Category Archives: Philosophy

Our continuing moral depravity

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Everyone who knows me, knows that I’m an atheist, and that I think religious inspired moral values are backed by vapor. If I were going around kidnapping teenage prostitutes, violating and humiliating them sexually, and then chopping off their heads with a chainsaw and burying them in my backyard, there would be no spiritual punishment upon my passing. (To be clear, I am not doing this. It’s purely coincidence that several teenage prostitutes have gone missing in the four mile area surrounding my house.)

However, unlike many atheists, I’m not convinced that the world would be a better place if it lost its religious moral values. The Templeton Foundation (an organization which admittedly has a bias towards offering an intellectual defense of religion and spirituality) notes the following in relation to the recent youth riots in Britain.

… Arthur, dean of the education college at the University of Birmingham, led a research team that produced a 2009 report on the crisis of character among England’s underclass teenagers. The report, produced as part of the John Templeton Foundation-funded Learning For Life UK program, warned that many English teenagers living in urban deprivation were disconnected from both their communities and basic morality.
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Not all underclass English youth are in such dire moral circumstances. Arthur found that Muslim teenagers who shared the material poverty of their white and black neighbors nevertheless were far more educated in the virtues and faithful to civil society’s values.
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By contrast, the white and black youth the Arthur study examined were far more likely to come from broken or dysfunctional families, and to have little or no religion at all. This too is not surprising to Arthur, who said that the rapid secularization of Britain, along with a post-1960s ethos that focuses more on rights than duties, has caused young Britons to lose touch with their moral traditions.
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“No government or other secular tradition, has been able so far to replace the Judeo-Christian moral tradition,” Arthur said.
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A grim Arthur declared that we may have entered “a new moral Dark Age,” driven in part by the loss of faith in transcendent values and the decline in authority among society’s institutions. This is not, he fears, only a British problem.
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“I fear that most of America is only 20 to 30 years behind us,” he said. “And I don’t believe we’ve seen the end of this. These young people have done it once, and I think they’ll do it again.”

Some of this is, I suspect, the inevitable gloomy view every older generation takes of the younger generation. And, there were a lot of youths rioting in Paris a couple years ago, and I believe many of them were Muslim. I also think there’s a lot of strong indications that to some degree morality is built into the brain — we are intrinsically uncomfortable performing immoral acts, particularly violence, regardless of our religious upbringing (well, most of us anyway — psychopaths would be a clear exception.) That said, I think this guy is onto something. And it’s fair to worry about a society that loses its religious moral center.

Final notes from The Painted Bird

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A lot of what “The User Illusion” — the book I just finished on consciousness — is about is the limitations built into various modes of communication. For instance, you can send someone a letter, but that letter can never convey the subtleties of emotion that could be conveyed via the human voice. Or, using speech, you could describe a scene to someone, but that would never be the same as actually viewing the scene. We can never fully convey our experiences to another person. We can’t describe every individual thing we’re seeing, every sound we’re hearing, every visceral sensation traveling through our body during an experience etc. And even if we took the time to address every detail of every experience, words themselves have a limited bandwidth. Words like “love,” or “consciousness,” or “justice,” or “beautiful” border on being meaningless, because everyone has a different interpretation of them.

Today, I finished up reading “The Painted Bird,” and find that towards the end the narrator — a mute child who has seen the horrors of World War II — sums this all up nicely. Reflecting on man’s predicament, he says…

It mattered little if one was mute; people do not understand one another anyway. They collided with or charmed one another, hugged or traveled one another, but everyone knew only himself. His emotions, memory, and senses divided him from others as effectively as thick reeds screen the mainstream from the muddy bank. Like the mountain peaks around us, we looked at one another, separated by valleys, too high to stay unnoticed, too low to touch the heavens.

Thus is defined the futility of our existence. The next time you’re having a conversation with someone, I recommend that you reach into your mouth and literally push the spongy gobs of your brain out through each of your ears.

Floating Libertopia

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This is kind of interesting.

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch–free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place.

Sounds like my kind of town.

Life before consciousness?

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I continue my reading of “The User Illusion,” and arrive at an interesting chapter where the book reports on the work of Julian Jaynes, of Princeton, who argues that consciousness is a relatively new evolution in human beings. Man had no consciousness as recently as 3000 years ago. Jaynes expresses the crux of this idea as follows:

“If our reasonings have been correct, it is perfectly possible that there could have existed a race of man who spoke, judged, reasoned, solved problems, indeed did most of the things that we do, but who were not conscious at all.”

The modern mind reels at the suggestion. How can a person make their way through life without consciousness? But think of it this way: you’re walking on your way to the store. You navigate down meandering roads, pause for traffic and eventually arrive at your destination. But, as you travel, you’re not thinking about how you get to the store — you’re thinking about the TV show you saw last night, the book you’re reading, whether or not your girlfriend is sleeping with your best friend. Extract all that abstract thought, and you have the non-conscious experience — the raw experience of navigating to the store without really thinking about it. Humans of 3000 years ago could have accomplished quite a bit in the realms of agriculture, commerce and politics, without having consciousness.

When you think about it, we see all sorts of perfectly functional, presumably non-conscious behavior in the animal kingdom. We certainly don’t think ants are conscious, but they seem to get around just fine. The same could be said about snakes, fish, birds etc. (There’s a bit of a debate right now as to whether certain apes have consciousness.)

There’s one other example of existence without consciousness that can be considered. Yourself, as an infant. “The User Illusion” summarizes the views of psychoanalyst Donald Winick at, stating…

… the infant has no sense of itself… the infant exists only together with the mother or other people. The notion of an “I,” an identity, does not appear until the third year of life. The original state of the infant is an experience of non-separation, non-identity.

I’ve read some theories that autistics suffer from an inability to define their “I.” They have trouble understanding where they end, and the rest of the world begins, and have trouble understanding that there are other “I’s” out there with their own interests and motivations.

The 40 bit limit

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I’m continuing to read this book “The User Illusion,” which is a overall survey of the study of human consciousness. I’ve gotten to one interesting section where the author is describing the two “persons” within a human. There is the “I” — the conscious self which provides our generally accepted narrative for life. Then there is the “me” — the cumulation of the gazillions of unconscious processes occurring in the human mind at any given moment.

Like the discipline of computer science, this book measures information in terms of bits. Bits are essentially yes or no questions. I still don’t totally understand how you can measure the world around you this way, but I’m guessing it’s something like this: a red circle would be two or three bits. You can ask the question, is it a circle or not, and get a yes or no answer. You can ask the question is it red or not, and get a yes or no answer. Maybe a third it would be used up to deal with the size.

Now, via all your sensory inputs — sight, hearing, smell etc. — you’re absorbing a whole lot of bits per second (I can’t recall the exact number, and a cursory review of the book came up empty, but I think it’s in the millions.) However, scientists have determined that the human consciousness can handle at maximum about 40 bits per second. It shouldn’t really be much of a surprise. Even if you’re hearing the air conditioner, usually you’re not conscious of it. Even if you’re looking at an expansive scene of natural beauty, you’re probably only focused on specific parts of it — say a plant — from moment to moment. When smelling a sweet flower, people often close their eyes to not be distracted by their other senses.

So how does this relate to I and me? Well, I is the consciousness experiencing life at 40 bits per second. Me is the unconscious. And there seems to be a solid argument that me is doing a lot with those other bits — the ones not making it to the consciousness. This corresponds with the classic suspense thriller narrative — someone gets hypnotized and revisits the scene of their parents’ murders and realized that they did see the killer, just not consciously.

There’s another interesting facet to this. If you’re any kind of performer — a musician, a comedian, an actor, a sportsman — it’s your me that you’re training when you practice. To really achieve the “flow” necessary to master your discipline, you need to be able to release your me on command. Or more to the point, you need to get your I to shut the fuck up when it’s time to perform.

The code to the universe

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I’ve been reading this interesting book called “The User Illusion” about… well, I’m not quite sure what it’s about. It’s supposed to be about the nature of human consciousness, but so far the author has been mostly talking about math equations and thermodynamics. There is an interesting section on the mathematician Kurt Godel. Godel examined the statement “I am lying” and noted that it was a paradox. If you spoke the statement truthfully, you were not being truthful and vice versa. Godel examined this paradox in mathematical form, and used it to show that math cannot completely describe the universe. There were mathematical statements that could be both true and false at the same time.

It’s interesting to think about the idea that both language and math can essentially convey the same concepts. And just today I was reading about how composers in the day of JS Bach criticized his music for being too mathematical. This opens up the idea that music itself can describe concepts we might presume to be the domain of math or language.

Thus I think we conclude that language and music and math are all describing some greater truth… some code of the universe. And I’m pretty sure that if you figured out this code you would be all-powerful and any chick you wanted would have to sleep with you.

Our bodies, our selves

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Hippies and assorted scum are always talking about the supposed “oneness” of humanity. They propose the theory that the boundaries of our egos are a chimera and, in fact, we all have the capability of existing in harmony as a unified sentience.

This is of course pernicious nonsense. The physical boundaries of our bodies are easy to see and feel — our skin, our flesh. And since our mind is the result of the physiological machinations of our brain, it too is separated from other minds. Until one person’s neurons can intermingle with another’s, they cannot be said to be joined. As such, it is clear that as humans we exist as individual units, not parts of a glorified whole.

But I would argue the situation is even worse than that. An individual human is not a whole unto himself or herself, but a collection of interlocking pieces. We’ve all had the experience of seeing a piece of chocolate cake and thinking “that looks delicious” while simultaneously thinking “if I eat that, I’ll get fat.” Those are indeed two parts of the brain talking to your conscious self. And we’ve all heard reams of stories of the infinite subconscious pieces of the brain which pursue their own interests and are not necessarily aligned with the rest of the self. And as we can break the brain (and body) down into separate components, we can break those components down further and further unto the level of cells. Is the cancerous cell replicating itself and poisoning your body part of “you”? Or is it an enemy whose destruction must be pursued?

I suspect that at some point in human evolution, the individual cells of the body will decide they no longer like each other and will choose to part. Hair will wrestle itself free from the grip of follicles, flesh will fall off bones and turn to foam, bones themselves will crack into clouds of dust and be carried away in the breeze.

I’d like to see what those hippies think about that!

The God part of the brain

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I’ve been reading an interesting book called “The God Part of the Brain.” It’s written by an author who freely admits that he had a bad acid trip as a young man which sent him on a decade-plus search for the roots of spirituality. His thesis is that human spirituality is an evolved function, much like language, passed through genes. Up to the point that I’m at in the book, he’s made two arguments — one that man, a creature whose only defense is his intelligence, is the only animal who realized his own mortality, thus setting off a kind of existentialist crisis for the species. Second, man, with his acumen with numbers, was the only creature to be able to contemplate notions of infinity which are integral to religion and spirituality. These notions of mortality and infinity were a kind of psychological attack, and in order to weather them, man had to develop his religions.

I’m not entirely sure I buy this, or at least it sounds more like a skeleton of a theory than a fully fleshed out idea, but it’s pretty interesting.

The evils of metaphor

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I find it interesting to note how often we refer to emotions as a kind of thing that has a measurable mass and other qualities. Someone might say, “Sally is filled with sorrow,” as if sorrow was some kind of liquid. Or, “John is feeling searing, hot rage,” as if rage had a measurable temperature. Of course, as I’m always arguing, emotions are not “things,” they’re simply sensations in our body being perceived by our brain. And to think of them as objects that have qualities is to lead ourselves down a path away from actual ways we can manage our emotional health.

In fact, I think all metaphors are dangerous and should be banned. The best way to do this would be to employ an armada of tiny flying robots would fly around listening to people’s conversations and when someone employed a metaphor they would shoot a strong electrical jolt at that person’s genitalia. So someone might say, “This is just like a knife through butter,” and the robot would blast him and he would fall to the floor.

Then he might say, “But it was just like a knife through butter. I was slicing my knife through a square of butter.” And the robot would say, “oh, sorry” and fly off.

More thoughts on Ayn Rand

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As I’ve continued to consider the work of Ayn Rand and read a few more writings related to the topic, I began to notice that there are two radically divergent interpretations of her work.

One is the standard liberal criticism that Rand was advocating selfishness for its own sake, while condemning human notions of sympathy, empathy and egalitarianism. It’s hard, reading Rand’s own words, to dispute this.

But there’s another interpretation of her writing that makes her out to be the first Anthony Robbins. She’s saying, “You can do it! Everything you need to make your dreams happen exists within you!”

And, I think there’s a lot of truth to this interpretation. Rand’s work is fundamentally at the heart of the battle between collectivism (e.g. we’re all in this together) and individualism (one person can rise above the steaming, stinking mediocrities that make up most of the human population.) And I think her work does acknowledge a seldom talked about weakness in collectivism. Perhaps the best summation of collectivism is the title to the Hillary Clinton’s children’s book “it takes a village.” The idea is that “it takes a village” to raise a child, or to put it another way, a person is only as strong as their support system. The problem here is that there’s an implicit message that if you don’t have a strong support system — for whatever reason — you’re fucked. The message of collectivism is that if you can’t group together and bond with people around you, you will suffer. This might explain why Rand’s work has such appeal for gifted children who have difficulty associating with their social peers. Rand’s message to such children is, “you are special! And you can transcend the bullying and idiocy of your cohorts.”

My view is that both collectivism and individualism — at least in their pure, extreme forms — miss something. And trying to apply them as simplistic rules for government is bound to reap numerous unintended consequences.

But, there’s no denying the individualist message has a resonance for me. I do consider myself superior to most people I encounter. Most social interaction consists of me digging my nails into the palm of my hand in order to distract myself from the contemptible, middling mental impairment of the person I’m talking to, an impairment that usually blinds them to my genius and superiority. For that part of me, Rand has a certain appeal.

There’s an interesting neurological question here as well. Do Objectivists and Ayn Rand followers have smaller neuronal networks for parts of the brain dedicated to social interaction? (I’m not putting them down; I suspect that I do.)