Category Archives: Philosophy

Atlas hugged?

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Andrew Sullivan, at his blog, has been collecting a series of posts called “growing up objectivist.” (Here’s one.) Generally speaking, it’s commentary from people who were influenced — positively or negatively — by the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. (It’s worth noting that a film adaptation of the first of three parts of her infamous novel “Atlas Shrugged” has just been released.)

Rand’s writing takes a lot of hits in these posts. I have somewhat conflicting feelings on the topic. I recall reading her short novel, “Anthem,” somewhere around the time of being a teenager and finding it to be a largely ignorable science-fiction dystopia novel. A couple years later I tried reading “The Fountainhead” and only made it a couple chapters in. But three or four years ago I took another stab at “The Fountainhead” and found it to be a quite enjoyable large-scale narrative with interesting character arcs and attention to detail that, while quite overwhelming, really made the story feel “real.”

But what also struck me about “The Fountainhead” was its delicious contrarianism. 98% of all fiction in almost any form of media is filled with standard messages of “sharing is good, we should look after each other, it’s only by standing together that we can achieve anything, blah blah…” “The Fountainhead” appeared deliberately oblivious to these sentiments and unapologetically presented Rand’s argument that selfishness is good.

I’ve never really bought Rand’s philosophy for reasons I’ll get to in a minute, but I have always squirmed at the saccharine, lovey-dovey “let’s all love each other” dribble you find in most narratives. As such, reading “The Fountainhead” offers a wonderful catharsis. (I’ve never read “Atlas Shrugged” — probably considered Rand’s magnum opus — mainly because it’s another thousand plus page novel and I’m generally familiar with the crux of it. Maybe I’ll give the movie a try.)

But there’s something that’s always seemed askew about Rand’s vision. And I think it boils down to the fact that as humans, we take a certain pleasure in helping each other. Engaging in some kind of discipline in which we attempt to purge ourselves of sympathy and compassion just sounds like too much work. (Which makes one wonder: did Rand herself achieve this? She definitely has a personal reputation as a bit of a oddball; her family did undergo the trauma of collectivization in early 20th-century Russia — perhaps that burned out her emotional circuits.)

The discipline of evolutionary psychology argues human sympathy — what you might call altruism — is hardwired into the brain. Humans, evolving in small groups, had to have an unspoken insurance plan: “you look out for me, and I’ll do the same in return.” As such, looking out for the other guy is really looking out for our own interests, and as a result, genes that create bodies that reward altruistic behavior with pleasurable sensations thrive. (The classic “joy of giving.”) Of course, there’s an irony here: by this definition, our altruism is ultimately selfish.

Inner peace for children

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I’ve been contemplating some of the ideas in my earlier blog post about two distinct types of happiness. To review: on one hand, we have a kind of “instant gratification” hedonistic happiness that we achieve by eating good food or having sex. On the other hand is a form of long-term happiness that might better be described as “well-being” which comes via working towards larger life goals.

It strikes me that it would be especially beneficial for children to understand the difference between these two types of happiness. The pursuit of the former, more hedonistic happiness will give only short-term pleasure. And children are notorious seekers of immediate gratification.

I suggest that the next time that you are in a van driving past Disneyland and the four-year-old who you are traveling with starts screaming “DISNEYLAND! I WANNA GO DISNEYLAND! LET’S GO NOW!” you say, “you know, instead of going to all the fun rides at Disneyland, why don’t we pull over and spend the next six hours considering how to achieve an inner serenity by accepting our place in the universe?” And then do exactly that.

Or, if you’re with a toddler and you pass an ice cream stand and the child starts screaming “Whhaaahh!!! I WANT VANILLA ICE CREAM. I WANT ICE CREAM! GIVE ME ICE CREAM OR I WILL HATE YOU FOREVER!” you say, “Instead of having delicious ice cream, why don’t we work on a series of mindfulness exercises where we contemplate calming our sympathetic nervous system and accepting that our physical needs are merely figments of our mind with no real control over our individual selves?”

I think children could benefit a lot from these kind of activities.

Further thoughts on cursing yourself happy

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I’ve mentioned my initially facetious now somewhat serious theory that screaming expletives releases some kind of emotional tension, probably by tapping directly into the parts of the brain that Freud might have referred to as the “id” (e.g. the older, “reptilian” brain.) For example, I recall reading about a case involving a man who had lost much of his cortical functions. The only talking he could do was to scream expletives.

I’ve also mentioned the pain/mental therapy known as the emotional freedom technique. It basically consists of tapping parts of your body while reciting self affirmations. I find it a bit fruity, but I did note this interesting recent post by an EFT therapist discussing one of her patients.

We went outdoors for our session and found a private place to work where we were free to tap and scream and cuss without attracting any attention. Here are some of Rose’s set up phrases:

Even though I am beyond furious with Mama – it’s always all about her – f**ck everyone else – I deeply and completely love and accept myself. (Said loud and strong)

Even though I feel responsible to make her happy I know that is a trap and it’s impossible, I deeply…

Even though I have this deep conviction that it is my responsibility to fix my f**ked up family, I deeply…

Should you be screaming expletives daily as a way of releasing tension? It’s best to be on the safe side.

What is happiness

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I’ve been meaning to comment on this Wall Street Journal op-ed which argues that different types of happiness have different kinds of benefits and deficits. What we traditionally think of as happiness — the feeling we get after having sex, drinking a strong martini or killing one of our enemies — is referred to as hedonic happiness, e.g. related to hedonism. But there’s another type of happiness which I will let the article’s author describe.

“Eudaimonia” is a Greek word associated with Aristotle and often mistranslated as “happiness”—which has contributed to misunderstandings about what happiness is. Some experts say Aristotle meant “well-being” when he wrote that humans can attain eudaimonia by fulfilling their potential. Today, the goal of understanding happiness and well-being, beyond philosophical interest, is part of a broad inquiry into aging and why some people avoid early death and disease. Psychologists investigating eudaimonic versus hedonic types of happiness over the past five to 10 years have looked at each type’s unique effects on physical and psychological health.

To some degree this is stuff we’ve heard all our lives. Chasing short-term happiness by taking drugs, watching television, seeing heavy metal bands and banging as many chicks as possible does not lead to the contentment that comes with slowly pursuing long-term goals. And it makes intuitive sense. The ultimate hedonists: rock stars (and possibly actors) seem to have a high likelihood of being depressed and killing themselves, even though they’re living lives that seem very enviable. Meanwhile, little Chinese men who do tai chi and eat a bowl of rice a day quite contentedly live to 90. We may be getting at the biological reasons why.

Eudaimonic well-being “reduces the bite” of risk factors normally associated with disease like low education level, using biological measures, according to their recently published findings on a subset of study participants.

Participants with low education level and greater eudaimonic well-being had lower levels of interleukin-6, an inflammatory marker of disease associated with cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s disease, than those with lower eudaimonic well-being, even after taking hedonic well-being into account.

It’s a little unclear whether they’re taking into account the obvious factor that hedonists probably expose themselves to all sorts of things — drugs, booze, fatty foods — that might increase their health risks.

What most strikes me reading the article is the sense that, after 10,000 years, human society still doesn’t have a very good definition of what the term happiness even means. And much of the conversation about the topic probably includes a lot of people using the term in different ways.

The chorus grows louder

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Another interesting point contained in the previously mentioned SEED book excerpt:

According to the New York Times, in 2009 the average teenage user sent or received 2,272 text messages per month. Assuming a sixteen-hour waking day, that’s 76 messages per day, five per hour. And that’s just an average…. Numbers like that suggests a seamless, continuous flow of messages woven throughout the day. Teenagers will text on their devices inside knapsacks during class, during restaurant meals, even while driving. That’s dangerous and sometimes fatal, but the allure is so strong they cannot resist. And, of course, many adults behave the same way. This intense connectivity reveals a longing for fast, dense communication—one that current bodies and devices can only partly fulfill.

This observation is interesting because you’re always hearing patrician nannying types saying that the rise of technology is walling people off from one another. But it seems as if technology is actually empowering people to communicate more than ever. Doubtless, yes, this is not direct communication — these are not people standing right next to each other — but not all communication can be direct. That would seem an obvious point for a society that seems in love with collections of letters written between great figures of history.

Of course, you could contemplate whether there’s really any value in communication between humans. Most people, especially teenagers, are absolute morons. Whatever ideas and sentiments that pass between them are likely dull, anti-intellectual and pointless obscenities that contribute nothing to the growth of art and culture the way this blog does.

Life with no senses?

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It strikes me that an interesting question is, “to what degree could we exist without our senses?” For example, let’s say you lost your vision, your hearing, your sense of smell, your taste and your sense of touch. Can we envision this kind of existence?

To some degree, we can — that’s fairly similar to what the experience of being in a sensory deprivation tank is. (You can still touch, of course, and taste, though there’s nothing particularly interesting to taste in there.) However, if we’re willing to believe the movie “Altered States” this kind of sensory deprivation can seriously trip one out.

But that’s not really depriving you of all your senses. There are many less considered but still quite important senses still at work while you are in a sensory deprivation tank. There’s the senses of our viscera — the sense of our stomach discomfort, or need to pee for example — as well as our sense of balance and awareness of gravity (determined by the vestibular system of the inner ear.) And there are things like our sense of temperature, and some subtle senses related to knowing where our limbs are in space. I’m asking, “what if ALL these senses were gone?”

You might think it would be an experience of total panic — to be trapped in a brain with no outside stimulation. But as I’ve argued in the past, emotions (like panic) ARE sensation (e.g. outside stimulation.) I think a brain in such a state would have no emotions. So what then is left of the experience of living? You would have memories, which involve ghosts of experiences, but would be incapable of any new experience. One has to wonder whether the consciousness would start to drift apart as the machinery of the mind lost any understanding of its purpose.

Here’s an even trippier thought: what if you were born with no senses? The mind would have no access to language, or structured thought (unless there’s some kind of structure imposed by the brain itself.) What would that existence be like?

Someone should take a whole lot of acid and think about this and get back to me.

Making sense of our senses

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I’m currently working on an acid logic article describing the senses (sight, hearing, taste etc.) and have been running up against some interesting thoughts. In a certain sense (ha ha!) we view our senses as part of ourselves, part of our essence. Part of what makes me me is all the things I’ve seen and heard. I am the culmination of my experiences, and experiences are really a collection of sensory input.

We also think we have a certain control over our senses. I look over here, and then I use my free will to turn my head and look over there, and then I decide to listen to this or that song, and then I decide to eat a hamburger and taste those succulent hamburger flavors. And in that sense (here we go again!), we do control our senses. However, if I happened to look over at a red flower, I have no control over the fact that I will experience the color red. The light waves bounce off the flower, hit my retina, and go into my brain and there’s nothing I can do about it. Or, if I happen to be standing outside and a dog barks nearby, I will have no control over whether or not I hear that dog.

With this view, there seems to be something oppressive about the sensory world. It is information flying in and we have no control over it. It surrounds us, assaults us, and overwhelms us. And, indeed, some people are driven insane by sensory input. We can pluck out our eyes, sever our ears, and burn our taste buds off at the root, but I suspect that, even deaf, we will hear the gods laughing as we break open our own skull and eagerly devoured fistfuls of our brain.

I hear Valentine’s Day is coming up.

The meaning of life

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After my life basically imploded due to my repetitive strain and vestibular issues, and I had to move from Los Angeles to San Diego, I spent a lot of time wondering about the meaning of life. More specifically, I found myself asking the question, “what do I do with my life now?” I’d basically just transitioned from a life of financial comfort, a rich peer group and steady access to pussy towards not knowing anybody, being celibate and spending a lot of time aimlessly walking around.

Mankind has, of course, grappled with these questions throughout its history. The presumption is that we should do what makes us happy. What makes us happy? Conventional answers might be having a relationship or family, generating wealth, accomplishing something (like writing a book) or earning celebrity. But those answers don’t ring so true these days. Families break up all the time, the miserable millionaire is a cliché and the joys of accomplishments and celebrity are fleeting.

In those early months of pondering the subject I noticed two things that gave me pleasure. One was continuing my lifelong dissection and exploration of music, the second was reading as much as possible as I could about the mind and the brain. It was the challenge of understanding some of the infinite mysteries integral to both subjects that gave me a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

This idea, that man likes a challenge, is nothing new. Biologists presume our natural curiosity helped us evolve, and psychologists and neuroscientists argue that it’s built into our DNA. Think of it this way: a primitive man sees a rabbit. He takes a guess at how hard he needs to throw a rock to hit the rabbit on the head. He overshoots and the rabbit runs away. The next day he sees another rabbit, under shoots, and again loses it. The third day, he sees yet another rabbit (or maybe even the same one, your choice.) He muses on what he learned the previous two days, throws a rock, and hits the rabbit on the head. He’s just figured out how to add rabbit to his diet which will only benefit him and his species. His willingness to embrace challenges is passed down to his offspring etc.

But I don’t think it’s any challenge that gives us a sense of fulfillment. We have to be faced with challenges that we have a reasonable chance of overcoming. If you challenge yourself to learn everything about post-Newtonian physics by Friday, you’re going to be frustrated and overwhelmed. But if you challenge yourself to get a decent understanding of molecules by Friday, you just might achieve it. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist I’ve talked about in the past, has discussed this. When people are presented with insurmountable challenges, they stress out, and stress is not pleasant or particularly effective for accomplishing anything. But people thrive in an environment where they face reasonable challenges. And this idea of challenging people in a benevolent environment is especially applicable to learning. Sapolsky states…

… educators call this the x+1 rule. We take kids wherever they are now (level x) and then challenge them with x plus 1, not x plus a thousand. There has to be a good chance of success from the beginning.

If we return to my list of potential happiness inducers, we might conclude that relationships are, in fact, a viable pursuit in life, because they are challenges. Figuring out how to have a mutually beneficial and exciting relationship with someone is, in itself, a challenge. And you often hear marriage counselors say that successful marriages consist of partners who continually surprise and intrigue (e.g. challenge) each other.

But here’s the rub. As a heterosexual male, my only option is to seek a relationship with a heterosexual female. And figuring out what a woman wants is clearly an insurmountable challenge because they defy all laws of logic. Their emotional state undulates for no discernible reason, their sexual desires are fickle, and their personal demands fluctuate with all the predictability of the weather on one of Jupiter’s moons (which we all know is very unpredictable.) Someone such as myself — intelligent, good natured, quite reasonable — is doomed in any attempt to placate the wild beast we call woman.

I don’t think I’ll ever tire of taking a thoughtful, perhaps even profound blog post, and appending to it a malicious slander against all women.

Our innate artistic preferences

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I happened across this interesting Ted talk last night, featuring Steven Pinker discussing his then current book, “The Blank Slate.” He has some provocative thoughts about the arts, alleging that the decline in high arts during the 20 century was influenced partly by the popularization of the idea that human behavior is determined entirely by the environment and is not innate. If you accept this theory, you might theorize that since humans have no built-in preference for classic artistic concepts like patterns or repetition, they can be “programmed” to like anything including atonal music and non-representational art (think Jackson Pollock.) However, the blank slate hypothesis has largely been debunked — humans do have innate tendencies, including preferences for patterns and repetition etc. (I’m not sure that’s actually been proven without a doubt, but seems intuitively true.) Thus, art that flies in the face of these preferences will fail.

(I was recently reading about the theory that humans prefer uncluttered, non-busy forms of visual art because they remind us of the open savannas we lived in for most of our evolutionary history, savannas that gave us ample opportunity to see approaching predators.)

That seems to be exactly what happened with atonal music. Humans seeking discernible patterns in the music cannot find any in atonal compositions and thus the music is popular with only a tiny subset of people. (Occasionally, I find it quite interesting in a “horror music” sort of way, but it would probably drive me up the wall if it was the only thing I listened to.) 20th-century non-representational art seems a little more welcoming. I find some of it interesting look at in the same way it’s interesting to look at clouds or fields of plants in nature. But, nonetheless, it’s fair to say most people prefer art that “looks like something,” and gives their eyes something to hook into.

I’d have to read Pinker’s book to really think through the ramifications of all this, but I’m always interested in the way that ideas in the sciences can affect the art world, which tends to hold itself as being above such distractions.

On a complete tangent, I’ve noticed that Flo, the Progressive Insurance girl, is looking a bit peaked in recent commercials. I hope they’re not working her too hard.

The bound God

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Occasionally, I’ve mocked followers of intelligent design in this blog, accusing them of being mentally incompetent retards, or feces stained morons, or dull-witted nimrods. Just good-natured razzing, really. But I have to concede that as I’ve been reading a lot about DNA and genetics and the cellular construction of the human body lately, I find it’s complexity so overwhelming that I have to wonder whether the only explanation for life is an intelligent designer.

Of course, on the flipside, I find the human body rather un-elegantly designed. The pathways which with the brain communicates to the rest of the body are often meandering and convoluted, and the system is rife with inefficiencies.

But an interesting thought struck me today. Man himself may not be far off from creating machines capable of complex processing such as learning. It may well happen that these devices — be they software or robots — will eventually develop some crude form of consciousness, and may wonder whether they themselves were created by a higher being or evolved “naturally.”

The answer will be that they were created by a god of sorts e.g. man. Of course, they would not be so much created as constructed out of existing parts. Man would not be willing the atoms and molecules these robots would be created from out of thin air. This opens up the interesting idea of a “bound God.” A god who can create life, but is still limited by the materials at hand and the laws of the universe.

Perhaps one day I could become a bound God. And use my power to destroy my enemies.