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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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* 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

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

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.

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* 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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.