The Immutability of Vicissitudes, part 1

Life contains many unpleasant, disagreeable, and painful things.

The human question is, how do we deal with this constant unpleasantness in our lives?

Flight...?

The first solution we might conceive is almost trivial: when something is unpleasant or painful, you move away from it. This is a tried and true survival mechanism inherited from our primeval ancestors, a mechanism which we possess simply because organisms who historically responded to a certain class of sensations – viz., sensations which appeared threatening to the organisms' integrity – tended to survive more often than those who did not. (Or so the evolutionary story goes). Biologically speaking, this manifests as the "flight" half of the fight-or-flight response.

Being the complex, intelligent, reflective creatures that we are, we humans can recognize a general pattern behind the individual instances of pain and suffering that we encounter from moment to moment. That is, we start to conceive of suffering as a class of things, not just as a collection of unrelated particulars – just as with any abstraction from particulars to a universal. Further experience, observation, and cogitation yields the conclusion that suffering, considered as a whole, cannot be escaped by any of our standard evolutionarily-supplied abilities: you cannot outrun it, you cannot outmaneuver it, you cannot hide from it, you cannot climb into a tree where it cannot follow, you cannot take refuge in your family/herd/pack/tribe. In short, there is simply no place in the physical universe to which you can flee to escape The Suffering. While we can escape individual instances of suffering, we cannot run from Suffering in its entirety. We are cornered with our backs against the wall.

...Or Fight.

Well, since we cannot escape such a nebulous nemesis, what of our other most primitive response? Perhaps we can posture aggressively, puff out our chests, howl ferociously, and appear larger than The Suffering – perhaps we can scare it off, thus avoiding a potentially costly physical confrontation. But no, this foe cannot be frightened, and in fact we cannot even locate it tangibly in a concrete form! We cannot see it, we cannot touch it, we do not know of any way we could conceivably harm it. This means that our next best aggressive strategy – pummeling the enemy with a rock or fist until it submits, flees, or dies itself – is equally useless.

Manipulation

So much, then, for our basal instincts. Yet, being human, we have keener minds than most other animals; as such, we have also developed keener methods for dealing with problems beyond hitting or running from them. Notably, we are able to 1) communicate/negotiate, and 2) manipulate our environment in subtle ways to effect desired outcomes. As it turns out, the second method encompasses the first, since, from a cynical point of view, communication is nothing but manipulating one specific environment – namely, the social environment. After all, intelligent communication primarily developed in order to nonviolently resolve tensions between tribe members and to facilitate group efforts. Or so one must suppose.

So far as this relates to suffering, notice how I anthropomorphized it above, calling it "The Suffering" and treating it like an animal foe (even as I claimed to deny it corporality). In doing so, I behaved much like primitive peoples that personified natural forces in the form of deities and spirits in order to understand and exert some measure of control over them. This strategy is actually quite forgivable: to a species that had developed such massively complex social abilities, attempting to appease hostile forces through social means comes naturally. What do you do if you are a scrawny weakling when faced with a furious, ferocious, muscled, invincible fellow human? You try to defuse the situation any way you can while preserving your own health; often this takes the form of trying to imagine something your antagonist wants so that you might offer it to him/her as a distraction or appeasement.

Communication/Negotiation

We thrive in social hierarchies. Paying respect to our betters is a way of life for us, so much that we do it unthinkingly: think of the biggest wolf in the pack getting first dibs on a kill; think of a tribal chieftain accumulating wealth; think of royalty and aristocrats receiving taxes and deferential treatment; consider how celebrities today are revered by the masses; consider how the American President is addressed so formally and with such respect. Reflect on how (some) individuals behave around a venerated religious leader, or the way that you must defer to your boss at work. Even at a more personal level, think of how children are taught to obey their parents ("honor your father and mother"...), and think of your own social networks – isn't there always a subtle awareness about who the "top dog" or leader-figure is? He or she may lead because of any number of reasons, be it physical aptitude, intelligence, beauty or social dexterity; but this "leading" factor is nearly always present and noticeable, should you take the time to see it.

At some point in our history, we must have looked at ourselves – and our place in the world – and seen that there are no visible rulers or leaders above humanity. Nonetheless, mysterious and powerful forces directly impacted our lives, often incomprehensibly. Sometimes there were droughts or long winters. Sometimes there was illness and death. Sometimes there were wildfires, earthquakes, and other traumatic natural disasters – floods apparently left a particular mark on our species, judging by the many and varied ancient diluvian myths.

How did ancient humankind cope with all this confusing horror? By giving the mysterious and powerful forces human faces (figuratively, if not literally). Imagining natural forces under the control of sentient beings with thoughts, desires, and motivations like their own allowed primitive humankind to "understand" misfortunes ("The gods are punishing us because they are angry!") and, more importantly, to "bargain with" them ("Let us give the gods a gift to appease them.").

(Should we think it a chance that Prometheus is said to have stolen fire from the gods? No – for fire was at one point the sole property and providence of deities, just as, presumably, all other non-human forces must have been: lightning controlled by Zeus, harvest and fertility controlled by Demeter, etc., etc.)

It is almost tragically amusing: we offered things that we considered precious, valuable, or attractive (bright, shiny rocks; young virgins; cooked meats) to these celestial divinities. In a typically human fashion, we assumed that all other beings would have similar values as ourselves; or, perhaps, we treated subjective values as though they were objective properties of objects, leading us to conclude that all intelligent beings would agree with our tastes. Of course Yahweh would find the scent of burning animal-flesh sweet (Gen 8:20-21), just as humans do! Of course the "sons of God" would find the "daughters of men" attractive, and want to mate with them (Gen 6:1-4)! Human men find human women attractive, so why should not God's other creations find them attractive as well? (In a yet-more-typically-human fashion, we still do this today: see Eliezer Yudkowsky's posts on the Mind Projection Fallacy and 2-Place and 1-Place Words). Above all, of course we would be created in God's own image, since it only makes sense that God would be like us, would think like us, feel like us (remember His fits of temper and jealousy in the Old Testament), etc.

Right?

Now, after that digressive historical exegesis, let us resume our inquiry into Suffering. I think by this point in the human saga, it is pretty obvious that attempting to negotiate with Suffering as though it were a sentient being is not going to fare any better than attempting to run from it or attempting to bash it. After all, prayer has a long, long history of being fantastically unreliable. Simply put, we have had much better success in changing the world when we learn to do so on its own terms (in accordance with its natural laws) rather than pleading with anthropomorphized forces. In spite of many claims by the religious, there remains no way to reliably effect change through divine aid. To put it succinctly, technology works a lot lot better than prayer under all verifiable circumstances, and it has done so ever since we first began bringing water to planted seeds rather than crossing our fingers and wishing for rain.

Let us abandon, then, all hope of attempting to reason with or appease Suffering as though it were a conscious entity.

Technology

Is technology our final hope? If it has been so wonderfully efficacious in the past, maybe we can dare to believe that Suffering as a whole could be outsmarted through a particularly clever manipulation of materials and energies, as enabled through the proper understanding of natural laws.

Transhumanists (Nick Bostrum, Ray Kurzweil, FM-2030 and the like) may believe something like this. They dream, after all, of conquering death, illness, and starvation. Yet surely these are not our only problems. Let us pretend that it is possible to thoroughly eliminate our physical woes. (Something like a heaven as promised by the Abrahamic religions, yet without God, and in our current world.) Yet, it seems that there would still be hordes upon hordes of other problems still in existence.

For would there not be jealousy and rivalry? Betrayal? Boredom? Ennui? Existential angst? Hatred? Wars? Cruelty? Rebellion? It seems fundamentally misguided to me to suppose that these problems would simply vanish if the playing field were leveled through technology. I do not think, then, that the transhumanist dream suits what I'm looking for here.


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In the preceding discussion, I have attempted to cover the general methods through which we might deal with the problem of suffering externally. In the forthcoming follow up to this post, I shall consider what we have done (and what we can do) to deal with the problem internally, or psychologically.
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And Now For Something Completely Different

... After that ridiculously long post on Buddhism, here's something both hilarious and depressing! Sarah Haskins (not to be confused with the Olympics competitor by the same name) is a comedian who has appeared on a few brief segments of the show infoMania, pointing out how specific types of television advertising is geared specifically toward women. Her segment is called "Target Women," appropriately enough.

I consolidated the few clips I could find here in this post, because of course you'll want to see them all! I like her a lot, and I hope to see more of her in the future. With luck she'll rally some more fans - She's already receiving a lot of positive comments from the feminist blog-o-sphere in general (e.g., Salon, Feministing.) .


***EDITED as of 08-30-08 to remove links to videos, since the server changed their content. ***

My Problems With Buddhism

[Disclaimer: I have not studied Buddhism as much as I would have liked. It may be that I am falsely representing certain Buddhist doctrines (and yes, I realize that they vary from sect to sect), but this is all to the best of my knowledge, and I believe it corresponds to the common grounds of the different sects.]

Problem One: Unwarranted Claims

My first complaint about Buddhism is that it makes unsubstantiated claims about the nature of the universe: karma as a force exists and influences us (e.g., what form our next life will take is dictated by our karma); there is an endless cycle of birth and rebirth for an individual soul; there are six states of existence (Gods, demigods/Asura, humans, animals, ghosts, beings in hell), and then three higher realms of existence (the Realm of Desire, the Realm of Pure Form, the Realm of Formlessness); in some sense, the soul persists throughout its rebirths, even while the individual dies; and so on and so forth.

There is a wealth of these metaphysical assertions. Yet for all that, the Buddha never provides us with evidence or any good reason to support the above claims! What do we have instead? Mystic revelation. The Buddha, as he sat and meditated under the bodhi tree, apparently tapped into a deeper source of knowledge - a source inaccessible to the rest of us - at which point he discovered The Truth. Presumably, then, we must trust the Buddha's word that things really are as he claimed. We cannot experience The Truth As Revealed To The Buddha ourselves until we achieve a similar state of enlightenment (if we ever manage to), and there is no way to either vindicate or falsify his "Truth" otherwise.

If you are like me, that alone will not feel particularly satisfying. When they are of such an extraordinary nature, I find it difficult to take anyone's claims on faith alone. I imagine most Buddhists would adopt an "If you don't believe it, try it yourself" attitude, saying that I too would eventually experience The Truth if I got to that point myself. But, attaining nirvana is supposed to be incredibly difficult; and, there is no way to know that one is doing the right thing until one actually reaches the end (nirvana). We are told that one can spend one's entire lifetime (and more! So many more lifetimes) seeking enlightenment unsuccessfully. If we could conceivably waste the rest of our lives pursuing nirvana without success, should we not want a little more assurance than "You will see it once you reach enlightenment ourself"? Since we cannot prove that the soul exists or that reincarnation works as advertised, then for all we know we only have one life to live. Would it not be more worthwhile to spend this one life in other pursuits, striving for things we are reasonably likely to achieve in one lifetime?

Many or all religions suffer from this problem of unverifiability. So this is not anything particularly special by itself. At any rate, the Buddha himself discouraged speculation and arguments about metaphysical issues beyond what he laid out himself. So let me move on to reveal the more grievous problem with Buddhistic doctrines.

Problem Two: Self-Undermining Beliefs

The four noble truths of Buddhism are as follows:
1. Existence is suffering.
2. Suffering is caused by desire/attachment.
3. It is possible to escape desire (and hence suffering).
4. The way to escape desire is through the Eightfold Path.

The the first truth - to exist is to suffer constantly - is pretty uncontroversial (isn't it?), but the second - suffering is caused by desire and/or attachment - might be less obvious. Is it really the case that all suffering results from desire? Well, when we look at examples of suffering, they are invariably accompanied by a desire to relieve that suffering in some way or another. Moreover, the ostensible "cause" of suffering (as understood by the sufferer) always stems from desire or attachment itself. For example, I may feel upset that a friend snubs me - this is because I wanted her to treat me otherwise than she did. I may feel hurt that my son dies, and this hurt derived from my feelings of love and care - my attachment - that I experienced toward him.

So, to cut to the chase, Buddha's strategy is pretty simple. We just found out what causes suffering: desire and attachment. So, let us rid ourselves of those things. The fourth noble truth points us toward the Eightfold Path, and we are told that practicing the Eightfold Path will lead to a gradual lessening of our fixation on transient things. The eventual aim of Buddhism is to realize that we are all nothing (or "no thing" - nothing we can comprehend); Buddha advocated the belief of anatman - that there is no self. Furthermore, everything changes and fluctuates, and so it is folly to become attached to anything and treat it as permanent. Permanence, for the Buddha, is an illusion.

What is so wrong with all of the above?

If there is no self (since my "I" changes from moment to moment), how can I really do anything, much less seek enlightenment? If there is no self, what precisely is being deluded and subject to suffering?

If all desires lead to suffering, what is the worth of compassion? Buddhism emphasizes compassion frequently, and Buddha himself remained in our plane in order to spread his words and alleviate our suffering. But how could he have been motivated to do so? At the point of enlightenment, he would have seen that all desires are pointless or harmful, including the desire to help others. In essence, I deny that Bodhisattvas (those who attain freedom from desire/attachment yet remain in the world anyway to help others) are possible.

Finally, let us suppose for an instant that the Buddha is wrong, that reincarnation is false, and in fact, there is no afterlife whatsoever. If so, should not death be the easiest way to achieve this sort of state - where one has no more desires or attachments, where one is free from suffering? Why do Buddhists not kill themselves, but for the threat of incurring bad karma?

And, on that note, is it even possible for a sentient, conscious being to still exist without desire? I would think such a being must want to remain free from desires and attachments in order to continually effect that state. The want to remain aloof from desires is still a want.

That is the true problem here: Buddhism entices us to accept its tenants in order to be free of suffering. Yet, that desire to be free from suffering was itself an attachment, an attachment to our own egos. At the least, some desires seem to lead us away from suffering - such as the desire to know The Truth. If so, it is not actually true that all desires or attachments cause suffering. Hence, Buddhist beliefs undermine themselves.

What's WITH minds anyway?

Last night I dreamt a musical--well, at least one song from it, anyhow. It was rather amusing: in the manner typical of musicals, after some key event had occurred, abruptly music came from nowhere and everyone present engaged in singing or dancing. In the manner typical of dreams, of course this made perfect sense, and I participated just as willingly as everyone else. (I did think it was marvelous that everyone present somehow either knew the words and melody, or they were adroit enough at following by ear.)

Now, the peculiar thing to note is that this was music (complete with orchestration and lyrics) I'd never hard before--it was the product of my unconscious mind. I can't guarantee that the music would win any awards, but it made harmonic sense, had convincing melodic content, and it flowed pleasingly. The lyrics were probably pretty nonsensical but I can't remember a thing about them.

(Also notable was the fact that I myself sung along, I was very deft at picking out various ways to harmonize with the other singers, something I've sometimes had trouble doing by ear. But this was easy--so very easy--and it felt natural.)

So my question: why is it so much easier to create music while I'm asleep? Why does it flow out so effortlessly, without thought or conscious guidance? I'm not saying that conscious guidance is necessarily a bad thing, but it's kind of frustrating that I can't simply choose to let this same thing happen to me while I'm awake. Again, I don't have any guarantees that the music produced would be any good, but I'd at least like to experiment and see what comes out.

I know that this ability is in my head somewhere: the ability to simply let musical works flow out, as Mozart was allegedly able to do. But I remain frustratingly unable to tap it--just as, for a highly relevant analogy, I know that the other events from that dream are in my head somewhere, but I can't remember them. Just as with any other memory one has difficulty recalling. The knowledge is there somewhere, encoded in an obscure part of one's neural circuitry. But how does one access it?


This leads me to ponder again the difference between the waking state and the dreaming state. I feel as though inhibition must be a large part of it. In dreams, while I do retain a modicum of reasoning ability, I am often so much more willing to simply embrace the absurd, the inconsistent, and the unusual without pausing to think, "Hey wait--this doesn't make sense."

Would I be better able to let music flow forth from within me if I stopped being so critical of it, then?

But if I am not critical, how can I trust that it will be any good?

Perhaps a strategy like the following is needed: relax the constraints of one's mind ("Free your mind," as Morpheus advised Neo), and let whatever wants to come forth, come forth. Do not seek to consciously guide it, do not judge it, do not think about impact this will have on others, about what it means--try not to think at all, really. After you have let this outflowing run its course, then--and only then!--do you reactivate your critical faculties in order to evaluate the products of your creativity. Only then ought to occur assessment, judgement, and revision.

Neo-Mystical Idealism: the Interrelationship Between Belief, Truth, and Action

Preamble.
This post is concerned with what I will call Neo-Mystical Idealism (NMI) of the sort often hinted at - or even explicitly endorsed - in pop-spirituality/self-help books (e.g. The Way of the Peaceful Warrior), movies (ranging from fiction like The Matrix and The Waking Life to allegedly "factual" films like The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know), fantasy and sci-fi books (Philip K. Dick), video games, various other popular sources (the Planescape expansion for the game Dungeons & Dragons), new age spirituality, ancient mystical traditions, certain idiosyncratic philosophers (Anaxagoras, perhaps), literary figures (Jorge Luis Borges, on some interpretations?), and a few fringe theories of modern physics.

Definition.
What I call NMI, broadly construed, is the belief that our thoughts, desires, beliefs, and/or intentions exert a direct, significant, formative influence on reality (and our ability to interact with it). Depending on the variant of NMI, this may be as subtle as influencing a random number generator toward a particular bias simply by willing it so, or it may be as drastic as the belief that reality simply is a dream constructed wholly by our own minds. I say "neo-mystical" due to its overwhelmingly mystical nature and its current prevalence in pop-culture, and I say "idealism" in reference to philosophical idealism where the world consists of mind-objects rather than "real" objects.

Notes:
+ "Idealism" may be a bit of a misnomer, since it is not necessary to believe that nothing exists beyond what the mind perceives in order to accept NMI; but, it's the most relevant term I can think of.
+ Accepting the efficacy of prayer or magic rituals could be seen as embracing NMI, since they both consist in effecting results through extra-physical means. But I would prefer to exclude them from NMI-hood since both prayer and magic rituals seem to be an appeal toward an external power, whereas proponents of NMI seem to focus very much on the personal mind's power.

Example.
In The Matrix, those who have been awakened - that is, those who have been taken from out of the computer simulation and shown the real world - realize a fundamental truth about what they thought was reality. Reality does not actually work the way they had learned and placidly accepted all their live. Rather, there is an underlying substratum - in this case, a digital reality designed and maintained by artificial intelligences - which governs phenomenal appearances. This means that what were thought to be unbreakable rules of reality are actually subordinate to the rules of the simulation. If one is in the know, one can "hack" the system to do things which aren't supposed to be allowed: as Morpheus puts it, "Some rules can be bent. Others can be broken."

This all pertains to Neo-Mystical Idealism in that belief is inextricably intertwined with overcoming the rules of the fake reality. Time and time again, The Matrix stresses the power of the mind and the power of belief. One of the most memorable scenes occurs during a training program where Neo, the recently-awakened hero, receives his first genuine test: he must leap a vast distance from the roof of one building to another, in defiance of his firmly entrenched beliefs about the laws of gravity. Notably, Morpheus tells Neo the following just before he jumps across the gap himself: "You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind. " Morpheus sails across the humongous distance practically without effort, but when Neo jumps, he plummets like a rock; he did not successfully follow Morpheus' advice, but clung to his old beliefs and preconceptions about the functioning of the world. Hence, he failed.

From this and many other instances that emphasize belief, The Matrix conveys a pretty clear message: your beliefs are intensely related to your abilities (at least when one is in a computer simulation, at any rate). This message is, indeed, essentially the same as that handed down from so many other sources. Transcend the world of illusion (realize The Truth), and you will be able to do the previously unimaginable. This is one of the key components of NMI - it always requires a sort of "awakening" or "enlightenment" process.

Reality?
There is a grain of truth in the lesson taught by NMI: false beliefs can easily inhibit our full potential. Certainly history abounds with examples where the "impossible" later turned out to be quite possible, and there resulted a dramatic shift in outlook to accommodate that change. In quite a few cases, it seems as though a belief (or lack of belief) hindered progress, as when it was thought (prior to 1954) that humans could not run a mile in less than four minutes. Yet, after an initial pioneering spirit showed that it was possible, suddenly many others followed suit, and improved upon his time.

So that seems pretty uncontroversial. However, there is a very big difference between being limited by a false belief and a belief creating or affecting reality. Beliefs do not and cannot create reality They can only accord or disaccord with it. Hence, while we should take from The Matrix the lesson that we should not grow complacent in our beliefs, this does not mean that NMI generally is true. If NMI were true, we ought to be able to find confirmation of it beyond the shaky pseudoscientific studies published in disreputable journals.

On the other hand, perhaps my belief that "Beliefs do not and cannot create reality" is itself a false belief? And perhaps I am limiting myself when I latch onto it so ferociously? And perhaps others do the same?

Three Cheers for Angst

When I ask, "Is life worth living," what does that really mean?

The very notion entails that there is a "worth" to be evaluated here. Normally, when we ask something like, "Is X worth doing," it suggests that we ought to examine whatever activity "X" represents, then determine whether its expected return will compensate for the expected investment.

So, is life worth living?

Living, under all meanings of the word, requires quite a bit of an investment--it involves suffering, tedium, labor, constant maintenance of and vigilance toward a physical shell. In fact, simply by choosing to continue to live, we open ourselves up to the possibility of undergoing every torment that could possibly be experienced by a human in a similar situation.

On the other hand, living also yields the possibility of every greatest joy that we could conceive. On the more mundane level, it is normal to experience pleasures, happiness at friends and family, food, bits of luck, enjoyment of love and sex, etc.

So, to evaluate whether "life is worth living" for a particular individual, she should determine whether her expected benefits will outweigh her expected detriments. Often, when someone reaches the point of suicide, it is because life no longer seems worth living: to the severely depressed individual, the expected suffering far outweighs the expected pleasure--and, perhaps, at some point it seems impossible for there ever to be any future pleasure again.

When I consider this post--I think, implicitly, is it worth it to try and keep working and rewriting until I come up with something more coherent? Something that others will be able to appreciate, that I will be able to look back at with pride (or something resembling pride)? Apparently the answer is no--or at least, it's not worth the extensive reworking that calls out to me--the post almost has a life of its own, in how it shouts to me, "There are parts of me that are wrong! Fix them!"--but sometimes--as now--it does not seem worth the revision and editing process. The striving. I mean, don't get me wrong--I'm doing some minimal reworking as I go, of course--but I keep needing to sort of grit my teeth and continue on past the glaring errors in order to make progress at a ll--because I lack the perseverance, dedication, and motivation required to bring it up to the standards it should be. For example, as I write, I am conscious that this paragraph (nor the post as a whole) does not flow particularly well; it skips from one subject to another without preamble or continuity, and it contains long, ill-formed sentences--often broken with m-dashes, because that's easier than figuring out how to make it into something elegant.

(I wonder how much my need to be free of errors stems from a fear that others will mock me or think less of me for them?)

But yes. That calling-- that anthropomorphization of error. Maybe it's not so much an anthropomorphization as--I don't know. But it's nearly tangible sometimes--the wrongness of a given object (compared to its ideal standards). I feel thus when I compose music, when I write a paper, when I long to be perfect in any way. In fact, too often the world as a whole seems this way to me.

And when I don't have the energy or ability to make it right--or at least to put forth a good solid effort, if nothing else--it doesn't seem worth continuing with.

Hence, perhaps, why I have no motivation?

I don't know. Is the problem that I lack motivation or that I lack competence?

Lack of Content

Well, as was probably inevitable, I seem to have run out of steam with this blog. That tends to happen. I guess I just haven't been quite as enthused about writing out my own thoughts on various issues, or something. This blog should probably be considered "dying."

It's not as though I really blog about anything that's genuinely philosophical, in the academic sense. I seem to excel at pseudo-philosophy more than anything else. Mreh. Writing papers for class is quite a drudgery too. For whatever reason, genuine philosophical issues seem to have soured for me.

I can't seem to make myself care about what various commentators think Kant really meant in the Transcendental Dialectic, or how his principles can be applied to field X for fascinating result Y. Do I care about the Ship of Theseus, the nature of time, or the fundamental nature of the reality? Not really, no. Not at the moment. If ever, to some degree.

What am I interested in?

I'm interested in how we as a species apply logic to the world. I'm interested in whether there's something wrong with how we conceptualize the world, generally. Could it be possible that our fundamental assumptions and frameworks are holding us back? What if there's a better way?

And yet, I don't want to do any studying that would aid me to find that out.

=/