No Bad Memes

Why people are activists

2012-01-15T11:10:00.008-05:00

Let's get one thing straight: The current populace is pretentious. The memes that dominate our culture promote everything from ego-boosting to selfishness, which in turn are manifestations of our selfish genes' primary agenda: live forever.

However, even the most selfish of memes, in spite of serving no other purpose than to complement their genetic counterparts, are justified by pitiful attempts to correct cognitive dissonance.

The majority of "activists" (whatever that really even means) have at least one of the following two agendas:

1. Preserve a personal identity partially predicated on activism. If that danged Wall Street weren't so corrupt, what would the "Occupy" activists do with their time? What would make them feel special, like they belonged to a group or had a purpose? What would make them significant in the grander scheme of things? Without something to rail against, a lot of activists would probably feel like a part of themselves had disappeared, or that they weren't special.

2. Sustain a way of life. Even if you work for a non-profit organization, you're still earning a salary. Without the world's problems, how would such people get by in life?

It's all a selfish game. Let's stop making ourselves feel good by pretentiously justifying our animalistic preservation instincts and start cracking down on reproduction. End the perpetuation of negativity by addressing causality!

Comfort is relief from discomfort

2012-01-15T10:20:00.029-05:00

Alright, so no one is interested in the Socratic method, apparently. Meta-discussions about ideation, opportunity cost, and process management must not be as sexy as the notion that baby-making is evil. In that case, I'm going to write up a quick summation of the current state of life on this planet -- just to provide a recap of how everything works.

First of all, comfort is not the default state of existence for sentient organisms; it is the result of terminating uncomfortable sensations. Uncomfortable sensations exist, as far as we can tell, to motivate organisms -- that is, animated, selectively open systems -- to the end of perpetuating the "selfish" genes that use said organisms as hosts. Put another way, the phenotypic genetic expressions of the hosts are almost irrelevant to the agenda of the genes themselves as they replicate from one host to another.

A couple of important things to note here:

1. This gene-driven process is only optional when the host has acquired mastery of syntax. Your dog does not love its life, because it is wholly incapable of manipulating the symbolic mind-object, or conceptual abstraction, called "life"; it cannot think to itself, "I'm glad I'm alive. What a wonderful experience this is. How lovely that the alternative did not occur instead." This is because your dog cannot temporarily leave the present moment to use syntax objects to the end of creating a mental model called "life." To your dog, there is simply ending discomfort continuously through action.

If, for example, impaling itself on a wooden spike and slowly bleeding to death were to produce an orgasmic sensation in its brain, then your dog's neurons would wind up overloaded with dopamine while anticipating suicide in this manner.

Your dog couldn't care less about the beauty or miracle of its life; it merely seeks pleasure, irrespective of whether said pleasure promotes its personal existence. Your dog does not yearn to see its lineage carried into the future; it merely seeks pleasure, with said pleasure sometimes incidentally causing its lineage to be perpetuated.

Keeping in mind that evolution was not instigated with forethought, what the above essentially signifies is that relief from discomfort is incidentally conducive to life's perpetuation. "Nature" near-randomly throws relief and pleasure at sentient organisms, and sometimes, one of the manifestations of this relief leads to a certain set of genes living to see another day. Of course, if things were structured more rationally, then all pleasure would neatly lead to all genetic lineages surviving into the future, and we would never run out of room.

If mother turtles could understand that there are alternatives to life -- because of an ability to manipulate syntax objects like "life" and "death" and arrange them at "will" within the mind -- and could also understand that pleasure is only one example of discomfort being ended, then they would not will for half of their offspring to be painfully gobbled up by crabs within the first few minutes of their lives.

2. Being okay with life's continuation requires that one be okay with the whole of life, which necessarily includes billions of years of horrific future suffering. If you are okay with your child being born, then you implicitly concede that you are okay with its eventual death, as well as all struggles subsequent to its existential inception. Further, if you are okay with life continuing and are aware that this implies that you are okay with future starvation, extinction events, wars, and genocides, then you should logically also be okay with experiencing those things yourself.

If you do not want to starve to death, then you should not be okay with projecting starvation into the future by promoting life.

3. The following are all examples of what we may deem pleasurable, yet they are obviously nothing more than a return to a "normal" state of existence:

Scratching an itch. Was it pleasurable to scratch that exact same patch of skin prior to the existence of the itch?

Snow days for children. Snow days are fun, but they're nothing more than eliminating that which is not fun. Saturdays and Sundays occur every week, yet in spite of not containing content different from a Saturday or Sunday, snow days are far more fun; they are relief from an expected experience.

Stepping into a warm room out of the cold. Was the warm room immensely pleasurable prior to your having stepped out into the cold to begin with? Why does it suddenly feel so good to be "normal" again? In an hour, in spite of the temperature not changing, will you still feel really good to be out of the cold?

How about getting rid of an intensely painful sensation? If you've ever taken pain medication for something truly horrific, then you'll know how good it feels to return to a state which was previously not especially pleasurable.

4. Everything that gives us pleasure -- especially those things which we now consume in excess -- existed in relative scarcity prior to our more recent technological advancements. It feels good to eat not because hunger is an annoyance -- and certainly not because food is a fun thing worthy of silly television shows and quirky restaurant ideas -- but because not eating leads to horrible pain and eventual death.

Next time that you watch Cupcake Wars, remember that millions of people are starving to death right now all over the world, and that animals have been starving to death for almost a billion years. What you enjoy in life should not be taken lightly, for it is precious.

On humility

2011-11-08T22:17:00.024-05:00

In spite of our need to remain humbled by our limitations as finite cognitive processes, it is perfectly permissible for us to think that we have better ideas than other people. After all, if we're not all that confident in our present assessments of the environment, then we shouldn't be presenting said assessments to the public. It is not okay for everyone to "have an opinion" on every conceivable topic. For example, because of my ignorance regarding the reliability of one spaceship over another for the purpose of getting to Mars, I keep my mouth shut on the matter; to do otherwise is to promote information pollution (side note: this is why the idea of a representative democratic republic is a poor one).

Conversely, if someone is confident in his assessments of the environment -- due, in part, to peer review and repetition -- then we should not scorn him for this, or reference his alleged "superiority complex." Of course, we should not take him -- or his independent peers -- at his word, but dismissing someone merely because he thinks that his ideas appear to be more rational than yours is a fallacy. "What, do you think you're better than me because you believe this stuff?" is not a valid argument in any scenario, and least valid where the purveyor of the assessments has no vested interest in proving his superiority.

I will say that suffering contains value instead of that it's my personal opinion that suffering contains value not because I know for a fact that suffering contains value, but because prefacing every single statement with "Gee, I guess this is kind of possibly right, but it's just my opinion, so feel free to think whatever you want and not listen to me!" would be tremendously impractical and counterproductive. Basically, the impractical part lies in the politically correct tedium of it all, while the counterproductive part lies in the ensuing "You can think whatever you want" clause, with the latter promoting the meme that all ideas are equal.

No two ideas are equal where their qualities or quantities differ in any way whatsoever, and the only apparent reason for why anyone thinks otherwise is because they associate ideas with personal identity and individuality. If no one defined themselves by their ideals or ascribed any emotional significance to the fact that they held those ideals personally, then no one would cast random accusations of superiority complexes whenever someone else felt confident in an idea; in essence, no one would ever feel threatened by new information or in any way consider it a weapon to be wielded in some struggle for social dominance. It's like gift-giving: If everyone were to give gifts out of kindness instead of to display their philanthropy to a social circle, then no one would raise an eyebrow or accuse any gift-giver of ego-boosting.

There is a clear difference between knowing that you're right and seeing the data as pointing in your direction more than in the other directions. Decision-making is a matter of both quality and quantity, and most of the time, the involved quantities cannot be represented by a binary quandary. If my idea is a 7 and yours is a 6, who's to say that there isn't an 8 out there somewhere, awaiting discovery? Even if I'm less wrong than someone else, that doesn't mean that I'm right. Approximation is all that we can do with science -- for now.

Problem-solving reminders

2011-11-05T09:27:00.001-04:00

Two of the most important things to keep in mind when it comes to problem-solving are as follows:

1. There would be no need for retroaction if we were an adequately proactive species. Both kinds of action are presently necessary for addressing problems (or symptoms), but preventing a problem before it even begins should obviously take precedence over addressing it as it emerges, over and over again. For example, police are currently necessary for arresting civilly restless people, but if those people were to have been brought up in a more methodical and socially healthy environment (we could expound upon this for quite a bit, but that would require its own post), then there wouldn't be a need for police -- or the need would be greatly reduced, anyway.

2. Even after a problem has emerged, and we are socially obliged to be retroactive about it, we should still focus on the source of the causal chain rather than the continuously generated symptoms, or end products of the chain. For example, no, we can't rewind time and raise hardened criminals correctly, but we can still do something so that more of them don't emerge in the future. This is definitely something that police do not do at all.

There are three approaches to problem-solving, and all are valid, depending on the scenario:

1. Prevent the problem from starting; use your foresight.

2. Once the problem starts, clean up its manifestations everywhere that they appear in as practical a manner as is possible. Don't overdo it, because you might generate more problems by focusing so much on symptoms.

3. Try to stop the problem at its source after it has started.

An emergent approach trumps a traditional approach

2011-10-29T13:36:00.009-04:00

When discussing ideas, we should use an emergent, systematic approach. This means that, as ideas emerge, we should tackle them case-by-case by addressing any apparent flaws in them, and then contrast those flaws -- or lack thereof -- with the flaws inherent in the alternatives available at that moment, per our existing knowledge base. This will allow us to determine the ideas' relative attractiveness, which is subject to change as new data -- and new alternatives -- emerge.

Further, our approach should be negative; we should arrive at logical vantage points by attacking all vantage points and subsequently determining which is least wrong. If you can manage to state all that is illogical, then what's left doesn't necessarily have to even be explicitly spoken of.

The alternative to this approach is tradition, which means deciding whether something makes sense based on one's own personal experiences and consumption of cultural values and customs. This latter approach promotes attachment and mental hoarding.

An example of the traditional approach would be someone making the claim that 2+2=5, and another person countering this claim by stating that our mathematicians have learned over the years that 2+2=4. This is a faulty way of addressing the new claim.

The emergent alternative would be to examine the claim that 2+2=5 prior to consulting past knowledge, then checking to see if there are any updates to past knowledge that contradict either the new claim, the old one, or both.

Make a claim

2011-10-29T13:18:00.001-04:00

Keeping true to the direction that I recently proposed, I am going to issue you a request: Make at least one claim in the comments section, and we will work together to understand whether it's logically sturdy. The claim can be about any facet of the world in which we live.

The only rule is that each claim can only be one sentence in length. Of course, with this rule in mind, you are allowed to post as many claims as you want.

Go!

Let's have a Socratic dialogue

2011-08-27T17:20:00.011-04:00

"Socratic dialogue" is an unfortunate term for it, since nothing should ever be named after anyone (Occam's Razor is one of the most notoriously awful examples), but the practice is nevertheless quite sensible. Below, I have listed a few controversial or uncommon viewpoints for you to oppose in the comments section, if you so wish. Single a few out if you disagree with them and let's get an interrogation going until we discover, once and for all, whether the statements are truly sound; perhaps you can succeed in modifying them.

Without further ado:

Out of the government, the corporate world, and the media, the government is the most benign.

The average person is a larger problem than members of any "elite" group.

Americans are no dumber or more privileged than anyone in any other first world nation.

Feminism promotes social division and frivolity.

Courting sexual partners is a demonstration of prejudice.

All pleasurable states are nothing more than relief from previous unpleasurable states.

We should do away with money as soon as possible.

No one should have children for any available reason.

The "traditional family" model suffocates and depresses people -- or at least reduces their quality of life significantly.

There is no such thing as a mental disorder.

Anarchism is selfish and myopic.

Democracy is a terrible idea, and certainly did not originate with the emergence of the United States.

Ownership (property, copyright) creates a massive amount of waste while promoting attachment and conflict.

Attachment exacerbates suffering.

It is unlikely that there are other intelligent beings in the universe.

If life exists beyond the Earth, it must be absurdly uncommon.

Hurricanes, flus, earthquakes, school shooters, terrorists, stock market crashes, and debt are not going to get you.

We have replaced god with popular entertainment and the media.

Individualism is socially corrosive.

Capitalization, apostrophes, the multiplicity of punctuation marks, and synonyms should be done away with as soon as possible.

All words should be spelled phonetically.

Most books are a waste of time. The faster that you can glean information, the more efficient you are.

Quoting people is no different from wearing name brand clothing, showing off an expensive car, or increasing the size of your friends list on Facebook.

There should be one human language; any more than this is needlessly redundant.

Civilization will not collapse at any point over the next hundred years. In fact, it has never truly collapsed since its advent some 6-7,000 years ago.

The only state of perfection is nothingness.

~~Investing in~~ [modification: Committing to] any idea is foolish, given that attempting to prove the reliability of one's senses via one's senses is illogical.

Marijuana will probably become the culprit of at least some lung cancer cases over the next hundred years.

Obesity, with few exceptions, is not especially unhealthy -- and is almost never life-threatening.

Loving your partner is the same, in principle, as favoring your race or nation over the others.

Cuddling with a puppy after eating a cow is contradictory behavior at its worst.

All competitive sports are a waste of money, resources, schooling, and brain space; furthermore, they promote social division and animosity.

We should strive to attack all ideas, no matter how good they seem. If we come to favor a particular viewpoint, it should be because, while attacking it, we found that it held up better than the opposing ideas -- which were also attacked.

Fast food is a convenient way to eat in modern society, and is usually better for you than a fatty slab of steak high in calories purchased at a fancy restaurant.

Organic foods are usually worse in quality, less delicious, and more susceptible to rot than other foods.

There is nothing particularly unacceptable about smoking cigarettes.

It is a bad idea to get high or drunk in any capacity, for such activities decrease one's judgment and physical reflexes.

Lyrics, image, philosophy, and politics have nothing to do with music.

Most people are unhappy due to their own poor decision-making skills, but rather than improve or seek guidance, they blame a group for their shortcomings -- usually the government, the corporations, the media, or their families.

We should intelligently (i.e. gradually, while maintaining a balanced ecosystem) spay and neuter all animals on Earth as soon as possible.

The Holocaust was not some brilliant conspiracy to exterminate a race of people, but rather, a poorly planned, feather-fluffing set of events aimed at merely deporting said race.

The United States's involvement in World War II was unjustified; similarly, the American Civil War and American Revolutionary War should have never happened.

We will be ruined by pleasure, meekness, and popular culture long before we are ruined by torture, statism, and Big Brother.

Failing any high school course -- or even most college courses -- will have no impact whatsoever on your economic well-being.

Those members of modern society who claim to believe in a god suffer from cognitive dissonance, and believe far more in television, work, and bar-hopping than that holy book which they have never once opened.

Washing your hands after going to the bathroom accomplishes absolutely nothing.

Charities accomplish nothing other than to generate profit for various entities while, in some circumstances, strengthening societies just enough to allow them to perpetuate their own suffering.

Exploring the planets and moons of our solar system is a tremendous waste of time and resources.

Most people speak in memorized, discrete blocks of thought patterns that are essentially platitudes. Rarely does anyone recite a "belief" from outside of his or her culture -- even if the belief is purported to be anti status quo.

We will not experience a major extinction event as a result of global warming.

Nature lovers are liars, for they despise plague, disease, insects (especially maggots!), suffocating heat, frostbite, intestinal worms, shredded animal carcasses, etc.

Most jobs exist only to help others do their jobs, or to produce more crap that we don't need.

Welfare and utility are not equivalent; consequently, the modern concept of a "job" is flawed.

Sexual orientation and desire for social bonds are largely conditioned.

The less people you know, the happier you'll be. The more wants and desires that have to be accommodated, the more that compromise becomes a necessity, and knowing less people means attending less funerals.

A pragmatic approach to ideas

2011-08-21T15:15:00.001-04:00

This has already been touched upon numerous times, but I'd like to once again stress that we should go about forming "opinions" by rigorously testing all ideas prior to implementation. The questions that we should be asking ourselves when initially considering an idea are:

1. Does the idea work?

2. If the idea works, does another one work more efficiently?

All ideas must be able to pass the test of falsifiability before being considered for implementation. If we can't see results from a test of the idea, then no one should hold an opinion regarding its practical validity.

Avoiding optimism bias

2011-08-21T13:46:00.004-04:00

If a potential quality that you're contemplating is desirable to you, consider a potential quality of similar likelihood which is undesirable to you before deciding to chase the former quality.

For example:

1. The odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 20 million*. Yeah, those numbers are outrageous, but I'm going to play the lottery, anyway. You never know!

2. The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 20 million*. Phew, that's good to know. That's one less way of dying that I'll ever, ever have to worry about. It's basically a guarantee that it'll never happen to me.

Funny how we think about things differently depending on whether they benefit us -- even when the data are exactly the same in all instances! Regardless of what topics you're entertaining, always be sure to control for optimism bias during the decision-making process.

* These odds were fabricated for the purpose of the example.

One more utilitarian post for the road

2011-08-14T19:17:00.008-04:00

Premise 1: An action was taken.

1. The action was imposed on a sentient being.

2. Therefore, the action was bad.

This conclusion is false. Not all bad actions are imposed on other sentient beings; some only affect the self. In this sense, they may not be "immoral," but they are nevertheless foolish. Likewise, not all imposed actions are bad, for reasons stated below.

Premise 2: An action was taken.

1. The action caused harm -- regardless of whether it violated a sentient being's will.

2. Therefore, the action was bad.

This conclusion is also false. Harm is inherently bad, but causing harm is not, for some harm leads to a reduction of harm overall.

Premise 3: An action was taken.

1. The action was imposed on a sentient being, and/or...

2. ...the action caused harm beyond being a mere violation of the being's will.

3. The action prevented a much worse kind of harm from emerging elsewhere.

4. Therefore, the action was good.

This conclusion is true.

Sometimes, you need to kill the killer, lest he continue with his deeds uninterrupted.

The next phase: Meta-conversations

2011-08-14T18:38:00.021-04:00

Attracting people based on any particular present position is myopic. In retrospect, it may have been better for this blog to have stuck with detailing how to formulate ideals and make decisions than to have mentioned or endorsed any specific ideals or decisions. In the future, I would like to hold discussions regarding process management, premise formation, qualitative analysis, and logic; in short, I would rather discuss how to come to conclusions than give any of my readers any specific conclusions to revolve around and rally behind.

It may be the case that my conclusions -- tentative though they may indefinitely be -- are sound, but I am more interested in how a reader might have come to the same conclusions as myself than in the mere similarity of our positions. If, for example, your antinatalism leads you to choose vegetarianism, that does not entail that all vegetarians are antinatalists, or that congregating with vegetarians without any quality control is a sensible practice.

Note that I say all of the above not because I am interested in censorship or stifling important discussions, but rather, because there should be an order to this process, with specific ideals coming into play much later on after everyone has established that they utilize similar mental algorithms for processing information.

As a final thought on antinatalism, I will say the following (note the lack of generalizations below, as I am myself an antinatalist):

1. Many antinatalists are concerned solely with refraining from reproducing, and have either weak or nonexistent socio-political philosophies; in other words, they are often far wiser than most when it comes to being proactive (in at least the fundamental sense), but could use some improvement when it comes to being retroactive.

2. Many antinatalists view the world from an anthropocentric standpoint, meaning that they are solely concerned with the end of human reproduction. They may understand that animal suffering is bad, but they very often have no ambition to do anything about it beyond becoming vegetarian.

3. Many antinatalists view "the" problem as life itself (or, in more sensible cases, sentient life). The more accurate position to take, from my perspective, is that of "the" problem being a lack of intelligent management and regulation of the universe's energy processes -- or the mere existence of energy and work in the first place.

Furthermore, if sentience were distributed in discrete executable files to volunteering computers, such computers could call sentient processes for any given duration and turn them off on demand. In this scenario, a computer without any capacity to feel pain or pleasure could make calculations on a level of sophistication comparable to that of a human, and would only call conscious, sentient experience to the fore -- or "wake up," if you will -- when it felt like it would be fun or educational to do so; this would solve the problem of deprivation.

Of course, if such experiences, through repeated observation and testing, were demonstrated to be too risk-laden, then they would be phased out -- though, again, any conscious experience would be undertaken voluntarily, without impinging on any other conscious experiences or requiring anything other than self-contained information.

In summation:

Symptoms: Sentience; deprivation/desire/discomfort
Causes: Lack of intelligence; presence of existence

We either become gods and attain absolute, one-hundred-percent certainty that our ending the universe means that it's all over forever, or we volunteer to learn and explore, given that we cannot undo our births and that some of us suffer when contemplating death. Preventing future births, while a good thing, is no more credible as a rallying point than any other philosophical position, be it the unlikely existence of a deity or something as crass as rights-based activism. The discussion of how to properly use your brain is the only true rallying point -- for now.

The goal of society

2011-07-31T13:14:00.004-04:00

This is a bit oversimplified, but it does bring some clarity to matters governmental:

Society should be goal-oriented. At present, the only goal of society is to have no goals -- or to allow everyone to be "free" enough to establish their own goals for whatever reasons they see fit. However, you can't predicate your political philosophy on "freedom," because:

1. Where do you decide to draw the arbitrary line? How free should people be allowed to be? If you concede that there should be some limitations, then how is anyone under the guidance of the proposed system free in the first place, and why is freedom the goal touted?

2. There is no such thing as freedom without context; we can only be free from specific things. Evaluate each potential constraint on its own terms, define its qualities, determine the value of those qualities, and then issue a decree regarding the necessity of freedom from the constraint.

3. Freedom from constraints is a means to an end; it can be used for any number of ends, all with their own pros and cons. Why not cut out the archaic Enlightenment rhetoric altogether and define some real goals for your society -- per its ideals?

No leadership does not equal no regulation

2011-07-31T12:55:00.007-04:00

Some axioms:

1. There exist transmittable information patterns which guide the course of other information patterns in the universe. The former patterns are best understood when condensed into discrete concepts, or "ideas."

2. There exist facilitators, senders, recipients, and processors of the aforementioned information patterns. These could be loosely defined as information agents, and are currently most apparent in the form of human beings.

3. Information agents should agree upon a foundational set of information patterns as "ideals." Furthermore, this set should serve as the broadest base for work. For example, "Suffering is unwanted among sentient beings" is a maxim that should probably aid in the foundation of this base.

4. Ideals, while serving as the base of society over both self-satisfaction and ruling groups, should be questioned in order to promote consistency and uniformity among information agents. This axiom is the -- or one of the -- meta-ideals.

5. In theory, a meta-ideal could be questioned by a meta-ideal another layer back in the chain, but as this process has the potential to carry on ad infinitum and has no apparent point of logical termination, it is best, for practical reasons, to avoid it and instead opt to carry out the above in a manner which encourages positive demonstrable results.

On a related note, the IEEE standards are great examples of how information can be centrally standardized without the interference of any particular group of people. No one "rules" the IEEE or keeps "the people" who use its standards "out of power," yet networking technologies seem to get on just fine; likewise, Microsoft, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, etc. do not "enforce" IEEE standards or promise punishment for breaking with them.

Of course, the difference between a truly open system promoting the establishment of standards and the IEEE is that the latter exists within a capitalist paradigm, and is therefore channeled through corporate activities. Imagine if, instead of computing organizations, standards similar to those endorsed by the IEEE existed for nation-states, and that those states, binded by the standards, no longer had a reason to exist.

Arguments against balance in the universe

2011-07-31T12:34:00.006-04:00

1. The ratio of "empty" space to stars and planets is astronomical. If life is part of some magnificent order, then why is the universe filled with cold blackness instead of green pastures and lakes? The current compilation of evidence points toward there being very little, if any, physical advantage in existing as a complex cluster of matter -- especially the kind that moves around and consumes other clusters of matter in order to resist entropy. Almost all of the universe is hostile to large masses, and life in particular. Seriously, just exiting the Earth's atmosphere is incredibly dangerous for sentient beings. How unfortunately small our safety zone is when contrasted with its encasing!

2. Extinction events happen all the time. Was there balance on Earth during the Permian Extinction, when upward of ninety percent of marine life vanished outright?

3. There is nothing against which we can compare the universe, so any relative statement regarding how structured or balanced it is is shortsighted. The universe's processes are orderly? Relative to what?

Actually, we can compare the universe's processes to another kind of process: the human kind. I'm pretty sure that no one on Earth would think it a good idea to build a computer case the size of a stadium just to store parts no larger than those found in modern PCs.

And if someone ever did? Perhaps the people of the future would marvel in awe and wonderment at the result, but that doesn't mean that they would subsequently desire to imitate it. Fascination does not entail admiration.

Re: Entropy

2011-07-31T11:11:00.011-04:00

So I got the following anonymous email today as a complement to a comment somewhere regarding the inevitability of the heat death of the universe:

Even if truth hurts, it is better to accept it and face the
consequences. I. e. that life is ultimately pointless and heads
nowhere. We lost. I laughed. Then cried. Soon I'm dead. Thanks. Not.

First, I want to point out that the reason for why I am writing my reply here rather than via email is because this message was sent by an Austrian remailer. I've had stranger things happen, but regardless, I'm not a fan of one-sided conversations where one of the parties isn't allowed to participate or defend his stance. The reply, unaltered, to... someone:

1. Why are you using a remailer? What are the consequences of revealing your email address to me? Is it so frightening to you to have me know who your ISP is -- or even just your mail provider? What could I possibly do with this information? Google you? Yikes!

Guess not everyone is into the idea of transparent communications.

2. When the ostensibly true "hurts," I embrace the pain for the greater good. What hurts more than the truth, though, is the human species' insistence on promoting absolute certainty with regard to epistemological claims. I find it fascinating that you are able to predict, with such alleged precision, events trillions upon trillions of years into the future. The time scales involved in your claims are absurd to imagine; as a result, your conclusions are even more so.

3. Current predictions regarding the heat death of the universe do not utilize the life variable, because doing so would make any subsequent claims baseless and erratic in conclusion. Life -- and, consequently, intelligent information agents, both artificial and organic -- resist entropic decay by actively seeking to keep themselves indefinitely open as systems. Given that I have no idea what the universe will look like in a trillion trillion years, I have no idea what the implications are for both the success and the failure of these processes. I also have no idea whether one outcome or the other will result; the future of information is more uncertain now than it has ever been in human history.

4. We are presently unable to detect approximately 95% of the universe, and only speculate that it exists because we can measure its effects on the 5% that we can observe. In what ways intelligent information agents will be able to utilize dark energy a billion years from now is unknown.

Something to keep in mind, here, is that, if protons decay into nothing at some point, the universe will not be empty afterward; on the contrary, it will be filled with energy -- so much energy that the energy content at this instant will be laughable by comparison. If current models of the universe are accurate, then dark energy will continue to expand the fabric of spacetime for, potentially, eternity. Does this mean anything for intelligence one way or another? No, because we don't know what dark energy is.

5. During Einstein's time, we only had evidence for the existence of a single galaxy; today, we are aware of hundreds of billions. Furthermore, recent evidence in the field of astronomy has pointed toward the possibility that the universe is at least 250 times larger than we've been thinking it is, and that, as a result of inflation, the light cone spanning the diameter of the visible universe is minuscule in contrast to the vast distance separating our central point of observation from all of material reality outside of the cone.

The moral of the story is thus: Never forget that your time period containing all of the answers to the universe's mysteries is an immense coincidence for you, and that everyone to have ever thought this has been wrong to date. Sometimes it is better to accept that we do not know much about our bizarre situation than to feign authority out of some psychological need to feel secure in our certainty that, yes, the universe is a fatalistic place, and there's nothing that we can do about it.

It may feel good to believe that everything is okay, but feeling secure in our certainty has the same effect regardless of whether we're sure that it's all okay or that it's all terrible. I can tell from your reply that you are consoled by your indisputable grasp on truth; it is, after all, easier to accept that everything sucks -- or that everything is wonderful -- than it is to accept that our context is a gigantic unknown. It's human nurture to tend toward confidence and security, after all. Not having an answer causes discomfort. We can't have that!

Having said all of the above, I have no hope for the future, and think that the most likely outcome for life on Earth is that it will all get eradicated when the sun becomes a red giant. If this does happen, it will be a horrific event, but it is possible that afterward, there will never be any horrific events anywhere ever again.

My take on the non-identity problem

2011-07-15T19:52:00.004-04:00

As posted previously here:

The non-identity problem forsakes the essence of sentient organisms, because no sentient organism truly has a discrete identity to begin with. You, for example, are probably much more "me" than the seven-year-old kid whom my memory bank has essentially tricked me, for evolutionary reasons, into thinking is me. I likely contain very little, if any, of the original chemical content of that seven-year-old kid -- and my reactions, propensities, ideals, and general disposition are all drastically different as well.

So, then, if there are no "selves" to begin with, what we're actually dealing with are sensations. If we could push a button that removed all the meat and bones which encapsulate the nerves that do the feeling, we'd realize much more quickly that there are no more hard boundaries between one bundle of nerves and another than there are between one asteroid and another. Even the Earth used to be two "separate" planets billions of years ago -- before they collided with one another and formed what we call "Earth" today.

If you spill two drinks onto the floor at the same time, you clean them up as one mess; you don't view them as separate problems. Sensation is no different. In fact, with every child that gets "spilled" onto the carpet of the world, it should become even more prudent for us to initiate a cleanup. If we can quantify our progress, it should be in electrical signals eliminated -- not persons.

Another way of addressing the non-identity problem is by alerting whoever is wielding it to the fact that proactive maintenance is often considered preferable in business environments over retroactive or reactive maintenance. To prevent a server crash, you implement a backup policy on your network; you don't overload your computers or up the heat in the server room intentionally "just for fun" and then correct any errors after the fact. Why should it be any different for living things merely because they possess the illusions of free will and individuality?

People are uninformed and lack direction

2011-07-09T20:50:00.005-04:00

I once watched a film with a strong environmentalist slant to it which criticized overpopulation and, on some level, the individualistic capitalism required for there to be unregulated reproduction in the first place. I agreed with a lot of what was offered, but not all. However, I appreciated the effort.

I also once visited an Internet message board where someone who very poorly criticized the film was told to "stay the hell away" from the board if he didn't have anything constructive to add, critical or otherwise.

I find this highly ironic, since the best thing to offer the person who'd made the thread would have been education. Rather than shoo the person away for his belligerence, why not interview him? You may not change his mind, but it's equally unlikely that you'll change his mind about continuing to post on the board.

It's ironic because the film criticized social alienation, and what better way to alienate those who oppose our views than to tell them to shut up and leave? This kind of behavior is everywhere in our society; most people enjoy displaying their intellectual accomplishments, but very few are actually living by what they say. Pathetic.

Why we shouldn't leave anyone in charge

2011-07-09T20:21:00.002-04:00

1. Leaving a set group of exclusive people in charge of society necessarily causes good ideas to get excluded from the meme pool.

2. On the other hand, getting rid of government really only means that a manmade government will be replaced by nature. This is why anarchism fails.

3. Therefore, the solution is to be ruled not by men, and not by nature, but by a methodology.

There is no President of the scientific community; on the other hand, "cryptozoologists" aren't considered real scientists for a reason.

All decisions should be made within the parameters of something akin to the scientific community; there is no qualitative difference between "We shouldn't waste resources" and "E=mc^2".

Do you think you have much to contribute to society?

2011-07-08T19:28:00.007-04:00

It bothers me that so few people look upon themselves with disappointment. Members of Bigfoot message boards will be more than happy to provide you with their "opinion" that Bigfoot absolutely MUST exist -- even if they have no idea what they're talking about, and have no credentials relevant to zoology, biology, etc.

Why are such people allowed to provide their opinions on these topics? There is no basis for them whatsoever. Is it okay to let people provide an opinion on some ontological matter just because they want to feel like they belong to something? What if we were to let anyone form an "opinion" on how to build a bridge?

If you were to eyeball the distance between yourself and the clouds above you, what would make your opinion somehow worth considering, given the existence of measuring instruments?

Be honest with yourself: Are you providing your two cents because you have genuine business in doing so, or do you just want everyone to know that you exist? Do you have something to contribute beyond the baseline at which most opinions rest, or do you just want to be recognized? Sometimes the right thing to do is to admit ignorance, even in spite of an interest in the topic at hand, and politely step aside.

Too few people are disappointed in their shortcomings. I am very, very disappointed in mine -- not because I feel as though I've "failed" in life, but because the universe has so perfectly limited me. My brain could calculate things so much faster, judge distances so much more accurately. Most people don't think about stuff like this, because they're after social gratification rather than truth. What a great world it would be if everyone were horrified by their limitations.

Antinatalism forum

2011-07-03T09:23:00.001-04:00

There is now an antinatalism forum.

I didn't set it up, but feel free to post. It looks like it could really use more activity.

The "nonexistent people never get a chance to choose" argument

2011-07-02T20:19:00.012-04:00

I see antinatalists constantly struggling to crush an argument that's best summed up thusly:

Nonexistent people never get a chance to choose whether their individual lives are worth living or not. Because a nonexistent person cannot desire things, we cannot make statements regarding whether a nonexistent person will desire life if presented the choice.

Another variant might look something like this:

We don't know whether a particular person's coming into existence will be for the greater good or not, so we have no right to prevent it from happening. For all we know, a person's birth will be, at the minimum, good for the person himself.

An easy way to trump this is to alert the person making the argument to the fact that he or she is actually on step two in the line of questioning. The first step is:

Is life necessary?

If there is nothing necessary about life, then we cannot possibly justify it, given that stakes are present. We can only justify taking risks with stakes involved where it's necessary, or where the stakes are the lowest possible out of all the options. If the lowest possible number of stakes within a given scenario is zero, and the other options are not necessary, then we should choose the option with zero stakes.

Again, if you're not willing to roll a six-sided die with five amazingly pleasurable sides so long as AIDS or stomach cancer or the bubonic plague is on the sixth, please remember that every day, someone gets the "I just fell in love" side, someone gets the "I just won the lottery" side, and someone, somewhere gets the "Wow, I'm HIV positive" side. If you're okay with this but not okay with rolling the die yourself, then you are a hypocrite.

The issue at hand is NOT whether potential persons should be allowed to decide for "themselves" that their lives are good; it's whether there is a real, hard reason to fabricate the dilemma in the first place. I'm sure that ninety percent of the human population enjoys ice cream, but that doesn't give you the "right" to order a friend ice cream for dessert without first asking him if he wants ice cream. What if he's in the ten percent that abhors ice cream?

Now imagine that, not only does he dislike ice cream, but he's lactose intolerant to the point where eating even a single spoonful will cause him to vomit uncontrollably and become hospitalized.

Now imagine that eating ice cream is not of such dire importance that we can ever deem it necessary for anyone.

Hey, you haven't forced the dessert on him yet, so we can't say anything about whether he likes ice cream, right?

So what?

A concession to the antinatalist and voluntary human extinction communities

2011-07-02T15:24:00.023-04:00

In a several-months-old post of mine, I said the following:

...it is certainly possible that automated, technological means of redesigning the natural world could emerge at some point, capable of removing negative sensation from that environs. In both cases, given that we can't predict future suffering with any degree of accuracy for now, it makes more sense to voluntarily exist to the end of learning more about our predicament than it does to voluntarily disappear from the universe outright. How irresponsible the alternative must be, if it indeed turns out that trillions of planets contain or will contain mass-energy configurations similar in content and substance to whales and buffalo, and that we can do something about it!

I was reading this post today, and realized that I don't really agree with its content. A couple of thoughts:

1. As previously noted, life, if it truly does exist elsewhere in the universe, must be preposterously rare -- so rare that any attempt to find and subsequently help it would prove incredibly impractical. We don't go out of our way to search for hypothetical abducted children halfway across the world from where they were last seen, do we?

2. How are we ever going to leave this solar system? Even if we were to dispatch energy-efficient nanobots and program them to spend most of their time drifting through space, coasting off their initial energy use, how in the world would we ever find anything without at least some kind of indication regarding where it might exist?

Given these points, I have modified my original stance on this issue. There are three kinds of people to consider, here:

1. Those who would rather end their lives than suffer to any great degree. These people abhor pointless pain, and, quite reasonably, find the concept of life unbearable.

2. Those who would rather live forever, or at least long enough to mentally prepare for eternal nonexistence and/or a huge, uncontrollable unknown.

3. Those who would rather live forever, or at least some substantial period of time, merely because they enjoy life. Note, here, that many life proponents who are also death proponents would probably opt for eternal life if given the choice; their biologically programmed desires do not have expiration dates built into them, so when they say that they think death is "just a part of life," they're usually just lying to themselves.

I see no reason why all of these groups shouldn't be allowed to have things their way simultaneously. The solution, then, is to legalize assisted suicide while working on simulated realities and a cure for aging.

So, if some of us ultimately do decide to stick around, it should be for one or both of the following reasons:

1. We're biding our time until we feel more comfortable with making a decision after which there is no turning back -- regardless of how unlikely the contrary prospects are.

2. We enjoy living.

We're probably never leaving this solar system, and if we do, it's unlikely that we'll find anything of interest out there. Sure, we can look, but looking shouldn't be our raison d'être.

An Ideal Society, Part 4: Language

2011-07-02T13:35:00.026-04:00

I'm going to make a rather bold statement:

There should be only one language.

Honestly, why the redundancy? It's not as though, if English were to "crash," we'd have Italian waiting on standby to pick up its slack as part of some array of languages. The less that we are able to understand one another, the worse off we are.

We can't solve the problem by becoming multilingual, either, because:

1. It'd be pretty difficult to learn every language on Earth.

2. If I know English and Spanish and you know English and Spanish, that's two people who each have two distinct symbols in their brains for every imaginable human conception. Multiply this waste of time and space by six billion and you'll see where I'm going with this. You should only learn a second language if you need to in order to understand someone who doesn't already know your language -- but in an ideal society, this problem wouldn't exist in the first place.

Imagine having two cars, but living alone. Imagine owning two pairs of shoes when you only need one to protect your feet. Imagine having two computer keyboards that you occasionally swap back and forth for fun. Imagine having two beds to sleep in and oscillating between them at random.

A duplicate item needn't be identical to the original in order to qualify as being functionally void or needlessly redundant. Sure, you may enjoy the aesthetic variation, the novelty, the sheer variety; perhaps these qualities supersede boredom. There's nothing wrong with this, but if you're acquiring duplicate items at the expense of something more materially valuable at that moment, then you're woefully ignoring opportunity cost, which necessarily leads to your generating wasted space.

Brain space is no different from other forms of space; it's certainly finite, above all else. Don't waste time learning a new version of something with which you're already familiar when there's much more to be learned in its place; doing otherwise promotes pretentiousness, frivolous socialization, and, ultimately, a fragmented species intermittently predominated by huge communications holes.

Important disclaimer: If you're not American, British, Australian, or Canadian and you read this blog, you're likely bilingual. Please take note that it isn't your fault that a second language has been imposed upon you by academia; furthermore, considering the gradual encroachment of the English language upon much of the territory of the other languages of the world, there may be some practical benefit in your knowing English. Just keep in mind that it'd be really dumb of you to decide to learn Arabic for fun or to show off how cultured you are to friends. In any case, this post isn't about what you should be doing with your own personal life, but what a society as built from scratch should look like.

Statement of the day

2011-07-02T12:00:00.003-04:00

It is better to be right than happy.

To reiterate: Pleasure is relief

2011-06-15T21:24:00.006-04:00

Pleasure results from the termination of a negative state of experience; it is a form of relief.

Remember: It really isn't your "choice" to enjoy what you enjoy about life. If you were to cease all enjoyable activities for even a few days, you'd be dead -- and after a horrific episode of torment and horror at that. We are punished by our central nervous systems for not chasing objects of desire.

The titular maxim is best exemplified in the case of itching. Itching, while not the worst form of suffering imaginable, is nevertheless a negative/unpleasant sensation born from the body's desire to rid itself of some perceived threat to its attempts to stave off systemic decay. People do not enjoying itching; they would rather rid themselves of an itch than allow it to continue unhindered. Ever try ignoring an itch in a hard-to-reach spot on your body? It's incredibly difficult, because itches are meant to be distracting; they're meant to shift your brain's focus from the other negatives you're constantly running from to a fairly immediate -- if usually innocuous -- one.

Ignoring an itch produces a fairly large amount of discomfort and cognitive distraction; it is an undesirable thing. If you ignore an itch, prepare to have your concentration greatly diminished in favor of absurd, obsessive thoughts regarding something silly.

Scratching an itch, on the other hand, feels pleasurable; we sometimes even sigh with satisfaction upon scratching a particularly distracting and uncomfortable itch. Scratching itches is perceived by our brains as a good thing.

Now, after scratching an itch, try scratching where the itch used to be. You'll be using the same fingernails, the same amount of pressure. Why doesn't it feel pleasurable anymore? It's the same skin, composed of the same chemicals. Where did the pleasant scratching sensation disappear to?

The answer is that you needed the bad feeling in order to receive the good one; you needed something negative to be relieved from. You can't just decide on a whim to start scratching all over yourself and expect to enter a state of ecstasy.

Cognitive dissonance as a staple of modern culture

2011-06-05T21:19:00.017-04:00

When was the last time that you had an argument with someone? Did either you or the other party end up changing stances by the end? Probably not. More than likely, this is what happened instead:

1. You introduced stance A.

2. They introduced stance B.

3. You provided a fairly sturdy argument for stance A.

4. They provided a fairly transparent argument for stance B -- even if, on the surface, it appeared to have some solidity to it due to its use of platitudes and memorized, regurgitated phrases.

5. The both of you went back and forth for a while, neither budging. Despite their stance being obviously flawed, you couldn't find a way to really hit them over the head and wake them up to this fact.

6. Finally, you introduced a poignant, concise meme which crushed the opposing argument directly and explicitly. The absurdity of the other party's argument was subsequently quite out in the open.

7. The other party replied with "You're starting to frustrate me. Why do you have to overanalyze everything? Can't we talk about something nice for once?"

8. The argument ended abruptly with no resolution and the prospect of such growing vanishingly small. The other party then appeared uncomfortable and confused.

What has just been described, I hypothesize, is the result of terrible parenting. The other party participating in the argument realized, in some recess of their consciousness, that your logic was sound, but another, more biologically beneficial part of their mind interceded.

What happened? Well, during childhood, your conversational partner had probably participated in similar conversations that went something like this:

"Dad, why can't we see god?"

"I don't know, son. That's just the way it is."

"But how can we know he's real if we can't see him?"

"He's testing us. It'll all make sense when you get to heaven. You'll be rewarded for waiting so long!"

"But... how do you know that?"

"Look, he's just real, okay? What's with these questions all of a sudden? I'm trying to watch the news. Why don't you go outside and play ball with the kid next door?"

Upon encountering the problematic "foreign object" within a logic chain, kids are programmed to switch routines and do something personally rewarding or pleasurable. Because our society is relatively affluent, everything from happy meals to high tech video games is almost always a few seconds away from the grasp of children, so there is zero incentive to do "the right thing" when immediate self-satisfaction can so easily be substituted in its place -- with no consequences or scoldings.

The mentality birthed during this period of development apparently carries over into adulthood, where it germinates until it becomes a contributor to the monstrosity that is our current situation.

This is absolutely unacceptable for adult humans in this day and age. We cannot continue to act like children.

The fundamental nature of consciousness-raising

2011-06-05T12:08:00.002-04:00

When it comes to memes of such immense gravity that they demand we spread them on a global scale, which do you, personally, think applies?

1. Progress, like the propagation of the memes themselves, is incremental; we must "spread the word" in any way that we can, with every "convert" being an indicator of progress.

2. Progress is spontaneous and holistic; we must find ways to access those methods which are most likely to bring about the change that we desire in a manner akin to searching for the lottery ticket that will be the winner.

I think it's more like 2., in which case, even if you wind up with a "following" of, say, ten million people, in a world of almost seven billion, it may ultimately turn out that you have accomplished nothing at all. When it comes to infrastructure, routines, rituals, and resource management, the nature of "societal transformation" is binary; either you're using the new model or you're not.

Islam, liberalism, and celebrity worship are tough opponents.

An Ideal Society, Part 3: Communication; Law

2011-06-02T22:26:00.022-04:00

Communication is something that we've been bad at from day one. In some ways, we've gotten better at it (e.g. the lack of revenge killings between "groups"), while in others, we've gotten worse (e.g. passive aggression, political correctness, bureaucracy). I'm not sure if we've really broken even per se, but the situation is nevertheless not very good.

What would it look like if it were?

Well, all of our communications media would be consolidated and centrally monitored. At birth, everyone would be assigned an ID number in addition to a name; however, unlike a social security number, this new number would be made available to everyone on Earth by everyone on Earth.

The news media would be incorporated into the future equivalents of RSS feeds and email subscriptions. If, for example, a powerful earthquake were to hit a given part of the world, rather than finding out in a more traditional way, you would receive a news update via email -- not because you'd be subscribed to a service of your own volition, but because the central computer would utilize something like IP broadcasting for sending out messages to all communications addresses on Earth.

For those not familiar with the process, all computers connected to IP-based networks -- or at least those configured to receive their addresses from a server -- must first communicate with any nearby servers in order to negotiate for an address. The problem is thus: How can something ask for an address -- that is, communicate -- without already having an address? Well, the solution to this problem is to design an address which can be utilized by any network object at any given time, but whose messages are also intended for all objects located within a given network segment's boundaries. This allows more or less any network object -- computer, printer, etc. -- to send out a quick, undirected broadcast to as many other objects as possible, with little preconfiguration, and no need to know who to contact beforehand.

In other words, we already have the ability to broadcast messages from one computer to any number of computers at once -- even if we don't know the individual addresses of the recipients; furthermore, rather than needing to keep track of which devices are currently online or within the replication boundaries, we can allow an address to be dedicated to the task of sending messages to every device, regardless of status.

Imagine what the world would be like if we were to apply this concept to the media. You'd no longer receive text messages and voicemails solely from friends, family, and stalkers; you'd also receive them from any number of organizations, including the government (if there were one at all, which there shouldn't be), schools, academies, research centers, your local news station, etc. If you were born into the society, it would be a requirement that you not only possess at least one portable communications device, but that you also be capable of receiving text messages and videos from literally anyone.

Communications devices would each have the future equivalent of a MAC address/IP address hybrid. If you ever wanted to replace your communications device with a new one, you'd simply go to an area where devices are distributed -- regardless of whether you were returning your current device(s) -- and check one out by swiping it through a computer on your way toward the exit; this would update the central database by mapping your personal ID number to the "IP address" of the device, thereby allowing all subnetworks on Earth to realize that, when that "IP address" does something, you're doing it -- not someone else. To put it simply, we'd do away with host names and domain names, and would instead utilize personal names and IDs for everything.

Staying informed would only be the beginning, however. With global broadcasting and a centralized Internet, help could be requested -- and subsequently received -- at lightning speed. Has someone just fallen from a building and shattered his spinal column? Don't call 911; send out a broadcast. Message options would have any number of designations, from "interesting" to "urgent," and everything in between. An urgent message, for example, would cause a person's device to buzz or beep, while most messages would not immediately interfere with daily activities. This way, in the event of an emergency, everyone within a given zone or sector would be aware of the situation. On top of this, if we apply my idea that first aid and mild medical knowledge should be taught at a young age to everyone on Earth, then it would be a rare thing indeed for an accident to go unattended, or to be attended in an untimely fashion.

The world is a big place, of course. Sending out broadcasts to everyone on the planet would be ridiculous; no one would be able to read all of their messages, and the whole system would become pointless in less than a day after its implementation. Therefore, while unicast and multicast messages would remain global in nature, broadcasts would come in three major types:

1. Those sent by the central computer, as input by some body of individuals who've deemed the message(s) globally relevant. These messages would first need to be approved, and would perhaps also need to be limited according to how many messages had recently been sent in succession in this manner. Examples of relevant information might include asteroid impacts, tsunamis, terrorist attacks, and major social transformations.

2. Those sent by anyone who feels that they are educational or otherwise interesting, but not urgent. These would be akin to the news, advertisements, etc., and would be grouped according to category on a central server rather than replicated locally on each individual device. These messages would not be broadcasts in the literal sense, but rather, free information available on the Internet. We more or less already receive these messages today.

3. Emergency messages pertaining to local events, such as a person having a heart attack in the street. These broadcasts would be the only kind that could be sent by an individual communications device, and would be designed with immediacy in mind. They would also be limited to particular population centers; every time that you'd leave a population center for another, in fact, a sensor would get triggered that would update the central computer as to the location of the communications device(s) that you'd be carrying.

If someone were to be assaulted unprovoked and you were a witness to this, you could submit something along the lines of a "trouble ticket" as a broadcast to the entire population center, complete with the approximate time of the interaction and the coordinates of the specific area within the center wherein the interaction occurred. Even if the interaction were to occur within a camera's blind spot, any interested parties could nevertheless consult the logs for the coordinates on the map for who'd triggered the sensors during that time.

For example, if the fight occurred at 30:20 (30 megaseconds and 20 kiloseconds) and you were a witness, you could simply broadcast an "email" that would be sent only to those within the population center; in computing terms, this would be something like how packets of data might only get sent to those hosts defined as within a domain, subdomain, workgroup, etc. behind a particular switch or router.

Next, Wikipedia-style communication would occur between interested individuals, who would then negotiate who got to investigate the skirmish. Because you were directly involved, you would be deemed valuable as a witness, but your role in making decisions would be diminished to prevent biases from influencing the consensus.

After that, logs would be checked in order to determine all of the people who had, from 30:19 to 30:21, walked "into" the invisible lines defining the particular sector of the population center (they would be much like modern alarm systems, only they'd belong to one, unified system, which would know where each sector existed via the previously mentioned GPS system). Whenever a sector's sensor would get triggered, data from a person's communications device would be downloaded to a server; this data would then get logged in order to ascertain which devices last triggered the sensor -- and, by extension, which individuals, as each device, again, must be mapped to a specific person's ID number in the central database.

Each sector, complete with its own unique coordinates, would be relatively small, and perhaps of standard dimensions. Because of the granular nature of each population center, let's say that only twenty individuals other than yourself had been registered as having entered the area during the three kiloseconds wherein the action occurred. Within little time, the people who'd remotely communicated their desire to be involved in evaluating the situation would then be in direct contact with the twenty people who'd been in the area from 30:19 to 30:21. Furthermore, even if you were unable to identify the "suspect," with some interrogation, it wouldn't take long before the investigation party would have an idea as to who perpetrated the assault.

More on interrogation methods, punishment, and the absence of police in a forthcoming post.

An Ideal Society, Part 2: Time

2011-05-29T13:00:00.020-04:00

We currently do a horrible job of keeping track of time. The two things that immediately come to mind when I think about how time is kept on Earth are:

1. Our time system doesn't integrate very well with our other measuring systems; in fact, it has nothing to do with them at all, which is strange.

2. Our time system is based on a medieval peasant's work day. Also strange.

Daylight saving time may conserve sunlight, but unless you don't have electricity, I don't really see why it's necessary. Actually, it's worse than unnecessary: It breaks the system. It's one thing to arbitrarily label a moment when the sun is positioned at a specific angle in the sky as 6:00 PM EST, but it's another altogether to later claim that that same angle occurs at a moment labeled as 7:00 PM EST, or 5:00 PM EST.

Wouldn't it be easier to get up at a different time than to change time?

Think about it: A lot more people than we might realize forget to set their clocks back, and while I'm most certainly in favor of automating all such menial processes to avoid lapses in memory, this particular one really doesn't need to exist in the first place. Furthermore, no credible academic or governmental body -- not even the U.S. Department of Energy -- has found any significant reduction in energy use or costs as a result of daylight saving time, with many studies reporting as little as a 0.5-1% difference in electricity use.

Worse still is that DST doesn't apply to all time zones, and some people frequently travel from one time zone to another, causing confusion regarding DST rules, which differ from region to region. Does this make any sense? If we are going to impose a confusing, arbitrary standard with no benefit to anyone whatsoever, can we not at least universalize it?

You might think that my proposal to do things at different times of day depending on sunlight output is myopic. First of all, in our technological society, it's extremely rare that the amount of sunlight matters to anyone for getting something done -- especially a mere hour's difference. Second of all, if our society didn't so rigidly impose its schedules, we wouldn't have to worry about reminding ourselves to do things at different times of day -- were schedules ever necessary in the first place. In an ideal society, if you really had to change how early you got up in order to increase the length of the day, because your boss wouldn't care whether you took lunch at 12:00 or 1:00, you'd eat whenever a "natural" break presented itself in the day. This would ultimately deemphasize the importance of arbitrary scheduling, which almost never accounts for scope creep, and certainly does not parallel the processes of human work and energy use.

If you need to be at work by 8:00, and the sun starts rising earlier, then change your time of arrival from 8:00 to 7:56, and keep gradually knocking it down a few minutes every few weeks until the sun starts rising later in the morning again. A guestimate really is good enough for stuff like this.

The problem of conserving sunlight isn't that we need to find a better way to transition from one time* to another; it's that we need to find a better way to transition from doing things at one time to another -- or even that we need to stop caring whether we're five minutes late for work in the first place (OR, that we shouldn't "work" in the way that we currently do!).

Time zones are also pointless. They're dictated by time of day, of course, but again, the day is an archaic unit of measurement restricted by the activity of the sun. If you want to eat dinner on one part of the Earth, perhaps you do so at 6:30 PM, but if you move, does it really matter if it's suddenly dark outside at 3:00 PM? Do you have to wait until 6:30? What's more important -- the little numbers on the clock, or what's happening in the world?

Finally getting back to point 1. above, consider that the metric system is widely used throughout most of the first world (outside of the United States) for measuring physical quanta. Why not for quanta within the fourth dimension as well? Instead of sixty seconds to a minute, there should be one thousand seconds to one kilosecond -- not because the latter are somehow the "right" units to use, but because consistency is important for avoiding slop. There would then be one thousand kiloseconds per megasecond, and so on, with the base unit (seconds) remaining the suffix to each unit in order to remind us of its fundamental nature. Not only would this ally our time system with our other measuring systems, it would also standardize the time system itself.

Why base a particular scale of measurement on how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the sun or rotate? We no longer need to track how many days we have left until we have to start preparing for the winter. Why does where the moon exist in the sky matter to us? What is the point of the month as a unit of measurement? Instead of each unit containing 60, 24, 30, or 365 of the previous, why doesn't each simply contain 1,000 of the previous, regardless of its scale? Wouldn't that be much simpler?

If we ever wind up living somewhere else -- a prospect which I find rather unlikely, admittedly -- then we will need to acknowledge that days and years are meaningless, anyway, given the extreme variation in them from one planet to another.

* The little numbers on the clock -- not the actual time per the activity of the solar system and universe

Statement of the day

2011-05-28T08:31:00.002-04:00

You do not need to dislike a sensation -- or even imagine what it must feel like -- in order to understand that other beings dislike it.

More ideal society posts forthcoming, I think.

Why suffering can be evaluated empirically

2011-05-24T19:08:00.001-04:00

I've gone over this plenty of times, so I'm sure that if you're a regular reader, you know the drill by now. However, regardless of who you are, I've come up with another way to phrase "Suffering is bad" so that it sounds more empirically testable. Here it is:

Those who suffer do not want to suffer.

If we can verify this statement empirically, then that's all that we need to do; there is no more to "prove." You can't want to suffer; as soon as you come to enjoy something, it's no longer causing you to suffer.

Revisiting a great meme: "Life is a gamble"

2011-05-24T18:46:00.004-04:00

Pleasure cannot justify suffering in any instance -- not even in instances where the pleasure experienced greatly dwarfs the negative state of desire experienced prior. Here's why:

Think of life as a six-sided die. The five greatest things about life that you can imagine occupy five of the six sides -- perhaps intense orgasms, spiritual fulfillment, growing old with a significant other, having ten trillion dollars, and access to an endless supply of great music (these definitely wouldn't be my choices; they're just examples). The sixth side is occupied by a fifteen-year battle with AIDS -- vomiting, loss of control over bowels and all.

Would you roll the die? If not, congratulations; if presented the choice to be born or to remain in your state of nonexistence, you'd choose to remain in your state of nonexistence. In other words: You wouldn't choose life.

We don't all get AIDS, you say. Well...

1. "We" don't exist as discrete selves in the first place. I remember things that happened to a ten-year-old kid, which gives me the impression that the kid was me, but he wasn't; he lacked my ideals, conceptions, desires, hormones, and even most (if not all) of my atoms. Therefore, that ten-year-old kid is no more "me" than anyone else to have ever lived -- yet all sentient organisms utilize the same chemical compounds and electrical signals in order to experience pain and pleasure, making them chemically equivalent. Clearly, then, there is no need for "me" to experience the worst parts of life: the universe experiences them, and that's bad enough.

2. It's very probable that we will all die -- most of us from cancer, possibly while in a tremendous amount of pain for a prolonged period of time.

The worst that life has to offer might not ever get inflicted upon you, but every day, we roll the die, and every day, many, many people roll the bad side. If you wouldn't want to live through it, then how can you justify its existence?

I ask again, and hope that you leave a comment with your answer: Would you roll the die?

How to make intellectual progress 101

2011-05-24T00:59:00.004-04:00

1. Leave fear of new ideas -- the cause of most knee-jerk reactions -- out of any formulation of premises and conclusions; do not foam at the mouth.

2. Express hope that the person whose ideas you're critiquing will come around to seeing things your way.

3. Express awareness of the possibility that you are in error, and that the person whose ideas you're critiquing may be able to provide you with a learning experience.

Failing to adhere to even one of these three will eventually lead to your species fighting wars with itself.

Class dismissed.

James Randi Educational Foundation: Take 2

2011-05-24T00:19:00.017-04:00

More convenient strawmen and haughty disdain, this time on page 2:

Posted by Sophronius:

I disagree that empathy is a bias. I have always considered empathy to be a source of information: By allowing us to sympathize with others, we gain a better understanding of them. It would be much harder to predict someone's behaviour without empathy, I think.

From dictionary.com:

em·pa·thy

[em-puh-thee] Show IPA
–noun
1.
the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
2.
the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

Empathy means to live vicariously through someone else, to truly feel or imagine what it must be like to be them, temporarily. If we were to attempt this for all beings to have ever felt anything, we'd fail miserably; nevertheless, the welfare of billions of beings is important -- something that we can ascertain via logic.

Empathy and sympathy completely block any attempts to fix problems, and in fact are part of "the problem," for they cause selfishness. When we identify with those like ourselves, it feels good, but it has no rational basis, and so is entirely founded on emotion.

Examples:

I'm a cripple, so when someone picks on cripples, I empathize; I get upset. However, when someone picks on an obese person, perhaps I laugh, because I'm not obese myself, and, for one reason or another, lack the ability to put myself into the shoes of the obese person.

Because I'm black, I sympathize with victims of slavery. Because I'm female, I sympathize with female rape victims. Because I'm obese, I sympathize with those who attempt to spread awareness of heart disease.

We shouldn't be limited by what we've been conditioned to be capable of empathizing with. I can't cry when I hear that a bunch of people died last night in a tornado, so if I rely on empathy alone, I'll not rationally concern myself with the event, or the fact that such events happen outside of my personal life. If I feel something for someone who's experienced a tragedy, I'm going to neglect those for whom I feel nothing who've also experienced tragedies -- especially if I'm presented with a choice between these two options, and need to make a decision per the law of opportunity cost. Is this fair? Is this unbiased?

Well, he seems to make an error in the first paragraph when he claims that we consider life intrinsically valuable due to having gotten "emotionally attached" to our ego.

Strawman. I stated that we fabricate excuses for why life needs to exist in the first place -- not for why life is valuable. Furthermore, I'm in favor of the idea that SENTIENT life is valuable; plants and bacteria can be tortured for hours for all I care.

How difficult is it to understand that something can be precious, even in spite of its lack of functionality or purpose (and thus, need to be continued on the production line)? When you perform a mercy killing on your pet, does the fact that you don't believe that it should continue to exist negate the fact that you find its life valuable?

The explanation for us valuing life seems the logical result of natural selection, and as such is intrinsic to our nature. But eh, minor point.

Completely disagree. The general goal of valuing things as a phenomenon sprung from natural selection seems to be to perpetuate genes at the individual level -- not to value life itself. Members of early human tribes were no different from members of chimpanzee troupes or lion packs in their valuing of those genotypes most closely resembling their own -- and, thus, the individual genes whose goals were to perpetuate themselves feverishly and for no good reason.

Very few humans value "life" as a concept nowadays, anyway; they value their own lives, their own personal satisfaction, their nations, and the lives of those closest to them. If you mean to say that humans value their own lives, well, the fact that people are addicted to their various desires does not make those desires functional, imbued with purpose, or somehow objectively worth perpetuating.

Valuing life requires intellectual effort -- at the expense of one's genetically motivated inclinations to scorn all life but that which is reminiscent of oneself. This is evident all throughout the animal kingdom; dogs do not value life, but their own self-satisfaction.

It's a bit odd that he suggests that life is the cause of everything negative in existence, or that "the world might be better off without you". Negative is a human concept and wouldn't exist without sapient creatures to experience it.

This is silly. When baby birds starve to death in the absence of super important humans capable of deeming such a thing negative, is it somehow less unpleasant for the baby birds? Negative is not only a concept, but a sensation. Does the fact that we've contrived the concept of sex change the fact that animals have sex?

It also doesn't make much sense that he distinguishes between creating a positive and ending a negative, since the net effect is the same.

There is no such thing as a positive derived out of thin air; all "positives" are contrived from states of deprivation. I distinguish between the two merely because the former isn't physically possible.

He then claims that having emotions is dangerous. He backs this up by citing things like genocide, which would not occur if humans had no emotions. Even if true, this completely ignores the fact that we consider genocide bad because of our emotions.

That's precisely the point, isn't it? If emotions can lead to nasty consequences, then adding more emotions to the pile is going to make things nastier than they already are.

What you're saying is akin to stating that cancer wouldn't be so bad if we were biologically like plants instead of animals. Isn't that an obvious inference?

We'd also have no genocide if there were no humans, but that is kind of missing the point.

And what point would that be? Can you justify genocide? Short of Jesus and heaven, you're going to have a tough time finding something to put on the other end of the scale that balances everything out. Are you sure that you're not as religious as the fish in a barrel that you like to shoot so often?

He actually does seem to argue that human existence is bad at some points... while simultaneously praising productivity as if it's our highest goal.

1. Suffering is bad.

2. Human existence leads to suffering, so there's certainly something bad about human existence. Whether human existence will ultimately lead to less suffering or a discovery of some metric of value far greater than what we're currently using is hard to say.

3. Even if, hypothetically, all of human existence were a bad idea, wouldn't it be productive to do something about that bad idea? You're framing "productivity" as some kind of linear initiative where positive quantities continuously increase, which is an extremely limited approach to productivity -- a word which always needs context in the first place.

He is right, however, that people will have children even when this is a bad idea (natural selection at work again), but that's nothing new.

Newness is a terrible thing to value by itself. The Nazis were new for a time.

Posted by I Am The Scum

You really need to stop reading this blog. It's absolutely terrible.

I think I'm going to start using this kind of rhetoric in my research papers. I wonder if my grade will go up or down if I start the first paragraph of a paper on nuclear fusion by referring to it as "really horrible and stuff." Hmmm.

In his computer example, he mentions that a computer would have an understanding of how others feel, and lack empathy. That's what empathy is.

2+2=4 does not require empathy; it requires logic. Understanding evolution does not require empathy; it requires empirical observation, from which logic is eventually derived by logic agents. Computers can understand these things.

Empathy is an emotional response to an imagined scenario; see above for its official definition. Empathy requires sentience -- a central nervous system designed for sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste, or some combination of these. A computer does not require a central nervous system in order to understand that 2+2=4, or that circles are round, or that things that don't feel good don't feel good (or that some organisms don't want certain sensations).

We should stop trying to make things better...

What?

We should stop trying to solve problems...

Huh? Have you read any of this blog?

Morality is a subtype of logic

2011-05-23T19:44:00.018-04:00

A thread courteously started by an anonymous reader over at the James Randi Educational Foundation: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=209087

I'm a fan of this forum, first and foremost. It's a good place for skeptics to congregate.

Secondly, I love stuff like this, and hope that more of it happens in the future.

Exhibit A: http://nobadmemes.blogspot.com/2010/12/logical-vs-moral.html

Exhibit B: http://nobadmemes.blogspot.com/2011/02/on-logic-and-morality-once-more.html

Posted by Vortigern99 in the thread:

The OP and thread question strike me as a false dilemma and a nonsense question. The two concepts, morality and logic, are not mutually exclusive so there is no compunction to choose one to "replace" the other.

You might as well ask, "Is it possible to replace a banana with a game of Monopoly?" It's nonsensical.

Clarification:

1. All personal moralities should conform to scientific standards and principles, as all facets of reality stem from or are themselves empirical phenomena; nothing is exempt from this -- not even whether you should be allowed to kill people for fun!

2. "Suffering is bad," while true, isn't the whole story. Value equations are the rest of it; see here.

3. However, there is a profound difference between "Suffering is bad" and "An action which causes suffering is bad." If causing harm in a particular instance negates a greater amount of harm elsewhere, then the potential action -- that is, the action that reduces suffering while in the process causing it to some degree -- is logically "good," while the harm itself is obviously still intrinsically bad in the same sense that circles are round.

4. Whether morality is an "objective" matter is beside the point of the original posts. Regardless of the status of morality as an empirically verifiable tool, it is valid; it's just that its scope is so narrow as to miss the vast majority of that which is "bad" in the universe. Humans are the only entities that we're currently aware of that are capable of being immoral; volcanoes, earthquakes, lions, and the AIDS virus may not be immoral beings, but they cause "bad" -- as far as we can tell.

Posted by mike3 in the thread:

...they seem to be saying we should toss out "morality" ("remove it from our philosophy"), leaving, apparently, only "logic". Does the false-dilemma response apply here?

"Morality" is in quotes in my original passage because I meant the word "morality" -- not the practice of framing things in moral terms. We should ask whether it's logical to rape women for fun -- not whether it's moral. Are both questions basically the same? Yes, but the latter causes us to focus on the human element of the bad parts of the universe, which isn't nearly a fundamental enough focus. I'm merely requesting that the human species update its vocabulary and broaden the scope of its ideals.

P.S.: It's more like asking if it's possible to replace a banana with a piece of fruit.

Quick rumination on functionality

2011-05-22T19:07:00.000-04:00

In between the ideal society posts, I might make another kind of post here or there. This one's about life's lack of functionality.

1. A knife is FOR cutting.

2. A steering wheel is FOR driving.

3. A computer is FOR information processing.

4. Life is FOR...?

...and, additionally:

5. The universe is FOR...?

An Ideal Society, Part 1: The Suburbs; Occupations

2011-05-22T16:43:00.031-04:00

Alright, we've hit on all of the major problems of the world, as far as I can tell. Occasional posts will still appear here regarding them, but today, I start a new series: An Ideal Society. It's time to stop talking about why our current situation is bad and start talking about what a good situation -- independent of whether a preceding bad one ever existed -- would look like, hypothetically. Over the months, I've hinted at some of the ideas that I'll be posting in this series, but I think that it's about time that I lay them out more explicitly.

Let's get started with the following two premises:

1. Our entire infrastructure is out of whack.

2. This is caused by bad values.

We waste things. A lot. The environmentalist movement seems to be aware of this, but in their quest to find a bad guy to blame, they've neglected the vast majority of the waste that humans produce in this society; perhaps one of their biggest blunders has been their blatant disregard for how we manage oil. Sure, there's lots of talk -- some of it legitimate -- about alternative energy, but what never gets discussed is that we could have continued to use oil for far longer than we will if we'd only structured society itself in a more rational, efficient way.

Let's pretend that society as we know it doesn't exist. If humans were to be dropped onto the Earth today, with big brains, language, and a need to understand whether the universe has any redeeming qualities whatsoever, how would their society (or societies) be structured in the ideal scenario?

For one, there'd be no suburbs. For two, there'd be no occupations.

Something that people generally don't seem to realize about jobs is that, in addition to being nauseatingly bureaucratic in nature, they're usually designed only to help someone else do his job; furthermore, for some reason, they don't really end.

Curious, isn't it? If jobs actually accomplished something, wouldn't they end at some point? If you need to paint your house, doesn't the need terminate once the house has been painted? You don't devise new ways to paint the house just to keep your family on the payroll, do you?

You might bring up more indefinite chores, like taking out the trash. To this, I say:

1. We already have the technology available to us to automate the majority of modern jobs. The only reason for why 90% of our jobs haven't been taken over by machines is that people need to make money in order to live. If we didn't need to make money, then machines would already be doing most of our menial chores.

2. Menial chores do not require that you hop into a car and drive for two hours to an entirely different building every day at a set time which cannot be violated. This is because menial chores are not enough work to constitute a true occupation, generally; they can be done by anyone whenever they're required to be done without forcing someone in particular to be "the guy" who does them at the same time every day. In short, while the chore of taking out the trash may be indefinite, my role as the person who handles the chore needn't be.

Number 2 takes us to the first assertion above: that the suburbs are a pathetic waste of resources.

Here's how our living spaces should be structured instead:

Housing units as large as one entire neighborhood -- or at least as large as some substantial portion of one, depending on architectural technicalities -- would exist all over the Earth. These units would look something like shopping malls in their openness, though they'd probably be much more aesthetically pleasing, given that no money means no capitalistic concerns over architectural parsimony. They would also contain individual quarters. There would be no leases, no deeds, and no mortgages, just as there are no leases, deeds, or mortgages for those who routinely and lawfully enter shopping malls all over the country every day today; if you wanted to take up residence within a housing unit, you'd simply walk inside at your leisure, just as you do today in parks, malls, libraries, and other public places where accommodations like benches and water fountains already exist.

For our ideal living quarters, though, the difference would be that, instead of mere water fountains and benches, you'd have access to cushioned resting areas, computers, pleasing scenery, and food kiosks. The analog to mall security in this scenario would be a centralized computer, complete with a camera system, alarm system, and connection to the main global network, where all information regarding individuals and material resources would be tracked (everyone would be monitored by a GPS in orbit around the planet). Of course, without money, there'd be no reason to hoard items and, more importantly, no reason to steal, so while the computer's sensors might get tripped from time to time, items leaving the premises wouldn't be one of the reasons for this.

Temporary residence would be encouraged, as exploration, innovation, and creativity would be valued in the place of self-indulgence, material excess, and expectation. The people within a particular housing unit's major lounge areas would likely be entirely different from one month to the next, with those bored of the area or finished with a particular project moving on to see the rest of the world, and newcomers (or past frequenters returning for one reason or another) constantly stopping by to relax and enjoy themselves.

Entertainment would vary, and would likely depend on the technology available per the time period. Modern examples might include fully immersive video games and other kinds of audio/visual simulations, Internet access from major kiosks for learning and interacting with content, mood lighting, and replicas of outdoor locations. Social activities would also be available, such as story-telling, game-playing (including physical games, though video games are already becoming increasingly physical), teaching, humor, etc.

Walls would, in many cases, be transparent; this would discourage privacy in public (i.e. the way that we treat places of work and cars today), promote open communication among everyone (e.g. if you're gay or really into Satanic heavy metal, you'd tell the middle aged woman sitting in the lounge area and never think anything of it), and increase the vitamin D intake for the population. The exception to the transparent walls rule would be private rooms, for the sake of allotting some amount of time for both personal contemplation and sleep.

Although such private areas would be available, when it would come to sleeping, they would be built to accommodate only one person, as group formation would be discouraged. Of course, it would be acceptable for a group of, say, four people, for example, to seek out a quiet room for planning an activity or working on a project, but each room would probably have one bed in order to both discourage the development of special needs (i.e. cutting down on pointless customization of infrastructure while in the process standardizing room sizes) and promote social transparency among the populace.

Rooms would be checked out by a user who would manually change the status of a door's computer from vacant to occupied, with additional settings including a "Please don't just barge in, but I'm open to talk if you need me" setting and a "Do not disturb" setting; the latter would call a computer-authenticated lock, and would also be monitored by the central computer in case the sensor ever remained flipped for substantially longer than is required by humans for sleep -- a sign of someone hiding something, in many cases.

There would be no need to "check out" a room the way that you do at a hotel, as the computer would handle everything by automatically updating the database to reflect room status changes. Check-out times would also be nonexistent, as the number of rooms per living area would always exceed the average population traffic size; where the main computer for a given population center detected that the average number of tracked people within the defined boundaries of the center was encroaching on an arbitrary maximum, an alert would be generated for someone to initiate a new building project for a separate housing unit.

So what about going places? The above description might be fine for a place to live, but what about the exploration that would allegedly be promoted by this model? Isn't what I've just written about the same as what we have today, only larger in scope and more socially open?

Well, no, it isn't. Remember that point two was that there'd be no occupations. Let's run through an example.

I, along with five people whom I've never met before, am a de facto overseer of a research project aimed at developing a way to clone organs. For convenience purposes, our research team has unanimously consented, without intervention from a third party or "leader," to meet at a specific population center designated on our communications devices' maps by an ID number (everyone would have a handheld computer that would provide him or her with names, IDs, and contact information for everyone else).

Perhaps we've chosen the population center based on the recreational activities available there. In any case, we convene at one of its living areas with tentative dates for when we'll be finished our research; there are no deadlines. To get to the population center, we take the public transportation system -- a series of interconnected, centrally managed, and automated vehicles tracked by the GPS. Once we arrive, we live there for about three months, often checking out local places of entertainment or enjoying time at the beach, but never really needing to go anywhere substantially far away. Remember: Every time that anyone in the society needs to commute to a new place of work, he changes where he "lives" to match.

My associates and I become close friends over the three months that we work together, sending our progress to the central computer for anyone in the entire society to read and add onto at any time. Once we've determined that we've made a substantial amount of progress and have heard back from a few interested individuals who want to pick up where we left off (without needing to preserve some profit-generating model, we'd have no reason to shun those interested in temporarily taking the reins), we part ways to relax or work on another, unrelated project elsewhere on the planet -- even if the latter project has nothing to do with medical science.

Contractors, freelance artists, and Wikipedia editors already do this; with the right amount of granular control, central management, and redundancy, real work can get done much faster in this model than it can in our current society -- especially given that there are no CEOs to demand that we manufacture the right amount of basketballs by a certain date or show up at exactly 9 AM every morning to begin scanning papers that are perfectly readable in their non-digital forms. The bottom line: Most "work" today is unnecessarily pushed into arbitrary time slots with pointless deadlines, all because the impetus is personal enrichment and not the betterment of society.

Alternatively, perhaps most or all of the research that I just outlined is done remotely, meaning that my imaginary team and I merely communicate via email and video chat, and are free to move around the world as we please. Maintenance and technical jobs might require physical meetings and close proximity to something in case it breaks, but again, as soon as someone else came in to take my place, I'd simply leave to do something else at another location on the planet.

So, there you have it. No ridiculous commutes, no traffic jams, no preposterous amounts of gas wasted every day. If you want to commute to a place and do work there, you go once, live down the street, and leave when your project has been completed. Even if the project takes years to complete -- an unlikely scenario in a sane, granular society with a socialistic bent -- there would never be a physical place of work without some living space within proximity, available to anyone free of charge. Really, if we can do it for libraries, we can do it for our homes.

Want to save gas? Don't do less; change the locations of your activities.

Reply to comment

2011-05-14T18:39:00.022-04:00

This is a reply to a comment that can be found here. My response is too long to fit into one comment, and this method seems to be more efficient, anyway (see my reasoning here). Perhaps it will bring the conversation to people who've missed the original post's comments up until now -- which is especially good if you consider that this is sort of a different topic from the one in the original post.

Before I begin with the comment, though, let me take a moment to make a definite statement:

Promiscuity and cultural investment in sex as a thing of supreme value are two different things.

On with the reply:

"If you meant to talk about people who use symbols in the place of empirical observation where it benefits them socially, why not, you know, say 'people who use symbols in the place of empirical observation where it benefits them socially'?"

Because that's not as likely to leave an impression, I suppose. It's the same as if I were to say that I dislike it when people believe in things solely because the things make them happy, and then proceed to poke fun at people who specifically think that fiery demons like to snack on the souls of homosexuals.

I'm sure that you also laugh at the latter mentality, yes? Is it okay for us to laugh at the absurdity of demons devouring gay people? If it is, then why isn't it okay for us to laugh at the absurdity of women obsessing over something as meaningless as a non-essential biological function? Note that, as I previously clarified, I was not targeting feminists as a whole -- just anyone, feminist and faux-feminist alike, who makes it her goal to promote hedonism as a means to achieving some kind of state of enlightenment. The Buddhists are wrong about meditation in this exact same way, and reality sucks. That's how I see it, at least.

"Moreover, being able to express oneself sexually with the freedom accorded to men and not face social ostracism or blame in case you get raped seems like a rather tangible, and not merely symbolic, benefit."

Great, but there's a big difference between having casual sex with people on one hand and promoting a retarded culture of porn, over-the-top music videos, and other kinds of carefree escapism as some kind of progressive initiative on the other. If you don't think that at least some of the "Look at me, because my appearance is important to my self-esteem, as should be the case for everyone, since shapes and colors of people matter" types are all about "girl power" and being "independent," think again. Say that they're not "legitimate" feminists if you want, but I'm not really interested in who's part of which groups -- just who's probably right about our situation on Earth and who isn't.

The point was simply that most people on this planet have terrible values. I can and have used plenty of other examples in the past, from Christian fundamentalists to CEOs who think that their yachts will save them from their fates; this particular example was not originally thought of as being somehow different from the others when it was selected.

"I haven’t actually seen any feminists advocate that we should have a custom and expectation of female promiscuity; maybe you have."

I haven't. What I have born witness to, though, is one unusually opulent generation raising another under the premise that not only is "being yourself" somehow meaningful, it's something that should allow you to get whatever your greedy, privileged self desires. Examples include women using sexual power to afford themselves self-esteem and emotional comfort, young men expecting places of employment to just accept them (and getting indigant when this doesn't happen), and the majority of the population never witnessing a live death of another person unless inside a hospital. These are all very bad things if we want to make people responsible and appropriately empathetic; all three prevent us from caring about anything other than our own over-blown neuroses while lost in a sea of materialism, solipsism, and attention-seeking.

"What I have seen feminists advocate is that women who wish to be promiscuous be allowed to do so without it being assumed that it’s okay to rape them, or that they are morally deficient somehow (whereas men are judged by much more lenient standards)."

1. Rape is fairly common, but nowhere near as common as car accidents, cancer, and a plethora of other horrors. It's a big deal, sure, but having more sex or dressing a different way is not going to make things better; in fact, it's going to make things worse. Education is the answer, here -- like with just about every other bad meme currently nestled inside of someone's brain; only after the populace is properly educated should we start dressing differently (and even then, we shouldn't pretend that doing so makes us interesting or that life is all happy times now).

As an extreme (and, potentially, ultimate) example of how education should work when it comes to sex, in one of my ideal future societies that I've envisioned, men and women would have sex with one another via simulated avatars customized according to each person's preferences. A man could become a woman and vice versa virtually if he or she wanted, and all humans on the planet would be raised by credentialied caretakers in a controlled "lab" environment to not only think but fully understand why preferring the attention of one person over another simply because he or she has different body parts is superficial. Males would have sex with their best male friends within such simulations -- even though they'd be entirely straight -- to strengthen bonds. Finally, there would be no or very few fetishes, as most fetishes result from the bizarre meme that sex is bad (or, more specifically, that where there's nudity, there's sex, and both are bad).

2. For the most part, a male's desire to rape a female is different from the current cultural tendency toward using sex for profit (prostitutes, pornstars, record label owners), ego gratification, or just to distract from how bad life is. The former is something that I do view as a legitimate concern, whereas the latter -- that is, the concern that being sexual needs to be incorporated into one's identity, etc. -- is really silly. I'm fully aware that many feminists are against these things; on the other hand, it does seem to be the case that our society accepts things like makeup as more legitimate as advertising methods than index cards with lists of ideals taped to foreheads. In other words, much of what makes obsession with sex superficial has been accepted for over a hundred years, now (remember the roaring 20s?).

Yes, this all applies to males as well, but outside of the gay community, there isn't much in the way of intensive male body decoration. If you want to out male attention-seeking and signs of being out of touch with reality, you'll have to go with rock stars, Facebook status updates, and emasculated whining about the government.

"If you think such advocates are necessarily motivated by selfish considerations, you are wrong. If you think this issue is trifling, you must not have researched it much or given it much thought. Not having to worry about such things is part of the privilege this culture accords you as a man."

I wouldn't know; I don't have sex.

I'm sure that I could if I really wanted to, but the amount of energy involved does not reflect the reward, especially given current relationship stability statistics (but certainly not because of such statistics). Anyway, I'm sure that there are plenty of outlying males who are -- mostly due to terrible values and false hope -- dying to have sex or be in a relationship, but also unable to due to arbitrary personality aberrations or lack of physical mass.

Everyone on this planet is impacted by this fundamental problem, regardless of the form that it takes. It's called prejudice.

"That’s why it’s crucial to not underestimate your connection with Western culture: you may be a culture drone in ways you don‘t even realize. You seem to think the slut stigma is a non-issue compared to people’s wasting time and resources on expendable entertainment, but at least people want to do that (and those who are currently starving would do the same, if they could)."

The slut stigma is a huge issue, but it isn't so big that it needs to drown out the issue of cancer or the more general issues of presumption and social exclusion. If you're in favor of ending the slut stigma, great; so am I. If you're in favor of ending the slut stigma and then using that scary "we" pronoun to declare a false victory -- especially if by "ending" you mean "replacing with more selfishness and pleasant fantasy" -- then I'm afraid that you've missed what it is that living things are doing here on Earth.

"If women's sexual freedom somehow became the new status quo, that would be a good thing"

Again, sexual freedom and slutification -- the original term that I used -- are two different things. I'm in favor of people being able to have sex with whomever they choose (although it still concerns me that this necessarily leads to a massive portion of people -- particularly the obese, socially inept, and elderly -- getting ignored by the rest of us in the exact same way that monogamy does). I'm not in favor of sex being glorified as some symbol of one's identity or "inner self," or some other nonsense. I was poking fun of that mentality, as it's all over our culture to the point where every time you turn around, someone is talking about how having sex makes his or her life meaningful. If you think that women having lots of sex is still as big of a taboo as it used to be -- or that what's been happening to what we value in our fellow human beings is good -- then you're not living in the same society as me.

"Re: it was a joke. It wasn’t funny."

You're still being a bit uptight here, I think. Maybe I just have a dark sense of humor.

"Why not make a joke about how separate drinking fountains for black people were merely a symbolic standard, and getting rid of them was a waste of time?"

Because being allowed to drink clean water is a billion times more important than being allowed to get really drunk and then seek undeserved attention from anyone within proximity. Again, the target was people who advocate slutification -- not people who advocate promiscuity. It was just my way of making fun of modern society.

I should also probably note here that I think polygamy makes way, way more sense than monogamy.

"And, of course, you still haven’t shown how advocating slutification makes one unable to also advocate other things, even if one does it for selfish reasons."

I don't recall making this claim. If I remember correctly, I asked you whether this is true of you, since it is a common occurrence for people to defend only those things which apply to them personally.

"Do you write this blog from your own computer? Why not sell it and donate the proceeds to Oxfam or some such organization? It would probably make more of an impact than writing a blog, realistically"

Don't know what Oxfam is. I'll do some research, and if it's something other than a generic charity, then maybe I'll take you up on this offer. If it is just a generic charity, then I'd prefer to write a blog. Either way, this blog doesn't get many views, and I don't pretend to be making a difference; it's just that if I do or don't write it, I'll probably not make a difference either way, so why not?

"You seem to have some kind of idiosyncratic virtue ethics about eschewing happiness and pleasure"

That's called asceticism -- something that I'm very against. What makes you think that I'm in favor of this?

"You have not provided convincing evidence that the rest of us should adopt your virtue ethics or, more importantly, that it is even possible for everyone to do so."

Spreading memes that influence others is a tricky business; you have to know what you're doing before promoting the memes in question. If, for example, I declare that self-expression through music is the gateway to harmony for all life on Earth, I'm going to be promoting a really skewed perspective of the world on par with the most out-of-touch of religions. On the other hand, if I love music that personally moves me and merely state as much, then I'm doing no harm.

1. Do things that you enjoy, so long as they do not tip the pleasure to suffering ratio for sentient life in suffering's favor.

2. Don't teach people that enjoying the things in question is valuable, or some end goal for humanity. Just enjoy them.

Crap, terrible, bad, very bad spam filter alert

2011-05-14T17:12:00.008-04:00

Google is the worst entity to have ever been constructed by humans -- or is at least right up there with the Third Reich and the Catholic Church.

Apparently, there is a spam filter on Blogger which you cannot turn off (if I'm wrong, leave a comment). And apparently, it likes to mark things as spam for absolutely no reason. This hardly surprises me; this is the same company who came up with the retarded flagging system that YouTube uses.

Anyway, on this entry of mine, I've restored two comments that were, for some unknown reason, marked as spam. If you are either of the two individuals who left the comments, or if you think that reading their comments might be to your benefit, they are now available.

I am in the process of reading and responding to them at the moment, but I figured that I'd make this post first in order to give everyone a heads up that this problem could continue into the future.

Edit: Looks like the comments finally restored by themselves. I'll leave the originals up, but I manually copied them as well, since it's probably easier to read them sequentially than by digging through the older comments for them. Oh, and apparently, spam filters don't believe in paragraphs.

A true story

2011-05-14T10:09:00.025-04:00

I work for a systems integration firm which specializes in providing solutions for the communications and security industries; specifically, I am "the IT guy" for our internal operations, though I work alongside several contractors who also maintain our network.

Sounds important, right? I'm not so sure that it is.

Two days ago, one of the contractors with whom I work needed to drive out to a nearby tunnel system with an engineer in order to swap out a server mounted on a rack full of modulator-things (I'm not an engineer, so I don't need to know exactly what the engineers do, apparently. As long as I do my part and make my money, right?). The goal was to change out the server, update the database, and test the modulator-things by way of a radio in order to ensure that the signals that the modulator-things were modulating were strong enough. Still sounds somewhat important so far.

But I wasn't there to do any of that. I was supposed to be back at the office re-imaging a hard drive and recovering its lost data from a backup system provided by a fairly unreliable (but cheap!) third party. Why did I have to drop everything that I was in the middle of and go, then? Because the contractor's back was hurt, and he wanted me to carry his suitcase for him.

That was it. I was there to carry a fairly light suitcase into a building, into an elevator, and then into a server room; the rest of my time was to be spent sitting in a chair and waiting for the other two guys to finish. Honestly, the contractor didn't seem all that hurt, but even if he was, the engineer who was also tagging along could have easily grabbed the contractor's stuff on a second trip from the car to the building. Basically, this was an inefficient use of man hours on the part of the contractor.

I normally wouldn't complain about such a thing, no matter how obviously poor the decision was -- especially on this blog -- but there's more to this story. In addition to my role in this operation being needlessly redundant, it turned out that neither of the two guys working on this system really knew what he was doing, and both had been rushed by their managers to get the job done that evening at all costs. Oh, and on top of that, the system turned out to be full of errors.

This combination of unfortunate elements -- all generated by a society obsessed with self-perpetuation and gratification, no matter the cost -- caused us to stay at this place until almost 9 at night, when the goal was to be done by 5 or earlier (we got there at 2:30). In other words, from approximately 2:30 until 8:45 or so, I was sitting in a chair. I could have been eating dinner, but because I was "needed" for carrying a relatively light load to a place where a project "needed" to get done that day, I just sat there for the entire day, doing literally nothing.

Even if I really was needed for carrying the suitcase -- which I am somewhat open to being a real possibility -- the system's lack of criticality indicates to me that there was no need whatsoever for us to stay any later than 5; the push to stay as long as it took makes no sense to me in this case, as we weren't exactly performing heart surgery.

All that aside, I still wouldn't have posted this entry if it weren't for this: The goal of the system that they were working on is to allow you to hear your radio when you're driving through the tunnel. I spent over six hours (three of which were outside of my normal hours of work) doing nothing -- not helping anyone back at the office, not eating or drinking, not enjoying a recreational activity at home -- just so that the people who drive through that tunnel can hear an extra thirty seconds of their favorite Lady Gaga song. With all of the things that need to get done on this planet to make the burden of life more bearable, apparently, what we did that day was more important.

Do you still think our society is sane?

Four thoughts to ponder

2011-04-19T10:12:00.008-04:00

There might be a bigger post in the works. I'm not sure. In the meantime, consider these:

1. Suicide is currently the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Why not Somalia or Afghanistan? Because the people there are too busy dealing with how horrible their lives are to even contemplate suicide. They haven't even had the opportunity; that's how bad things are for them.

2. People who claim to be happy in public are often lying, because being depressed is a social taboo that can lead to being ostracized -- especially if one has a spouse and/or children.

3. Many people who legitimately think that they love their lives are only ever asked after things have settled down. Humans are fickle; it's very easy to say that something horrible is "worth it" when it's no longer happening. Ask someone if they're happy right after they've gone through a coincidental string of three funerals in a row and then gotten fired from their job and see what they say.

4. Some people love to eat unhealthy foods, but the subjective satisfaction of eating those foods does not make the foods healthy. Likewise, someone may legitimately enjoy living, but that in no way implies that their life is healthy -- for themselves or for the rest of the biosphere.

Update: Alright, I'm seeing conflicting reports on the suicide thing. Some say that it's the eleventh leading cause of death, which, while still high up on the list, doesn't quite make it seem like a crisis or confirmation of there being a substantial number of profoundly unhappy people in the world. It's definitely still a problem that needs to be addressed by society (not in the "take some medication and pretend everything's okay" way, of course), but the huge variation in data just goes to show how sloppy a lot of modern research is. For this reason, and because of my general skepticism regarding statistics, I'll refrain from citing any sources and just state that suicide happens, which is a perfect reason to not have children.

Humans are important

2011-04-17T19:00:00.010-04:00

In both real life and Internet dealings, I often hear people say things like "We humans are so insignificant in the grander scheme of things," or "How important could humanity possibly be? We're sooo arrogant, and yet the universe is soooo big!" It's almost become a cliché at this point, really -- and while it sounds good, or at least gives people philosophy points in social circles, it really isn't anything more complicated than a self-deprecating platitude.

Here's a thought: What if our worth, our significance, depends upon something far less trivial than physical mass?

I guess I don't get it; what does being relatively small have to do with the significance of the human species? Furthermore, given that we don't know how far down and up the scale reality extends, we could ultimately be relatively voluminous; after all, quarks are incomprehensibly tiny compared to a single human individual. And let's not forget that human bodies are not set physical objects, but continuously changing subroutines utilizing all of the universe in their procedures; abstracting a chunk of the suffering entity that we call the universe is tempting, given our evolved sense organs and their scale of operation, but it's not a very legitimate way of seeing things.

However, for the sake of argument, let's temporarily assume that this isn't the case, and that humans really are on the smaller end of the scale. Let's assume that, if you were to take all of our sensory abstractions of the matter, energy, time, and space in the universe and order it all in a straight line according to mass, humans would be in, maybe, the bottom one percent. Why would it matter?

The Grand Canyon is far larger than I, but if there's an avalanche nearby, is anyone obligated out of practical responsibility to rush the entire Grand Canyon to the hospital? No, but when a human being -- a vulnerable, sensitive creature subject to the intense chemical administrations of its own irrational cognitive processor -- gets trapped under the rocks, then anyone nearby is obligated to at least do something to help.

We're not insignificant; in fact, until we have proof that super-intelligent extraterrestrials exist, we're the most significant thing in the universe. Not only do we suffer as a consequence of chemical syntheses irrationally acting to stop their corresponding systems from breaking down, we also can deliberate upon our suffering for hours, days, years both before and after it occurs, creating even more suffering and compounding the void that is sentience. Oh, and on top of that, we're the only living organisms capable of doing something about it.

That makes us pretty significant to me.

So why not worship ourselves, then? Well, that's simple: In addition to being the most significant thing that we're aware of, each of us is also imbued with an incredible potential for algorithmic decision-making and model-building. The problem is that almost none of us is taking advantage of this, leading to the most tragic waste of energy in the history of reality as we've come to know it thus far.

The Buddha's teachings are garbage

2011-04-13T19:11:00.035-04:00

Notice how I didn't title this "Buddhism is garbage"; while stupid, Buddhism and its various sects often have nothing to do with what the Buddha actually taught, making them far less attractive as targets for critique. For example, the following were not part of the original teachings of the Buddha, yet are often essential to modern Buddhist practice:

1. Monastic hierarchy

2. Arbitrary rituals and customs (e.g. shaving one's head, wearing a robe, reciting formalized chants)

3. Forbidding sex (obviously in direct opposition to the Buddha's conception of the Middle Path)

4. Reincarnation; "seeing" past lives; dualism

5. Compassion for non-sentient life (e.g. trees and possibly insects)

...and, most importantly:

6. "Isms," or treating ideas as groups to be generalized, "converted" to, etc.

So, fine, the Buddha was right not to incorporate any of these things into his teachings. That's great, but he was nevertheless about as far from being scientifically minded as one can get. Don't believe me? Think the Buddha was some atheist way ahead of his time, or on par with Einstein? Have a look at the following flaws in his modus operandi:

1. The numbered lists: Everything that the Buddha taught seemed to break down into definite lists which more or less could not be challenged by his disciples. Perhaps you think this point ironic, since I'm putting it on a list of my own, but the difference is that I will neither title nor close off this list in an attempt to formalize it or make it dogma; in fact, it's very likely that I'll add onto it in the minutes and hours following my publishing this post.

Given the nature of data and the very states of impermanence and not-self that the Buddha was so fond of demonstrating, he should have more carefully considered that his lists would need updating and refinement as he encountered more worldly problems. Likewise, he should have considered listening to others, and consequently spent equal amounts of time both teaching and learning. Titling your list "The Noble Eightfold Path" or "The Four Noble Truths" is setting you up for adulation and blind acceptance on the part of your "followers." Wouldn't it have been better for the Buddha to have simply said, "I've found four things about reality that are worth teaching, but I, in being imperfect, am both student and teacher, just as you are. If you happen to find a fifth noble truth, by all means, let me know about it"? Certainly, the Noble Eightfold Path is very far from a complete list of methods for avoiding suffering; it doesn't even account for what currently appears to be the primary cause: unregulated emergent process.

2. The neglect of non-human causes of suffering: The Noble Eightfold Path basically asserts that we can end all suffering by changing our thoughts and actions. This is patently false; anyone who has ever passed a kidney stone, been shot in the stomach, or endured cancer can tell you that intense pain, no matter how good you are at managing it, is a by-product of material interactions which cannot be stopped unless their causal processes are. In other words, while I may be able to deal with suffering better upon taking up the Noble Eightfold Path, this in no way demonstrates that my newfound ability to cope with suffering also leads to the cessation of said suffering. It doesn't matter how great you are at meditation, mindfulness, or detachment from desire; if you're being beaten with a baseball bat or ripped apart by an alligator, your psychological sophistication is not going to prevent -- or even mitigate -- your suffering. Incidentally, how meditation could ever help starving baby birds is beyond me.

The solution really is far simpler than a contrived set of mental practices requiring extensive training: Just don't have kids.

3. The ambiguity: The Buddha often spoke in parables and metaphors -- which, in the general sense, may occasionally edify a person seeking to understand an elusive concept not easily grasped using more literal means -- but the Buddha is almost never direct with his followers in the Pali Canon. The lack of clarity of wording has had such dramatic consequences, in fact, that today, there are entire "Buddhist" sects which teach literal reincarnation where the Buddha only ever spoke of a metaphorical "rebirth" of one's moral energy, or kamma. Worse still, the concept of rebirth isn't even all that accurate: One transfers one's ideas, notions, and physical actions through the world both while alive and after death, so it's a continuous process, and not something that occurs exclusively after the body ceases to function. Counter by claiming that, in accordance with the flux of material reality, the Buddha was referring to the continuous generation of new "selves" who have causal influence on their environments and you'll further illustrate my point that the wording of the Buddhist texts is so ambiguous that we can't even agree on what it's referencing.

This problem could have been easily solved by the Buddha's referring to the phenomenon in question as simple transmigration of data and information -- both physical and conceptual -- rather than as a "rebirth."

4. The gods: Contrary to popular belief, the early Buddhist texts are filled with nonsense about gods of all sorts. Dimensions, planes, and immaterial consciousnesses are often spoken about as things which the Buddha confronts during intense meditation sessions. Essentially, they're all leftovers from the obviously whacky Hinduism, but the Buddha took what were integral facets of a supreme godhead and turned them into imperfect, desirous beings capable of suffering just like anyone else. The claim that a conscious, sentient being is necessarily imperfect, in part because of its desires and impetuses, is accurate; the claim that any such beings exist beyond the Earth, or in other realms of existence, has no basis in empirical observation whatsoever.

It's like saying that, even though it's quite obvious that man contrived Santa Claus, there could be a guy who rides a sleigh driven by flying reindeer somewhere in another dimension -- except that the Buddha apparently took the unfounded presumptions of his backward Indian culture quite seriously, to the point where he actively believed that gods and ethereal realms were real in the most literal sense imaginable.

5. No suicide or antinatalism: If ending suffering is the most important activity of life, then why didn't the Buddha advocate suicide or the cessation of human reproduction? You can counter by claiming that spreading the word on how to obtain enlightenment is a far better use of one's time than suicide, given that it will help end not just your own suffering but the suffering of others, but what if you're suffering so horribly that meditation does nothing to ease your mind? Is it okay to kill yourself? Furthermore, even if there were a valid reason within the Buddhist paradigm to forbid suicide, what does that have to do with merely refraining from having children? Sure, modern monks don't reproduce, but that has more to do with the false notion that the Buddha advocated abstinence than with any desire to end life as we know it -- and, assuredly, monks do not attempt to stop laymen from reproducing.

It seems rather obvious to me that the Buddha was entirely invested in the agenda of life: He saw that part of it was bad, but instead of trying to fix it proactively, he advocated messy self-help steps for those unfortunate enough to have had to endure the onset. If he'd truly been interested in eliminating all negative sensation, he'd have said more on how to cleanly terminate one's own life -- or at least strongly emphasized the importance of abstaining from sexual reproduction (regardless of social status).

And above all else, no matter what the Buddha actually said, the fact that some 350 million people continue to not only venerate but outright deify him goes to show what a mess we're in. If I, a random, anonymous person on the Internet can so effectively dissolve the original words of the Buddha with a few paragraphs, then why is he being treated with such reverence? Why is he being singled out above billions upon billions of people? If I can put a dent in his ideas, and there are seven billion people on Earth, how many others do you think can do the same?

Is it possible that the entire "path" advocated by the Buddha is -- like just about everything else that justifies enslavement to non-rational cognitive faculties -- a sham? Here's a final word of advice: No matter how much you agree with a person or set of ideas, if the method used to arrive at those ideas is flawed, or if the ideas share space with really stupid ones, you're better off not trying to gain social status through associating with their "isms." Always discuss ideas one at a time.

The "hard" problem of consciousness is pretty mushy

2011-03-31T14:42:00.013-04:00

The hard problem of consciousness is silly. Here it is, as summed up here:

The problem is how an entity which is apparently immaterial like the human consciousness – it exists, but you can’t locate it, much less measure it – can have arisen from something purely physical, like the arrangement of cells that make up the human body.

You can say the same for abstract concepts like efficiency, health, power, racism, immensity, height, etc. Can you physically locate efficiency? If not, does that mean that efficiency has a soul, or that it's some overly complicated conundrum? Not really.

And yes, you can measure consciousness. Energy is a great analogy for consciousness, because it's not a physical substance in itself; rather, it's a measurement of the ability of physical objects to perform work. You can't feel, taste, touch, hear, or smell energy, but you can know that it exists, because it, by definition, is nothing more complicated than a capacity. Consciousness is just a measurement of the work done by neurons -- a process; in other words, even if it is not the sum of the neurons themselves, it can be demonstrated to be a property or by-product of the neurons for the same reasons that a tornado or river (or their energy content) can be demonstrated to be properties of physical matter, but are not themselves limited by it. Just because a process is not limited to an unchanging set of physical matter doesn't mean that it requires magic in order to be explained, or that it is somehow beautifully complex; conceding that this is true for just about any abstraction, process, or measurement while simultaneously allowing consciousness to be an exception is preferential thinking at its worst.

The crux of the article, though, has to do with why people mistakenly believe that they have a soul, which is fine, but the issue is made out to be needlessly complicated:

No one has produced any plausible explanation of how the experience of the redness of red could arise from the actions of the brain. It appears fruitless to approach this problem head-on.

I can't make sense of this at all. Anything that confers an evolutionary advantage, no matter how intuitively incomprehensible it may be to us, will be selected for, because the universe will use any impetus or motivator that it can to keep life going. Analogously, the two options with which we're currently presented as explanations for the universe's existence -- that there was a point in time before which no causes existed, and that causality is infinite -- make no sense to humans intuitively, but that doesn't imply that there absolutely must be a third option.

Your brain's inability to imagine things which it did not evolve to imagine does not in any way demonstrate that those things are not business as usual for reality.

As for the subjective feeling of "being" a soul, or an ego that "pilots" a body, I fail to find this phenomenon any more exceptional than any other evolutionary motivator, including non-sensitive reflexes, or even genetic instructions to consume chemicals. When you say things like, "It's truly a marvel how the brain has devised a mechanism for encouraging the reproductive success of organisms by way of thoughts, feelings, awe, wonder, and a sense of beauty," it just sounds like, "I'm in awe of the fact that living things have the capacity to be in awe," or even, "It's amazing how living things are controlled by genetic instructions for no reason whatsoever" to me.

For future reference, here are some immaterial entities which probably exist, but which also probably do not have souls:

Love
Shyness
Hunger
Bravery
Adolescence
Adultery
Success
Enlightenment
Disgust
Exercise

You know what? This list could contain thousands of items, so I'll stop here. Consciousness is not special.

Update: Maybe the following idea will be of help to those who think that consciousness is special simply because it is slightly more complex than its surroundings:

Consciousness, like rivers or exercise, doesn't merely "exist" -- it happens. Think of anything that happens, and you'll soon realize just how unspecial consciousness really is. Can you quantify a baseball game? Can you hold it in your hands? Can you pinpoint exactly where the game is and label it as a material object? No, but baseball games happen, which is something else that the universe allows for. Consciousness happens; our brains are the stadiums.

The pitfall of staying still

2011-03-30T18:53:00.003-04:00

Sometimes, someone's sole reason for not implementing a plan or solution to a problem is that it has flaws -- or that it will yield some negative results. The problem with this approach is that it's all-or-nothing, so incremental improvement is essentially disallowed by it. It's important to remember that solutions and potential courses of action should be compared not absolutely but relatively to their alternatives, including the alternative that's already in place. If a particular course of action allows for the possibility of something going wrong, and the current plan also does, then your concern shouldn't be whether your new plan will solve all of your problems; it should be whether the new plan will be better than the current one.

1. If you're in a warzone and realize that it's almost certain that many people around you are about to die, this should not prevent you from saving the ones whom you know you can save. Saving three may not be as great as saving fifty, but it's still better than saving zero.

2. If you're standing on train tracks and a train is heading straight for you, but there are murderous thugs on both sides of the tracks, it would be foolish to continue to stand on the tracks simply because the thugs pose a risk to your safety.

The importance of free education and reforming general education

2011-03-28T14:05:00.064-04:00

The free nature of Wikipedia and YouTube demonstrates a potential direction for education -- if we're smart enough to allow it to happen. Unfortunately, Wikipedia's relevance criteria for articles is based on the argument from popularity (the American Idol/democracy argument), while YouTube is a for-profit website owned by scummy capitalists in league with advertisers devoid of real values; both are interested in pleasing people en masse, either as a symbol of some arbitrary image, or to make massive amounts of money at the expense of everyone else. Never mind the issues with inheriting wealth, allowing profit-generating entities to have owners (or to NOT be owned by everyone), the lack of alternative service providers, or using symbols in the place of hard, empirical observation; that all sucks, but what this post will be about is how such incentives and lack of regulation will keep us retarded for decades, if not centuries, to come.

Let's put it this way: You don't have to pay for an ISP in order to gain Internet access (try a library, school, or other academic location), so if you can read free articles and watch free vlogs that are of higher value than the average, hugely expensive college lecture, then someone better realize the potential that's currently being wasted and pull a Napster for education. Knowing who Napoleon replaced when he came to power or how to factor trinomials makes no sense in the context of the modern person's highly technicized existence, so why are we continuing to teach people such functionally useless nonsense? Do we really get off on artificially conjuring up value in order to give our society the false appearance of being interesting and productive? What about all the stuff that's out there in the real world that actually matters?

Furthermore, now that, thankfully, the music and film industries are dying* (and the porn industry†, believe it or not), I think it's time that the same started happening to the education industry. Let's not pretend that it isn't an industry, either, because that's exactly what it is. Remember when I said that it makes no sense for the average person to learn about Napoleon and complex math? Well, it does make sense -- for the banks and academic institutions administering all the tests, texts, and other materials. Firstly, yes, there are some colleges that are for-profit (I go to one), and secondly, regardless of motive, it's nevertheless still the case that millions of dollars get wasted every year on producing and using crap that not only could be learned by browsing Wikipedia in far less time, but is also totally irrelevant to anyone's ability to:

1. Treat people properly or behave in a competent manner within a social environment

2. Produce things that actually improve society's overall quality by removing or reducing negative impediments

The monetary incentive aside, colleges are still usually interested in upholding an image, which is a symbolic gesture that, in this case, has positive social consequences for the colleges, but hurts both the minds and wallets of those used to this end. Offering needlessly complex math and history courses in order to show off your "standards of quality" and "reputation" is no different from a woman showing off how "graceful" and "respectable" she is by wearing dresses. So all you feminists out there who advocate the slutification of your culture as a means to "realizing gender equality" or some such silliness, drop your personal predilection for the one symbolic standard that hurts your cause and start promoting free education -- for the betterment of all!

Alright, facetious rundown over. Three points:

1. In the future, if we're all going to be streaming movies from hulu.com and downloading mp3s, we might as well take our "online" classes for free as well; it's more efficient than the alternatives, and the technology is already available (even if everyone is too interested in music videos and online shopping to care).

2. If we're doing all education online and for free, then we might as well choose "courses" -- or even individual lectures -- ourselves, and leave out the authoritative administrators altogether. If you want to fix toilets for a living, find a free online service provider who specializes in providing information and examinations for that stuff, then read up on it, participate in the discussions, do your real-life practice lessons, and take a few (hopefully not too memorization-based) tests. This will allow you to earn a certification for your desired skill set without all of the wasted resources and bureaucracy.

3. Even though general education in the modern sense sucks, there should still be a foundational set of ideas that gets taught to everyone at a young age, regardless of what they go on to pursue later in life.

If we as a society ever become interested in this direction, in order to make sure that 3. is established as a societal baseline, we'll first need to scrap the following:

1. Psychology - especially Freudian psychology (if your textbook admits that a concept that it's bringing forth is no longer accepted even by modern psychiatrists, you know you're holding a waste of trees in your hands), but all psychology, really, as it focuses on the individual rather than the environment, doesn't involve empirical observation and testing, and contrives arbitrary "disorders" where almost all people have at least some of the qualifications, even if they don't have enough to qualify for "treatment"

2. Math - Keep arithmetic and times tables, but get rid of trigonometry, geometry, calculus, etc.

3. History - I don't need to know about King Hammurabi or the Boxer Rebellion in order to fix your computer

4. Creative writing - Most fiction writers never go to college for writing, and the few who do often don't get anything out of it. Being graded for such a subjective activity is really silly, anyway.

5. Arbitrary guidelines for research papers - It doesn't matter whether your student indented twice or only once for his block quotation, so stop throwing a fit about it and do something meaningful with your credentials for once

6. Political Science - This is just "Spend hundreds of dollars to listen to the news in person 101"

7. Sex Ed

8. Phys Ed

9. "Philosophy" - This is just "Spend hundreds of dollars to have someone give you a list of their favorite philosophers while refusing to in any way indicate that one might have better ideas than the others, or that other not-so-famous people probably have the same ideas... 101"

10. Music

11. Art

12. Any other liberal arts courses

13. Creation "science" and Intelligent Design

14. The pledge of allegiance

15. Prayer

16. Grades - Either you're good enough to do it in real life or you're not -- no arbitrary, base-10 nonsense necessary.

After we've scrapped all the junk, we'll need to teach the following to all young people before they go on to pursue an occupational field, regardless of what they become interested in learning about later on:

1. Arithmetic

2. English

3. Logic

4. Philosophy (the real kind -- not the "all ideas are equal and memorizing the names of famous people is more important than thinking coherently" kind)

5. Meta-cognition

6. Science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy)

7. Computer Science (or at least basic computer competency and troubleshooting skills)

8. Statistics

9. Economics

Obviously, anyone who wants to specialize in something will be able to go more in-depth in some of the above areas than what the general requirement entails; additionally, they'll be able to take entirely separate courses for the purpose of acquiring the above mentioned certifications. However, when it comes to what is a requirement, there are certain skills and concepts that should be stressed.

Specific things that everyone should be taught at a young age:

1. How to formulate logical premises and conclusions; logical fallacies and why they're fallacies; how to construct a logic flowchart; what things like non sequiturs are

2. The ever-present possibility of being in error, or of being deceived by one's senses

3. A methodology for living, including methods for how to manage processes, formulate values, and accomplish goals; an understanding of why something is more valuable than something else, or at least appears to be based on sensory information; an understanding of how to determine what to do in various situations and how to make decisions based on opportunity cost, value equations, etc.; how to isolate variables for problem-solving; how to perceive the world as an integrated system dictated by cause-and-effect, relations, input, processing, and output that can be infinitely broken down into subsystems

4. Waste management, which expands upon 3., but is a bit more specific

5. How to conduct an experiment (of the thought variety of otherwise); how the scientific method works; why peer review is important; the differences between dependent variables, independent variables, and controls

6. How to spot any kind of prejudice, bias, superstition, fear/attachment, emotionally-made decisions, or religious thinking (regardless of whether it applies to what people refer to as "religion")

7. The nature of pleasure as a termination of deprivation

8. The arbitrary nature of most criteria in all areas of life, including deadlines, work hours, and weekends. For example, there is no scientific evidence in favor of the idea that working eight hours a day is more effective than working seven or nine, or somehow optimal. In any case, the ubiquity of the arbitrary criteria phenomenon needs to be stressed at a young age.

9. The arbitrary nature of the self; why a peer of yours who is very similar to you ideologically is more "you" than your seven-year-old self; why memory is the only neurological component that prevents individual sentient organisms from realizing that they're the same, in substance, as all other sentient organisms; why your pain and someone else's pain are substantively equivalent in the same way that one chunk of iron and another chunk of iron are substantively equivalent; how chemicals enter and leave the body, and what they do during metabolic activities; why living organisms are sort-of-open systems, complete with processors, memory, storage devices, buses, input devices, output devices, system software, etc.

10. Statistics; how to collect a sample; how to deduce probability outcomes; the significance of sample size; how to calculate odds; how to interpret odds (to avoid wishful thinking, etc.). Note: If 3. and 8. are properly taught, then the idea of percentages will not be taken seriously, even if percentages will still be used on occasion (or maybe not, depending).

11. Attachment avoidance - for death, life, work, loved ones, ideas, beliefs, isms, and material possessions. I'm not sure if I'd take it as far as meditation and related practices, but there should definitely be an emphasis on preparing for the inevitable decay of the "fun" things around you, as well as how to maintain a productive psychology in the absence of fulfilled desires.

12. How to use a personal computer; how to use a mouse and keyboard; how to navigate the Windows operating system; how to keep your PC free from malware, security threats, and performance problems; how to upgrade your PC. Note that this doesn't need to be incredibly comprehensive or technical; it just needs to allow the general population to be computer literate. This deserves far more attention in school than dinosaurs or Pilgrims. Sorry.

13. The different spheres of influence on the individual, and how to recognize them in everyday life. For example, the media wants you to stop smoking not because it's the only thing (or the most painful thing, or the first thing) that can kill you, but because there's plenty of money to be made in ineffective products advertised as being capable of helping you to quit. It's unlikely that lung cancer will be less pleasant for you than the average cancer; likewise, it's likely that you'll live almost as long as you would have had you never started smoking. Besides, quality is more important than quantity, which is always absurdly tiny when weighed against eternity. Oh, and all that marijuana that you think "isn't a drug, man"? Yeah, no one has gotten lung cancer from it yet because your grandparents didn't consume it in massive quantities every day for years. In a nutshell: Do you hold a fairly popular belief or presumption? If yes, then odds are good that someone is making money off of your gullibility.

14. The flaws inherent in the English language and why, despite our needing conventions in order to effectively communicate, most of the rules of English are totally arbitrary and meaningless. For example, synonyms are often superfluous, and capitalization was only necessary in times of hard-to-read Gothic script devoid of paragraphs.

15. What the Bible actually says; comparisons between modern values and ancient Semitic values to demonstrate the huge contrast between the two; emphasis on the barbarism of the Old Testament and why it makes sense in the context of a pastoral people with few resources; emphasis on the previously henotheistic nature of proto-Judaism; how religions, like languages and species, share common ancestors and are related to one another, in spite of the commonly held view that they are spontaneously generated

16. The differences between harmful radiation and harmless radiation (wavelengths, frequencies, photons and electrons, etc.). Honestly, people being afraid of ghosts and Satan is bad enough in 2011. Do they really need to be afraid of cell phones and microwaves, too?

17. Maybe a LITTLE bit of drawing technique or music theory as part of a larger course on something else, just to demonstrate why no one should make millions of dollars by painting portraits of women without eyebrows or by singing songs about love

18. How slaughtering livestock actually works; why meat is just a preference and not a basic human need; how much money and resources could be saved by feeding grain to all of the starving people on the planet as opposed to the pigs and cows on your burgers, which don't need to exist in the first place

Updated 6/2/11: 19. First aid; a mild amount of medical knowledge

Doing all of the above will only be possible in an environment where everyone with innovative ideas is allowed to start his own organization or website and subsequently generate publicity for his efforts; it won't be possible in an environment run by corporations, and it certainly won't be possible in the current academic environment. We must, to the best of our abilities, separate not only education but all forms of human conditioning from money-making; if we don't, we'll never promote proper skill acquisition or social understanding and competency, and courses will continue to waste resources and brain space in the meantime.

Why doesn't anyone talk about this stuff? Well, the majority of people are not in school, so they don't care, because it doesn't affect them -- at least not directly. If more people would stop treating education as either some compartmentalized facet of existence that "just happens" or a pathway to corporate enslavement, then maybe it would be easier for them to see just why our inability to raise children properly leads to war, world hunger, and any other huge, generic problem in the world.

Feel free to add onto one or more of the above lists in the comments section if you have any additional ideas. I'm always looking for more.

_________________________________________________
* This is the place where I'm supposed to link you to articles proving that I'm right, but I don't feel like Googling for the obvious.

† Apparently, because so much porn is available for free all over the Internet, producers are struggling to stay in business. I find this kind of amusing for some reason.

No Bad Memes - Current Status

2011-03-21T15:55:00.006-04:00

I haven't updated this blog in about a month, now. I'm sure that there will be ideas worth promoting in the future, but don't expect frequent updates from here on out. I will continue to check for emails and comments as usual, though, so don't assume that I've disappeared; I'm still here, and will definitely be adding content whenever necessary over the next few months.

I just made a post on how the monetary system and lack of social programs on the Internet are inhibiting human progress, so feel free to read that in the meantime. It's something that I've been thinking about for a while; hopefully, I've succeeded in thoroughly explaining my position on it.

Thanks for reading what I've been posting here over the last couple of months in general. In the best case scenario, one day, everything will be sufficiently covered to the point that updates won't be necessary at all. That may sound kind of negative, but I think that it would be a positive sign that everything important was here out in the open for anyone to read. We'll see.

Individualism and the absence of goal-setting on the Internet

2011-03-21T14:17:00.055-04:00

Let's get one thing straight: The Internet is dominated by a handful of corporate* websites that are for-profit. Government websites and personal hosting space are almost nonexistent; can you name a site that you regularly frequent that isn't corporate-run? When was the last time that one of your friends decided to invest in a few servers and implement something like IIS or FTP for hosting sites or files? Was it practical? Did it prove useful?

On the Internet these days, ads and unskippable commercials abound; incentive and encouragement are given to those who help the corporations in question make money -- so long as such people aren't associated with ideas antithetical to the corporations' pursuits, that is. If you don't give a particular site a bad image or speak out against it, you're acceptable; if you have an interest in genuine goals and completion of finite, quantifiable tasks, however, you're in trouble.

This problem is compounded by the fact that, not only is the Internet run by corporations, it's more or less run by a number of them no larger than the amount of fingers on your two hands. So long as the incentive for providing a web service is profit, no resultant product site is going to be geared toward encouraging people to better themselves, or work. Work, in this society, is not something that consumers do; it's something that producers do, and while most people take on both roles at various points in their lives, they almost never take them on simultaneously.

People aren't interested in making society better unless the betterment of society is incidentally profitable on a personal level, so if they're not getting paid -- especially if they're expecting to be provided a service for purposes other than "work" by someone who is getting paid -- they're not going to be interested in doing anything that isn't for themselves. And, as the saying goes, the customer is always right.

Or is he?

When you really think about it, it does seem as though the primary cause of the monopolization of the Internet is the apathy and selfishness of the average e-consumer. "Here's a new technology that allows you to make videos of yourself and broadcast them to thousands of people; do whatever you want with it except take your clothes off or badmouth us. Oh, and since you can do whatever you want with this functionality, there's no need to go to any other sites with similar functionality ever, ever again!"

This line of thinking keeps the website's superficial, outward integrity in tact while simultaneously enabling the customer to fulfill his every most base desire, regardless of how much of a waste of time the desire is when put into the context of a finite existence continuously guided by decision variables affecting all of sentient life. In other words, the owners of the website get richer by encouraging its users to use the service for pretty much any reason they want, which usually turns out to be one that doesn't involve helping someone else; in simplest terms, the website has no goals.

Sure, there is a distinction to be made between continuous goals and finite goals, and profit is a continuous goal, but what about the latter type? To me, a goal in the truest sense of the word is any completable construct representing the need for an object that can be quantified. For example, "make money," as previously noted, isn't really a goal per se, but "make X amount of money" is, as it contains a quantity variable, and, once the quantity is obtained, the goal ceases to exist.

The problem with our current framework for the Internet is that, not only does it disregard attainable goals, it actively seeks to prevent them from emerging, as it treats the Internet as an end in itself (for the consumer) or a means to the end of profit (for the producer) -- rather than as a means to any other imaginable end, including real, quantitative goals.

Without intervention from an external body -- whether a government or something similarly authoritative -- the Internet, like much of our economic system, will continue to foster goalless profit-seeking, which, while superficially beneficial to the consumer for mere minutes at a time, is ultimately only materially beneficial to a fraction of the human population smaller than the population of the average city. Perhaps someone unaffiliated with a particular website has brilliant ideas, or is working on a project that would be of interest to you, but because the project isn't in the best interest of the two or three major websites capable of hosting it, you never learn that it exists. What a travesty this is if true.

Imagine a world where websites actually promote goal creation and completion. By this, I don't mean vapid social networking "gaming dynamics" (i.e. allowing users to set commenting goals, story writing goals, etc.), which only encourage further self-absorption in the same manner that the video games after which they're modeled do; I mean things like providing propositions for a community, convincing others that your ideas are reasonable, and finding new avenues for promotion and discussion.

A real-world example might be something like a YouTube, Blogger, or even Wikipedia specifically geared toward philosophy, science, and social welfare vlogs/blogs/articles as opposed to just about any non-"offensive" videos or articles that one could imagine. A mission statement or declaration of methodology and goals would be evident everywhere on the site, and all users would be subject to bans based not on how their content affected others emotionally, but on whether the content was logical and conducive to the goals proposed by the site. There would be no owners, and everyone would have access to all editable components and modules.

In this scenario, suddenly, the aforementioned sites are no longer doing everything [legal] that they can in order to get ahead of everyone else; instead, they're working toward seeing demonstrable, practical results of proposed solutions to the world's problems. Users are encouraged not to simply behave themselves, but to actually do work. The dichotomy of user and designer has collapsed; everyone fulfills both roles simultaneously, creating a positive feedback loop of suggestion input and implementation. Everyone involved consumes resources or uses services in order to make other resources and services better, with the latter resources and services doing the same, etc., all to the end of improving society.

So long as problems exist, it should be every major organizational entity's goal to solve them. This goal can be broken into a plethora of sub-goals, of course, but it should nevertheless lie at the foundation of every organization's agenda, no matter the circumstance. Until we stop treating everyone as a source of our own personal satisfaction, though, this will not happen.

So just imagine it for a second. Imagine being able to edit someone else's blog, because you've both agreed beforehand on the direction and goals of the blog. Imagine participating on (and owning) a YouTube channel owned by fifty other people, each capable of uploading and favoriting videos. Imagine being able to, as something like a site moderator or administrator, suggest whether someone should be removed from the group or have their videos deleted, but not being able to actually do those things on your own without the input of the entire group. Imagine being able to alert everyone involved to potential areas of expansion. Imagine a website that exists not to provide people a service, but to get something done. People "get things done" and set goals all the time in their own personal lives, so why shouldn't a website advertise itself for this same purpose? A simple "Calling all interested parties: We need someone to start writing material on X subject. So and so is already working on Y subject, but if you think you have a better way, let so and so know" would suffice.

It would certainly beat what we currently have.

The interesting thing is that most of the above is possible right now on a small scale, but the services provided by the sites that can be used in this manner don't exactly help in any significant way. While it's certainly possible for you to write a blog or book on a topic that is actually important, without promotion from a major organization tailored specifically toward promoting and regulating content like yours, it probably isn't going to matter much.

Oh well. Until progress in this area is made, the alternative should be group YouTube channels, group blogs, wikis, etc.

____________________________________________________
* Wikipedia is an interesting exception. I'm in support of its method, but not its goals. Modern people tend to conflate method with goals quite often, which is unfortunate, because the technology is fantastic, in this case, and could be used in a more stringent and socially beneficial manner. Instead, Wikipedia contributors are content to delete articles for interesting ideas unfamiliar to the general public, for example, but if something which promotes horrible values is incredibly popular, it's "relevant" to humanity in some skewed way, and thus worthy of an article according to the site.

I'm not against providing or caching information on every conceivable topic, because free information, no matter how trivial, could prove useful to someone in the future. However, even if one concedes this, Wikipedia's only "goal" is to let people learn more about things they've already heard of. Popularity is only one form of relevance; relying on it to demonstrate the benefit of your website to society at large is, like democracy, a form of argumentum ad populum.

Brains are the source of suffering - follow-up musing

2011-02-20T04:52:00.002-05:00

1. Brains create pain; pain is not a native property of the things with which you traditionally associate it. If you're suffering, it's because your brain is a painful organ -- not because the stimulus affecting your neurological wiring is actually painful. Brains hurt.

2. Furthermore, brains create and poorly manage bad memes -- which, like the genes necessary for brains to exist at all, get passed on from generation to generation in the interest of staving off entropy. Brains are selfish and illogical.

3. The universe would be absolutely devoid of value if it weren't for the existence of sensation; even bacteria, which dominated the first three billion years of evolution of life on Earth, would be acceptable in a valueless universe, in no way compromising its neutrality. Prior to the beginnings of neurological functioning on Earth some billion years ago, it's possible that the universe wasn't the horror that some now think it to be; likewise, it's possible that it won't always be as horrible a place as it currently is. Brains are the worst, and thus most important, aspect of the universe.

Brains are the source of suffering

2011-02-20T03:25:00.034-05:00

If the universe were a closed system composed of nothing but temporally "closed" subsystems, then the eventual entropic decay of each "isolated" system -- and of the universe itself -- would be inevitable. However, for some currently unknown reason, at some point in the past, a process called life emerged on at least one planet in the universe, effectively breaking the previously prevailing chain of tendency toward system disorder. Once this event took place, it became possible for systems that were more or less closed in the traditionally understood, macroscopic sense to -- almost contradictorily -- remain open -- by seeking out energy actively rather than passively.

Of course, to prevent integration with competing systems and other environmental parameters, these new systems also had to remain partially closed -- at least in the sense of putting defense and regulatory mechanisms in place. This kept the systems well-defined, with physical barriers and spatial limitations, while still allowing them enough openness to acquire the energy necessary for their perpetuation.

So what did this opening of otherwise self-contained, self-regulating systems accomplish? For starters, it introduced homeostasis into the environment. This was initially a radical, if meaningless, departure from the way in which energy had been transferred from one location to another in the past. After the fact of life's emergence, though, it turned out that the "mostly closed" systems, or organisms, were nevertheless quite susceptible to the various forces of the universe, and thus, entropy. Mobility and a binary attraction-repulsion system enabled them to disperse energy in an entirely new way, but other physical agents were still quite persistent in their vying for physical space, and were occasionally successful at bringing about states of maximum disorder among some living organisms; this eventually culminated in what we call death.

The organic instructions to resist disorder were mutually persistent, however; as time went on, organisms managed to find, by happenstance, new ways to perpetuate themselves -- even with both living and non-living "space competitors" vying for the same resources. Finally, a few billion years into this routine, one motivation mechanism of incredible efficacy arose -- sentience.

But why does it matter? What was sentience effective at?

Well, as it would turn out, the goal of sentience was not to help organisms "enjoy" their processes; rather, it was to stop organisms from decaying, as it had been with all previous biological mechanisms.

In short, this meant that neural nets would go on to continually birth, over and over again in successive generations, increasingly complex incentives for organisms to avoid behaviors and parameters conducive to their own destruction. At some point during all of this, fully robust brains emerged, and with them, not the capacity to feel pain, but pain itself. To put it succinctly, brains did not attempt to manage pain to the benefit of organisms; they attempted to manage disorder to the benefit of nothing, using the pain that they created entirely on their own as a motivator. We sneeze a lot when sick not because viruses convert themselves into mucus as they multiply, but because, to prevent the body from being destroyed, the immune system must produce mucus. We experience pain not because external agents are inherently painful, but because brains are painful while attempting to prevent disorder.

If you're not following along, again, "disorder" in this context refers to that lack of physical work that causes closed systems to literally "freeze," having no more energy to convert from one state to another; everything has been evenly distributed, and each piece is incapable of transferring energy to any other, or has itself decayed.

Is there anything wrong with decay, though? When two weather patterns collide and eventually disperse their energy content, leaving no further work to be done, is this a bad result? Is it something to be avoided, or even stopped at all costs? It doesn't appear to be, based on anything that we've ever observed; furthermore, without any good reason to invest in the god hypothesis, the agenda of brains (and of central nervous sytems as wholes) must be questioned, for the alternative to the god hypothesis is that the universe -- and thus, all constituents, including central nervous systems and other organic systems -- emerged.

This, if true, essentially means that no intelligent or coherent reason for the existence of life was considered beforehand by a rational entity in some planning stage. In the absence of any good reason to take the notion of a planning stage seriously, or the notion of there being a valid goal in preventing the decay of material systems, we more or less have to conclude that the brain's ability to create sensations in reaction to stimuli is not only unintelligent, but downright nasty.

So, to reiterate: Nothing capable of being received by a brain as sensory input is possessed of some innate unpleasantness; the brain, as part of the central nervous system, is chiefly interested in preventing the genotype, as an energy-dependent process, from decaying; to this end, the brain creates unpleasantness as a reaction to the "efforts" of external agents to bring about disorder in the system; however, there isn't any intelligent reason to believe that entropy is something to be stopped, making the brain's extremely painful efforts to stop it really unnecessary and unintelligent; additionally, every brain has failed or will probably fail in its efforts, and over 99% of them no longer exist.

Pain is bad, but is termination of life? If we were completely incapable of feeling anything, but, unlike bacteria, still possessed language, would we really mind dying? Are shark teeth bad because they can damage our organs, or because they hurt? Would you mind a lion ripping your guts out if it didn't hurt or cause intense fear, and if not, why is that a bad thing? If the AIDS virus were the only entity in the universe capable of replication, it would no longer be a terrible virus, for what do rocks care if they "get AIDS"? Brains create pain to preempt decay; get rid of all the brains and you could have a universe composed of nothing but AIDS -- with no problems whatsoever, anywhere.

The next time that you try to avoid a horribly painful situation, remember that it's not the world that you should be fearing -- it's your brain and its childish insistence on resisting entropy. Bullets, kidney stones, births, panic attacks? Bone cancer? They're okay in themselves. Really, the only thing that's actually capable of hurting you is that pink thing in your skull.

Argument against conventional humanistic morality: Take 2

2011-02-17T21:36:00.007-05:00

In my last post, I illustrated why logical actions should be pursued with earnestness by everyone, regardless of the actions' pertinence to the realm of human morality. There is a second reason to broaden one's scope of decision-making indicators, however: the potential for non-human agents to cause harm to themselves, to other non-human agents, and to human agents.

No one frames nature in moral terms, but we can tell when something like the AIDS virus is negative. You can't put the AIDS virus in jail, but it's still bad.

Can you put an earthquake in jail? No, because, while bad, earthquakes are not immoral activities, or entities perpetrating immoral activities.

Morality only takes us so far; logic, in the most general sense that we can fathom, currently takes us farthest -- even if this is ultimately a relative statement.

On logic and morality once more

2011-02-16T19:43:00.011-05:00

I've sort of gone over this before, but here's the basic premise: We should strive to take actions which appear logical,* regardless of to which arbitrary realms of agent interaction they belong. I've devised an extremely simplistic way of looking at this here. Consider the following two statements:

1. Mass murder is acceptable.

2. 2+2=5

As noted previously, there is no such thing as mathematical data uncoupled from empirical observation; there have to be empirically observable objects which can be added or subtracted in order for arithmetic to even exist.

So, then, is there a difference between the above statements? Consider their inverses:

1. It's wrong to commit mass murder.

2. 2+2=4

Do you agree with 1.? Do you agree with 2.? Great, so what's the problem, and why are we placing one in a different category from the other?

And technically, no, I can't "prove" that either statement is true, contrary to what some mathematicians and scientists might allege. With this limitation in mind, if I were to use the logic of most people, I'd have to declare 2+2=4 a "subjective opinion" in the same sense that that term gets applied to things like morality. This is where the pragmatic element comes into play: we have to make decisions. Period.

Note, however, that I bring this up not just to demonstrate that all truth claims should be measured by the same metrics, but also to elucidate my take on what's worth promoting. It's a statement both to those who view suffering as too subjective a phenomenon to care about addressing, and to those who are gung ho about ending suffering, but who are coming at things from a "moral" perspective, which probably isn't fundamental enough. If we want to end suffering, we can't just teach people that it's not a good thing; we have to make them into logic machines for any kind of situation.

* In this context, "logical" refers to any action which appears more logical than all competitors, thus relegating the competitors to being "illogical," given that none of them were or will be opted for.

Signs that someone is probably pretentious or lying about their experiences

2011-02-16T15:57:00.003-05:00

Just a few quick thoughts. Nothing too serious this time around.

1. They claim that they're capable of choosing how they feel about things, e.g. saying that they recently decided to "get into" a sexual fetish, as though sex is a lifestyle accessory and not a product of our cultural upbringing and biology.

2. They claim to want to make real change in the world, but always seem to be way too busy for it. Their various social networking accounts continue to be updated in the meantime, of course.

3. Most of the activities that they enjoy in life, or claim to enjoy (or have convinced themselves that they enjoy due to various societal pressures), are not enjoyable in the eyes of eight-year-olds.

The four metrics for treating your fellow man

2011-02-09T20:16:00.016-05:00

These are in order of precedence; I wouldn't advocate ignoring number one while practicing number three.

1. Welfare: How great is a sentient agent or agents' capacity for pain? What forces are they being subjected to that cause them to suffer? Will making them feel better cause more suffering elsewhere, per the law of opportunity cost?

2. Social utility: Do they know how to build bridges? Can they send probes into space to preempt imminent asteroid impacts?

3. Personal utility: How can they benefit us -- emotionally, socially, etc.?

4. Overall competence: Even if they're of great social value, do they have good values themselves? Are their heads filled with nonsense? While we may see some utilitarian benefit in allowing them to do their jobs or fulfill one of our personal/psychological desires, are they still promoting bad ideas in their personal lives? Are they bad at understanding complex information? Are they bad at understanding simple information?

1. should determine how to treat someone in the sense of not impinging on his personal space or causing him harm; it's how we were initially granted the so-called "rights" mentioned in the Constitution (which, by the way, are far too absolute, and rarely take context into account per the "social contract" -- a contract that should exist but is in serious need of an upgrade).

2. should determine, after we've determined that hurting someone isn't a good idea (or is, if you think it is), whether it's a good idea to allow him to try his hand at various trades that could increase the overall well-being of society as a collective.

3. should determine whether a person can help us in some way, like by serving some kind of emotional use, even if we don't necessarily think he is "good," with good ideals. Note that 2. and 3. must come after welfare, but aren't in any particular order themselves.

4. should determine, after we've figured out the others, whether someone is worth truly befriending, working alongside, respecting, etc.

Only the brightest, most aware, and most productive are worthy of 4.; anyone can be worthy of 3., because everyone has something that someone else probably wants on a purely psychological or emotional level (or social level, as in the case of being able to give a recommendation); most people are worthy of 2., even if they're not currently realizing their full potential by working at bureaucratic institutions; everyone to have ever lived is worthy of 1.

An additional thought on the idiocy of quotation and praise

2011-02-09T19:40:00.006-05:00

In an older post of mine, I described a somewhat trivial issue that I have with quotation. I still don't see it as particularly problematic, but pretense is pretense, and I might as well bring this topic up again in the interest of hitting things from as many points as possible.

When quoting someone, you're essentially conceding that he or she is superior at representing a set of ideas -- either relatively superior to you, or the definitive authority on the ideas, period.

If the person quoted is superior only to you, good on you for bringing him or her to our attention; now remove yourself from the conversation if you don't have anything to add yourself so that we may investigate the approach and arguments presented by your source.

If the person quoted is superior to everyone, fine, but as soon as you append his or her name to the quote, you're essentially promoting adulation, which is how jealousy, war, social inequities, and deification result. It's also not even true that the person is the source of the quote, because we can't choose the ideas that come to us any more than we can choose to be incapable of passing through walls.

And honestly, if you want to give someone an award for an accomplishment, go with a Child Labor Factory Worker of the Year award over a Grammy or a Nobel prize. Productive work, especially in disingenuous or less than ideal conditions, is much more respectable than studying rocks or discovering potential musical combinations.

Negative experiences falsely perceived as positive

2011-02-08T20:56:00.004-05:00

No explanation necessary. Here we go...

1. When you're hungry, you don't want to enjoy a delicious meal; you want to not slowly starve to death as your stomach eats itself, causing intense bloating and pain.

2. When you're thirsty, you don't want to enjoy a refreshing glass of water; you want to not die of dehydration.

3. When you feel like going on vacation, you don't want to enjoy a nice day at the beach; you want to not work anymore, or stop doing the activities that have thus exhausted you.

4. When you're tired, you don't want to enjoy a refreshing night of sleep; you want to not feel run-down and mentally impaired.

5. When you're in love with someone, you don't want to enjoy his or her company; you want to not be lonely, consumed by excessive solitude and feelings of inadequacy.

6. When you become interested in getting a hobby, you don't want to have something to do; you want to not be plagued by boredom and restlessness.

7. When you're cold, you don't want to put on a coat in order to feel the pleasing sensation of warmth; you want to not feel the uncomfortable sensation of coldness.

8. When thinking about watching a thought-provoking film, you don't want to have an entertaining and potentially enlightening experience; you want to not do everything else, because your psychological disposition has declared it all of less interest than watching the film at that exact moment.

9. When considering doing drugs, you don't want to get high; you want to not have to put up with the horrors of the world around you.

10. When desirous of a college degree, you don't want to pursue an education; you want to not be ignorant relative to your peers so that you may better socialize with and work alongside them, or get hired by an employer offering a higher salary.

You can't have good experiences without first feeling bad. If you let any of the above go, in their most extreme of manifestations, without attempting to take care of them, nature will punish you with: starvation, dehydration, work-induced stress, sleep deprivation (hallucinations, extreme exhaustion, panic attacks, depression, anxiety), intense loneliness, low self-esteem, poor social development, extreme boredom, general restlessness and aimlessness, frost bite, asthma attacks, general breathing problems, lost appendages, ignorance, relative poverty, and homelessness.

Suffering sucks -- "objectively," Part II

2011-02-08T20:14:00.011-05:00

Readers of this blog may already be familiar with Karl Popper's negative utilitarianism ("negativism"), and hopefully see some merit in the idea that, no matter how slight the discomfort, all desires are the result of deprivation. You can't enjoy life without first being unsatisfied with it; otherwise, you'd never be motivated to pursue that which you enjoy. Therefore, the elimination of negative sensation -- whether that means eliminating a biological drive, reducing the amount of time it takes to fulfill a desire, lowering the intensity of some form of discomfort, or eliminating a hurdle in the way of the temporary satisfying of a desire -- is a worthwhile pursuit. So far, so good.

But I'd like to append another term to this form of utilitarianism: pragmatism. Negative utilitarianism is still essentially a moral pursuit, which means that it is a subset of the overarching pursuit of logical outcomes in all contexts. This is fine, but how will the reduction and elimination of negative sensation work? How will we carry out tasks to this end? What will our tools be? How will we make decisions in scenarios where relative differences exist among competing potential actions? Pragmatic utilitarianism answers these questions, because, while utilitarianism addresses how functional or useful an idea is with respect to a value standard, pragmatism addresses whether the idea works at all, in any context -- and therefore, whether it is worth acting upon.

Moral utilitarianism: "What is the utility of this action? Will it be useful to the end of improving what we value?"

Negative utilitarianism: "What is the utility of this action? Will it be useful to the end of eliminating what we negatively value?"

Pragmatic utilitarianism: "Why do we value what we value, and what can we use in order to act to the end of maximizing and minimizing the interacting outputs? How can we test these potential actions for viability and workability? Once we've figured that out, what is the utility of the actions? Will they be useful to the end of eliminating what we negatively value?"

How this works: by employing qualitative analysis, or a kind of scrutiny pertaining to abstract qualities as found within finite physical objects, to the practical decision-making process in an effort to alter both quantities and qualities in an environment.

Where two or more qualities are the same but one is greater or less in quantity, a relative decision must be made; where two or more qualities are different, the quality which is most likely to yield the result of the highest value must be selected. The underlying principle of this practice is opportunity cost, a method for making decisions based on what, if anything, of value will be lost upon acting. After all, when making decisions, we necessarily exclude every action other than the one opted for, so it's essential that we understand what it is that we lose by gaining what we do from taking a particular action. The act of not acting, as implied by the wording of this sentence, is itself an action -- a kind of meta-action, to be specific, taken after assessing whether to act toward acting or "not acting." "Meta-decision" would be another term for this (deciding whether to decide).

Before refraining from making a decision in a situation, always be sure to ask yourself, "Am I sure that I'm unsure?"

Suffering sucks -- "objectively," Part I

2011-02-08T19:37:00.016-05:00

This one is long overdue, I think. To avoid having to repeat myself, I've attempted to make this entry adequately elaborative and encompassing. Hopefully, I've succeeded.

In order to appreciate just how relevant negative feelings are to sentient organisms, it is perhaps necessary to start by defining how analysis of physical qualia should work, then defining which individual qualities, in the abstract, are worth applying the process of pragmatic selection to. Based on my own observations of physical reality, and on the confirming observations of others (even if I must always observe that a person has observed something myself, making all observation slightly suspect, but that's a separate topic), I've found that the quality of sensation is inherently negative, as it could not exist in the absence of discomfort or perceived deprivation (more on this later). However, this premise warrants further analysis if we are to properly convey that such sensations are, in effect, "bad" according to a well-defined and organized value system; otherwise, we'll wind up with people saying, "So what if things hurt? Your assertion that pain is bad isn't based on anything empirical!"

Most children grasp why such statements are bloated and borderline pretentious on a raw, intuitive level, but rarely are they equipped to actually deal with the slew of contrived counter-arguments in support of the idea of the "subjectivity" of suffering. Let's see if we can help.

Firstly, I cannot honestly claim to still support the dichotomy of empirical/a posteriori knowledge and mathematical/a priori knowledge. Math only appears "unempirical" because it is a raw abstraction, meaning that it is a mental conception of a general principle without any applied context, making it data rather than physical information. However, both data and information are essentially the same thing; it's just that data, again, lacks context, and, in being rather non-specific, cannot be useful until it has been properly interpreted and stored or acted upon as information. Math and empirical phenomena, then, are part of a unified continuum, just as data and information are, because math is essentially data, and empirical information is, well, information.

What role does logic play in this? It can be applied to both empirical information and math; claiming that logic is somehow synonymous with math, while empirical information is in a realm entirely separate from logic is blatantly fallacious. Of course, logic itself could be said to be taken a priori, but given that I always refrain from making truth claims of any kind, this isn't so important to note.

A visualization might look something like this:

Logic=>Math; data
||
\/
Logic=>Contextualization; qualification; processing; interpretation; understanding (what it is)
||
\/
Logic=>Information; understanding (what it entails, concludes in, etc.)

I apply logic to all three steps; it should be applied not only when converting data to information, but also when gleaning data, or when understanding information after it has been interpreted.

With the above in mind, is it not likely that all "logical" claims are predicated on some kind of empirical observation via the senses? 2+2=4 is data, but two apples being combined with two other apples to form a group of four apples (or one group, depending on abstraction level) is an empirical phenomenon which requires repeated observation and peer review, just like anything with which we physically interact. 2+2=4, therefore, could not exist without the myriad claims similar in content to "Two apples plus two apples equals four apples." The bottom line: It's all empirical; in order for math to exist, we have to be able to first test things which provide empirical evidence of the existence of quantity.

But what kinds of empirical information are there? Are there any divisions that we can make in order to bring coherence to our worldview? Well, the most obvious and fundamental of all empirical divisions appears to be into analytic and synthetic statements, as originally proposed and defined by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. In this work, Kant quite accurately proposes that there are two kinds of concepts: subjects and predicates. The logic goes that all syntax structures can be fundamentally divided into these two parts, with the latter being necessary in conjunction with the former if a syntax structure is to qualify as complete and independently functional. In essence, subjects define what a sentence is about, while predicates affirm or support the subject in some way with additional information, usually conveyed via verbs. Additionally, subject concepts can subsume predicate concepts, or contain them; in such cases, the subject can be defined by the ensuing predicate, making the statement as a whole an analytic statement. The inverse, of course, is when a predicate concept is not contained in a subject concept, making the statement as a whole a synthetic statement.

If the definition of "circle" requires that things must be round in order to qualify as circles, then roundness is part of the subject concept of "circle." In a sentence, if additional clarification is provided after a verb, and the information presented is inherent in the definition of "circle" ("...are round"), then that second half of the sentence is not only the predicate half, but is also contained in the subject itself. Where a quality is not inherent in the definition of "circle," however, like when stating that a particular circle is eight inches in diameter, the quality can be said to be a supporting predicate concept independent of the subject concept. To put it simply, "All circles are round" contains a subject ("...circles") and a predicate which is inherent in the essence of the subject ("...are round"). "This circle is eight inches in diameter" contains a subject ("...circle") and a predicate which is independent of the concept of a circle, meaning that not ALL circles must, by definition, possess the predicate quality ("...is eight inches in diameter").

Bold though it may be, I am, here and now, claiming that "bad," "needs to be fixed," "should be avoided," "needs to be reduced," etc. are predicate concepts contained in the subject concept of "suffering," making "Suffering is bad and must be reduced or eliminated altogether" not only an empirical statement (due to all logical statements being derivatives of some kind of empirical experience), but an analytic one as well.

Part II will include more on how I view the process of qualitative analysis.

Mental disorders are slavery

2011-01-30T02:54:00.012-05:00

Mental afflictions are caused by a combination of genes and environment, but often require a specific configuration of both in order to manifest. Properly changing the environment, then, even without actually changing the genes, would, in most cases, completely eliminate a given "disorder" -- so why, after having developed some arbitrarily defined mental "illness," are we taught that our thoughts are irrational, rather than that there is a mismatch between our genes and our environment?

Simple: because psychiatrists would be out of jobs if there were no more patients to retroactively treat

Imagine a world where, instead of abolishing slavery outright, we felt like we were doing the right thing by teaching American blacks that all that matters is that they're "cured" of their slavery -- while completely ignoring the responsible system. Instead of stopping slavery at its source, we'd "treat" slaves -- the "patients" -- by setting up slave-freeing services, which would require a small fee for our efforts. "Hey, I can get you off of this plantation. Just sign right here, and we'll have someone come by tonight to pick you up. Who's your insurance company?" In such a world, we could make ourselves feel good for freeing finite numbers of slaves while simultaneously making tons of money by doing so, because there would always be more slaves being born into the system to treat after the fact.

Metaphorically speaking, the solution to mental disorders is to abolish slavery (and to educate the population about its adverse effects). Literally speaking, it's to establish an entirely new societal system.

Mental disorders are not unique in this regard, of course. The underlying problem, itself both fundamental and abstract in nature, also manifests in the forms of: police forces, charity organizations, political lobbyists...

I sometimes wonder...

2011-01-28T22:17:00.002-05:00

Does the world make progress because people change their minds, or because they die?

Going beyond technical solutions -- into the territory of meta-cognition and abstraction

2011-01-28T19:41:00.007-05:00

I'd like to address a commonly held misconception regarding the functioning of human societies -- specifically pertaining to the nature of social conflict. It seems that organizations such as the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement subscribe to the notion that conflict is the result of material scarcity. This concerns me, as I see some potential in the general direction proposed by those organizations -- and am, as always, interested in the revaluation of our society and culture -- but see no merit in passively espousing the "scarcity" point of view.

The problem with this proposed line of thinking is that it brazenly ignores the intensity and fervor with which the average person defends his preconceptions -- about life, politics, economics, religion, practical matters, art. Even in a society free from social stratification, material inequities, barter, ownership, etc., there would still be a need for stringent monitoring of thought systems, for having open access to material resources would in no way mitigate the stresses of philosophical division. For example, sure, there would be less incentive to steal in a society where no one could profit from reselling a stolen item, or where no one would cache items in order to conceal them from neighbors, but would this so-called technical solution have any impact whatsoever on whether someone thought that the purpose of life is to reproduce and have fun? I think not.

Hunter-gatherer societies were almost universally egalitarian, and rarely generated murder or went to war with one another, but they were also notoriously superstitious in constitution. Technical solutions should be greatly favored over the band-aids and services which are in current practice, but they're only part of the solution as long as minds are involved.

No bad memes -- or no bad brains?

2011-01-26T01:48:00.005-05:00

I haven't updated lately, but I honestly haven't had an incentive to. In general, I try to ensure that my updates are emergent, or predicated on an initial interaction between my "self" and some new agent of information; anything else is probably redundant, and I don't really have the energy for redundancy at this time. Sometimes, when a story has reached its conclusion, it really is better to refrain from planning a sequel.

That metaphor was intended to illustrate the necessity of complete thoughts, by the way -- not the completeness of this blog! Challenger thoughts emerge all the time, breeding competition and potential deposition (so it's almost inevitable that there will always be more to do), but when there is no signal, you probably shouldn't parade the champion around for longer than is necessary -- from a purely efficiency standpoint.

In the absence of anything particularly new or untouched upon that might warrant elaboration, I'll post the following thought that I had today:

Conditioning humans according to their various needs and capacities is presently of importance, but, given that any "well-nurtured" individual's brain would generate drastically different behaviors and beliefs in the absence of its currently held memes, there lies a fault not only in the memes emerging from human processes, but in the brain itself. In short, being capable of giving birth to a new meme which is systemically unstable or negative by design is equally as problematic as being capable of possession by that meme after it has emerged elsewhere, in another brain.

Even if we were to fix all extant systems and systems components which constitute society as we know it, the naked human brain would still pose a security threat to every sentient organism on the planet. Is augmentation a supportable solution? I don't know; funding is so scarce in that field that almost no research has actually been done to the end of finding out.

Ideas should do battle... fairly

2011-01-11T17:05:00.004-05:00

The process of memetic selection, while possible in the face of apathy, or even a lack of awareness that it is ongoing, appears best conducted with a certain degree of seriousness and passion for making progress. This entails not only that those involved should hear all new information introduced by a peer, but also that such information should be presented as though it bears considerable gravity upon the circumstance of being human.

The real issue, though, is that it's hard to make a fight of ideas fair; everyone seems to possess some kind of preconditioned conception of what the best course of action is, and either is unwilling to hear the opposition, or sees the fight itself as some kind of bizarre, frivolous game where the goal is to win (especially where an "in-group" is watching, or where there is some set of figurative "belongings" to guard and protect). Cognitive biases, when combined with a genuine lack of respect for the pursuit of understanding, breed cheating in the forms of: slander, trolling, character assassination, poisoning the well, group bullying, scare tactics, threats, red herrings, being louder than your opponent, sticking your fingers in your ears, propaganda, falsely associating an idea with something obviously stupid or horrible, hyperbole, making unfair comparisons....

You get the idea.

If you have your "thing" that you like to do, and define yourself by that "thing," you're going to do everything that you can to make sure that you are "the one who does his thing" -- even if it means throwing sand in someone's face, distracting the fighters, or otherwise throwing a wrench into the works. Not only is this unfair, it's unproductive, and usually an implicit admission of a lack of regard for the process of selecting the best ideas; this lack is corrosive to mutually beneficial "discussion" relationships, and often leads to unnecessary conflict, passive aggression, and other negative "forces" which have absolutely no business in any selection process -- whether of ideas or something else.

I couldn't fathom a scientific, peer reviewed journal being criticized by a particular institution with terse comments like, "Are you kidding me? Do you really think that Neanderthal DNA is present in the human genome?" or "Oh God, not more of that 'dark energy' crap again. Save it, Einstein," or "What you have to say about the structure of the DNA molecule is nice and all, but don't you hate Jews? Get out of here, Jew-hater!"

If you don't have respect for the rules of the game, don't play.

A note before you comment: There was a misunderstanding or two recently in some of the comments sections of my posts. It is unlikely that this post is referring to you personally in any way, regardless of who you are; clarification was provided in at least one instance. My mind works by relation, meaning that I get ideas based on tangential experiences; the ideas are very rarely direct reactions. This post applies universally, as far as I can tell, and is something that all of mankind should heed.

Quick update

2011-01-11T12:06:00.007-05:00

This is just another blog-centric update.

Since comments are now being posted slightly more frequently, I've decided to have a closer look at some of the settings for this blog. First order of business: I've eliminated the previously mandatory image verification captcha in order to streamline the commenting process. Apparently, I don't have to enter a word prior to commenting because I own the blog, but I don't see how that's fair, and those distorted images are obnoxious in my opinion. For now, you don't have to worry about them.

I'll bring this feature back if it turns out that there are legitimate spammers. If you have experience with these things on your own blog, let me know whether getting rid of the captcha verification system is a bad idea on my part.

To all non-registered, potentially anonymous readers, if you exist: You can now comment as well. Sorry! I wasn't aware that the default was to prevent anonymous users from commenting. If you do have an account but would prefer to remain anonymous, you can now also choose the option to post a comment anonymously -- without even having to log out of your account.

Do you agree with the following premise?

2011-01-10T21:27:00.000-05:00

Life should be stopped.

I haven't made up my mind yet; I think it's too early to tell. The marriage between sentience -- or, at least, deprivation and negative sensation -- and life may end at some point.

However, I can imagine that stopping life will ultimately prove to be a good thing. Such a scenario seems perfectly reasonable to me.

The next questions:

When should life be stopped?

How should life be stopped?

I've provided some possibilities in my last two posts. I don't accept them, and I don't reject them.

I wonder about them, and hope that anyone reading this does as well.

Clarification

2011-01-10T16:47:00.000-05:00

1. I think that life beyond Earth is likely to be uncommon, if it exists at all.

2. If life does exist beyond Earth -- even in vast quantities -- I still think that complex life is probably rare.

3. It's unlikely that we'll ever leave the solar system. In all likelihood, if we're still around at the end of the sun's life, we'll die with it.

4. It's unlikely that we'll ever accomplish anything of importance with respect to the overall processes of evolution and life on Earth.

5. The concept of a multiverse seems completely laughable to me -- not because I think it's impossible, but merely because it seems untestable and, in all likelihood, irrelevant to anything that we do with our time here.

6. I highly doubt Ray Kurzweil's claims of an impending technological singularity, and think that he has greatly misapplied several key variables, while potentially ignoring many others.

7. Artificial intelligence is likely a very, very difficult and expensive endeavor. I don't expect that it will occur in my lifetime.

8. We won't know the ultimate outcomes of any of the above unless we give them a try. Furthermore, we should abandon any tests, implementations, designs, or plans should they prove too costly, or even detrimental to sentience.

The problem, to me, is that I don't know what will be possible billions of years in the future, given the enormous number of variables involved in human consciousness and its physical manifestations, so anyone who claims to know for certain what will happen over such preposterous time spans, then proceeds to declare humanity in need of disappearing from the universe, strikes me as someone who has drawn a premature conclusion. "Of COURSE nothing important is going to happen elsewhere. This place sucks; let's kill ourselves, leaving the universe to its own devices, because that plan will eliminate our suffering, and we already know that nothing more important will ever happen anywhere, ever" just doesn't cut it for me.

Don't worry; I'm not a Jew-hating Holocaust denier.

On voluntary human extinction

2011-01-09T16:03:00.000-05:00

In a nutshell: I'm currently against it. Feel free to try to convince me of its worth, but keep in mind the high probability that I've already heard your argument in some form, somewhere.

Voluntary human extinction implicitly assumes that the rather logical notion of reducing suffering in the absence of consent is equally as valid as the subjective notion that one's own life is not worth living. To me, the idea that everyone must be convinced that their own personal lives are horrible is just as repugnant and idiotic as the idea that children should accept the fact that they emerged involuntarily. This is only the start of my contention, however, as I don't even think that the choice to continue living, once born, is entirely psychological, or an individual choice to be made.

Proponents of voluntary extinction make claims of either 1. the amount of suffering introduced by our existence at the expense of other life (the amount of resources that you consume that could go to a deer or cat instead, for example), or 2. the amount of potential suffering that we could unknowingly introduce by accident, via sensation and deprivation, simply by existing. This doesn't make sense to me, as 1. implies that we are currently capable of defining every variable involved in determining the outcome of the equation, and 2. ignores all of the suffering that we may be able to prevent by existing, given the possibility of eternity, and of the existence of sentience in multiple locales.

In the case of 1., it is certainly possible that automated, technological means of redesigning the natural world could emerge at some point, capable of removing negative sensation from that environs. In both cases, given that we can't predict future suffering with any degree of accuracy for now, it makes more sense to voluntarily exist to the end of learning more about our predicament than it does to voluntarily disappear from the universe outright. How irresponsible the alternative must be, if it indeed turns out that trillions of planets contain or will contain mass-energy configurations similar in content and substance to whales and buffalo, and that we can do something about it!

We may suffer as a result, but we've chosen to -- rationally, based on a thorough assessment of our circumstance and the need to withhold judgment in the absence of a more all-encompassing value equation. We may accidentally impose harm onto other sentient creatures as a consequence of our existence as well, but this is necessary if we are ever to determine the scope of reality as we know it, and, thus, the suffering contained therein.

Note, also, that artificial intelligence and the eventual replacement of the central nervous system with a superior, efficient body alert system may be possible, meaning that, in the future, humans (or intelligences, more accurately) may become physically incapable of suffering. The fundamentals of life are probably already understood in our current time, but again, that says nothing of our scope of the problem, so why shouldn't we augment our bodies while in pursuit of a working picture and understanding of what, elsewhere, warrants solutions?

But what if everyone decides that they, personally, cannot handle the horrors of life in the meantime? What if there, eventually, are no volunteers for the job at all? This is why I made the above statement that whether someone should kill himself is not a decision to be made individually. In our present time, this is true thanks to the potential existence of friends and relatives, who may suffer greatly as a consequence of a person's suicide; eventually, it may be true in the face of sentience -- and, thus, value -- emerging over and over again (even if only in different iterations of the universe, given that possibility as proposed by M-theory) in a state of ignorance.

On practical decision-making once again

2011-01-09T15:18:00.000-05:00

While I concede that I may not, in fact, know anything at all -- and that my senses cannot be used to validate themselves -- beyond this initial concession of potential ignorance, I will still pragmatically make decisions as though they are the best -- even in the absence of absolute evidence in my favor, or a way of absolutely verifying the integrity of my actions. For example, I can claim that my senses appear to indicate that there is no god, or that suffering is valuable, without knowing these things for certain, because, by living, I appear to be continuously acting, and my senses give me "leads" of potential validity. You can claim that my lack of certainty precludes my justifying any action -- and that, consequently, all actions are equally invalid, capable of being chosen at random based on no metric of value whatsoever -- but do you really practice this? Of course not, as it's impossible to be sentient while doing so, unless schizophrenic, psychopathic, et al.

Let's use a less abstract, practical example, instead of god or suffering: A plane in the midst of crashing is headed right for where you're standing. You may not know for certain that the plane will crash into you and kill you, but that does not make the idea that you will survive, or that the plane doesn't actually exist, somehow equally as justifiable as the idea that it's best to move out of the way. It's okay to concede that you don't really know whether it's best to get out of the way while still getting out of the way, and no one would really do otherwise outside of some useless, abstract world of irrelevant philosophizing. For as long as you live, there is no such thing as "not choosing." Further, while it's certainly possible that standing still and getting out of the way are equally valid in this scenario, no one would ever act at random upon realizing this, making it completely irrelevant to our lives.

The opposite approach -- certainty of belief -- is a fundamental cause of human conflict, for it promotes static systems, and denies the process of scientific refinement, or the prospect of being in error. It doesn't matter whether the generalization-borne conflict in question is the Holocaust, an argument between you and your girlfriend, or someone rolling their eyes at a creationist for "not knowing what they're talking about"; it's the same exact error in every instance.

Furthermore, the idea that nothing is justifiable is itself something implicitly justified by the senses, and is thus a statement of absolute certainty lacking in any kind of solid basis whatsoever. When asked how they know that no action can ultimately be justified, proponents of this view will simply respond, "Because they don't appear justifiable." In what way is appearance ever justifiable, other than as a potential lead? How do you know that nothing can be known, and if you can't know this, then why should our senses and absolutely nothing be put on equal grounds? Finally, how do all actions not appear justifiable? From what are we deriving this conclusion? Plenty of actions appear perfectly justifiable to me, given variable constraints, problem scope, etc.; if you disagree, then this is where some form of scientific consensus via repetition and peer review comes into play.

The realm of sensory data and and its interpretors may be limiting, but we are enslaved by it, whether we like it or not.

Aphorism: Nature

2011-01-06T03:43:00.000-05:00

I've said it here before, but I might as well reiterate with an aphorism: If you don't pick sexual partners based entirely* on looks, then you shouldn't choose Mother Nature based entirely on hers.

Also, you can think that she beats you because she loves you all that you want, but that shouldn't stop someone from calling the cops when one of your domestic battles gets out of hand.

* I think that all sexual partners are ultimately chosen for more or less superficial reasons -- physical or otherwise -- but that's beside the point of the metaphor.

Explicitly defining value equations

2011-01-02T21:38:00.001-05:00

There has been some chatter in a comments section of one of my posts lately, so I figured I'd make an official follow-up post outlining what I use to make decisions in life. This way, I'll avoid annoying people with double and triple commenting. Here you go:

As far as values are concerned,

Object A + Valued Quality X = Object B + Valued Quality X

and

Object A + Valued Quality X ≠ Object B + Valued (or not valued) Quality Y

and

Object A + Valued Quality X ≠ Object B - Valued Quality X

Choosing between two foods which your taste buds perceive in ways that are virtually indistinguishable to you, the macro-scale observer, does not require a practical decision-making process, because both foods share the quality of "delicious" in almost equal amounts and configurations. However, there had to have been a preceding decision -- the decision to eat something delicious, which was made practically based on qualitative analysis of the quality of "delicious" and its competitors. Once you've chosen to eat something delicious -- instead of to eat something disgusting, for example -- so long as what you're being presented with possesses this quality, your decision-making job is done.

Forget about physical objects; they're just convenience abstractions, mental projections of the external world. What really matters are the qualities that these abstractions harbor -- and in what amounts and configurations they exist.

Facts about the not-so-average person living in Western society

2011-01-02T01:10:00.000-05:00

1. They often move seamlessly from government positions to high-paying corporate ones and back again, with no one asking any questions.

2. Very few of them wind up in their positions as a result of smart business ideas or luck. Most are where they are thanks to connections, cronyism, and inheritance.

3. They don't know what they're doing, even if it may seem as though they're part of some conspiring global hegemony. No one does anything to stop them not because of some brilliant conspiracy, but because the public also benefits from their profiteering, and are too selfish to give up their materialistic lifestyles to even out the global distribution of wealth.

4. Most of what they do is perfectly legal.

5. Their primary tactic is to install corporate strongholds in impoverished countries under the veneer of "helping" them, then force them to either repay the huge debts that they accrue or start exporting their most valuable resources in astronomical amounts. Over time, this parasitic relationship leads to increased levels of violence and poverty within the dependent countries, all to the benefit of contractors, bankers, et al.

6. They've set up the United States such that practically everything of material value that exists there comes from overseas, meaning that the rest of the world has been exploited and crippled to this end.

7. They've killed off all ideologies that have traditionally been associated with the elite (Christianity, for example), and have consequently transitioned from being ideologues to pure profit-seekers.

8. They use the electoral college to provide a layer of abstraction between "the people" and themselves, just in case someone from outside the bipartisan divide gains popularity.

9. Almost none of them is elected by anyone, as most of them are CEOs and their associates. Given that corporations influence politicians to an incredible degree, and control almost all of the world's resources, more of us should be deeply concerned that no one elects businessmen into "office." Furthermore, most of us work for them for the majority of our days -- and thus, lives -- so the choice between one kind of President and another is a facade which distracts from our inability to vote for those who actually influence our lives.

10. They possess no technical knowledge whatsoever, and have consequently never built or designed anything in their lives. Who was the last President to advertise his former success as an architect, engineer, systems designer, programmer, surgeon, or nuclear physicist?

11. They have to lie in order to do their jobs -- to prospective customers in an effort to downplay competitors' advantages, by defending the obviously guilty in courtrooms, etc.

12. They design things to not last. The quicker that something breaks, the quicker that a profit can be turned when a consumer inevitably purchases a replacement. This practice is known as planned obsolescence, and it isn't illegal.

13. They provide us with the illusion of power by giving us a choice between two virtually identical candidates in the realm of Presidential politics -- long after they've chosen the candidates without our involvement. Before the DNC and RNC, where do the prospective Presidential candidates come from? Why is it that we've usually never heard of the choices forced upon us until they're being suggested as candidates at the last minute? Furthermore, what wars, laws, or stimulus packages do we vote for? Why do the elite make those decisions for us?

14. They create money out of thin air based on government bonds, which are themselves created out of thin air. This process is further compounded by fractional reserve banking, which allows banks to create even more money out of thin air based on the reserve requirement. Finally, interest rates are applied such that the amount of money owed by borrowers always exceeds the actual sum total of money extant in the economy, with most of that money (as a result of the fractional reserve banking mentioned above) existing only in digital form.

15. They're going to die. No amount of money, yachts, or mansions can make morphine a stronger anesthetic against bone cancer, and the more terminal illnesses evaded over the years, the more likely that a given person will contract a similarly painful form of cancer in the end.

Facts about the average person living in Western society

2011-01-02T00:46:00.001-05:00

1. They get divorced around half the time that they get married. If you believe in the meme of relationships and are currently in one, flip a coin; if heads, you and your partner will stay together; if tails, you won't.

2. They invest an absurd amount of time and energy into future events which they perceive to be building blocks for the ideal life. Often, this time and energy is proven a waste when a divorce, death, etc. with a high probability of occurring actually does occur.

3. They believe that the next idealized object of desire that they obtain will make them happy, even though this has never happened for anything to have ever lived, and there will inevitably be more such idealized objects for them long after the present ones have been obtained.

4. They're each about eight thousand dollars in credit card debt, to say nothing of the debt accrued as a result of loans from banks. Compound this with the fact that 19% or more of the original amount of the debt is repaid in interest over absurd periods of time.

5. When receiving loans or government aid, they waste it on cars, boats, televisions, and other luxury items, none of which helps their financial situations.

6. They complain about the price of gas, but drive to all kinds of unfulfilling, boring, and frivolous places of entertainment, thus wasting far more gas than they need to.

7. They complain about the wars that the government fights overseas, but when made aware that it is precisely these wars that permit them to use cheap gas, they don't mind looking the other way as innocent people die.

8. Almost all of them have to resort to drugs -- or alcohol, at the least -- to cope with the stresses of life. When a person refuses an alcoholic drink, he is often met with scorn, ridicule, or at least bemusement.

9. They all claim to not have the time to change the world, write books, start a blog, etc. -- because of work, school, children, etc. -- but seem to have plenty of time to watch sports, go to bars, and update Facebook pages.

10. When arguing or presenting information on a given topic, they are extremely confident in their certainty of holding the right position. Credentials, experience, and omniscience are not important to them, no matter how many millions of people are made aware of their suppositions. If they weren't there when it happened or didn't go to school to learn about the topic, it doesn't matter to them -- they are amazing and wise. Always.

11. Their lives are not as good as they think they are. A third of them is spent asleep; another third is spent enduring passive aggression, inhumanly fast work, and performance reports; the last third is spent feeling hungry, horny, lonely, thirsty, curious, depressed, anticipatory, or the need to go to the bathroom -- with the obtained goal of each of those drives lasting as few as several seconds, in some cases. Ever meditate? If not, try it; you'll become aware of just how uncomfortable you really are, both mentally and physically, throughout your day.

12. Nearly one hundred percent of them has had the flu, a stomach virus, or has experienced some form of vomiting or diarrhea at least once in their lives.

13. Almost all of them will lose loved ones, and may feel absolutely devastated as a result.

14. They're all going to die, and even the "religious" ones don't really believe in Heaven anymore.

For those in favor of addressing symptoms and small, particular problems...

2010-12-30T19:04:00.000-05:00

Will watering the leaves of a plant allow it to grow, or do we have to water the roots?

The Venus Project: Accusations of being a cult

2010-12-30T15:16:00.000-05:00

For obvious reasons, the Venus Project cannot be defined as a cult. However, to preempt future accusations outright, I wonder whether that organization's followers could benefit from the following improvements:

1. Stop referring to themselves as a "movement" or "project." Technically, no one has to fill out a form or endure some initiation rite in order to "become" a "member," so the Venus Project is already not a true organization -- and I understand the benefits of creating names, logos, and other concrete symbols to motivate people -- but the resultant backlash is immense. Those who have knee-jerk reactions to the proposals may not be worth our time in the first place, but their insipid outbursts and archaic rhetoric can be preempted by simply discussing the ideas themselves "undercover," so to speak -- as yourself, and not as a "member" or "supporter" of anything. While this will do nothing to correct people's underlying biases and mental obstructions, it'll at least get them interested in reforming society in a manner less hostile to their generalized presumptions as regards human activity; once that occurs, then we can worry about correcting their thinking.

2. Get more contributors to take the reins. If hundreds of people put their faces on the ideas -- as opposed to just Jacque Fresco, Roxanne Meadows, and Peter Joseph -- then there will at least be a push toward labeling others as something-ists over referring to them as part of a more well-defined, physical group or organization.

Neither of these suggestions will eliminate dissenters, but they don't have to for the same reasons that upgrading your laptop's memory doesn't have to completely prevent runtime errors and memory dumps.

Two requests for humanity

2010-12-30T15:00:00.000-05:00

1. When presented with new information -- including that found in this blog -- scrutinize it from as many angles as you possibly can; check the information for "glitches" and flaws, regardless of the track record or authoritative status of, or your relation to, the information provider. If the provider is a close friend, person of eminent status, or someone with a history of successful ideas, this does not guarantee his sanctity or infallibility, and so his future proposals should be treated with the same degree of initial scrutiny and analysis as those of anyone else on Earth. Even when an idea or set of ideas sounds reasonable, do not ever stop checking it for errors or faults; always attack your own perspective, no matter how counterintuitive this might feel.

2. When in a state of relative ignorance with respect to a field of knowledge, be humble, and admit your ignorance; do not obstruct progress by professing an understanding of something where you possess no such understanding, or where the data is insufficient to warrant action -- or even discussion. "I'll let the two of you decide what we should do, because I don't know anything about the topic" is always the superior option where you are relatively or comparatively ignorant, regardless of what damage it does to your ego; the alternatives breed wild goose chases, clutter, "the blind leading the blind," and even social enmity.

If possible, find a way to improve the current operating system running on your computer; after all, how likely is it that it'll prove to be the last version to ever exist? Likewise, let architects build your bridges; do not interfere with their work with criticisms.

New links in the sidebar

2010-12-20T15:54:00.001-05:00

A YouTube channel had a comment a week or two ago with a link to an antinatalism blog. As it turns out, there's a small network of antinatalism/anti-nature blogs that are worth checking out, so I've added a few of the better ones to the links section in the right sidebar. Not sure what my rarely frequented blog will do for theirs, but if you're reading this, go have a look.

What does the average person care about?

2010-12-20T15:19:00.000-05:00

So I felt like making a list of things the average person cares about. I think it's pretty all-encompassing, but I'm sure I've left some important things out. These are great examples of why we need to reform the human value system as soon as possible.

Note: None of these applies to me -- at least, not intentionally; I like to think that they're a quick composite of the current state of society, and not targeting any group or person in particular.

I hope he doesn't know that I'm a virgin.

I better get a free sandwich because of this. This thing has no toppings!

What do you expect? He's a liberal.

What do you expect? He's a conservative.

Why didn't he thank me? That deserved a thank you.

No, I was the one who fixed it. Why don't you go ask so and so? He'll back me up. It was me, not the other guy! It was ME!

No, I was the one who helped you, remember? What has he ever done for you? Forget about him. I do things out of the kindness of my heart!

Jesus, how much do you think that guy weighs? He looks ridiculous.

Wow, look at that guy. I bet he has no friends.

Who did the dishes last? It isn't MY turn. It's HIS turn.

Did you hear about whatshername? Yeah, she broke up with her boyfriend yesterday!

Yeah? Well, at least I have a life!

What are you doing using that? That's MINE!

Public opinion is turning against my favorite pop star! Ugh, what can she do to be on top again?

You really think your favorite pop star is better than mine? Please! My favorite is WAY more real, and even writes her own songs.

Hey, I'm your FAN. No one cares more about what you do than the fans. We DESERVE something new NOW. Do you have any idea how long we've been waiting?

I know that he's controlling and a jerk to other people, but I can't help how I feel about him.

If I could just manage to talk to women and get a girlfriend, I wouldn't need anything else in life.

God, I'm so socially inept and ugly. I'm a total loser.

Our sports team won last night! We're the best!

I can't eat that. I'll get fat if I eat stuff like that.

I want a smaller nose. My life is pretty good, but if I could save up the money to get my nose fixed, I wouldn't have any worries.

That celebrity wears way too much makeup. I would NEVER look like that.

You don't have a Facebook? I didn't even know that that was POSSIBLE in this day and age.

Is this fifty percent off? Better get two, even though I don't even need one.

At least I don't drive an SUV. How much of the ozone layer do you think that guy is destroying with that thing?

My friend laughed at me yesterday for being awkward in front of his other friend. I feel really bad now, because I want him to like me.

I got a B on the final. Ugh, my GPA is going to suffer because of this.

Ew, you smoke? You ARE aware that that's going to kill you and make you stink, right?

Go a few more blocks and waste some more gas to get to the other gas station; gas is five cents cheaper there than it is here.

Did you just spill that all over MY rug?

You need to get out of the house more. This isn't good for your MENTAL HEALTH.

Only poor, fat people eat at this fast food chain. That one documentary told me that fast food's bad for your health, and it doesn't cost much, so I put two and two together.

Jeez, are you still not getting this? Sorry, but you are obviously wrong about your philosophical stance, here. Ever read a book by this guy? No? Didn't think so. Go read him; he'll change your life the way he changed mine. Maybe then, you'll understand things in as much depth as I do.

You're obviously a blahblahblah-ist. Ever considered blehblehbleh-ism? Because that's what I am.

Who are you to judge me? You know what? I don't care. I don't care what you or anyone else thinks about me.

Who are you to judge my favorite music artist? I'd like to see YOU make a hit album.

Hey, do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't break the golden rule or hurt anybody else.

Being sexy is important, but ONLY if you can do it without getting surgical enhancements. It's okay to spend tons of money on your appearance so long as it doesn't involve a knife.

Who are you to tell me that I can't have children? What if my future son turns out to be the next Einstein? You would have prevented the next EINSTEIN from coming into the world.

Wow, all you ever do is talk about the world's problems. How depressing! You need to either lighten up and have a little fun or kill yourself. You hate YOUR life, right? That's what you're saying, right?

Love can change the world. Love everyone unconditionally!

My life is meaningful because I am sexually liberated. Free your inner slut; you won't regret it!

Society would be so much better if we'd get rid of all of the corporations and show nature a little respect. Down with corruption! Up with sustainability!

You don't believe in aliens? Wow, talk about having a closed mind.

There are trillions of stars in the universe, so I KNOW for a FACT that aliens are out there.

We're supposed to live in a progressive society, but gays can't marry? Unbelievable.

I normally don't get so riled up about issues like this, but what can I say? This particular one is actually important to me, and is a big part of who I am.

You have a WHAT fetish? Man, you need to see a shrink.

I didn't know you liked THAT kind of music. It's not a big deal, I just never would have expected it from you, of all people.

HE didn't show up for work today? He's never a missed a day before. That's definitely not like him, the little goody goody!

He thinks that's a funny show? What, is he retarded or something? Then again, most people enjoy their low-brow humor...

I don't care if that's my responsibility. I deserve a BREAK right now, alright? Piss off.

He sleeps in until WHEN? Jesus, what a lazy guy.

Can you even spell? I'm not going to listen to anything you have to say if you type like that.

If I could only obtain the thing that I currently desire most, I wouldn't ever want anything else. I just need ONE MORE.

It's not cheating if it's online, right? I deserve affection.

I deserve respect.

I am entitled to anything I want, so long as it doesn't cause anyone physical pain. Well, maybe I deserve most of those things, too. I work hard!

I know that it wasn't my fault, but I still feel awful. Why did I do that? I regret it so much.

I can't stop thinking about that one particular event in my life that caused me and/or those around me some degree of discomfort. Screw the rest of the world; I HAVE to focus on this. It's a big deal!

I trust my senses, alright? You can keep on telling me what you THINK you heard me say, but I KNOW what I said. I'm not wrong. How could I be wrong about this?

What school do you go to? Oh...

Did you hear what happened on the news last night?

I know that what he did was wrong, but that doesn't give you any right to talk to him like that. He's a FAMILY member.

What happened to that country yesterday? Someone started bombing them? Yikes. Anyway, what else is on?

What good has economic competition done for us?

2010-12-19T20:46:00.001-05:00

We have to enact anti-collusion and anti-monopoly laws just to sidestep the inevitable consequences of capitalism, making it obvious that harmonious competition is far from the only -- or most likely, even -- outcome of that economic system. That's absurd enough as it is, but where is the competition in the following areas of our lives?

1. Google - Who stands a chance against Google? Bing? Yeah, right. How about Google's blog service, their translation service, their trends service, their online documents service, etc.? Where are the competitors, if competition is so good and natural?

2. YouTube (now part of Google) - Does YouTube more or less hold a monopoly on Internet videos? Yes, it does. Can you name a site with any decent chance of competing against YouTube?

3. Twitter

4. Facebook - MySpace has been killed by Facebook, leaving Facebook the monopoly on social networking. Scary!

5. Other examples of advertising-based companies becoming monopolies once their sites go viral

6. Microsoft (though they've been broken into separate corporations)

7. Best Buy devoured Circuit City a few years back.

8. Hechinger was put out of business by Home Depot not too long ago.

9. Netflix is on the verge of eliminating its last competitor, Blockbuster.

Everywhere I look, all I see is monopolies, monopolies, monopolies! Looks like it's time to upgrade our systems and give up on the idea of the invisible hand.

Of course, there isn't anything inherently wrong with there being one way of doing things, but monopolies 1. demonstrate the myth of naturally occurring, perpetual competition in human societies, and of its alleged benefits, and 2. allow companies to control markets without regard for consumer input. In the future, let's allow everyone to produce goods and services, and to collaborate while continually peer reviewing one another. That way, we can promote uniformity and a kind of social objectivity -- not by accepting standards imposed by any particular group, but by working together to come to conclusions. Company A, company B, and "the consumers" will come together and talk with one another in an effort to maintain checks and balances, with company A and company B joining together to form company C always remaining a strong possibility. Kick out the profit incentive, and this could be done not to guarantee growth, but to end disagreements on how to produce goods.

See: your electric company, the public library

"Logical" vs "moral"

2010-12-19T20:31:00.000-05:00

Another short entry for today

Something that a lot of modern people get wrong: the idea that, so long as an action is not "immoral," it doesn't matter how "illogical" it is -- it's everyone's "right" to take it, should they so choose. This kind of faulty reasoning should lead us to remove "morality" from our philosophy, because that abstraction is unnecessary in the first place (logical is logical, regardless of to what part of life it applies), and, additionally, it allows people to sidestep real, society-wide problems. It wouldn't make sense for me to neglect my health, for example, by gorging on fatty foods all day, but that action is not immoral (meaning that it doesn't directly harm anyone else, and doesn't interfere with the principle of consent) -- it's merely illogical. This distinction allows the majority of people in today's society to completely ignore the problem of their thoughts and behaviors, and to live irresponsibly -- in a phrase, "because it's not immoral."

Let's list assertions and discuss their merits

2010-12-19T19:14:00.000-05:00

Let's list as many assertions that presently appear agreeable to us as we possibly can -- without pointless, arbitrary limitations in the form of "top 10" stipulations, et al. -- and then discuss their merits with one another. Everyone who sees himself as possessing a coherent perspective of the world around him should just start making short, poignant assertions in number format (1., 2....) somewhere so that we can get a more direct view of his current philosophy.

I've already done something similar (excepting the enumeration of the list, but this was months ago) here. I think, however, that everyone should do this so that we can better understand where we're all coming from. So, whether it's as a comment on this blog entry, a blog post of your own, a YouTube video, a book chapter, or something else, take some time out of your day once in a while to work on a list of assertions and ideas; it'll help all of us to make sense of the world.

Just a short rumination on economic collapse

2010-12-19T18:39:00.000-05:00

I sometimes wonder why so many portend an imminent economic collapse in the first place, but what's still more peculiar is that many such people have no sense of the hell that we're already in. Does it ultimately matter whether we can "stabilize" something if it's inherently chaotic and strife-ridden? Talk of collapse seems to imply that things will get bad soon; on the contrary, things are already bad, and have been bad since the emergence of sentience on planet Earth. Why would we want to sustain something like that?

The problem with democracy

2010-12-17T22:38:00.001-05:00

In simple terms: When it comes to forcibly removing ideas, it prevents everyone from acting, in order to preserve, in concept, that which they view as worth acting upon. In other words, it assumes that both person A and person B hold views of equal merit, so, because person A's views conflict with those of person B, neither should be allowed to act on his views, or to attempt to manually remove the ideas and practices of the other.

Democracy: Ensuring that no one does anything, all so that we can keep our "opinions," regardless of the sturdiness of their bases.

The contradiction, of course, is that laws are still enacted all the time; the premise behind them rests on the assumption that majority rule is somehow valid -- yet, when it comes to preventing ideas from remaining in the "meme pool" long after they've run their course, a taboo exists, regardless of whether a majority is in favor of their removal.

Note that this taboo exists for all "rights" -- not just the right to freedom of speech. For example, it is permissible in a democratic society to watch sports and get drunk, because those things are part of our "inalienable rights." Causing anyone direct harm as a consequence of those actions, however, impinges on someone else's rights, so we're not allowed to do that. We can, of course, believe that it's okay to harm others in such situations, because that's part of our "right" to freedom of speech. So, then, in a sense, we have too many unjustified "rights," while we also lack good preventative measures against most poor decisions.

Insane, isn't it?

We may remain alone forever

2010-12-17T19:02:00.001-05:00

1. Life is probably incredibly rare, given that it arose on Earth only once.

2. Where life exists, intelligence is probably incredibly rare, given that it arose on Earth only once.

3. Where intelligent life exists, it is probably impossible for it to travel beyond its star system, given that there is no evidence for the existence of worm holes, and that our fastest space shuttles would take over 150,000 years just to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbor. Artificially intelligent shuttles could be sent in the place of those operated by organic lifeforms, but, in any case, we have no evidence for the existence of anything of that sort.

There are at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars currently in the universe -- a number larger than the number of grains of sand on all of the Earth's beaches combined, and not even representing the total number of stars to have ever existed (we can still detect leftovers from long-extinct civilizations, remember) -- and it would only take one with advanced life in almost fourteen billion years for us to have evidence for the existence of such life anywhere. If only a quarter of those stars has orbiting planets, with only one hundredth of those stars having Earth-like planets orbiting them, with only a fifth of those stars having Earth-like planets containing life, with only a tenth of those stars having Earth-like planets containing intelligent life, with only one hundredth of those stars having Earth-like planets containing intelligent life capable of interstellar travel, that means that there are currently 5,000,000,000,000,000 (5 quadrillion) advanced civilizations in the universe capable of interstellar travel.

That would come out to be about one intelligent civilization capable of interstellar travel per two million stars. If, say, only a trillion of them have had this capability for at least a billion years, even with our technology, they'd each be capable of visiting close to 6,700 stars in that time (assuming that the average closest star is only a few light-years away). That means that, even with such conservative estimates, 6,700,000,000,000,000 (almost 7 quadrillion) stars have been visited by space-faring civilizations in the last billion years. Admittedly, that's still only about 1/1,500,000th of all of the stars in the universe, but premises 1 and 2 concern me enough to prevent me from being optimistic about our ever encountering extraterrestrials. If life arose here only once out of who knows how many trillions upon trillions of opportunities, how likely does that really make its emergence?

Of course, arbitrarily stopping at a billion years ago doesn't make too much sense, anyway, given that stars have existed for almost as long as the universe has, and a trillion is only 1/5,000th of our original number of interstellar civilizations; raise it to 100 trillion existing for five billion years instead of one billion, and you get 33,300 stars visited per civilization instead of 6,700, or 3,330,000,000,000,000,000 (over 3 quintillion) stars visited in the last five billion years -- over 1/3,000th of all stars in the entire universe -- by civilizations currently existing (in other words, not counting all the ones who've gone extinct). You can play with these numbers all day, because they're highly variable and far from certain, but I suspect that even the most conservative of estimates will yield similarly gargantuan numbers of civilizations.

The question that you should be asking yourself: Where is all of their trash? If we take the scientific community's assumption that where there's water, there's life, then in our original scenario, there'd currently be (again, disregarding even the ones who've gone extinct, which, if counted, would only increase the odds that we'd find "space trash") 25,000,000,000,000,000 (25 quadrillion) extraterrestrial civilizations capable of interstellar travel. The number of stars in the universe is fairly certain at this point; the number of stars with planets orbiting them is starting to become clear, as is the number of stars with planets similar in size and composition to the Earth; we're already fairly certain that it takes extraordinary circumstances for language and syntax to emerge from the process of natural selection; as demonstrated, given human lifespans, interstellar travel is currently looking next to impossible. Are the odds of encountering extraterrestrials really as good as scientists claim?

4. Even if it were possible for intelligent extraterrestrials to contact us, it is highly unlikely that they would have any groundbreaking, philosophy-altering information to give us. They would possibly be able to help us, but what they knew would likely not change our assumptions regarding anything meaningful. In other words, understanding the functionality of a particular process is all that is required in order to ascertain whether that process is worth perpetuating; you don't need to know every minute detail at every scale in an infinitude of abstraction.

A proposition

2010-12-12T14:05:00.000-05:00

The following already exist in our society:

- Abstraction techniques
- Meta-analysis (especially in the field of psychology)
- Peer review
- The scientific method
- Process management
- Systems analysis and development
- Meta-cognition
- Qualitative analysis
- Risk analysis
- Cost-benefit analysis; theories of opportunity cost
- Lists of logical pitfalls and fallacies to avoid during debates
- Set theory
- Information theory/systems theory
- Relational/regression analysis
- Iterative, cyclical, incremental, agile methods for improving systems
- Information transparency

The problem is that they do not exist concomitantly, and so are incoherent within the mess that is our bureaucratic, emotionally-driven society. The integration of these systems components, if you will, into a cohesive whole will be necessary for alleviating and terminating the negative consequences of sentient existence -- so let's get started! If you regularly perform any of the above processes or utilize any of the above tools and methods in a specific, concentrated area of your life, please start utilizing them in ALL areas, regardless of how contra it may be to your worldview and justifications for existing.

Is it communism?

2010-12-12T13:49:00.000-05:00

Preface: I am NOT a "member" of either the Venus Project or the Zeitgeist Movement. The below is an attempt to address accusations made by dissenters of those projects that they are inherently communist -- but with, perhaps, my own take on what a future society should look like. For the most part, this "rebuttal" does ally itself with the Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project, but 4. and 5. in particular may differ slightly from those organizations' propositions, and I make no attempts to hide this fact.

1. Anarcho-communism and perfect communism are nothing like Stalinism, or any other implementation of state communism. The early Communist parties were afraid of revolt, so they adopted authoritarian practices. If our economic models are similar to perfect communism, that does not entail all of the negative consequences of what was essentially state socialism. Most of Europe is already socialist today, but no one has a knee-jerk reaction to its healthcare policies, for example, because those policies were implemented in a way that was completely dissimilar to that of the policies of the original Communist parties. In any case, while associating true communism with Marxist-Leninism or any other variant of state communism is itself erroneous, more importantly, each of the tried economic plans is contingent on the existence of scarcity, ownership, private property, etc. -- and, therefore, state mandates, hierarchy, top-down approaches, and lowest-common-denominator distribution of resources.

If the criticism is not that communism = state communism, then it is often that communism as an ideology has existed for over a hundred years and has never been effectively put into practice. This is basically a concession that it is a "good idea" (our economic models are not communist, though they are very similar), but that no one will listen. If this is the case, then the person making the assertion needs to stop attempting to convince those attempting to convince the world that it's not going to work, and start attempting to convince the world! Wouldn't that be so much more meaningful a use of his time?

Attempting to convince me to stop convincing others is not going to work itself, so you're being doubly inefficient by trying, and hypocritical to boot.

2. We have no interest in empowering the proletariat. In the future, humans will not just freely work alongside one another at will; they will also delegate monotonous tasks to machines. Marx had good ideas, but they were limited to his particular time period, and were thus naive and myopic -- in essence, resultant from the conditions and variables of the current system, and not from anything outside of it.

3. The economic system is just one of several internetworked systems which play a key role in the functioning of society as a super-system. Two "communists" may agree about the problems of means of production, private property, and social hierarchy, but that does not mean that both understand the various technical and social issues which currently plague our societies. Saying that our goals are "communism" is akin to saying that a computer system is an instant messaging application running on the system software.

So we and "communists" both enjoy using that same application; what does the application say about our respective practical solutions to foundational problems, or our goals and values? Further, what does it say about the entire, emergent system which we are developing? Reducing or relegating any set of ideas to a predefined category is an error of categorization borne from faulty qualitative analysis; an idea possessing a quality found in another idea that is part of a particular category does not mean that the former idea is also part of the category, and to think otherwise leads not only to errors in cognition, but to social enmity and conflict as well. Additionally, even where an idea is a member of a particular category, we cannot use non-defining qualities shared by members of that category to make assumptions about the idea.

4. We need a justification for human life before beginning work on the design of a new system. Communism does not provide this, because it is merely a vague economic model; it says nothing about scarcity, technology, infrastructure, the meaning of the universe, epistemology, meta-cognition, methodologies, process management, the scientific method, the nature of value, eliminating social biases, etc.

5. Communism is flat-out wrong in assuming that we can be "free" to access resources as they are made available, regardless of who we are. Rehabilitation, confinement, and conditioning centers will all be necessary in the future -- though, as abundance increases, and all fundamental human drives and desires come to be properly satiated with minimal time spent feeling deprived, there will eventually no longer be an impetus for most traditional, obvious forms of human conflict. After this, we would simply need to monitor conditioning centers carefully so as to allow memes and concepts to run properly and efficiently on their host minds, while controlling environmental stimuli to the greatest extent possible. This process will become easier as the human mind is augmented via nanotechnology and other cognitive enhancements.

Marx's communism was missing a necessary element that was not entirely developed in his time: the scientific method and its corresponding methodologies and principles. Rule by an ungoverned majority who simply wish to oppress dissenters in the name of their precious "free access to resources" or "control over the means of production" is NOT something that happens to peer reviewed communities in any form. So, yes, checks and balances will exist, as they do in democracy, but they will have some rational basis, and they will not come in the form of any one particular person or group of persons -- they will be contrary ideas. In other words, in our model, if a "senator" makes a decision that defies the views of someone who has written a letter to him -- and it is concluded that his decision is best, based on a number of variables and calculations performed by several parties -- that does not guarantee that the person who'd written the letter will not be "senator" for a day when his or her next idea is more agreeable and logical. Context will be stressed, and no one will have an absolute, indefinite role to play.

This may all sound like we're setting ourselves up for oppression, but do scientists "oppress" one another by prohibiting the publishing of poorly conducted studies, or by invalidating published ones with new or current research? Do architects "oppress" their peers by determining that they do not understand how to build bridges? Does Wikipedia "oppress" its users by disallowing the publishing of irrelevant or frivolous articles (well, they may be too lax)? Meta-analysis already exists in psychological circles, so why don't we implement it on a more fundamental level? True oppression only occurs in the face of scarcity; everything else is simply a matter of listening to the ideas that exist. What reason would anyone have to develop a bias, then consequently ignore new information, in a society like that proposed? How would he or she benefit from boosted social status and ego in a world without social hierarchy?

Defining people

2010-12-11T18:48:00.000-05:00

A human being, in the abstract, can be defined as a biochemical process -- and its corresponding systems, input, and output -- genetically distinct from, and incapable of genetic recombination with, processes and systems which meet the morphological and genetic criteria for "non-human." Technically, all physical objects to which symbols or concepts refer are interrelated, making their separation and definition arbitrary, but the concepts which are constructed from those objects can be given definite shape for the purposes of analysis and ideation. Words and concepts, therefore, can be given absolute definitions, because they are artificial in construction, while physical objects and other referents cannot undergo such objective abstraction (they are still necessarily abstracted by our sense organs, and we have no way of knowing what the true source of the abstractions is, however). Because of this, out of pure, practical necessity, we must give shape and constitution to any arbitrary set of objects or abstractions with which we interact, and human beings are no exception.

However, there are two erroneous ways to define a human:

1. Reducing him or her to one or several particular qualities or sets of qualities. Examples: Defining someone as "smart," "athletic," "fat," "black," "quiet," "artsy," "an atheist," "a liberal," etc. Obviously, this is problematic, because humans are complex organisms, and to reduce them to arbitrary facets of their so-called personalities is to gloss over essential nuance.

2. Assuming that the qualities which are currently applicable to him or her will always be applicable, or are applicable regardless of context. Examples: Defining someone as a creationist and consequently ignoring his or her attempts to have a philosophical discussion under the pretense that his or her beliefs are unshakable; defining someone as quiet after having interacted with him or her in only one kind of environment.

By all means, indicate where an "ism" applies to a person in the sense that it is something with which they agree (only if they universally agree with it, though), but refrain from indicating that the person is an "ist," and from any of the above. Tangentially, when it comes to "isms," it is important that you do not espouse any yourself, as it is impractical to invest in a belief, or to believe in anything at all; making probability assessments, then subsequently taking practical action to test the utility or efficacy of an idea -- all while never assuming that what you are acting as though you believe to be true actually is -- is the only way to live -- for now.

Also, many "isms" are bound by entirely independent qualities, making them pointlessly arbitrary and impractical. For the most part, discuss ideas individually; do not coin words for sets of ideas unless it is practical to do so, and above all else, where a proposed quality is not inherent in the definition of a predefined category, refrain from placing an idea sharing the quality into the category (unless it meets the actual criteria, of course).

Example illustrating the different kinds of isms: "Atheism" is simply the absence of a belief in a god, while "liberalism" contains so many concepts in its definition that it would be incredibly impractical to ever associate it with how you view the world.

On categorization

2010-12-09T03:20:00.000-05:00

Categorization and definition are essential aspects of human reason; they give practical shape and meaning to concepts, and are therefore unavoidable during the process of understanding. Although this is currently the case, we must also realize that all definitions and categories are ultimately arbitrary, as their referents are purely conceptual; meanwhile, physical referents found in the "real" world are in fact interconnected with their surroundings, and mutable.

Arbitrary categorization is often a major problem in our society resultant from poor understanding of the mechanisms of causality and relation, or the populace's inability to properly conduct qualitative analysis. However, it is important to abstract this problem into two major groups, given that categorization is occasionally a necessity of being human:

1. General categorization: Often problematic, but sometimes temporarily necessary for the purpose of discussion or deliberation. If I give a name to a set of concepts that I find worth implementing, that does not automatically imply that I will not consider casting off the name as soon as new data becomes available. However, any form of categorization becomes a problem as soon as I decide that, because each member of a category shares a given quality, they must necessarily share all qualities. For example, all apples grow on trees, but not all apples are red. Sadly, this principle of multiple qualities is often ignored when people conduct qualitative analysis.

2. Categorization of new ideas by predefined groups: More or less always problematic, as it attempts to force new concepts and memes to "be" older ones. This is usually done in order to gloss over the nuances of the new concepts, thus trivializing them and relegating them to the status of having already been tried and tested.

Note, also, that a set of concepts can exist within a category without any particular generalization being inferred from their interaction. For example, categorizing a person who participates in the welfare system as "poor" is not the same as stating that all poor people are uneducated drug addicts; the latter is poor induction at its worst, and quite pervasive in today's society.

Put succinctly, there are two distinct errors of categorization:

1. Inferring that qualities not inherent in the definition of a category apply to all members of the category. Example: Some obese people are lazy; therefore, all obese people are lazy.

2. Assuming that qualities shared between a category and an unassociated idea imply that the idea is actually a member of the category; assuming that any quality shared by members of a category is a defining quality of the category itself. Example: Existentialism rejects a personal god; therefore, existentialism is the exact same thing as nihilism.

Update: Upon giving this further thought, I think that I've pinpointed a third error:

3. Inferring that, because a good or bad idea is a member of a given category by default, any associated idea, or the category itself, is absolutely good or bad. Example: Existentialists do not believe in god; therefore, existentialism is good. Antithetical example: Fascism is oppressive; therefore, the concept of impinging on so-called "freedoms" is bad.

Idearchy - continued

2010-12-09T02:21:00.000-05:00

Ostensibly all governmental systems, no matter how open, transparent, or docile, should be named, if only to provide a proper framework for their operation and maintenance. Unfortunately, however, most new ideas get pigeonholed into predefined groups, because, in being so prone to categorization, humans tend to prefer convenient guesswork (defining a set of ideas as being the same as a previous set based on superficial similarities) to innovation (birthing an entirely new paradigm) -- even where such a practice is a derived necessity of the circumstance. When discussing a new system, emphasizing social mobility, uniformity, and resource trust connotes communism to some, for example, while emphasizing lack of representation or centralization connotes anarchism to others. Given that neither of these economic and governmental models is very well-designed, it is imperative to avoid any association with them; being explicit in outlining the tenets of a proposed future governmental system, then, is of utmost importance.

In the future, if there ever becomes a need to upgrade to a more efficient model, then it should be done, but in the meantime, it appears reasonable to tentatively conclude that rule by ideas -- idearchy -- is superior to rule by individual humans or groups. The logic behind this concept is simple: Humans are receptacles of memes just as much as they are agents; furthermore, they are prone to lapses in judgment from time to time, no matter how reasonable they may generally be. Therefore, without true memetic redundancy, a governmental system is set up to fail; in other words, should a leader ever "malfunction," without a backup leader, you've essentially ensured the annihilation of your system. Checks and balances may suffice to the end of preventing such catastrophes, but so long as they are rooted in the concept of an individual or group as representative, they, too, are inefficient. This is because:

1. They generate waste by insisting that decisions be made exclusively by "authorized" individuals or groups, regardless of the extent to which the scientific method is actually applied in situations.

2. They exalt majority rule while insinuating that reality can be reduced to subjective opinions.

The former reason to not trust representative governments demonstrates the mechanistic inefficiencies inherent in their design, as it reveals a totally unnecessary, invisible boundary in place between "the people" and "the government." Why does it matter who proposes a good idea? Do I have to be a congressman to be able to make an important decision for society? What if my idea is superior to its competitors, but no one cares, because I am not in a position of power? Such apathy is an expression of what is known as the appeal to authority fallacy -- that logical error which leads its hosts to believe that, since a person has been elected into office, for example, he or she will have superior ideas to those of the "average" person. If a populace is not informed enough to make its own decisions, then it necessarily follows that it is also not informed enough to vote those into power deemed capable of doing it for them. This realization should cause us to reject the democratic model in favor of rule by ideas, and to stress educational reform -- if we truly want to encourage objectivity and innovation.

The second reason to not trust representative governments pertains to the scientific method, and how it can be used to make informed, rational decisions in society. An idea should not be considered worthy of implementation solely because it is popular, and to think otherwise is to commit the argumentum ad populum, or argument from popularity fallacy. Put simply, one unbiased perspective is superior to a consensus among a hundred biased perspectives. Creationism, for example, might make us feel good inside, but we shouldn't submit to the constraints of that belief system simply because the majority of the world is invested in religion.

Why should action be any different? Simply disagreeing with your representatives and their corresponding voter bases is not enough if all that it terminates in is your grinning and bearing the situation; if you don't think that something makes sense, then you shouldn't do it (except in cases where prison time and other penalties prove impractical, of course).

Finally, consider that ideas inside of minds are analogous to files on hard drives. When discussing the data stored on those latter devices, how often do we deal with the devices as wholes? In other words, if I want to download a file from the Internet, I don't fly to where the host is physically located and confiscate the hard drive on which the file is stored. Why, then, should I elect a leader, when I can directly download his good ideas instead? Where biases prevent a person from making rational decisions in particular areas of policy, we would do well to attempt to override those biases; where no such biases exist, we should listen. I don't have to find all of a person's ideas to be rational in order to find some of them to be, so why aren't we dealing with individual ideas instead of with groups of ideas running on faulty cognitive hardware?

If one person has the best idea in a given scenario, then his idea will lead the way, but if his idea in a second scenario isn't that great, then the group will opt for a superior competing idea -- no leadership required.

Remember: We don't have ideas -- ideas have us.

Life is probably incredibly rare

2010-12-05T00:56:00.000-05:00

1. There is no space trash anywhere near us. Even if a super-intelligent race of extraterrestrials, with a civilization a million years ahead of us, were to exist, they still would have existed in a more primitive state at some point in their past -- perhaps recklessly sending out radio signals, or exploring nearby star systems without much in the way of deliberation. Where is the cosmological fossil record?

2. All life on Earth has descended from a common genetic blueprint; there is no evidence that, even in the earliest days of life on Earth, other attempts at life ever competed with our blueprint. While life evolved in one of the early oceans, why didn't it evolve separately a hundred more times in different parts of the same ocean, or in another ocean altogether? Perhaps one genetic lineage came to predominate over the others, but we have no evidence for this, and a few years, at the least, of isolation could have allowed for the other lineages to thrive in their respective niches.

More to the point, why doesn't life simply emerge at any time, anywhere on Earth? Even if it would get quickly consumed by "our" life, shouldn't it be happening billions of times per year, everywhere? Remember that we are all descendants of a single, microscopic organism; given the vastness of the oceans in contrast to such a small piece of chemistry, you'd think that if its emergence were so simple with the requisite conditions in place, we'd be finding new life all over the Earth -- even if only for a few minutes at a time before it got cannibalized (and who's to say that it wouldn't become a threat to the order of life here? "our" life is quite resilient, so wouldn't other strains also be?). Yes, the chemical composition of the Earth is different from what it was four billion years ago, but we have no evidence for any other life forms ever living here -- ever! On top of that, it took over 400 million years after the Earth cooled before life got started. That's quite a long time, and when it did happen, it only happened once, in the form of a tiny, microscopic cell amid miles and miles of ocean.

3. We haven't been able to recreate life in a laboratory in over fifty years, and still have no idea how it emerged here in the first place. None. A planet with the requisite conditions for life does not necessitate that life will exist on it -- it merely makes life possible there. The actual spark that initiated our evolution still eludes us. What if life occurs once every 300 trillion trillion tries? If the odds of a coin landing on its side are one in a thousand, and a coin actually lands on its side the first time you flip it, that does not mean that you flipped it a thousand times! Perhaps, then, from the complete data set of planets harboring life, Earth is an outlier or minimum for the time it takes for life to evolve, rather than an average.

One incredible accomplishment does not a great man make

2010-12-05T00:50:00.000-05:00

"Stephen Hawking is a great man. He contributed immensely to our understanding of black holes."

"Socrates was a great man. Without him, we'd be missing out on invaluable philosophical insight into the nature of reality."

"Beethoven was a great man. Wow, writing beautiful music while clinically deaf! Incredible."

None of these people -- nor anyone else -- deserves to be recognized, congratulated, or praised for his efforts. Here's why:

1. In at least some cases, the "accomplishment" doesn't actually matter. For example, Neil Armstrong didn't do anything important at all by walking around on the moon; he merely served as a symbol for American "superiority" over Russia. Likewise, whoever unifies the standard model of particle physics and the theory of relativity won't have accomplished anything of importance, either, because the trivial details of our existence never, or very rarely, impact how we view what actually matters in life -- namely, our capacities for pain and pleasure, and how we derive meaning from these. Knowing the math behind what causes rocks to behave the way that they do isn't going to stop lions from tearing open baby gazelles or prevent your grandmother from suffering from bone cancer. Sorry.

2. Even where an accomplishment contributes to human progress (or Earth progress, more accurately), it was always going to happen from the beginning, as the universe's infinitude of states are predetermined by the preceding states, and are dictated by immutable physical laws. Furthermore, there is no quantifiable self inside your head, let alone one capable of making decisions; every environmental response triggered by some stimulus or another is effected by your brain long before you are even aware of what's going on. Therefore, when achieving a first for mankind, you are simply doing the will of the universe; you are not, in any way, impulsively acting on your free will.

3. Calling someone a "great man" is a stupid generalization, regardless of to whom you're referring. So Socrates was an interesting philosopher. What if he'd also beaten his kids on a regular basis (I know that he never had any; this is hypothetical)? One incredible accomplishment does not a great man make; humans are far more complicated than that, and to reduce them to singular events in their lives is to commit a grave fallacy -- whether you're vying for their greatness or forever begrudging them for solitary screw-ups.

A quick rumination on decision-making

2010-12-04T15:47:00.000-05:00

1. When living, you are necessarily always acting.

2. In scenarios and cases involving decision-making, deciding not to act is not only a decision, it's an action -- if only a negative one.

3. By living, we are slaves to physics.

4. We can choose to what we are slaves, in some cases. If we must be enslaved, then logic currently appears to be a suitable master.

5. Even if we concede that relying on our senses to conclude that our senses are reliable is nonsensical, we still necessarily act on our senses continuously by merely existing.

6. Therefore, we must always act as though we believe that a given option is the most logical, even if we have no idea one way or the other, because "not acting" is still acting, and is often less logical than some other option. Note: This refers to instances in which one action appears more logical than the others -- not instances in which we don't even have leads derived from sensory input.

This illustrates the necessity of pragmatic action in life; just because I am humble and possess a finite, relative perspective of the world does not mean that I cannot make decisions to improve reality. I don't have to believe anything to be true in order to act as though I do. Furthermore, because action is an inevitable by-product of existing, that which is perceived as the most logical out of all potential actions will come to be the logical action, while all other actions, in spite of occupying a gradient of degrees of logicality, will come to all be illogical actions. This is because, even though these latter actions differ in to what extent they are logical, they all share the quality of having not been chosen.

Note, also, that my supposition that relying on my senses to conclude that my senses are reliable is nonsensical is itself relying on my senses, as is this very statement. In other words, there is an infinite regress of assumption that must necessarily be made in order to exist as an intelligent organism, so whether something is true is entirely irrelevant to how much work we should put into implementing it in our daily lives.

A note on the future directive of this blog

2010-12-04T15:12:00.000-05:00

In the future, I will be making fewer posts on specific, derivative problems, even if they are fairly fundamental, as in the cases of suffering, the agenda of life, the eternal struggle between logic and sensation, etc. As previously stated, solving problems requires that we first solve the problem of being bad at solving problems -- in a word, meta-cognition. Actively and pragmatically refine cognitive processes and hardware, and you'll become much better at decision-making and problem-solving. Better yet, do this in iterative increments involving lots of testing for errors, and you'll be more likely to maximize your productivity. In short, it's more important to teach people how to arrive at conclusions than that they should arrive at your conclusions (bonus points if you don't ever draw any conclusions at all, given the inability to confirm your senses' reliability without relying on your senses, and instead merely act as though you draw conclusions out of practical necessity).

Plus, there are so many descendant problems all around us that, unless we work alongside those who process data using the same algorithms and mechanisms that we do, it doesn't matter whom we choose to support; we'll never get anything done. You can agree with liberals that the war in Iraq was a dumb idea, but that doesn't make you a liberal. Most people get something right, so declaring yourself a something-ist every time that you encounter a good idea is going to be quite tedious and time-consuming!

If you agree with someone, but have different reasons from him or her for your tentative conclusions, then your agreement is ultimately trivial. It is of no practical value to share commonalities when it comes to what you think, so long as you do not share commonalities when it comes to how you think. You may agree now, but if your mode of thinking allows you to change your mind, or if the other person uses his mode of thinking to arrive at an erroneous conclusion in another realm, then you are effectively wasting time by associating or working with him -- that is, unless you can help him see his errors, or vice versa.

So, then, let's get down to business: Bad memes prevent progress, and faulty cognitive agents and mechanisms prevent good memes from doing their jobs. Until we clean ourselves up, it doesn't really matter who agrees with whom -- we're all part of the problem.

Revised problem-solving hierarchy chart

2010-12-04T13:56:00.011-05:00

The following is a hierarchy chart that I've devised as a way to grasp the scope of the source of all problems (or symptoms, more accurately) in the universe. The idea is that, through the process of decomposition, we can granulate problems into logical sets of parent problems (causes/sources) and child problems (symptoms). This helps us to ascertain starting points in our various attempts at solving problems systematically; it also helps us to ascertain the viability of the bottom-up methodology proposed by this blog. While a top-down approach might sound more rational due to the apparently definite nature of this list, the fact of the matter is that this list is anything but definite, and life dictates that we tackle problems on a case-by-case basis while working toward a goal or set of goals.

Until you 1. methodically define the scope of the problem, and 2. decompose the problem into logical, irreducible constituents, you may make progress with respect to its parts or symptoms, but you will nevertheless remain in the dark regarding the source itself, and your attempts to solve the problem will lack both structure and coherence. We should outline everything in need of fixing in this reality; doing so will greatly expedite the process of making the universe an acceptable place.

An extant system ostensibly lacking in planning, intent, goals, and true functionality -- the universe
I. Life and evolution (natural selection, genetic drift, et al.)
i. Sensation (olfactory, gustatory/taste, tactile, balance, location,
thermal, auditory, visual, mental/emotional)
i. Attachment and fear, which cause one another in a positive feedback
loop; lack of foresight in nature
i. Attachment to assumptions, preconceptions, absolute notions,
or beliefs of any sort; static belief systems
i. Cognitive dissonance; confirmation bias; other logical
fallacies and cognitive pitfalls
ii. Generally underdeveloped cognitive algorithm; poor
cognitive programming
iii. Condescension; humiliation; dehumanization
iv. Arrogance; certainty
v. War and other forms of physical violence
vi. Apathy
vii. Other kinds of social conflict
viii. False sense of security
ix. Creation and maintenance of a static personal identity;
egomania; self-esteem
x. Attention-seeking; social appearances and statuses
xi. Societal and social competition
ii. Depression; anxiety; fight-or-flight; fear (also noted above under
attachment); grief; melancholy; other kinds of negative emotions
iii. Sensory distractions erroneously perceived as positive
i. Entertainment; pleasure; hedonism
ii. Hallucinations; cognitive distortions
iii. Other distractions
iv. Physical suffering not derived from logical errors among humans
i. Predation; carnivorous consumption
ii. Parasitic relationships
iii. Accidents
iv. Natural disasters
v. General competition among living organisms

Note: All mental suffering is the result of a kind of perceived deprivation. Whether you're running for your life or looking for something to eat, all desires are the result of a negative state of being, with a termination of such states only being possible as a result of some form of pleasure or relief. No desire is positive, for all desires, by definition, require that their subjects run from a stimulus, or a sensation caused by such a stimulus. Yes, even basic drives like hunger are fulfilled as a result of organisms running away from a negative sensation toward a state of relief. Likewise, a literal, physical chase, while also initiated by a negative sensation, involves a form of relief that is chased as an object of desire.

Re: Antinatalism comment on another blog

2010-12-04T13:11:00.001-05:00

Most websites aren't interested in encouraging discussion or ideation -- particularly where they have an economic incentive in direct opposition to anything above the lowest-common-denominator, like in the case of YouTube. You would hope that a blog service would be better in this regard than a video service, but apparently, even a purely text-based medium is prone to unnecessary functionality limitations, like comment word limits. Then again, this is Google I'm talking about...

I attempted to leave a comment on another blog today (you can read the discussion here). That attempt failed. I could break my comment up into three separate ones, but why bother? This is more efficient, and as the information is relevant to anyone who comes across it, I think that it's important to display it here, rather than solely to its originally intended recipient. Here you go:

filrabat: I distinguish between the two because most living things (especially conscious ones) do strive to survive.

No, they don't. The primary agenda of single organisms on Earth is to reproduce; the primary agenda of life as a whole is nothing. In other words, the original DNA molecules on Earth were not capable, for physical reasons, of metabolizing compounds indefinitely, so they were "forced," in a sense, to do so from a basal stage, over and over again, in iterations. Because this process possessed no innate purpose and was not designed by any intelligent agent, it was ultimately conducive to glitches, which are now considered an integral component of natural selection. Again, only humans know that they are going to die; only humans care about surviving, while the general impetus for most life is simply to avoid negative sensation, regardless of in what form it presents itself. We have no innate instinct to survive or to reproduce; we have innate instincts to find big animals frightening and to have sex. It just so happens that these propensities and desires are conducive to survival to the end of reproduction, or to reproduction itself. It's not any more complicated than that, and humans can certainly maintain their urges without reproducing.

Humans hope to do it vicariously through reproduction.

Humans are the only ones who hope to do it at all. Again, our innate drive to have sex is controllable using our intelligence, so any hope to reproduce is a purely cultural contrivance. My cat most definitely does not want to see the fruits of his sexual exploits as some sign of his vicarious and indefinite existence; he never says to himself, "Ah, where are all the female cats? I must leave behind a legacy of my existence -- for the betterment of the Earth!" Instead, he is presented with a very crude form of sensory stimuli -- cries and miscellaneous visuals -- then proceeds to execute his corresponding mental program designed to terminate his newfound deprivation. You know, sperm cells are regularly killed by most female immune systems, because those systems are entirely unaware that the reproductive systems with which they interact have anything to do with survival or reproduction; so it is with all of the other crude mechanisms of life.

Suffering is a sign that things aren't going as well as they are compared to you're accustomed to. The survival instinct is very likely a mechanism that allows us a 'better than dumb luck' chance of escaping from unpleasant situations (whether through fleeing or successfully attacking a problem). The survival instinct also ensures a better-than-dumb-luck probability of reproducing. Therefore, I think the survival instinct/avoiding suffering dichotomy is more intertwined than you let on.

Let's just call it what it is and not get caught up on definitions: It's a fight-or-flight response, not a "survival instinct." It doesn't aid in the survival of the organism, because there is no such thing as survival. Life is not as complicated as you think it is; it's simply reproducing chemistry with the sole impetus of intaking chemical compounds per its particular code, with the end result being at least one copy of itself, should the organism realize its full functionality.

Response to Point 1:It’s not enough to say that “A world of intelligence and positive sentience … will always be superior to a world devoid of consciousness”. WHY is such a world superior; more specifically, in what way is it superior? As it stands, the notion of worlds with intelligence and sentience being superior to worlds without it is just a bald assertion – at best a faith-based statement (not in a religious sense, but in the sense that either you agree with the notion or you don’t).

I never made such an assertion. My statement was: "A world of intelligence and 'positive' sentience (that is, sentience absolutely deprived of negative value) will always be superior to a world devoid of any form of consciousness so long as there is no absolute guarantee that sentience will never, ever arise again in the distant future (in this universe, in a parallel universe, or in a future iteration of the universe)."

Not only did I refrain from making an absolute statement, I rebuked such statements in my own. Do you not agree that voluntary agents of monitoring and exploration -- be they sentient, artificially intelligent, or something else -- are essential in a universe where we are deprived of the guarantee that no suffering will ever occur ever again? How is the extinction of the human species going to do anything about the suffering of trillions of other living organisms on Earth, let alone potential suffering taking place elsewhere in the cosmos?

How would we ever, ever be absolutely positive that nothing else would ever get hurt in the future? Furthermore, so long as synthetic, or even biological, life forms consent to their continued existence, why do we care? They're not reproducing. If you're afraid that their existence might introduce risky variables in the future and thus allow for something to go wrong, how is that any different from the prospect of something going wrong without anyone, anywhere, to monitor and control the situation? Until we know the ratio of our own accidentally-caused suffering to the suffering of reality as a whole, the extinction of humanity is meaningless. In other words, should we ever begin to succeed at convincing humanity to stop reproducing, there should be a point during the transition where we, existing in the meantime, develop ways to end the suffering of the other sentient creatures. We could also develop new technologies capable of preparing anyone -- synthetic or otherwise -- for attempts at further investigation and exploration of the circumstance of the universe, including cures for aging, virtual and simulated realities, augmented or corrected nervous systems, and superior communications technologies.

In moral/ethical terms: If a huge rock slams into Venus, that's fine; if it doesn't slam into Venus, that's fine.

So you've been everywhere, can predict the future, and are absolutely positive that Earth is unique? Sorry, but statements of this kind are, to me, far more fundamentally erroneous than the act of having children -- irresponsible though that act may be -- because, from a purely qualitative standpoint, they are no different from any other form of faith, arrogance, belief, or certainty, and are thus both illogical and religious in composition. To me, it doesn't matter whether you say, "I know for a fact that ending life on Earth will be good for the universe, because I also know that no life will ever be possible anywhere after its heat death," or, "I know for a fact that God is real," or, "I know for a fact that liberalism is superior to conservatism" -- they're all absolute statements, with no regard for probability, conditions, or exceptions.

These statements facilitate static belief systems, which retard human progress by preventing memes and ideas from properly competing for brain-space; therefore, while I might superficially agree with you that reproducing is "immoral" (morality does not exist, so what we should be worried about is whether reproducing is practical or logical), I do not share your stance on meta-cognition and general human functioning. Maybe it's just me, but any time that someone gets caught up on a singular cause which they perceive to be the end-all problem -- especially if it is in fact descended from a parent problem, or his or her solution is just as much a part of the problem as what he or she is proposing to be the real problem -- I must look to history, where emotional reactions and witch hunts have been all too common. Reproduction isn't what's wrong with this planet; all faulty mechanisms and systems are, including systems hosting faulty logic and other unfortunate by-products of the unintelligent process of evolution.

I know that "debates" are actually counter-productive, because at least one side is always disinterested in the process of allowing ideas to flow freely through the mind, uninterrupted by other cognitive mechanisms, so I will not press this issue further; the information is freely available here to peruse and comprehend, so I have done my job. If you wish to present something new rather than to defend your "beliefs" (I neither have beliefs nor defend anything, because I acknowledge the existence of glitches and flaws in more or less all systems), you can leave a comment here (which I will not delete ;)), or you can e-mail me. I am not an anti-natalist for the same reasons that I am not an anti-anything, or an anything-ist -- the world is far too complicated, and my perspective is far too limited for me to make a definite decision, then proceed to rally behind a "cause." It simply isn't practical to behave this way.

That having been said, while you may not be receptive to my attempts to point out logical traps and pitfalls in this rather narrowly focused approach to course correcting the universe, I certainly condone your choice to not reproduce, and hope that you manage to convince as many people as possible throughout your lifetime. Good luck.

Our biggest problem

2010-12-04T13:05:00.001-05:00

Our biggest problem is not anything external to ourselves; it's us, plain and simple. I may write a lot about the flaws inherent in biological systems, the likelihood of there having never been a designer, etc., but I do not pretend that meta-cognition is not important; in fact, understanding what makes your brain work and how to logically process data is the only way that you'll ever be able to competently address any external problem, no matter how ostensibly fundamental or obvious it might be.

On the trappings of anti-natalism

2010-12-04T02:28:00.000-05:00

1. Anti-natalism prevents future risk, but we exist, so not only do we have to prevent new lives from emerging (if the premise that such lives would not generate positive value or permanently solve a problem is true), we also have to improve ours while they last. Therefore, we must be pragmatic and society-oriented if we wish to avoid the trappings of preoccupation with a singular cause; otherwise, we'll become witch-hunters, too attached to our particular "problem" to see the bigger picture. Plugging a leak is more important than cleaning its resultant puddles, but once you really have plugged it, cleaning the puddles becomes essential! Plus, abstaining from the act of producing offspring is not a total solution to the problem.

2. The premise that humans should not reproduce, like any other premise, is conditional; therefore, whether something of greater value ever presents itself in the future should be taken into account before we decide to make such confident, absolute assertions as, "No one should ever reproduce." Remember: From a fundamental standpoint, absolute generalizations are part of the core problem of our existence -- namely, brain logic shortcomings, which descend from the process of purposeless and inefficient evolution, which descends from the lack of an overseer of that process. Any "ism" that I can think of is part of this problem, as it is necessarily self-limiting, forever impractical and ineffective by design. Want to make the world a better place? Don't create or promote mechanisms of memetic exclusion.

To ponder

2010-11-29T21:27:00.000-05:00

I value isolation, because in a world without memes, there are no bad memes.

I value lifelessness, because in a world without feeling, there are no negative feelings.

Nihilism does not apply to the current universe; however, if we can obtain absolute assurance that life will never produce anything of any degree of real, positive value, then working toward achieving a state of absolute valuelessness will become ideal.

Re: The Pragmatic Paradox

2010-11-22T21:10:00.001-05:00

http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Am-Stuck-Pondering-Philosophical-Pragmatism/1282372?edited=t

Problem 1: Assuming that conceptual systems such as "pragmatism" exist anywhere beyond their places as constructs of cognition convenience in the mind

There is no such thing as pragmatism beyond the meme; it's just a summation word used to define a number of philosophical tenets, and has no innate physical basis. Therefore, it could be stated that pragmatism -- or any ism, for that matter -- is similar to, for example, government-imposed age requirements in that both are artificially constructed for convenience, but neither can be directly deduced by the physical properties of the universe. Put simply, there is nothing preventing us from inventing a new ism similar in scope and definition to pragmatism, but with one additional or one less tenet; ultimately, it's just a word, while its individual constituents are what we should instead be discussing. Even if "pragmatism" weren't useful, again, it's just a word for a handful of concepts, so if any one of those concepts were independently functional, it would be ideal to implement it, regardless of the flaws inherent in "pragmatism" itself.

Problem 2: Assuming that pragmatism has no use

It sounds like your professor is confusing the utility of pragmatism with the lack of useful ideas in his life. Just because you're incapable of inventing ideas of practical merit doesn't mean that the ideal itself is impractical; everything around us has been implemented as a result of its practical value. "I don't see any use in thinking up useful ideas" is a non-sequitur, and even contradictory, as you've pointed out. More likely, the intended meaning was, "I don't see any use in any of MY ideas, so looking for useful ideas must not be useful." Is this more accurate interpretation any more logical? No. In fact, it's so stupid that it actually succeeds in reducing philosophy to its semantics component, all for the glory of some adorable platitude and a bit of ego sex. Tell him to grow up!

No Bad Memes

Why people are activists

Comfort is relief from discomfort

On humility

Problem-solving reminders

An emergent approach trumps a traditional approach

Make a claim

Let's have a Socratic dialogue

A pragmatic approach to ideas

Avoiding optimism bias

One more utilitarian post for the road

The next phase: Meta-conversations

The goal of society

No leadership does not equal no regulation

Arguments against balance in the universe

Re: Entropy

My take on the non-identity problem

People are uninformed and lack direction

Why we shouldn't leave anyone in charge

Do you think you have much to contribute to society?

Antinatalism forum

The "nonexistent people never get a chance to choose" argument

A concession to the antinatalist and voluntary human extinction communities

An Ideal Society, Part 4: Language

Statement of the day

To reiterate: Pleasure is relief

Cognitive dissonance as a staple of modern culture

The fundamental nature of consciousness-raising

An Ideal Society, Part 3: Communication; Law

An Ideal Society, Part 2: Time

Statement of the day

Why suffering can be evaluated empirically

Revisiting a great meme: "Life is a gamble"

How to make intellectual progress 101

James Randi Educational Foundation: Take 2

Morality is a subtype of logic

Quick rumination on functionality

An Ideal Society, Part 1: The Suburbs; Occupations

Recent comments

Reply to comment

Crap, terrible, bad, very bad spam filter alert

A true story

Four thoughts to ponder

Humans are important

The Buddha's teachings are garbage

The "hard" problem of consciousness is pretty mushy

The pitfall of staying still

The importance of free education and reforming general education

No Bad Memes - Current Status

Individualism and the absence of goal-setting on the Internet

Brains are the source of suffering - follow-up musing

Brains are the source of suffering

Argument against conventional humanistic morality: Take 2

On logic and morality once more

Signs that someone is probably pretentious or lying about their experiences

The four metrics for treating your fellow man

An additional thought on the idiocy of quotation and praise

Negative experiences falsely perceived as positive

Suffering sucks -- "objectively," Part II

Suffering sucks -- "objectively," Part I

Mental disorders are slavery

I sometimes wonder...

Going beyond technical solutions -- into the territory of meta-cognition and abstraction

No bad memes -- or no bad brains?

Ideas should do battle... fairly

Quick update

Do you agree with the following premise?

Clarification

On voluntary human extinction

On practical decision-making once again

Aphorism: Nature

Explicitly defining value equations

Facts about the not-so-average person living in Western society

Facts about the average person living in Western society

For those in favor of addressing symptoms and small, particular problems...

The Venus Project: Accusations of being a cult

Two requests for humanity

New links in the sidebar

What does the average person care about?

What good has economic competition done for us?