, other circuits of the Earth around the Sun. We can be pretty certain at some point, some other now, there are even more such circuits engraved and erased upon what is. That means, of course, that it’s not strictly meaningless to talk about time. But leave aside the idea of a future and a past like a great crystal block, fixing things in some supposed and uniquely directional dimension, and you find that change is the actual substance of reality all about. Time is a construction of the speed of a regular change. Think about that metaphysical ice – it makes no sense. Where’s the present? Is it any slice you take, orthogonal to the line from past to future? But “time” is a mess. The geosynchronous satellites experience a slightly slower clock than all of us walking down here in the gravity well. The red-shifted galaxies tick slower still. When is now, in that universe-cube? Am I a four dimensioned worm, growing from the fetus-tail to the aged and decomposing head, unchanging yet experiencing one segment at a moment? A flip-book, with each page pre-written? Bull. My experience is the present. The light of those galaxies leaves them in their present and reaches me in my present. Everything happens where the change happens, because change is what there is.
This moment is deeper than an instant. That famously uncertain cat has a smear of present, each one a possibility of disaster. It experiences each but only one. Are the others still there, branches pruned from the tree of this-cat-present, burning in some irrecoverable parallel? Until the box is opened, I experience that smear as cat-reality. Opened, my smear is likewise pruned as this-cat-present cuts apart the tree of what I see. Or so you’d think, but you think that way to make tigers persistent in the long grass when our distant relatives had lost the smell and sight of them. It’s a necessary trick of the mind’s eye, harder to see than the past-future illusion but from the same cause. The absent tiger isn’t in my present, not even the box of undecidable cats is here. What’s here is the sight of the box, or the supposition that the present will change to include a tiger if I’m not rather careful.
That’s how I can experience the superimposition of cats or, on opening the box, generate in the experience of some more distant particle or person the effect of a superimposition of myself. But I cannot experience being a superimposition. One can suppose, from for example the various cats, that things like me – who call themselves me – experience presents like this one or very different. That’s the small truth, the best model predicting how the present changes. The big truth is the one the models and predictions obscure, this perfect flow of what *is*. And everything is, although very little of that happens in any one experience.
Experience and belief are inseparable. Each generates the other. Beliefs are genetically imprinted consequences of our perception systems; they are also taught, cultural things which fasten onto and reinforce those basic proclivities; and perhaps they can be chosen, no longer habits of thinking but consciously re-patterned thought processes and methods of perception. Beliefs shape our perception which shapes our experience which causes belief. It takes quite a bit of thought and imagination to tease this cycle apart, but it can be done because at the deepest level we require the world to make sense – to be consistent with itself. In other words we require the beliefs, which are in the end patterns, to fit throughout our experience and in harmony with one another. Even where a religious person says “that’s a matter of faith, not science” they don’t mean that has no pattern, they mean it is part of the religious pattern and the science pattern. But they’re aware a serious discomfort in this claim. All patterns should match with one another, or rather, all shapes should form part of a greater pattern. So the scientist who believes in religion is actually a religious person who thinks science is the expression of religion in the field of the measurable.
This is to say, we all make models. Finding patterns is deeply intrinsic to any intelligence – it’s what intelligence *is*, and patterns are models. The deepest rooted model, perhaps the structure on which all our models are founded, is the idea that experience happens to us. The implied subject. Without this the elements of experience cannot be collected or sequenced. Perhaps a new baby feels hungry and instinctively cries, but does not at first connect the hunger happening to it, the crying being done by it. Or perhaps a baby always understands that “I” is the common element between hunger and crying and being fed. Each individual assumes itself as subject of experience, and assumes itself – the subject – has a continuing identity even though the characteristics that identity expresses may change and the world around it changes.
So, in the best available model, the most likely small truth, I make every choice – with various degrees of probability – and the causes of and consequences of that choice are embodied in the present I of that possibility. If “I” makes any sense then “I” experience each choice and its outcomes as the “I” who would make that choice. Thus embodying a logical past and future. Some I experiences each one but it’s a different I in each case. So how is it really me? If is me why is the cat not me? If it’s not me, then how is the I of 5 minutes ago or the I of tomorrow “me” in any meaningful way? Two possible answers – every locus of experience is equivalent and the idea of identity is only a convenience, a construct on which to found the small truth, the Science, the coherent model of the world with best predictive powers. Or, on the other hand “I” exist only at any particular instant, but that instantaneous I includes the experience of memory, conscious and otherwise, of similar instants where similar subjective realities pertained, and it’s therefore not surprising that similar choices were and will be made by those and this similar I.
Those two answers are the same. There is only me in this present, and also there is no me, no identity, so all loci of experiences, all subjectivities the one experiencing.
Chinese junk-hulk sinking as pirates attack, and you flee the burning deck. I sit in front of a keyboard. Green things send chemical messages to one another, forming a process akin to thought. A bored child, too hot in the sun, looks out a car window as his parents argue. A sorcerer listens to the words spoken by falling autumn leaves and is afraid. Experience is too full for consciousness, too much even for all the consciousnesses there are, though it generates them.
This is a cosmological love story that you’re experiencing. More than that, since it’s strictly participatory, it’s a love song. There’s just that bit of order needed for harmony, plenty of chaos to keep it interesting – but all the parts are sung, all the notes sounded. And you know this, dear reader. You know because I’ve looked into your eyes. That moment is in this present, sung and unsung. That moment is every this moment, that you look away, that you don’t, that makes all this richness and beauty.
We dance, you and I, and are in the turning world. I love you.
In: philosophy, science, theory
Come the Rapture?
What I wonder about the most, though, is do we get to watch? Will all of a sudden people start floating off the ground toward the sky, or will they just blink out of earthly existence? If they float, what happens if they’re in a house or car? Is there a time limit on getting out to clear sky? What if they get stuck?
I guess we’ll find out. Whatever happens, remember you still have friends here amid the damned.
Calling out the fey
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.For I have known them all already, known them all: -
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
Wonder
Language is constructed through pattern recognition and generalisation, and the connections between ideas forge meaning.[1] The Science is that web of communal meaning, and thus all language is of universals, generalities. What we notice in an experience is what fits known patterns, turning it from a collection of sensations into a thing. At best we notice simultaneous patterns and construct from the sensations many overlapping things, but it’s always a process of filtration. The direct sensation is lost, we let that moment of truth with a capital T slip away, hoping better to grasp its ghost – the thing, the connections and relevance, the mnemonic.
This is why I’m distrustful of language, especially language used unconsciously.[2] Symbols, concepts, clusters of meaning – thus, language – are terribly good at protecting us from our real emotional response to a situation and at concealing from us the direct understanding of a thing.[3] Paradoxically ideas are also essential to meaning and meaning is the basis of more than momentary feeling, however intense. So language and ideas have to be an aid in the creation of that connection of feeling and thought which is deep understanding, and not a substitute for that connection. Objective reality, that construction of a world we can agree on and talk about, is at best provisional. It helps reach toward the real truth of experience, but it should not be mistaken for that. Nor is all experience equally available to us; the ability to anaesthetise ourselves through our symbol set is just an instance of this mechanism. We experience fully only that to which we pay active attention, especially engaged and passionate attention.[4]
The temptation is to filter too soon. We think we already know, so we don’t actually see. When we really experience a thing it’s as if we had the patience and care to allow the sensation to experience us. Understanding or interpretation dawns gradually, naturally. That’s one of Sherlock Holmes two secrets: first he really sees, and then he has the courage to accept all the consequences of the conclusions he draws from what he sees. Usually people insist so strongly that their reality should fit the consensus of what to expect in a situation that they reject experience which does not match.[5] To truly experience a set of sensations, and then to truly allow the consequent opening-to-possibilities is, I think, called wonder. It’s not a passive sort of perception, it’s instead a combined passive-active-joyous mode of being – passionate – even if the thing being grokked evokes sadness.
Love
To my mind there are three ways we can interact with others. The first is to interpret their possible proclivities, beliefs, motives; map from that their likely actions, and determine my possible interactions with those possibilities. This approach works from conceiving of the other as an object. It’s not necessarily kind or unkind, and it’s certainly not incompatible with ethical systems which structure one’s treatment of others according to rules. But it is a power relationship. It’s a necessary starting point: the objective connection.[6]
Human empathy and imagination allow us to instead conceive of the other as ourselves in different circumstances, and from that as not-ourselves but still from a subjective viewpoint. What would I-the-other want, need, believe? This is still a conceptual understanding, but one that’s much richer.[7] It’s sustained by good objective understanding, but its basis is inherently compassionate. Such relationships overcome loneliness because when the other’s actions and professed feelings match the imagined-other’s actions and feelings then it proves the existence of the other’s subjective experience.
Finally, compassionate understanding of the other allows one to reach past language and concept to directly experience the other: beyond subjective or objective; before the idea of self or other. [8] It’s wonder-in-another, and it works as a conversation or a feedback loop. Pure communication without nameable content. Or rather its content is that truth with a capital T which is the uncensored experience of being. It’s love.
Nor does this apply only to other humans. The compassionate understanding which forms the basis for love is harder to apply where understanding is more difficult, but since understanding is conceptualisation of experience, love is possible wherever there is experience. Mammals all need some level of empathy since it feeds the understanding which makes them effective mothers. They’re relatively easy, because the feedback is good. Love beyond this is founded in the inklings of pre-conceptual experience which permeate the basis of our consciousness, or on the blast of pre-conceptual thought which forms the mystic experience.[9]
Passion
The best anaesthetic is not to care. Wonder and love are based on passionate and active care. This is the foundation of attention and attention is the foundation of experience. Being-in-the-world is a thing you do, not have. And it’s impossible to care without being motivated by the consequences of that care. To act. To dare to disturb the universe.
All of which sounds very serious, but caring about something is a joyful activity. I suspect this is for the same reason that exerting oneself utterly in a physical activity is joyous. It lifts the spirit to be wholly engaged. But caring also combats fear, and thus brings with it playfulness. Fun. Real communication is a happy activity. Love is expressed best through play, laughter, teasing. Personally, I get too serious – which I suspect is because I’m prone to as much fear as courage. I can see the possibility of lightness but it usually eludes me. I substitute determination, a thing that will slay dragons by means of conscious will rather than the sort of brave gentleness which makes it look easy.
Passion is both unfashionable and dangerous. Wonder and love are incompatible with the consumer culture’s plastic pacifier dipped in sugar and fat. To care is to need to risk, to be willing to spend oneself for the needs of the other. This is Holmes second secret, accepting the consequences of real understanding. If people believed in and understood their experiences were true they would have no choice but to care, and people are afraid to care with any actual passion. Instead they walk past someone who is desperate, and they keep their own needs secret from themselves.
It’s not the white picket fences that really frighten me, it’s that I might one day be too afraid to continue living outside them. Hence the mantra calling out the fey. It describes a hope of wonder and love and passion and risk. Of caring easily and completely. Reminds me of an imaginary time when this was easy. Provides a compass for this course that I’ve more or less stayed on my whole life.
I’m just not a very good mariner. Maybe the compass will help.
- It’s fascinating, by the way, that it’s through empathy that we solve Wittgenstein’s conundrum of communication. I see someone talking about a thing, and by imagining what I would feel prompted to say in the same situation, and why, I’m able to imagine that the other means the same. The extent to which my guess is correct is a function of our degree of commonality and my ability to imagine that commonality and understand the differences. Understanding must precede communication, which will make talking with aliens difficult.
- The short version of why that is is explained here and I’ve made obsessively carefully reasoned argument here for the cultural/memetic angle on that.
- For example this, and all sorts of propaganda from ancient to more recent times.
- What Kierkegaard calls deepest subjectivity, or the infinite passion of inwardness.
- “Change Blindness”, for example. Subjects approached a confederate, who stood behind a counter, to participate in an experiment. After a brief interaction with the experimenter, the subject signed a consent form and handed it to the experimenter. The experimenter then ducked behind the counter to put the form away, and a second experimenter popped up from behind the counter to conclude the interaction. This time, 75% of subjects failed to detect the change in experimenters.
- Utilitarianism objectifies all in this way, including the actor. I should do whatever is best for all-as-objects. Kant’s focus of action is subjective, the good will, but his conceptualisation is of all including the actor in objective terms (even though via their subjective choices). His universal law is the same as saying “take my potential action out of the subjective – could I want it to apply objectively?”
- It’s what Kant was aiming for, clearly, and what he would call an ethical relationship.
- Yes, it sounds mystical. At that level of pure sensation there is only the ocean. Buber has it. The absolute exists within the particular, not apart from it. The rose is within the worm, rather than the other way around.
- That mystical. Or any other, pretty much. Non-duality. Most attempts to interpret it are simply confusing, so there’s not much to say.
In: philosophy, theory, world
Calling out the fey: introduction
I’m terrified of white picket fences. Someone I knew in high school started saving cash from a weekend job to use as deposit on a house. That seemed like a joke, but a few years later I met him and he had that house, and a secure job, and he’d met the woman he was going to marry. His life was mapped out and it was perfectly sensible. The fabled summer ant. He and his wife would be able to afford their 1.7 children, and even send them to college. His retirement was going to be comfortable.
It’s a carefully considered and effective strategy, which recognised and fulfilled his needs and, I hope, made him happy. But the very idea makes me ill. Not because that he might have died before he had a chance to enjoy his savings, but because he wasn’t living, not the way I see it. He merely existed, in the most painless and comfortable way possible. That is if you’re somehow anaesthetized to the boredom and creeping horror.
The world is teeming with similar zombies. Most of them driven by a combination of the security stick and the pleasure carrot. This makes them less effective than Brian because they’re torn between short term and long term requirements, and also because they don’t approach their goals rationally. This is how people become consumers, and the advertising industry – in other words, the whole of western consumer capitalism – has grown up to encourage this in a co-dependency which is sucking meaning out of people’s lives and destroying the planet.
As for me, I think my goals are as innate as Brian’s. I need to engage with life, both intellectually and emotionally. I need to experience, feel, and understand. I think the reason that’s so important to me is that I find it very easy to withdraw from engagement, and occupy myself with distractions from having to care and make an effort. Books, computers, education, my own imaginings, and even to an extent politics.[1] The thing is that each of those are useful to engagement, when used for that, and a displacement activity from engagement when used otherwise. Just like financial security, and like pleasure. Without them life is a struggle rather than a joy, and without a light heart there’s engagement only with the idea of a thing, not with the experience itself.
Which is why I’m scared of those fences. I don’t want security because it makes it too easy to sink into a comfortable disengagement, but I need money so as not to be distracted by getting it. I don’t want an intellectual life, but it’s both a pleasure and a necessity for understanding. It’s also perilously close to all sorts of ways of forgetting goals; a slow and apathetic disintegration that I’ve come close to, briefly, a few times in the past. And each time I’ve become deeply, desperately, miserable, and changed things. Which is exactly what happened when I had a lot of money and got distracted by hedonism. Nothing about my needs is a choice, but like Brian, or rather, most of the time like Brian, I carefully think about how to best meet them.
I don’t think my goals are uncommon, but our culture misrepresents and subverts the idea to certain kinds of consumption. Because of that it’s important to reframe things [3], to make a language and a set of ideas – what a friend of mine would call a mythology – to understand this completely and on its own terms. Someone else’s framing begs the question, puts a worm in the heart of the rose.[2] You think you have what you mean and suddenly it’s turned around to mean the consequences of its preconceptions. In essence any new question needs a new way of thinking, and any new way of thinking is a whole world.
Which is a big ask, but we’re pattern matchers and world creators, we humans. And I have a shorthand for this idea, I call it “calling out the fey.”
- Politics, after all, is the game of “someone
on the internetelsewhere in the world is wrong.” - There’s a reference I can’t find, but I mean this not that
- Hence some famous reframings.
All the things I wrote in 2008 and 2009.
Introduction
With a rare exception or two I haven’t written here for several years. Various things have intervened – moving to a new country, starting a new business, and preceding all that some formal study. What I’d like to do is go through here and edit things, weed out the crap, format it nicely, and redo the blog design. Generally keep house.
More important, since you dear reader can skip the rubbish and out of date current events yourself, for now, is that I include here the other main tract of material which matters to me, and that’s the academic-style writing that I did during that formal study. I think I had a few good ideas amongst it, and there are some things I want to be able to refer to in future things I might write.
They’re all PDF files so for now I’ll just link them in this document and add an introduction to each one, to help you sort through and decide which you might want to read. I’ll also try to somewhat order them so that those with the more interesting content are first.
Is, or should, ethics be based on genetic predisposition?
I argue that while genetic and memetic influences are important in forming what’s called these days our “moral intuition”, that we benefit from making the effort to untangle these and understand them so that our ethics is fundamentally from a rational choice of values, even though these values are in the end an intelligent expression of our emotional and practical needs. Social/memetic motives primarily benefit the social or institutional organism they make up, and not the individual. Genetic motives are unsophisticated and may be outdated.
“Change”, not “time” is fundamental.
A defense of the discredited idea that we live in an ever-changing present rather than a 4-dimensional unchanging block of space-time. I think what’s called “presentism” has it slightly wrong, but that space-time (in what is clearly a multiverse) is an untenably inelegant model. The essay doesn’t get into this but this whole thought process shows clearly that our physics, our world-model, is not especially “reality” but rather the most effective way of squaring experience with expected experience. There is no “reality” as such. The block view of space-time has blinded us to a great deal of what we experience, I think.
Passion, meaning, and truth – subjective and objective. Tragedy. Boredom.
All the good stuff, as seen by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This is a fun little read and it expresses my horror of the conventional and safe.
Buddhist arguments for putting the environment as a system ahead of the needs of humans as a species.
Because wonder is a selfless act. Here’s the article.
The I think in the Critique of Pure Reason
Detailed exegesis. Long. I ended up really understanding Kant, but it’s mostly of academic interest now, if you’ll excuse the pun.
The Buddhist argument from control that there is no self.
It’s a good argument. It’s interesting philosophy. It’s amazing how deeply clever those medieval Tibetans were.
Here.
Connectionism and Meaning
I defend the connectionist theory of mind as the mechanism for the construction of meaning. The essay is a little dry but I think somewhere, buried here, is the beginning of an important insight into how we make the world from our senses. But I can’t yet get it clear, it’s only glimpses. “Meaning” is a really interesting and loaded word, and I don’t think it means what we think it means, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya.
The Gorgias, and Freud
These two are the least interesting, unless you thought Freud was anything except a dangerous fraud. Well, a dangerous fraud with one good idea – that the mind is a mechanism constructed from a series of mutually interacting psychological forces. Spoiler alert: psychoanalysis has been proven in double-blind studies not to have the least beneficial effect.
Here (Gorgias) and here (Freud)
God in Kant and Spinoza
I didn’t know nearly as much about Kant when I wrote this, and it shows. Just the same Spinoza is wonderful and seriously underrated – more for his ethics than his metaphysics, but just the same.
In: environment, philosophy, science, society, theory
