science

The Clouds Should Know Me By Now

By in foolosophy, identity, science

“You,” Grand argues, “are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made.”

Eh. I agree with the basic idea, but the way it’s worded here still seems to imply some sort of mysterious, immaterial essence. “You” are a combination of the stuff of which you are made, the form it takes, and the time and place in which it exists, how’s that?

You Wasted Life, Why Wouldn’t You Waste the Afterlife?

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, science

Sean Carroll:

Adam claims that there “simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information” regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. But that’s only scratching the surface, as it were. What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn’t true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon’s interior, you don’t really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon; I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.)
Obviously this is completely crazy. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon’s interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.
We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it.
You don’t even need to understand anything about physics to grasp this; many Buddhists have been reasoning their way to an understanding of the incoherence of the idea of a personal soul for thousands of years. The tragic thing about the belief, to me, is that it does nothing to alleviate a much more pressing issue — that of people drifting through the life they’re actually living with no curiosity, no deep appreciation of what they have; their thoughts mired in the future or the past, oblivious to the present. I don’t even mean that a life well-lived has to be devoted to manic thrill-seeking, just that a sense of “magic” is perfectly attainable through mindful awareness. Some would have you believe that the concept of souls and afterlives are necessary to give life meaning; I would counter that metaphysical beliefs can just as easily act as narcotics, or as incentive to procrastinate. Why make the most of this life if you think you’ll have endless chances for more? Why face up squarely to the fleeting impermanence of the most important relationships in your life and the imperative to not take them for granted when you can just assure yourself you’ll meet up again at some point down the road? People talk big about all the things they’d like to do before they die, but look at the reality of how most people live day to day, and tell me why they think they need an indefinite extension at the end. What did you do with the several decades you already had?
I think the science in cases like this needs to be paired with something like therapeutic reasoning, though. Not that it’s not vital to point out the nuts and bolts of why something like a soul couldn’t exist, but it’s probably more useful to try to show people why believing in one doesn’t actually enhance their life anyway.

I Wanna Idealize You Like an Animal

By in augean stables, science

This is a loooong essay by Raymond Tallis, and I fully admit up front that I don’t have the time to give it the careful attention and engagement it deserves, but at the same time, when an argument starts off with such weak points, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of it or make me inclined to want to spend much more time on it:

The failure to distinguish consciousness from neural activity corrodes our self-understanding in two significant ways. If we are just our brains, and our brains are just evolved organs designed to optimize our odds of survival — or, more precisely, to maximize the replicative potential of the genetic material for which we are the vehicle — then we are merely beasts like any other, equally beholden as apes and centipedes to biological drives. Similarly, if we are just our brains, and our brains are just material objects, then we, and our lives, are merely way stations in the great causal net that is the universe, stretching from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch.

Hmm. I don’t know; maybe we can only get the full effect if he tells it around the campfire with a flashlight under his chin. As it is, I’m sorry, but repeating a viewpoint in an incredulous tone with a disbelieving look on your face does not count as a rebuttal. Affronts to your vanity or conception of human dignity are not automatically disqualified. Does this really need to be reiterated anymore?

Most of those who subscribe to such “neuroevolutionary” accounts of humanity don’t recognize these consequences. Or, if they do recognize them, then they don’t subscribe to these accounts sincerely. When John Gray appeals, in his 2002 book Straw Dogs, to a belief that human beings are merely animals and so “human life has no more meaning than the life of slime mold,” he doesn’t really believe that the life of John Gray, erstwhile School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, has no more meaning than that of a slime mold — else why would he have aspired to the life of a distinguished professor rather than something closer to that of a slime mold?

Because he is a distinguished professor and not a slime mold. He’s not claiming there is no difference at all between the two, he’s claiming there is no more inherent biological worth to one over the other. I’m not sure what the implication is here. What is he supposed to do upon realizing that humanity is an extremely clever ape that may nonetheless be undone by its own cleverness? Run off to the woods to subsist on grubs and berries, communicating through clicks, hoots and grunts? Commit suicide? What?
Was it Stephen Jay Gould who basically said that humanity exists at the discretion of bacteria and viruses, the real rulers of the planet? One random mutation is all it would take to quickly eliminate tens or even hundreds of millions of oh-so-special humans. And all of our wonderful cultural achievements aren’t going to grant us any exemptions from the consequences of environmental destruction or of any meteors streaking toward an impact with Earth. Our kind of consciousness is obviously a wonderful thing to experience. But it doesn’t imply anything about us somehow being independent of our biological origins or promise us a glorious future.

Never Mind Over Matter

By in philosophy, science, spiritual-not-religious

Galen Strawson:

“Yes, yes,” say the proponents of magic, “but there’s still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?” (I’m assuming, with them, that we’re wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the “magical mystery show”, Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it’s surprising that it involves consciousness. We don’t. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.
One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they’re put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It’s happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.

As Lookers-On Feel Most Delight that Least Perceive a Juggler’s Sleight

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, psychology, science

Fear has promoted knowledge of men more than love has, for fear wants to divine who the other is, what he can do, what he wants: to deceive oneself in this would be disadvantageous and dangerous. On the other hand, love contains a secret impulse to see as much beauty as possible in the other or to elevate him as high as possible: to deceive oneself here would be a joy and an advantage – and so one does so.

– Nietzsche
I thought of that while reading this from Ed Yong:
Whether it’s a drug-addled actor or an almost-toppled dictator, some people seem to have an endless capacity for rationalising what they did, no matter how questionable. We might imagine that these people really know that they’re deceiving themselves, and that their words are mere bravado. But Zoe Chance from Harvard Business School thinks otherwise.
Using experiments where people could cheat on a test, Chance has found that cheaters not only deceive themselves, but are largely oblivious to their own lies. Their ruse is so potent that they’ll continue to overestimate their abilities in the future, even if they suffer for it. Cheaters continue to prosper in their own heads, even if they fail in reality.
She showed that even though people know that they occasionally behave dishonestly, they don’t know that they can convincingly lie to themselves to gloss over these misdeeds. Their scam is so convincing that they don’t know that they’re doing it. As she writes, “Our findings show that people not only fail to judge themselves harshly for unethical behaviour, but can even use the positive results of such behaviour to see themselves as better than ever.”
I like to think of myself as a mostly honest person, to the extent that I would often rather face unpleasant situations than weave a tangled web of deceit to avoid them. But that’s just it; it has just as much to do with the fact that I really prefer my life to be as straightforward and uncomplicated as possible as it does any noble idealism. If I didn’t feel overwhelmed and scattered by having too much to focus on, perhaps I’d get a kick out of lying just to amuse myself with my own cleverness. Of course I’ve lied my ass off in various circumstances, and will probably do so again. But it just so happens that I find it too taxing to have to keep various falsehoods straight in my own head, so I generally prefer to just be up front and deal with whatever results.
In the same way, then, the most efficient and effective liars will be the ones who can mostly convince themselves of their story, enough to not get tripped up by a nervous conscience.
As biological beings who mainly need to feast and fuck (and possibly fight) above all else, it really doesn’t matter if we know ourselves. Plenty of unreflective people do just fine in life when it comes to food and sex and driving off enemies. In fact, you could argue that the examined life, while a goal I personally endorse, can be an onerous burden to impose on oneself for what can often appear to be a negligible payoff. What really matters with regards to advantageousness is how others perceive us, how well we can manipulate them to get what we want and need from them. And sometimes, it might be much more to our advantage to be misleading here, especially if we’re so smooth about it we don’t even consciously notice it anymore.

Blinding Me with Science

By in art, books, music, poetry, science

The Internet sure hasn’t been providing me with much stimulation lately. But fortunately, I have read a book or three in my day, so I can always dredge up one interesting passage or another for your entertainment and illumination. Here’s one from Owen Flanagan:

The claim that science can, in principle, explain everything we think, say and do—that it can, in principle, provide a causal account of human being (a causal account of Dasein)—should be distinguished from the claim that everything can be expressed scientifically. Consider art and music. It is patently crazy to say that the works of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Mozart, Chopin, Schönberg, Ellington, Coltrane, Dylan or Nirvana could be expressed scientifically. Assuming something like the best-case scenario for science, we might want to say that artistic and musical productions can be analyzed in terms of their physical manifestations—painting in terms of chemistry and geometry, and music in terms of sound waves and mathematical relationships.
Furthermore, some very complex combination of the culture, individual life, and the brain of the artist might allow for something like an explanation sketch of why that artist produced the works he or she did. Kay Redfield Jamison has done some very interesting work on the high incidence of bipolar disorder among great nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets and musicians. Such work might lead us to understand more deeply what ordinary and creative imagination consist in. But such work does not replace or reveal what Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, or Seamus Heaney says, means or does in the language of poetry.
There is nothing remotely odd about these kinds of scientific investigation of art or music, or of the creative process itself. But although such inquiry takes artistic or musical production as something to be explained, it does not take the production itself as expressing something that can be explained scientifically. The claim that not everything can be explained scientifically is not a claim that art, music, poetry, literature, and religious experiences cannot in principle be accounted for scientifically, or that those productions involve magical or mysterious powers. Whatever they express, it is something perfectly human, but the appropriate idiom of expression is not a scientific one. The scientific idiom requires words and, often, mathematical formulas. Painting, sculpture and music require neither. Indeed, they cannot in principle express what they express in words or mathematical formulas. Therefore, whatever they express is not expressible scientifically. To be sure, poetry, literature and music use words. But their idiom is not a scientific one. And the reason is doubly principled: Many of the relations explored are not explored causally (the relation in which science excels). A good love song can make you feel love, but it never does so by getting into the “pheromonics” and the neurobiology of love. The arts work our imaginations with all the playful tricks of language, allegory, metaphor and metonymy that science, for its purposes, doesn’t much care for.

They Act Like Earth Was Terrestrial Prison

By in art, science

Stefany Anne Golberg:

In the end, Caruncho and Fernández say they want to separate romance from reality, but their diagnosis leads to a conclusion no less romantic, and no less religious, than the legend: that our own bodies can generate within us a sensation of the divine. From this, maybe the romantics and neoclassicists can be brought together for a new notion of genius, one that allows for, and sometimes necessitates, ecstatic irrational reveries that must still be grounded in practice if good works are to be produced. After all, visions alone are not enough. If Chopin hadn’t practiced his piano, he may never have gotten past the Polish border. But his experience of the sublime, whatever its cause, was a real factor in his ability to compose as well.

Works for me. I don’t get why so many people think our most sublime experiences are diminished unless we pretend they descend, uncaused, from some mysterious dimension outside of space and time. Again, I blame Plato.

Neti, Neti

By in atheism, foolosophy, nietzsche, religion, science, spiritual-not-religious

Thanks to Shanna for passing along a link to an interesting blog, and even taking the time to ferret out several posts of interest from the archives! I’d say this pretty much guarantees her the coveted “Minion of the Month” award for January! But we’ll have time for award ceremonies later. Cracking knuckles, getting down to bidness. This was one from last summer:
A letter to my fellow skeptics
What if, Dr Dawkins (or any fellow skeptic), you had an experience of a particular kind that you can’t really explain?
You catch a fleeting glimpse of, well, you can’t really say. Words fail you, but you try anyway: “I’ve witnessed, uh, something… some distinct experience in which I’ve seen the perfection and limitless beauty of the world. I believe, no… I know that I was seeing with utter clarity, and that it was not the way I normally see the world. I saw clearly that I was one with the universe, that unconditional love is its basis, and that I am an eternal being and not a hapless, mortal creature.” Already you sound nuts, even to yourself.
You search for the terms to explain the quality of it, and cringe when the only word you can summon is “divine.” Every stab you take at conveying your experience only amounts to a disappointing, evasive-sounding cliché:
•There is something more to us
•Everything is in its right place, we just can’t see that
•There is a higher intelligence behind all this
Whatever it is, you have a very strong sense that its cultivation is immeasurably valuable, not just as a means of achieving peace and ease in your life, but for others to do the same. It is, clearly, exactly what humanity needs in order to overcome — no, transcend — its current palette of troubles. For this reason you feel it is important for others to have this experience too.
Well, I could quibble with some of the specifics, but in general, sure, I have that experience quite frequently, especially via music, and to a lesser extent, writing or art in general. What I don’t understand is why this kind of experience of harmonious… je ne sais quoi is so commonly held out as incommensurate with atheism and scientific materialism. Stephen Asma is currently involved in a back-and-forth exchange that demonstrates how neither of those things require that one jettison an appreciation of the role of emotions and mystery in human experience, for example. And someone like Steven Pinker, as hardboiled as they come, says this in The Blank Slate:

But greedy reductionism is far from the majority view, and it is easy to show why it is wrong. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam has pointed out, even the simple fact that a square peg won’t fit into a round hole can’t be explained in terms of molecules and atoms but only at a higher level of analysis involving rigidity (regardless of what makes the peg rigid) and geometry. And if anyone really thought that sociology or literature or history could be replaced by biology, why stop there? Biology could in turn be ground up into chemistry, and chemistry into physics, leaving one struggling to explain the causes of World War I in terms of electrons and quarks. Even if World War I consisted of nothing but a very, very large number of quarks in a very, very complicated pattern of motion, no insight is gained by describing it that way.

There’s a bit of a “God of the gaps” mindset here that bothers me — just because science has to currently admit not knowing something, or just because we don’t have the vocabulary to express ourselves coherently enough for science to even begin addressing the nature of our experiences, it doesn’t imply a supernatural origin or character to them. For the most part, the reason we can’t explain these experiences is because there’s no way to get an outside perspective from which to analyze them. The nature of language and conceptual thought is such that we can only really talk about things by contrasting them with different things. To what can you compare those moments of bliss that accompany this, uh, god’s-eye view? It’s sort of like not being able to see a tiny star when looking directly at it; you have to look just to the side of it to catch a glimpse of its dim light. Hence poetry and music, which often trace a circle around the experience without ever trying to pin it down. But lacking the ability to put something immediately into words, or to reduce it to its component parts like a piece of machinery spread out on the table, does not necessarily entail that we shrug our shoulders and start talking about God instead. None of these experiences, however awe-inspiring and ineffable, do anything to offset the fact that our personalities do not survive our body’s death, or that there is nothing like monotheism’s personal God overseeing the whole shebang. Did you get that? Let me say it again, because it’s important: None of these experiences, however awe-inspiring and ineffable, do anything to offset the fact that our personalities do not survive our body’s death, or that there is nothing like monotheism’s personal, loving God overseeing the whole shebang.
Even someone like Nietzsche, who famously said that mystical explanations, far from being deep as commonly thought, were “not even shallow”, was familiar with this sort of ecstatic communion with the spirit of life, the ground of all being, the which than which there is no whicher. The difference is, he was well aware that this is an understanding that transcends our limited, partial notions of love, peace, purpose, morality and all that good stuff. The harmony that pervades life itself includes all the notes we would call dissonant. The brief glimpses we have of “a cosmic place for everything and everything in its cosmic place” includes all the things we would call discordant. If you’re seeing only “positive” manifestations of this insight, I daresay you’re projecting a bit. All the mindless destruction and suffering that has permeated life as we know it since time immemorial has been just as necessary to the whole, which is why Nietzsche initially called his idea of the eternal recurrence “the most abysmal thought”. If you want to merge in rapturous union with the sum total of all that is, was, and ever will be, you have to accept all of it. No picking and choosing, no highlighting the parts you approve of and ignoring the rest.
We can’t exist on that level of understanding, any more than we can have a permanent drug high, a neverending orgasm, or an up without a down. Our day-to-day existence requires that we settle for imperfection and partiality. We can only visit there occasionally, and whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.

This Cocaine Makes Me Feel Like I’m on this Song

By in music, science

Ever had goosebumps or felt euphoric chills when listening to a piece of music? If so, your brain is reacting to the music in the same way as it would to some delicious food or a psychoactive drug such as cocaine, according to scientists.
The experience of pleasure is mediated in all these situations by the release of the brain’s reward chemical, dopamine, according to results of experiments carried out by a team led by Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, which are published today in Nature Neuroscience.
Music seems to tap into the circuitry in the brain that has evolved to drive human motivation – any time we do something our brains want us to do again, dopamine is released into these circuits. “Now we’re showing that this ancient reward system that’s involved in biologically adaptive behaviours is being tapped into by a cognitive reward,” said Salimpoor.
She said music provided an intellectual reward, because the listener has to follow the sequence of notes to appreciate it. “A single tone won’t be pleasurable in isolation. However, a series of single tones arranged in time can become some of the most pleasurable experiences that humans have ever reported. That’s amazing because it suggests that somehow our cerebral cortex is following these tones over time and there must be a component of build-up, anticipation, expectation.”
I’m not surprised at all, because I’m sure my music listening habits would make some people wonder about the possibility of addiction. But it is interesting what they note about intellectual pleasures being able to tap into a system designed to encourage more prosaic pursuits like eating and sex. I was just telling Shanna the other day that I have to be careful when I engage in writing or thinking about stimulating topics because they can have a physically energizing effect on me as potent as a cappuccino. Perhaps I’m using music and thoughts to accomplish something like what Steven Pinker talked about:

Now, if the intellectual faculties could identify the pleasure-giving patterns, purify them, and concentrate them, the brain could stimulate itself without the messiness of electrodes or drugs. It could give itself intense artificial doses of the sights and sounds and smells that ordinarily are given off by healthful environments.

Speaking of whom, I see I wasn’t the only one to see this story and recall his characterization of music as “auditory cheesecake”.

And with Strange Aeons Even Death May Die

By in atheism, extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, religion, science, the big sleep

And once again
You’ll pretend to know that
That there’s an end
That there’s an end to this begin
It will help you sleep at night
It will make it seem that right is always right
– Smashing Pumpkins
The idea of dead scientists engaging in an experiment in eugenics is incredible enough. Yet the most striking feature in this episode – only fully revealed more than 100 years after the scripts began to appear – is the power that is ascribed to science itself. While spiritualism evolved into a popular religion, complete with a heavenly “Summerland” where the dead lived free from care and sorrow, the intellectual elite of psychical researchers thought of their quest as a rigorously scientific inquiry. But if these Victorian seekers turned to science, it was to look for an exit from the world that science had revealed. Darwinism had disclosed a purposeless universe without human meaning; but purpose and meaning could be restored, if only science could show that the human mind carried on evolving after the death of the body. All of these seekers had abandoned any belief in traditional religion. Still, the human need for a meaning in life that religion once satisfied could not be denied, and fuelled the faith that scientific investigation would show that the human story continues after death. In effect, science was used against science, and became a channel for belief in magic.
Much of what the psychical researchers viewed as science we would now call pseudo science. But the boundaries of scientific knowledge are smudged and shifting, and seem clear only in hindsight. There is no pristine science untouched by the vagaries of faith. The psychical researchers used science not only to deal with private anguish but also to bolster their weakening belief in progress. Especially after the catastrophe of the first world war, the gradual improvement that most people expected would continue indefinitely appeared to be faltering. What had been achieved in the past seemed to be falling away. If the scripts were to be believed, however, there was no cause for anxiety or despair. The world might be sliding into anarchy, but progress continued on the other side.
Many of the psychical researchers believed they were doing no more than show that evolution continues in a post-mortem world. Like many others, then and now, they confused two wholly different things. Progress assumes some goal or direction. But evolution has neither of these attributes, and if natural selection continued in another world it would feature the same random death and wasted lives we find here below.
…The fantasies that possessed the psychical researchers and the god-builders still have us in their grip today. Freezing our bodies or uploading our minds into a supercomputer will not deliver us from ourselves. Wars and revolutions will disturb our frozen remains, while death will stalk us in cyberspace – also a realm of mortal conflict. Science enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.
It looks like a fascinating book. Though I’m beginning to fear that I might need an afterlife just to read all the books I’m accumulating. If only science could help me do away with eating and sleeping…
But yes, the belief in some sort of immortal soul and afterlife, and the belief in a teleological essence to life itself both seem to me to be more interesting issues for skeptical attention than that of God’s existence or lack thereof. As Schopenhauer said, given a stark choice between belief in personal immortality and belief in God, most people wouldn’t hesitate to become atheists. And while some branches of Buddhism have managed to reconcile belief in a continuation of personal consciousness beyond death with a denial of any meaningful deity, Buddhists in general may be the only people who wouldn’t suffer a crisis of identity if forced to relinquish an attachment to the idea of progress, the numbing distraction of being in constant motion toward a goal.

Ex Nihilo

By in atheism, mythology, nihilism, religion, science

Peter Lawler, summarizing David Bentley Hart:

Hart’s “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity. And that rebellion has been not so much radical as selective and self-indulgent. By compassionately privileging personal freedom and human rights over what they believe they know through science, the new atheists remain parasitic on the key Christian insight about who we are. Their attachment to the humane virtues makes no sense outside the Christian claim for the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person. That claim is completely unsupported by either ancient (Aristotelian) or modern (Darwinian) science. The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ.
…Christ, the Christians claimed, freed us from the limitations of our merely biological natures through his perfect reconciliation of God’s nature and man’s nature. He was, the Nicene fathers concluded, fully God and fully man, and his redemption was to divinize every man. Christ freed each of us for unlimited love for every other person made in God’s image; Christ was the foundation of a virtuous way of life based on a vision of the good that has no pagan counterpart. Charity to all became the virtue most in accord with the truth about who we are. For Hart, the wonder is that anyone could have imagined the ideals of the Christian faith in the first place, given that those ideals had so little support in any pre-Christian conception of who we are.
It is barely too strong to say that, for Hart, Christ transformed each of us from being nobody to being somebody—indeed, a somebody of infinite value. None of us is destined to be a slave, and death has been overcome. We are no longer defined by our merely biological natures, because our nature is now to be both human and divine. From one view, there is no empirical evidence that death has been overcome for each particular human being. From another, the evidence is the unprecedented virtue flowing from the unconditional love present among the early Christians and that virtue’s indirect, historical transformation of the broader social and political world. The change in who we are is the result of a deepened human inwardness or self-consciousness: Christ made each of us irreducibly deeper by infusing divinity into every nook and cranny of our natures.
John Gray has made much the same point about the roots of rational humanism, but he, at least, went further and noted that the real problem was that both Christians and humanists refuse to accept the fact that homo sapiens are still, at base, another species of animal, probably destined to pass away like so many others did. Hell, Dimetrodon ruled as the Earth’s top predator for fifteen million years, all for naught; we’re barely 50,000 years into our reign and already constantly flirting with planet-wide self-destruction, yet we can’t stop singing our own praises over how essential we are to the universe.
But the logic here just cracks me up. Ignoring the fact that many of our altruistic inclinations are indeed rooted in our biological nature as social animals, conservatives like Hart claim that it’s intellectually dishonest and illogical to arbitrarily decide to value the humane virtues. Grounding them in agreement arrived at through shared experience and dialogue isn’t good enough, evidently. But arbitrarily deciding to believe the myth that an anthropomorphic deity granted us a magical essence that allows us to appreciate and embody those virtues makes for a rock-solid foundation to build a culture upon. Got it.
Again, we see this fear of nihilism that’s so peculiar to Christianity. By staking all value and meaning to a teleological conception of progression toward an unchanging, timeless realm of perfection, we convince ourselves that nothing in the here and now can be worth anything in and of itself. Like poor old Wile E. Coyote, we’re seduced by the illusion that we’re suspended over an abyss, and if we take our eyes off that heavenly future and glance down, if we fail to keep running in place, we’ll plummet to our doom.

The Ghost in the Machine

By in philosophy, science

io9:

Fruit flies and other simple organisms might seem like they’re creatures of instinct, governed by a set of basically predictable stimuli and responses. But fruit flies actually have free will. Depending on what your definition of free will is.
Leaving philosophy aside, we know humans have free will because we’re able to evaluate a set of different options and make a conscious decision as to which of them we’re going to choose. But for animals, we can’t ask them how they go about making decisions, so figuring out whether they possess free will in a biological sense is much trickier.
I don’t know about you, but I think I could present at least some examples of people who appear to be “creatures of instinct, governed by a set of basically predictable stimuli and responses.”
But yeah, I’ve always thought the supposed distinction between free will and determinism is such a misleading way to frame the issue. We humans are able to visualize a set of options (within certain constraints) and choose between them because the type of brain we have allows for that sort of abstract thought. Other mammals have that ability to lesser degrees, so I’m not surprised that other animals might also have some ability to intelligently react to new situations. It’s a difference more of degree than kind.

I Watch It All Through My Mirrored Shades

By in prying eyes, science, solitude

See yourself in my shades
You’ll never know if I’m looking the other way
– Animal Bag

One of the major deficits of autism is the lack of eye contact. “If patients with autism are talking to you, not only do they not look at your face, they may even turn their face in the other direction to avoid any contact,” said Dr. Sirigu.

In addition to the unusual memory that I mentioned recently, one of the things that made me wonder if I might be somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum was the fact that I’ve never been able to maintain eye contact. Even among people I’ve known for years, it’s all I can do to make occasional glances to their eyes. It’s a feeling akin to trying to stare into a searchlight. In fact, the only time I can make sustained eye contact is when I’m not the one talking, and even then, I can only do it by essentially vacating my head, sort of like when you’re daydreaming, and your eyes are fixed on a certain spot without you being conscious of what you’re looking at. So I’m afraid partners in face-to-face conversation have to choose between me not looking at them or not really hearing them. Sorry, y’all.
But long before I ever heard that there could be a biological reason for it, I had been intrigued by reading that some cultures made a virtue out of not staring in someone’s face. Tony Hillerman in Skinwalkers:
Janet Pete was studying Chee’s face. It was a habit that Chee had learned slowly, and come to tolerate slowly, and that still sometimes made him uneasy. Another of those cultural differences that Mary found odd and exotic.
(“That first month or so in class I was always saying: ‘Look at me when I talk to you,’ and the kids simply wouldn’t do it. They would always look at their hands, or the blackboard, or anywhere except looking me in the face. And finally one of the other teachers told me it was a cultural thing. They should warn us about things like that. Odd things. It makes the children seem evasive, deceptive.” And Chee had said something about it not seeming odd or evasive to him. It seemed merely polite. Only the rude peered into one’s face during a conversation…)
Janet Pete was reading his nonverbal signals. Rude, Chee thought. No wonder Navajos rated it as bad manners. It invaded the individual’s privacy.
Makes perfect sense to me. Maybe I’m a long-lost Navajo. But as long as I’m stranded here among the belegana, forced to rely on dark or mirrored sunglasses to ward off prying eyes, I have to wonder why it is that humans don’t have the natural aversion to prolonged eye contact that so many other animals do. Is this a particular cultural value that somehow got normalized by Westerners? I’ve never seen any studies that approached the topic from this angle.

Nepenthe

By in foolosophy, psychology, science

Yeah, I’m going to say that this looks rife with potential for unintended consequences:
Soldiers haunted by scenes of war and victims scarred by violence may wish they could wipe the memories from their minds. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University say that may someday be possible.
A commercial drug remains far off — and its use would be subject to many ethical and practical questions. But scientists have laid a foundation with their discovery that proteins can be removed from the brain’s fear center to erase memories forever.
“When a traumatic event occurs, it creates a fearful memory that can last a lifetime and have a debilitating effect on a person’s life,” says Richard L. Huganir, professor and chair of neuroscience in the Hopkins School of Medicine.
…”Erasing a memory and then everything bad built on that is an amazing idea, and I can see all sorts of potential,” she said. “But completely deleting a memory, assuming it’s one memory, is a little scary. How do you remove a memory without removing a whole part of someone’s life, and is it best to do that, considering that people grow and learn from their experiences.”
…Wolpe could see only limited uses for erasing a memory for now, such as for those suffering after a rape or single terrifying event.
“Certainly, there may be appropriate applications,” he said. “But human identity is tied into memory. It creates our distinctive personalities. It’s a troublesome idea to begin to be able to manipulate that, even if for the best of motives.”
I don’t dismiss this lightly, let me add. My mom thought I had total recall as a toddler (I don’t), and I’ve had others suggest that I have a memory often found among people with some of the mild autism-spectrum characteristics (which seems plausible from what I’ve learned since then). I’ve actually long been in the habit of pretending to forget things occasionally, or downplaying how easily I can remember odd details even after long periods of time, because I’ve found that it tends to freak people out. Probably because they assume that only an obsessed stalker could possibly remember that much.
So I’m very well aware that there are a number of things that would probably increase my overall happiness were they to be surgically removed from my memory, but still, I’d never choose that option, especially in light of the theme we were just discussing.

Mentis Fugit

By in alan watts, foolosophy, meditation, science

io9:

People spend 46.9% of their waking lives thinking about something other than what they’re actually doing. It’s a terribly inefficient use of one’s mind and, worse, it actually seems to make people unhappy.

Letting your mind wander might seem like a bad thing, but really it’s just the natural byproduct of being capable of abstract thought. Humans are capable of thinking about things that have happened, things that might happen, and things that may never happen at all. (As a science fiction blog, we rather encourage doing that last part.) Sure, letting your mind wander is a good recipe for goofing off, but it’s also a necessary part of contemplation and reflection.

I’ve quoted this from Auden several times before, but it just sums it up so perfectly:

With envy, terror, rage, regret,

We anticipate or remember but never are.

But yeah, I think there’s maybe a little more nuance to this. As many have said, especially Buddhists, the future and the past are mere abstractions. We only actually exist in “now”. Alan Watts used the image of a ship’s prow to symbolize this — we only ever exist right there, at the prow, as it cuts through the water, and the past flows behind us in our wake.

If you spend every present moment wishing you were somewhere else, you’re going to feel perpetually dissatisfied, since the pleasures you’re so eagerly anticipating will seem boring once they become actualized, and you’ll already be looking forward to the next one. It’ll never feel like you’ve actually experienced anything fully. You’ve become attached to the wanting, not the having.

But on the other hand, meditation is, in many ways, a form of purposely letting your mind wander, tiring itself out. Personally, I do my meditating while listening to music, and I find it revitalizing, not distracting. It’s like a mental equivalent of a good workout. Sometimes I do it while performing simple tasks that don’t require my undivided attention, like washing dishes or cutting grass, and it seems to me that somehow, the repetitive physical activity keeps me grounded, even though my mind may be on various other things. I’m not sure how to explain that exactly.

I Am He as You Are He as You Are Me and We Are All Together

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, philosophy, science, spiritual-not-religious

For we are all insulted by
The mere suggestion that we die
Each moment and that each great I
Is but a process in a process
Within a field that never closes;
As proper people find it strange
That we are changed by what we change,
That no event can happen twice
And that no two existences
Can ever be alike; we’d rather
Be perfect copies of our father,
Prefer our idées fixes to be
True of a fixed reality.
No wonder, then, we lose our nerve
And blubber when we should observe…
– W.H. Auden
Alva Noë:

Mind, after all, is almost universally taken to be something inside us. That was Descartes’ view. Inside each of us there is a thing that thinks and feels. Each of us is identical to that thing. Neuroscience updates the picture by adding that that thing inside you that thinks and feels is your brain.
You are your brain!
What are the implications of such a view? One is that we inhabit our bodies as a submariner inhabits his or her vessel; the main function of the body is to transmit signals from the surrounding sea of stimulation to neural headquarters. And what of the world beyond the body? Well, it is nothing more than a sea of potential stimulation! And what of other people? These are nothing other than more-or-less persistent patterns in the flow of surrounding stimulation!
What an ugly idea!
…Let’s imagine a new possibility. Your brain is not the thing inside you that thinks and feels. Not because something immaterial does this work for you, but because nothing does. Thinking and feeling is not something that happens in you, not in your brain, or anywhere else. Consciousness is something you achieve. It is something you do, and like everything else you do, it depends on your embedding in and reliance on the world around you (including other people).
Trying to find consciousness in the brain — consider this! — would be like trying to find the value of money in the molecular structure of bank notes. And just as the fact that we can’t find the value of money using an electron microscope does not show that value is mysterious, the fact that we can’t find consciousness in the brain does not show that consciousness is somehow unnatural.
Well, first of all, monetary value is not a property of coins and dollar bills; those are just symbolic representations of value, which itself is abstract and symbolic. The brain on the other hand, is not symbolic of consciousness, and consciousness is very much an emergent property of the brain, so this metaphor kind of falls flat.
Other than that, he seems to just be playing fast and loose with the definition of who “you” are. It is, of course, obviously true that we, as conventionally defined individuals, don’t exist in a vacuum. As Nietzsche said in response to Kant’s concept of the Ding-an-sich:
The properties of a thing are effects on other “things”:
if one removes other “things”, then a thing has no properties,
i.e., there is no thing without other things,
i.e., there is no “thing-in-itself”.
You, Joe/Josephine Blogreader, are a physical product of your parents’ DNA, and all the air, food and water that have maintained you since birth. Mentally, the thoughts you think are conditioned by the culture you live in and the language you speak, both of which are organic processes in constant evolution, with countless contributions along the way from countless people. So in that sense, yes, you are not simply a self-contained, unchanging, timeless observer peering out from the fortress of your body at a world filled with dead matter and likewise separate observers. “You” wouldn’t exist without “everything else”, as a lengthy stay in a sensory deprivation tank would make clear.
However, your individual brain is the nexus, the crossroads in time, where all these physical and cultural elements come together to form unique and unrepeatable combinations of experience. Remove or severely damage that, and there won’t be anyone “doing” or “achieving” consciousness on any level. No other conventionally defined individual will have the same thoughts you do at the same time about the same events as viewed from the same perspective. No one else will ever have the precise experience that you have, informed by the same history, at 3:18 on Wednesday afternoon next week. Understanding this does not imply a life of empty, spiritual barrenness or any of the other clichés he trots out, just as understanding the former perspective does not imply mental peace and bliss. You can fully grasp that life itself, the great process, the Tao, the “I know not what” will continue on after absorbing all of our temporary individual selves back into itself and still feel a pang of wistfulness at the thought of your individual perspective, limited as it is, coming to an end at some point.
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