We'll resume our observation of the animal kingdom shortly. For now, we turn our gaze back to humanity.
Humans are culture agents. Culture, as a function of genotype, encourages the promulgation of any memes which increase the likelihood of genetic success. This does not have to occur at the level of the individual; after all, it does not occur at the level of the gene itself in any scenario. Because "nature" is inefficient, its causes rarely result in a "kernel" mechanism being transported in the absence of impurities. To any particular gene, your body is the food to its vitamin or mineral: Waste is assumed to come along for the ride. This, of course, contrasts immensely against our technology, but that's another topic for another time.
Although no living CEO, marketing analyst, economist, systems engineer, or architect would ever fathom doing this with specifics, culture, as a function of the natural world, will do whatever it takes to get genetically beneficial memes into the future -- even if it means the unsuccessful reproduction of the originator or original promoter of the memes. In short, whether you directly benefit from your own ideas is irrelevant to their success within your social group.
Nevertheless, most people tend to believe that their ideas benefit them personally, even where they objectively do not, or where there is some ounce of something beneficial, but nothing substantive to the point of making the idea relatively beneficial. This is a huge problem which essentially underpins why individual humans cannot be trusted to rule themselves, preside over others, or make useful modifications to existing systems: As agents of culture, they are unwittingly participating in that deterministic, subatomic foray -- an abstraction independent of time, and thus unchangeable -- with predominant strands of DNA as its core mechanism of cause and effect.
Why should we trust ourselves to make decisions regarding what's best for us, what will most effectively reduce our pleasure to suffering ratio? We were born with brains designed for use in a "middle" world -- not the world of atoms, and not the world of black holes -- as depicted on the African Savannah. We're good at simple calculations like whether the risk in hunting a mammoth is worth the reward in a particular case, but we're terrible at determining whether our career paths are most likely to make us happy. We're good at carving lion gods from ivory, but we're terrible at counting to a billion in a realistic period of time.
So we have computers do it for us -- at least, in the latter example. No one person on Earth could mine a cave for raw materials and come back a few hours later with a computer mouse. Why don't we do the same for the former, then? Why don't we utilize complex algorithms -- or their precursors in the forms of independent, peer-reviewed standards organizations -- to determine how each one of us, as aggregates of desires and emotions, can live best? We may not be able to pull it off yet, but shouldn't it be in the works?
Our senses are notoriously unreliable. You may be dozens or even hundreds of meters off when assessing a large distance using only your eyes. People take inanimate objects in their periphery to be shadow beings, only to turn their heads and realize that they had been mistaken. An uttered sentence fragment may sound like something that isn't, contrary to the listener's protestations. Our opinions suck.
The prevailing hand shaping our opinions today is that subset of culture known as media -- an unfortunately anti-empirical, purely anecdotal device. Technology has allowed media to usurp religion, but who the hell would ever find gratification in replacing one despot with another? Conspiracy theories, "us versus them" notions, and the "evil mastermind" card aside, the answer is still, well, the despots.
Actually, it isn't. The more accurate answer, even if many a documentary maker doesn't want to hear it, is that all members of government, lobbies, or corporate entities, no matter how rich, no matter how powerful, no matter how comfortable, also have terrible opinions, and are equally victims of media. The military-industrial complex, Google, and anti-smoking lobbies are just as much a part of the meme agenda as the average guy on the street. This implies not that a small few are keeping the majority in line while benefiting from the latter's sheepishness, but that all humans currently alive are being "controlled" by poor values.
These values may be beneficial to the myopic system known as nature, who only "cares" about immediate results, but they are not only bad for the planet in the long run, they're bad for everyone alive. Were we to eliminate the monetary system, the psychotherapy paradigm, democracy, and the agenda of life itself, we would all be much happier.
It's one thing to be a rich CEO with a collection of private jets, but it's another altogether to be incapable of experiencing clinical depression, or systemically unlikely to experience fear of hackers, burglars, and scammers. What's more likely to be better for you? A bank account so full that only an absurdly minute portion will ever be used to purchase any kind of material goods, or a value system acknowledging the importance of both freedom from attachments and science as a tool for discovering social benefits, regardless of cost-effectiveness? The very pursuit of wealth is generally stressful, laden with paranoia, and high-risk. At the very least, there is fear of a revolt of "the masses," but ruthlessly fighting the competition, struggling to protect your interests, or ignoring the subtle pleasures of life are all a surefire way of inviting in very real -- and totally superfluous -- psychological duress.
Of course, it is still true that the rich benefit more from the presiding value system and its physical implements than everyone else, but the difference is insignificant relative to the difference between the middle class and upper class as a whole on the one hand, and what society would look like with independent peer review utilizing the scientific method to determine best practices for psychological wellness on the other. New medical practices; cures for aging; the permanent blocking of pain receptors; highly individuated, fully immersive, simulated fantasy worlds; abundance managed from the ground-up by computer algorithms "in charge" of a checkout system; dynamic, agile refinement in the place of complete system overhauls every few years -- none of these are profitable to any corporation on the planet!
Opting for something simpler may make you more money now, but what if you were to completely shut down your business, stop working altogether, research the open source and the innovative, then attend weekly seminars with other former corporate stockholders in a United Nations-like environment aimed at understanding the universe? The "scientific community" is there for this, but it has been relegated to a mere aid where it should be a guide. Besides, it currently relies on funding and donations, and is generally impeded by bureaucracy; if what you're looking into isn't going to benefit a powerful body, don't expect to get any money to fund your experiments.
In any case, our computers should be far more powerful now than they currently are; our search engines should be far more accurate than now, with their sloppy results, pointless hand-holding, and imposed inefficiencies; the average mind should be far more methodological, far more systematic than it currently is, but pandering to those who are stupid enough to click on Internet ads is more profitable than pandering to those who are most likely to make life awesome.
Why should YouTube be a video library with nothing but filmed college lectures, debates, and material inspiring us to live more efficiently, critically, and happily when it can be a place for pop music, makeup tutorials, and movie trailers? Who makes money when you learn something on the Internet? Who makes money from you figuring out how to better make your own money? Who makes money from you building something better than what everyone else makes money from? If we were not so enslaved by our own ideas and the lack of a real process for refining those ideas, we would all benefit, and the guys at the top would be much better off than they are today.
Monetary gain is still championed as the highest ideal by society because of this value disorder. Even though the notion that having more money is the equivalent of experiencing a better life is false for all of the above reasons, it's still causing our media to shape us into emotion-driven consumers. Anti-smoking lobbyists have succeeded in demonizing cigarettes, and although those are probably not the best things to consume, they have a far less negative net effect than alcohol. The Super Bowl shows us why we have been conditioned to think the opposite of the reality: because it's profitable.
Never mind that I have never met a social drinker who does not have at least one or two horror stories to tell about the time that they woke up somewhere unfamiliar, accidentally drove a car, slept with someone whom they shouldn't have, woke up feeling absolutely terrible the next day, or embarrassed themselves to the point of their coworkers perceiving them differently. Although these obviously stupid and unwanted consequences outweigh any minor social benefit of fitting into a crowd, young people drink far more now than they smoke, even in spite of smoking possessing almost zero potential to harm others.
Additionally, consuming several alcoholic drinks in a night on a weekly basis -- "drinking to get drunk" -- has been demonstrated by studies to drastically increase the likelihood of alcohol dependency later in life, and is pretty terrible for your health. Personally, I'd rather die of lung cancer at 70 than of cirrhosis at 50, or live a life replete with awful headaches and other physical withdrawal symptoms, domestic violence, and depression.
How can these memes flip in just a few decades? Changes in power structures. If you want to get ahead, the best way is to "push" people into a beneficial direction, and the best way to do that is to influence lobby groups into putting together unscientific smear campaigns. Chances are that if you believe in something strongly, it's because someone is making money from the physical effects of your belief, and has orchestrated an agenda to this end. Further, chances are also quite high that if you're living a life defined by shopping for clothes, listening to repetitive music, doing drugs, or following celebrities on Twitter, someone is profiting immensely from your lowest-common-denominator approach to the human experience; this "someone" may not have orchestrated such cultural degeneration, but upon realizing the potential for a trend to emerge, they certainly didn't bother to stop it.
School shootings, unfortunately, are no different. Gun control advocates play an important role in United States politics. The result? You can't go a half hour without running into pictures of President Obama wiping tears from his eyes as he describes a recent shooting as an "atrocity." Let's all continue to ignore the millions of years of elephants being eaten alive -- not because a quick shot to the head once in a while over the course of a few hundred years is objectively worse than being eaten alive once in a while over the course of a few million, but because we want gun control*!
Don't believe me? Find a CNN article on the most recent massacre and see how many comments you can make it through before some kind of gun-related policy discussion takes place. We need to wake up, but not because we're being controlled by an elite group. We need to wake up because we're allowing our own stupidity to shape us into predictable culture zombies, regardless of our social class.
* Gun control in some form is probably a good idea, because the majority of shootings in the first world are the result of accidents in a domestic environment, usually involving children. You are more likely to be paralyzed for life from a car accident than from a bullet wound to the spine. The problem isn't the guns, of course; it's the "gun culture," or more accurately, the paranoia culture, again, promulgated by the media (there are conflicting interests competing, remember?). In any case, take a look at any Crips neighborhood or read any anecdote from the Old West and tell me with a straight face that everyone possessing a gun is a good idea.
Encouragement of domestic insecurity also encourages avoidable suffering, whether in the form of unnecessary fear or actual bullet wounds. Just because four out of ten media items have to do with guns (I'm making this up for the sake of the point being illustrated) doesn't mean that four out of ten calamities in the real world involve guns. Do not allow culture to subjectively impress incidence statistics onto you anecdotally or vicariously.
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Sexual attraction is racism
Historically, we have proven a very myopic species. Whenever we collectively come to the realization that some facet of our culture is destructive, we never attempt to extrapolate from that realization, and instead pass it on to the next generation as "tradition" to be memorized and subsequently parroted without regard for its fundamental essence, or what essence of which it is a manifestation.
Upon making the realization that humans shouldn't be forcefully and selfishly sacrificed to the gods, it shouldn't take much time at all to realize that homosexuals should have access to the same resources and institutions as heterosexuals. Why does each of these realizations take so long to make, in spite of their occupying the same fundamental value space?
The problem is that the realization is never that sentience is the kernel of value, or that symbolic cultural assumptions need to be rigorously and scientifically challenged; instead, it's that mass murder should not be a form of entertainment, or that blacks are people, too. In reality, these latter phenomena are just surface manifestations of the former; if eating food that tastes good is important, then we should realize this in the fundamental sense rather than make the claim that because we once ate a good-tasting apple, eating apples is important.
Of course, the above analogy gets into the nature of variability and value equations, but this blog has hit on those concepts enough by now, I think. Just keep in mind that after gay marriage, there's the right to die, and after that, there's outlawing impregnation, and after that, there's the idea that sexual attraction is racism.
When it comes to sexual attraction, we can abstract the focal qualities of an individual into two primary categories:
1. Those qualities which sexually attract us to the individual
2. Those qualities which make the individual a valid companion capable of making calculated, informed decisions and being rational overall (which increases the likelihood of the individual understanding us, reciprocating during conversations, and enjoying our company)
In the case of category 2., the individual needn't even be part of the particular gender or age bracket to which we are sexually attracted, underlying the ultimate superficiality of sex. This should come as no surprise to "antinatalists," however -- that is, if they've embraced the idea that the phenomenon of sexual reproduction is fruitless, aimless, and insipid.
It's important to understand, here, that at a racist organization, the above two categories are very much the same in the abstract, but manifest in physical substance as the following:
1. Those qualities which we have culturally -- and, to a much lesser extent, genetically -- come to embrace or find symbolic security in, due in part to the evolutionary power of xenophobia
2. Those qualities which make the individual a hard worker capable of filling the role offered at our organization
Big tits and a cute laugh are to human companionship what light skin and Caucasian facial features are to corporate employment. If you want your company to do as well as it can, then hire people based on their skills rather than their skin color; if you want your social life to be as fulfilling as it can be, then live and share your life with interesting and intelligent people rather than sexually attractive ones. We should have figured this out as soon as we stopped rolling human heads down pyramid steps, but, well, we suck.
Is ritualistic human sacrifice a bad thing? Yes, very bad. Okay, we've figured that out, so we're set.
Oh, gladiatorial combat is a bad thing, too? Yeah, that makes sense. Well, it's been a few thousand years since our last decree and all, but it's still a good thing that we figured this one out. We're set now, right?
What? Don't tell me that slavery is wrong, too! Jeez, nothing fun is acceptable, is it? Well, at least we're making progress. We deserve a pat on the back, now.
You've got to be kidding me. You mean that even though other races get paid for their labor, now, they should have access to the same resources as us? Fine. That sort of makes sense. Hey, it only took us a hundred years to knock this one out. Contrast that with the few thousand that it took last time! We're obviously becoming more progressive and rational as a species.
But don't you dare propose that gay people should be allowed to get married. That is absolutely off limits.
Upon making the realization that humans shouldn't be forcefully and selfishly sacrificed to the gods, it shouldn't take much time at all to realize that homosexuals should have access to the same resources and institutions as heterosexuals. Why does each of these realizations take so long to make, in spite of their occupying the same fundamental value space?
The problem is that the realization is never that sentience is the kernel of value, or that symbolic cultural assumptions need to be rigorously and scientifically challenged; instead, it's that mass murder should not be a form of entertainment, or that blacks are people, too. In reality, these latter phenomena are just surface manifestations of the former; if eating food that tastes good is important, then we should realize this in the fundamental sense rather than make the claim that because we once ate a good-tasting apple, eating apples is important.
Of course, the above analogy gets into the nature of variability and value equations, but this blog has hit on those concepts enough by now, I think. Just keep in mind that after gay marriage, there's the right to die, and after that, there's outlawing impregnation, and after that, there's the idea that sexual attraction is racism.
When it comes to sexual attraction, we can abstract the focal qualities of an individual into two primary categories:
1. Those qualities which sexually attract us to the individual
2. Those qualities which make the individual a valid companion capable of making calculated, informed decisions and being rational overall (which increases the likelihood of the individual understanding us, reciprocating during conversations, and enjoying our company)
In the case of category 2., the individual needn't even be part of the particular gender or age bracket to which we are sexually attracted, underlying the ultimate superficiality of sex. This should come as no surprise to "antinatalists," however -- that is, if they've embraced the idea that the phenomenon of sexual reproduction is fruitless, aimless, and insipid.
It's important to understand, here, that at a racist organization, the above two categories are very much the same in the abstract, but manifest in physical substance as the following:
1. Those qualities which we have culturally -- and, to a much lesser extent, genetically -- come to embrace or find symbolic security in, due in part to the evolutionary power of xenophobia
2. Those qualities which make the individual a hard worker capable of filling the role offered at our organization
Big tits and a cute laugh are to human companionship what light skin and Caucasian facial features are to corporate employment. If you want your company to do as well as it can, then hire people based on their skills rather than their skin color; if you want your social life to be as fulfilling as it can be, then live and share your life with interesting and intelligent people rather than sexually attractive ones. We should have figured this out as soon as we stopped rolling human heads down pyramid steps, but, well, we suck.
Monday, March 28, 2011
The importance of free education and reforming general education
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.
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.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Facts about the average person living in Western society
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.
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.
Monday, November 22, 2010
It's not about emotion...
It's about psychology. Our psychological dispositions are each composed of an array of complex experiential data derived from various constituents of sentience, including sensation deprivation (desire), fear, mental sensation (emotions), physical sensation, visual sensation, auditory sensation, olfactory sensation (smell), thermal sensation, balance sensation, and gustatory sensation (taste). These constituents are, as part of a continual process of psychological development, the root cause of all destructive tendencies inherent in sentient organisms, from preferring junk food to healthy food to falling in love with a person who's wrong for us to selfishly favoring those whom we have feelings for over others. They're also all fundamentally negative by design, and stem from an imposed, baseline state of discomfort which can only be relieved by death; furthermore, discomfort is imposed by unintelligent physical forces for the ultimate goal of preparation for genetic reproduction, and nothing more.
With this in mind, it should be quite obvious that sensation is the only physical quality which possesses de facto value in the universe -- until proven otherwise, that is. Therefore, the reduction of its adverse effects should be a prime directive of our civilization, not only in localized instances, but also where the continual, unregulated creation of new sentient life occurs.
Conclusion: Human psychology is not a prerequisite for logic to run as a process on sufficiently capable systems. Furthermore, in being so frequently prone to corruption, human psychology actually hinders the advancement of logic everywhere that it exists alongside that mechanism; in fact, the sheer intensity of subjective sensation as perceived by organic memory stores makes it an extremely effective motivator for individual, multicellular organisms; thus, it retards the logical process of improving reality, as the more effective it is for individuals, the less effective it ultimately is for sensation as a phenomenon. In other words, the required immediacy of action of an organism in dire situations precludes the possibility of practical, comparative analysis being carried out while free from intervention in the form of emotional and physical biases.
I don't want a balance between emotion and logic; I want the outright elimination of all that is negative -- and thus, valuable -- in the universe, and will continue to want this until it is demonstrated that other forms of value exist outside the realm of chemical-based sensation.
With this in mind, it should be quite obvious that sensation is the only physical quality which possesses de facto value in the universe -- until proven otherwise, that is. Therefore, the reduction of its adverse effects should be a prime directive of our civilization, not only in localized instances, but also where the continual, unregulated creation of new sentient life occurs.
Conclusion: Human psychology is not a prerequisite for logic to run as a process on sufficiently capable systems. Furthermore, in being so frequently prone to corruption, human psychology actually hinders the advancement of logic everywhere that it exists alongside that mechanism; in fact, the sheer intensity of subjective sensation as perceived by organic memory stores makes it an extremely effective motivator for individual, multicellular organisms; thus, it retards the logical process of improving reality, as the more effective it is for individuals, the less effective it ultimately is for sensation as a phenomenon. In other words, the required immediacy of action of an organism in dire situations precludes the possibility of practical, comparative analysis being carried out while free from intervention in the form of emotional and physical biases.
I don't want a balance between emotion and logic; I want the outright elimination of all that is negative -- and thus, valuable -- in the universe, and will continue to want this until it is demonstrated that other forms of value exist outside the realm of chemical-based sensation.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
I don't live to feel good or be happy
I don't live to feel good or be happy, and I think that anyone who does is disgusting. Happiness is a short-lived (sometimes lasting only a few seconds) mental sensation which, because of the reward pathways in the brain, creates a false perception of value. When the sensation dissipates, like any other addict, we immediately want more of it, and will stop at nothing until we have more, regardless of how irrational and paltry all of the little moments that we define as "good" ultimately are. This, in turn, facilitates the dichotomy of actual mental and physical sensations on the one hand, and the perception of those sensations as desirable ideals on the other. Incidentally, the perceptions are themselves generated by what are essentially false memories that do their best to "sell" experiences as things we'd enjoyed more than we really did while they were occurring. Clearly, then, we spend a preposterously tiny portion of our lives being happy -- a third of life is spent asleep, and most of the rest of the time is dedicated to the chase that eventually ends in those few seconds or minutes of satisfaction.
Desire is problematic for what I perceive to be fairly obvious reasons, but if you'd care to know more about why mindlessly filling a figurative pool over and over again is stupid, I have a story called "A desire has never been fulfilled for anyone" that you should check out (hint: if a problem that you're experiencing only goes away when you tend to it in finite intervals, and comes back almost immediately after you've cleaned up the mess, then you're perpetuating the problem, probably for selfish psychological reasons related to feelings of accomplishment -- not fixing it).
Regardless of the efficacy of repetitiously consuming and experiencing as regards the fulfillment of our desires, keep the following in mind: Everything that we crave results from deprivation. If we ignore our cravings for long enough -- especially those most directly beneficial to the maintenance of our bodies to the end of producing genetic copies of ourselves -- then the deprivations grow. Thus, in addition to faulty perceptions facilitated by the brain's reward pathways, we also experience a kind of natural punishment for failing to procure the things necessary to temporarily satisfy our urges. Does punishment for not obtaining something that fails to cure your problems make any kind of rational sense?
1. No organism has ever survived; there is no such thing as survival of the fittest. Nature doesn't care about survival of organisms; it cares about survival of genes, which almost always means reproduction.
2. Happiness is ephemeral, intermittent, and a persistent attempt at filling deprivations created by our biology; these deprivations only exist to keep us interested in our environment long enough to reproduce. If the environment, in lacking intelligence, fails to provision us with nourishment of various kinds, then we suffer tremendously as our deprivations deepen.
Given the above, it should be obvious that our enjoyment of life is not only meaningless in the long run, but also nothing more than a way to stave off horrific suffering. Taking a so-called "negativist" approach to life, then, we have no choice but to opt for responsibility, education, and discussion over hedonism, happiness, and self-indulgence. Furthermore, we must concern ourselves with eliminating the problems that we see, rather than merely with perpetuating our particular desires, or "fixing" our own problems for psychological reasons. Getting into a relationship is not going to solve your financial or health issues, let alone anyone else's.
None of this by any means implies that we should be miserable in some attempt to symbolically convey selflessness, however; we can't escape our desires, and so should humor them to some practical extent. The humoring of what pleases us in itself isn't the problem that I have with modern society; my problem is that we go far beyond humoring our desires to the point where they are the reasons for why we exist at all. In a world where an astonishing proportion of humans are below the poverty line while the rest slave away at office jobs on medication for a third of their existences, we can definitely do better.
So why is this phenomenon, this perverse self-indulgence, so prevalent in today's society? If I had to guess, I'd say that the collapse of organized religion and the rise of so-called advanced technologies has played a major role. Now that we don't have to worry about our crops seeing it through the winter, or whether the earthquake was caused by god, we're so free -- and lacking in direction -- that we've become pigs. We've fixed the means to our various ends, but the ends are a veritable mess.
The next time that you think to yourself, "The world would be so much better, if only I had _____," remember this post. Whether it's a boyfriend, a better paying job, the ability to say that you've tried some hallucinogenic substance, or a bigger apartment, remember that you will not survive in the long run, and neither will anyone else. Further, when presented with the chance to engage in discussion about how to improve our society, don't pass it up in favor of indulging in something that will make you feel good, and don't allow your desires (other than the desire to reform planet Earth) to rule your life. Maintain a balance, always!
Desire is problematic for what I perceive to be fairly obvious reasons, but if you'd care to know more about why mindlessly filling a figurative pool over and over again is stupid, I have a story called "A desire has never been fulfilled for anyone" that you should check out (hint: if a problem that you're experiencing only goes away when you tend to it in finite intervals, and comes back almost immediately after you've cleaned up the mess, then you're perpetuating the problem, probably for selfish psychological reasons related to feelings of accomplishment -- not fixing it).
Regardless of the efficacy of repetitiously consuming and experiencing as regards the fulfillment of our desires, keep the following in mind: Everything that we crave results from deprivation. If we ignore our cravings for long enough -- especially those most directly beneficial to the maintenance of our bodies to the end of producing genetic copies of ourselves -- then the deprivations grow. Thus, in addition to faulty perceptions facilitated by the brain's reward pathways, we also experience a kind of natural punishment for failing to procure the things necessary to temporarily satisfy our urges. Does punishment for not obtaining something that fails to cure your problems make any kind of rational sense?
1. No organism has ever survived; there is no such thing as survival of the fittest. Nature doesn't care about survival of organisms; it cares about survival of genes, which almost always means reproduction.
2. Happiness is ephemeral, intermittent, and a persistent attempt at filling deprivations created by our biology; these deprivations only exist to keep us interested in our environment long enough to reproduce. If the environment, in lacking intelligence, fails to provision us with nourishment of various kinds, then we suffer tremendously as our deprivations deepen.
Given the above, it should be obvious that our enjoyment of life is not only meaningless in the long run, but also nothing more than a way to stave off horrific suffering. Taking a so-called "negativist" approach to life, then, we have no choice but to opt for responsibility, education, and discussion over hedonism, happiness, and self-indulgence. Furthermore, we must concern ourselves with eliminating the problems that we see, rather than merely with perpetuating our particular desires, or "fixing" our own problems for psychological reasons. Getting into a relationship is not going to solve your financial or health issues, let alone anyone else's.
None of this by any means implies that we should be miserable in some attempt to symbolically convey selflessness, however; we can't escape our desires, and so should humor them to some practical extent. The humoring of what pleases us in itself isn't the problem that I have with modern society; my problem is that we go far beyond humoring our desires to the point where they are the reasons for why we exist at all. In a world where an astonishing proportion of humans are below the poverty line while the rest slave away at office jobs on medication for a third of their existences, we can definitely do better.
So why is this phenomenon, this perverse self-indulgence, so prevalent in today's society? If I had to guess, I'd say that the collapse of organized religion and the rise of so-called advanced technologies has played a major role. Now that we don't have to worry about our crops seeing it through the winter, or whether the earthquake was caused by god, we're so free -- and lacking in direction -- that we've become pigs. We've fixed the means to our various ends, but the ends are a veritable mess.
The next time that you think to yourself, "The world would be so much better, if only I had _____," remember this post. Whether it's a boyfriend, a better paying job, the ability to say that you've tried some hallucinogenic substance, or a bigger apartment, remember that you will not survive in the long run, and neither will anyone else. Further, when presented with the chance to engage in discussion about how to improve our society, don't pass it up in favor of indulging in something that will make you feel good, and don't allow your desires (other than the desire to reform planet Earth) to rule your life. Maintain a balance, always!
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Love is stupid
Unlike some who view love as problematic, I don't think the problem is that it isn't real; I think it's that it's an irrational, uncontrollable preference perpetuated by unfounded evolutionary incentives. This might not seem too problematic at first glance, but when you consider the huge amount of time and energy wasted -- often in vain -- to woo someone because of what makes their personality superficially intriguing, it becomes obvious that love is a very, very bad aspect of our perverted psychological dispositions. If an elderly man whom I randomly meet on the street one day is the most intelligent, productive, kind-hearted, and pragmatic person I've ever encountered, why shouldn't I work alongside him, or at least engage him in discussion, more often than I would chase after women? Why shouldn't I move in with him, buy him gifts, take him to dinner? I have no feelings for him whatsoever -- aside from the baseline feelings that I have for all sentient creatures -- but isn't that a good thing? Doesn't that make him a more objectively worthy companion than someone who makes my heart flutter?
We can't control whom we love. We can't control what kinds of foods taste good, either, but we know which ones are healthy and which ones are unhealthy. Perhaps there are loves that are healthier than others, too, but love, unlike food, is not necessary for our survival. Trapping others in our emotions and personal dramas, then, is both egoistic and selfish, for it promotes preferential thinking -- a clear sign of a non-functional civilization. Further, the preferences created by love are meaningless, as I'm sure anyone who's experienced unrequited love can attest. Everyone, no matter their gender or how their smile or confidence makes us weak in the knees, must be judged by the same standards.
I highly, highly doubt that anyone you've ever loved was chosen because they were among the best and brightest of mankind. Love may not be an illusion, but its benefit to society certainly is.
We can't control whom we love. We can't control what kinds of foods taste good, either, but we know which ones are healthy and which ones are unhealthy. Perhaps there are loves that are healthier than others, too, but love, unlike food, is not necessary for our survival. Trapping others in our emotions and personal dramas, then, is both egoistic and selfish, for it promotes preferential thinking -- a clear sign of a non-functional civilization. Further, the preferences created by love are meaningless, as I'm sure anyone who's experienced unrequited love can attest. Everyone, no matter their gender or how their smile or confidence makes us weak in the knees, must be judged by the same standards.
I highly, highly doubt that anyone you've ever loved was chosen because they were among the best and brightest of mankind. Love may not be an illusion, but its benefit to society certainly is.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Remove the human element
Remove the human element from "nature," and let's see how lovely it is then. If you, even for a moment, stop projecting your own desires, psychological disposition, and relative perspective of the world onto nature, you'll quickly realize that humans are the only living things that care about, well, anything. Sorry, but that's how it is -- aside from humans, nothing cares about much of anything aside from itself or its offspring.
1. Humans are the only animals that can cry.
2. Humans are the only animals that can laugh.
3. Even though plenty of highly functioning mammals are capable of compassion, grief, and joy, they're still quite a paltry part of life on Earth. 99.9% of living organisms -- especially when we tack on the first three billion years, when no life would have been visible to the naked eye, and certainly wouldn't have been multicellular -- wiggle around in the dirt for a few days, suck up enough food in order to poop out a jillion copies of themselves, then die. There is nothing glorious, beautiful, or moving about three billion years of worms, bacteria, and parasites, and if you think otherwise, you are figuratively in love with a vile, indefensible woman solely because she is physically beautiful. Never mind her modus operandi or that disgusting birthmark; she's hot!
In other words, nature lovers are only concerned with looks, and are even in denial when it comes to the preponderance of aesthetic unpleasantness that exists in nature, though that's not what matters in this case. The ultimate point, here, is that beauty is subjective, deceptive, and even manipulative. The sooner you realize this, the more pleasant a place this planet will be for all of us.
Do you love life? Great. Now make a list of your favorite things about it, and let's see how many of them would exist without humans. Seriously, I'd love for someone to do this; I'm curious to know if even a handful of what we cherish predates our emergence. Note: I'm not referencing the objects of affection, but rather, the subjects who perceive the objects as worthy of affection. For example, yes, flowers predate humans by quite a bit, but before humans, nothing thought that flowers were pretty. Get over it.
Ask yourself this question: "What do I enjoy about being alive?" Think hard about whether any of your answers are even physically possible for an organism that is not a human being.
Do not invoke New Age or spiritualist platitudes while thinking about this; instead, also ask yourself, "Is what I'm thinking about right now observable with scientific instruments? If not, then why do I think that it exists? Who told me that it does? Are they trustworthy? Are they fallible? Am I arrogant to cling to this? Am I doing so because it makes me happy, or because I've done some thorough investigation in the name of the truth?"
Do you love nature, or do you love that work of art called Nature which mankind has conceptually fabricated? Funny how we pride ourselves on overcoming religious dogma, where answering every unknown with superhumans is the name of the game, then commit the exact same error while gazing longingly at the mess of suffocation and heart attacks taking place in the jungle. When we're not ascribing human properties to god, we're making nature out to be just another one of us -- a friendly, flower-sniffing human being. We're the crazies in Independence Day holding up the welcome signs just before the aliens blow up Washington.
When will we grow up?
1. Humans are the only animals that can cry.
2. Humans are the only animals that can laugh.
3. Even though plenty of highly functioning mammals are capable of compassion, grief, and joy, they're still quite a paltry part of life on Earth. 99.9% of living organisms -- especially when we tack on the first three billion years, when no life would have been visible to the naked eye, and certainly wouldn't have been multicellular -- wiggle around in the dirt for a few days, suck up enough food in order to poop out a jillion copies of themselves, then die. There is nothing glorious, beautiful, or moving about three billion years of worms, bacteria, and parasites, and if you think otherwise, you are figuratively in love with a vile, indefensible woman solely because she is physically beautiful. Never mind her modus operandi or that disgusting birthmark; she's hot!
In other words, nature lovers are only concerned with looks, and are even in denial when it comes to the preponderance of aesthetic unpleasantness that exists in nature, though that's not what matters in this case. The ultimate point, here, is that beauty is subjective, deceptive, and even manipulative. The sooner you realize this, the more pleasant a place this planet will be for all of us.
Do you love life? Great. Now make a list of your favorite things about it, and let's see how many of them would exist without humans. Seriously, I'd love for someone to do this; I'm curious to know if even a handful of what we cherish predates our emergence. Note: I'm not referencing the ob
Ask yourself this question: "What do I enjoy about being alive?" Think hard about whether any of your answers are even physically possible for an organism that is not a human being.
Do you love nature, or do you love that work of art called Nature which mankind has conceptually fabricated? Funny how we pride ourselves on overcoming religious dogma, where answering every unknown with superhumans is the name of the game, then commit the exact same error while gazing longingly at the mess of suffocation and heart attacks taking place in the jungle. When we're not ascribing human properties to god, we're making nature out to be just another one of us -- a friendly, flower-sniffing human being. We're the crazies in Independence Day holding up the welcome signs just before the aliens blow up Washington.
When will we grow up?
Sunday, October 31, 2010
No desire has ever been fulfilled for anyone
Our desires as living organisms accomplish absolutely nothing; their continued reintroduction into the environment, therefore, only drives the problem of sentience into perpetuity. Here's why:
Imagine having a swimming pool in your backyard that you fill at the start of the summer. On the first day, you go swimming for a few hours and have a lot of fun. At the start of the next day, however, you go outside to realize that the pool is, once again, empty. So you fill it again and have a great time for a second day in a row, though you're also wondering what could have possibly happened to the original water content with which you'd filled the pool the day before.
Upon waking on the third day, guess what? The pool is empty again. You have to get out the hose, the chlorine -- everything involved in keeping the pool clean and temperate. You do this laboriously, but when all of the hard work is done, you only have an hour to actually go swimming, meaning that most of the day was spent preparing yourself for the fulfillment of your desire instead of actually fulfilling it. "The preparation, the process of getting to the point of being able to swim, is also fun," you rationalize to yourself. "The work involved is what makes it all worth it."
This goes on for two weeks. At the start of every day, you have to fill the pool all over again, and this consumes the vast majority of time dedicated to your pool-related activities. Are you accomplishing something? Are you solving the problem of there being no water in the pool? No, but the renewed problem, to your psychology, is a good thing, because it gives you something to solve every day. Unlike in other areas of your life, where solving a problem is perceived as a good thing, the renewal of this problem seems to justify itself based on the intensity of your desire to go swimming. After all, you feel like swimming matters, so it must, right?
But wait! You don't just have one desire. No, you have a multitude of them: cars to keep clean, computers to maintain. Now, every morning, in addition to an empty pool, you're also presented with a car completely covered in mud and a computer without Internet access. Every day, not only do you have to fill up the pool, you also have to wash off the mud and call your ISP. It happens every day, and despite all your efforts, none of these problems is ever solved.
Eventually, you get tired of putting up with it all, so you decide to ignore the pool for a few weeks. "It can stay empty for a little while, I'm sure," you say to yourself. But then, something happens: the deprivation created by the lack of water in the pool causes you to contract AIDS. You've been punished for ignoring the problem!
Are any of the above any different from eating, sleeping, having sex, obtaining money, or enjoying so-called fun experiences? Once we satisfy our deprivations, do they ever go away, or do they come back as strong as ever in a relatively short amount of time? If it's all in good fun, then why are we punished so powerfully for ignoring the deprivations as they deepen? Why is the chase sane or logical? Why would we impose it on a new generation, other than to satisfy our egos?
Imagine having a swimming pool in your backyard that you fill at the start of the summer. On the first day, you go swimming for a few hours and have a lot of fun. At the start of the next day, however, you go outside to realize that the pool is, once again, empty. So you fill it again and have a great time for a second day in a row, though you're also wondering what could have possibly happened to the original water content with which you'd filled the pool the day before.
Upon waking on the third day, guess what? The pool is empty again. You have to get out the hose, the chlorine -- everything involved in keeping the pool clean and temperate. You do this laboriously, but when all of the hard work is done, you only have an hour to actually go swimming, meaning that most of the day was spent preparing yourself for the fulfillment of your desire instead of actually fulfilling it. "The preparation, the process of getting to the point of being able to swim, is also fun," you rationalize to yourself. "The work involved is what makes it all worth it."
This goes on for two weeks. At the start of every day, you have to fill the pool all over again, and this consumes the vast majority of time dedicated to your pool-related activities. Are you accomplishing something? Are you solving the problem of there being no water in the pool? No, but the renewed problem, to your psychology, is a good thing, because it gives you something to solve every day. Unlike in other areas of your life, where solving a problem is perceived as a good thing, the renewal of this problem seems to justify itself ba
Eventually, you get tired of putting up with it all, so you decide to ignore the pool for a few weeks. "It can stay empty for a little while, I'm sure," you say to yourself. But then, something happens: the deprivation created by the lack of water in the pool causes you to contract AIDS. You've been punished for ignoring the problem!
Are any of the above any different from eating, sleeping, having sex, obtaining money, or enjoying so-called fun experiences? Once we satisfy our deprivations, do they ever go away, or do they come back as strong as ever in a relatively short amount of time? If it's all in good fun, then why are we punished so powerfully for ignoring the deprivations as they deepen? Why is the chase sane or logical? Why would we impose it on a new generation, other than to satisfy our egos?
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