Musings on Rebirth

Rebirth, let us say, is that which occurs when an autonomous entity takes actions to arrange matter into a self-sustaining replica of its own pattern. In mammals, the actual "birthing" process is that which occurs when the newly fashioned pattern physically emerges from within the host entity, becoming independent, to some degree. But let us use "rebirth" in its more general, metaphor-inclusive sense.

"Rebirth" can also refer to the revival, renewal, or reactivation of an autonomous entity after a period of dormancy, rather than the creation of a separate replica per se. Plants die yet are reborn each year, in a sense. Aside from the specific "annual" species, which literally do die each year, all season-responsive plants undergo changes that mimic death and rebirth throughout the year, just as with the hibernation cycle of many animals, and indeed, with the periodic alternation between activity and rest that all animals experience.


Rebirth is what keeps things vivacious.

Punishment and Justice

What should we do with those who commit heinous crimes? What about those who commit minor crimes?

Punishment as a deterrent--like any overt deterrent, I suppose--functions as a threat. If you misbehave, you will be hurt or slain, or something will be taken from you. Yet that isn't where punishment ends, psychologically: people feel a rage towards particularly vile criminals, a rage that is more of a bloodlust or "righteous" fury than anything else. In these moments, the thinking is not, "We must make a warning to keep others from doing this", but rather, "That bastard must pay!"

Someone who hurts others deserves to be hurt themselves. When paired with the view that those who do good deserve good themselves, this sentence is a very near relative to the Golden Rule. We see the sentiment naturally manifested in the Judeo-Christian punishment of sinners and reward of believers, and indeed, in Jesus's famous explicit formulation of the Golden Rule. Hinduism's principle of karma is another example; even if it's not seen as a "punishment" per se by the Hindus, clearly it stems from the same sort of thinking. More recently, the neo-Pagan/Wiccan Rule of Three tells us that our decisions, beneficent or maleficent, will be visited upon us again, with threefold consequences.

Nietzsche described the general punishment urge in depressingly incisive terms:

... to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”? To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury as well as for the distress caused by the injury, got an extraordinary offsetting pleasure: creating suffering—a real celebration, something that, as I’ve said, was valued all the more, the greater it contradicted the rank and social position of the creditor. [1]

I would quibble with him here about harming others being "the highest degree of pleasure" for most people, but I think the general gist of this passage is right. Causing others to suffer, in certain contexts, brings pleasure which is supposed to "make up" for wrongs perpetrated against oneself. (If "pleasure" is too strong a word, then "satisfaction" may be substituted, though mayhap that sugarcoats the situation too much.)

Considered less aesthetically and more economically, as it were, one gets the impression that there exists some metaphysical balance or scale, upon which doing wrong tilts the scale; and this tilting must be accounted for. "Harm" or "hurt" is the currency being weighed here, and so a person (or, more usually, a government) does what would normally be "wrong" to a criminal, and thus the upset scale is righted.

When generalized and made normative, we call this meting out of harm for harm "justice". For Western culture, Lady Justice (Justitia) symbolizes the concept quite plainly: she carries a scale of judgment and a sword, the first for determining where and how much harm to dole out, and the second for applying it. In "civilized" societies, now that we feel a conflict between wanting wrongdoers to suffer and squeemishness about the dirty work that that entails, we do not directly apply punishments ourselves; instead, we license a certain body of people--viz., the government and its police force--to enact the tenets of justice, which is to say, the tenets of reciprocity. Not literal reciprocity in the sense of an eye for an eye, of course; we are sufficiently advanced that we can invent substitutes and equivalents such as fines and imprisonment. Or, in some dire cases, the punishment probably exceeds the crime quite excessively.

Actually, the vast majority of crimes don't incite much ire (bloodlust) in the average citizen, because the vast majority of crimes are misdemeanors that do not directly harm individuals.[2] Jay walking; smoking cigarettes in a non-smoking area; smoking marijuana; downloading and sharing copyrighted material illegally on the internet; most other forms of copyright infringement; violating the terms of agreement in a competition or an online game by cheating; minor speeding or another small traffic offence; violating a zoning ordinance, that sort of thing. While opponents of drug use agree abstractly that smoking marijuana deserves punishment, I do not think they actively feel rage when they see or hear of such use, as long as it is not, say, "contributing to their children's delinquency". Players of an online game may feel that cheaters should be banned from the game--and in a fit of passion, perhaps more than that--but they typically do not believe that cheaters should be fined or locked up. (Indeed, perhaps these aren't even "misdemeanors" or "infractions", although most of the time legal agreements have clearly been broken.)

Along the continuum of wrongdoing, two things influence a bloodthirsty emotional reaction: personal impact, which is to say, how much an individual is personally affected by it, and severity or depravity of the crime. The former is more of a selfish thing, perhaps, insofar as we tend to care less about vandalism when it is not our very own property or part of a public space we care about. The latter is more universal or normative insofar as we can be riled up by hearing about child molesters, serial killers, or any perpetrator who inspires serious revulsion in us in spite of our own lack of personal investment in the matter.

[1] The Genealogy of Morals, more specifically the online edition here, because I'm lazy. Second essay, §6.

[2] "Misdemeanor" may not be the appropriate legal term here. "Infraction" or "regulatory offence" might be better. I should also add that whether another person is directly harmed or not can be argued in each of the following examples, but hopefully you can put that aside or mentally substitute your preferred examples as necessary.

Inquiry Into Impossibility

(Briefly).

I am a being with desires. Roughly, this means that I, as a sentient system, feel impelled to relieve an urge. So, I create a mental simulation of some thing, some state of affairs that differs from the current state of the world, that I expect (or hope) will alleviate that urge.

A simple example: Debra is hungry. Instinct and memory tell her that moving her body so as to bring comestibles to her mouth and chew (+ swallow, etc.) will make her less hungry. Thus, her object of desire is a state where she has eaten food, or where her stomach is full, or something to that effect.

The fundamental principle, as everyone already knows, is that actions modify our environment, and our bodies consequently reward us – with dopamine and the diminishment of urge – through modifying the environment in particular ways.

What happens, now, if I desire something impossible?

Let me sit and contemplate a bowl of fruit. My desire is for one of the fruit – a mango, perhaps – to be in my hand. I have, then, a clearly defined goal (a simulated aspect of the environment which will sate my want), and all that remains is to use the power of action to translate object of desire into actuality. Common sense says I should move myself within range of the bowl (if I'm not there already), extend an arm, and pick it up. However, my desire is slightly more complex than that: I want to achieve my goal without going through those steps. Part of my envisioned goal includes the condition that I collect the mango in the absence of gross physical movement.

There might be other options: maybe I have a friend (or servant) nearby who will interpret a very slight gesture on my part as a request for the mango. Or maybe there's a mechanical hand and conveyor belt set up that leads directly to my own biological hand, and it is activated through some minute action – moving my eyes or blinking in a particular pattern, for example.

But let's say none of these things have been arranged: the most likely situation is that I'm sitting in place alone, unaided, merely willing the mango to somehow appear in my hand through no great effort of my own.

That this should happen is improbable to the point of impossibility.

So, I review my options: supposing that I stubbornly stick to my original constraints (no gross physical movement), there is little to nothing that I can do to change the situation. To effect change, action is required; and only a particular subset of available actions leads to particular (desired) outcomes. If the set of actions-available-to-me happens to be disjoint to the set of actions-leading-to-my-goal, it seems I am utterly powerless. There must be overlap between those categories, otherwise it is logically impossible for me to achieve my goal through action.

Is there any other way to achieve a goal than through action? By the very nature of the word "achieve", I think the answer is no. Is it possible for me to accomplish something while doing nothing? Pace Laozi, the very idea reeks of contradiction. "But," I protest, "I am doing something – I'm thinking and simulating." The problem is that, apparently, thinking and simulating exert no influence on the universe if they are not accompanied by physical forces to realize their aims. Alone, they do not overlap with very many sets of actions-that-lead-to-goals at all.

How can I shape the universe to match my desires? Only through the channels that the universe allows me. And so the question becomes, how can I change those channels?

Philosophy as counter-productive in a therapeutic sense?

From Irvin D. Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy:

As nature abhors a vacuum, we humans abhor uncertainty. One of the tasks of the therapist is to increase the patient's sense of certainty and mastery. It is a matter of no small importance that one be able to explain and order the events in our lives into some coherent and predictable pattern. To name something, to locate its place in a causal sequence, is to begin to experience it as under our control. No longer, then, is our internal experience or behavior frightening, alien or out of control; instead, we behave (or have a particular inner experience) because of something we can name or identify. The '"because" offers one mastery (or a sense of mastery that phenomenologically is tantamount to mastery). [pp. 189-190]

Does the study of philosophy, I wonder, run counter to that need we have for certainty? Or on the contrary, does it perhaps assist it? After all, though philosophy does not provide us with cut-and-dry answers, and its study exacerbates our awareness of the human's dismal epistemic and existential plight, nonetheless any sort of rational investigation (of which philosophy purports to be the discipline par excellance) will invariably encompass the latter part of Yalom's quote, viz., the bit about "naming" and explaining/ordering events.

The Ancients make for a good example here: reducing the physical world's phenomena to a limited number of substances--e.g. fire/change for Heraclitus, water for Thales, air for Anaximenes, all four elements for Empedocles--allows the more succinct and manageable comprehension of that world. Rational reductionism of all shades and hues affords a better sense of psychological certainty, and consequently an increased feeling of "mastery". Science, as the eventual granddaughter of this impulse, performs the same function, although our methods have since grown much more mathematical and empirical.

But by no means ought we think this strategy unique to science and philosophy. Human mythology is cross-culturally rife with proposed explanations for phenomena ("just so" stories). Tellingly, many of them explicitly exalt the importance of words and naming in the development of humanity. For current Euro-American culture, most obviously we see Adam's naming of the beasts in Genesis. Sigmund Freud asserted that religion attempts to reconcile our needs for control against the volatile chaos of nature: if the natural world is controlled utterly by a superior being who acts as a father for us, we are thus assured that there is order lurking behind ostensible chaos; and, more importantly, it is an order with our own best interests in mind (eventually, that is. Because God's will is inscrutable and ineffable, we must accept that bad things will happen to us in the now). Finally, it is an order which is not set forever in stone, but an order which may be bargained with and appealed to, since it is ruled fundamentally by a person of sorts, not by a blind, unintelligent, and uncaring force. (The "Communication/Negotiation" section of my post "The Immutability of Vicissitudes, Part 1" addresses this too.)

It may in fact be fruitful to analyze the scientific thirst for knowledge in light of psychoanalytical need for control, and I am positive that I'm not the first to suggest this. We might say that science-lust is an extension of Freud's interpretation of religion: science serves similar psychological needs, although it requires a deep paradigm shift as well. The scientific Weltanschauung does not privilege humanity by pretending that the universe operates in humanity's best interest, nor does it offer us a kindly father-figure. However, it does give us an explanation--an understanding of order inherent behind the horrible confusions nature presents us with; and it supplies us, through understanding, with a means to combat our own helplessness.

Thus, science may be seen nearly as an outgrowth of religion (more properly, the religious impulse); but it is one that replaces an anthropomorphic epistemology with a mechanical epistemology. As Quine said of physical objects and gods,

Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. ["Two Dogmas of Empiricism"]

That is to say, we put forth the common understanding of physical objects (as opposed to the skeptic's or the idealist's) as an explanation for our collected observations in the same way that, and for similar reasons as, our ancestors put forth gods. However, gods are not very good explanations and they do not enable us to do things the way that believing in the reality of physical objects do; hence their (physical objects') epistemic superiority.

Though we cannot appeal to a God anymore, science does furnish us with a means to control nature ourselves, which is something that religion and mythology could never adequately supply. From this we get the term "playing God" and our species' tradition of shunning technological progress for the power it takes away from God. Now, the contemporary existentially-minded human finds herself sitting down in God's throne after having killed Him, and she finds herself terrified by the loneliness, the lack of direction, and the growing awareness that, if God had ever existed, He wouldn't have been any better off than she is now.

So, all respect due to Boethius, is philosophy actually a consolation? Cautiously, I say that it can be; but I hasten to add that stopping there is woefully (and willfully?) near-sighted. Rational inquiry enables us to satisfy some of the needs Yalom detailed above in a similar capacity that religion has served past-ly. Unfortunately, we no sooner find a good reason to believe something than we recognize that there can be no absolute certainty (in a broad sense). Naming (and, these days, quantifying) the surrounding world is a valuable ability, but the relentless and open-eyed pursuit of exhaustive naming schemes leads one to the conclusion that such things are impossible--and that certainty is more so.

(It seems to me that Mark Z. Danielewski deals with these themes among others in his novel House of Leaves, although I may not be able to say exactly how.)

Why we're here

It doesn't seem as though the universe should exist. It is common to think there should be a reason--a truthmaker--for why the universe exists as opposed to not existing.

Which is a mighty peculiar thing, since we've certainly never had any observations of a non-existent universe, nor can we even properly imagine it (in my opinion). All we have is the assumption that the pre-natal and natural state of anything is non-existence, or absence; accordingly, there must be something else, some kind of metaphysical mechanism, that causes that non-existence to become existence.

This stems from our observations about causality, perhaps coupled with innate physical intuitions. Maybe it isn't so peculiar to have this belief, then, since every time that we witness an effect in everyday life, it is preceded (anteceded) by a cause. Hence cosmological arguments; hence the conclusion that there must have been either a single "unmoved mover" or an infinite chain of antecedent causes to explain the universe's existence. Well, that or the universe shouldn't exist at all, being causeless.

I wonder if we're really justified in this conclusion. We have never witnessed something come from nothing (which is presumably what must have happened when a pure void became material substance?) but then... we have truthfully never witnessed "nothing". As our scientific instruments grow more and more powerful, we end up discovering that even that which has appeared empty before--vacuums, space--is nonetheless filled with a frothing mass of virtual particles and other bizarre fauna of the micro-universe. (See, e.g., this Wikipedia article on the vacuum state).

And if there is always something there materially... I guess then we have to suppose that those minute, practically non-existent material bits must be able to exert causal influence on other bits of matter. In that case, how can we be sure that it's even physically possible for the universe (or at least matter) not to exist? Maybe it is logically possible, infosofar as we can imagine it (which I have my doubts about, as I said before). Metaphysically possible? Hmmm....

Consider another Easter egg laid by the goose of science: the first law of thermodynamics. The total amount of energy in an isolated system must remain constant, though it may change form. (Similarly so with physical information, as came up in the black hole information paradox. I believe the conservation of one quantitiy--information or energy--may be derived from the other.) If the universe is an isolated system, and if we presume that this law holds invariably, then we must conclude that the universe has always existed--or rather that the energy within it has always existed, which is close enough for our purposes, since energy may be converted to matter.

Thus, the laws of physics do not allow the energy of the universe to come into or out of existence--thus, we must presume it has always existed.

But then, all I'm doing is shifting the question back a step. Now we ask instead, "Why is it that the total energy in the universe equals a positive value, not a zero or negative value?"

I don't know. Should we expect there to be a reason that gravity exists? That time exists? Some physicists do look for causes there, I suppose. And to a certain degree, we may get explanations about gravity and other forces as they (we think) split off from a single unified source in the very early universe. Still, if we accept that laws or forces need no justification for their existence, maybe we shouldn't expect a justification for the existence of energy either?

Edit as of 07-05-2009: I should clarify that under some theories, the total energy of the universe actually does add up to zero; it just that the way it's distributed gives us the material and energy formations we're used to. (I think gravity is typically suggested as the negative counterpart for the energy released during the Big Bang. Here's a handy and relevant (though brief) link for further reading).

Controlling oneself

Fascinating post over at Less Wrong about the influence of control systems on human behavior, and the role they seem to play in the brain. A control system here basically means a feedback device that catalyzes or inhibits some variable in order to maintain it within an accepted range. (Thermostat, homeostasis, etc.)

Here's a lengthy quote that seems most pertinent to me:

In a primitive, tribal culture, being seen as useless to the tribe could easily be a death sentence, so we [likely] evolved mechanisms to avoid giving the impression of being useless. A good way to avoid showing your incompetence is to simply not do the things you're incompetent at, or things which you suspect you might be incompetent at and that have a great associated cost for failure. If it's important for your image within the tribe that you do not fail at something, then you attempt to avoid doing that.

You might already be seeing where this is leading. The things many of us procrastinate on are exactly the kinds of things that are important to us. We're deathly afraid of the consequences of what might happen if we fail at them, so there are powerful forces in play trying to make us not work on them at all. Unfortunately, for beings living in modern society, this behavior is maladaptive and buggy. It leads to us having control circuits which try to keep us unproductive, and when they pick up on things that might make us more productive, they start suppressing our use of those techniques.

Furthermore, the control circuits are stupid. They are occasionally capable of being somewhat predictive, but they are fundamentally just doing some simple pattern-matching, oblivious to deeper subtleties. They may end up reacting to wholly wrong inputs. Consider the example of developing a phobia for a particular place, or a particular kind of environment. Something very bad happens to you in that place once, and as a result, a circuit is formed in your brain that's designed to keep you out of such situations in the future. Whenever it detects that you are in a place resembling the one where the incident happened, it starts sending error signals to get you away from there. Only that this is a very crude and unoptimal way of keeping you out of trouble - if a car hit you while you were crossing the road, you might develop a phobia for crossing the road. Needless to say, this is more trouble than it's worth.

(P.S., I should note that the author of the quoted blog post, Kaj_Sotala, draws this conceptual material largely from a self-help article by PJ Eby).

Fascinating stuff. Maybe not without its problems though, as commenter Silas Barta notes:

The explanations here for behavioral phenomena look like commonsense reasoning that is being shoehorned into controls terminology by clever relabeling. (ETA: Why do you need the concept of a "feedback control system" to think of the idea of running through the reasons you're afraid of something, for example?)

The thought concerns me a bit too. Are we really getting any benefit from describing these aspects of behavior as control mechanisms? Are we getting a more accurate model of behavior? At an individual, practical level, does it help us to conceive of our thought processes in this way?

Why Do People Do Bad Things?

A question that has troubled humankind for as long as we've been able to formulate it, no doubt.

Let us consider a moral agent, Agent Q. (Not 007, no.)
Q commits an immoral act B (B for bad. Or maybe for /b/.).

Possibilities:

1. Q performs B because she doesn't know any better. She may have no conception or understanding of morality, or at least not the required kind of morality at hand here. Perhaps she is an animal or mindless drone and not a moral agent at all.
   
2. Q performs B but does not believe it is wrong. This is basically a variation of 2, only now I assume Q does understand why other people might think B is wrong, yet she disagrees. Maybe she's Nietzsche.
   
3. Q believes that B is wrong, yet she wants to benefit from B (in whatever way she does) badly enough to overcome any moral hestitations. She could be Judas, I suppose.
   
4. Q believes that B is wrong and does not think that B's selfish good will outweigh the evil it entails. Somehow, Q performs B nonetheless. Q now seems to be conflicted – was this a lapse of will (akrasia?) How do we account for what has happened? Did Q choose to do B? Why, when she knows that it's wrong?
   
5. Q had no genuine control over her actions.
   

The real one we're concerned with is naturally number 4. Why do I do (or does anyone) do that which disagrees with her own judgment?

Are we simply animals? Do we have impossible standards?
What gives here.

Creation

Is it satisfying to create a world in which your creatures achieve their desires, so that you may vicariously effect wish fulfillment? To craft a fantasy where your own dreams (and perhaps others') come true?

Is it satisfying to create a world in which your creatures suffer through a morass of confusion, despair, and ever-frustrated longing, so that you spitefully ensure they are never happier than yourself? To craft a fantasy where no one's dreams come true?

Must Perfection Equal Stagnation?

At various times I have encountered or myself espoused the view that anything which is perfect must be, in some sense, static. Religious critics might apply it to the idea of heaven, to show that any possible heaven must be a boring/stagnant place; similarly, we might argue that we're better off not being able to reach a state of complete perfection, because perfection would require no change, and therefore what would we do?

The reasoning goes something like this: for change to occur, an entity or circumstance must become other than it is currently. That is to say, at one time we may say of x that Px, while at another time we may say ~Px. So, if x is currently in a state of perfection but that state changes, surely that change now negates the previous, perfect state of x, thus rendering x imperfect.

An analogy with which we should all be familiar is grades: suppose a student has the perfect grade of 100% in the first week of a course. Suppose further that the teacher never allows extra credit, so at this moment the student possesses the highest grade attainable. From here on out, the only possible change to her grade would be to a lower value; so if at any point during the remainder of the semester, her grade experiences any form of change, it must be to a state of imperfection (< s100%).

So far, so good. If perfection be defined as having a grade equal to 100%, this is all true. Any change to that number necessarily yields an imperfect grade. The problem comes when we assume that, because the state of being perfect must not change, therefore nothing else pertaining to the object or circumstance in question can change. And that assumption is simply unwarranted.

To continue with the grade analogy, we should recognize that even while the total grade percentage does not change, a number of other factors do: as the school term progresses, the student continues to do assignments and turn them in. The teacher then grades these new assignments, sums the student's earned points so far, and divides that number into the highest possible point total. So while the grade percentage does not change, the student's earned sum continually rises. And of course, throughout the term, the course progresses, the student strives and sweats over homework, studies for tests, etc.

To me, this makes an obvious case that perfection can occur even while the qualities being judged for perfection change. In my example, the percentage remains at 100% even while the sums increase. This suggests the more general point that "perfection" can describe processes, not merely singular, unchanging states. Which really ought to be obvious, since, after all, we can easily set up (artificial) criteria for a perfect performance or the perfect execution of a technique in music, dance, etc. Yet clearly change does occur in these cases, for they are activities, not frozen states, after all.

Now, the point about lack of change is still true insofar as a perfect performance or process must never deviate from its perfect criteria on pain of falling from perfection. That is to say, the perfect student must continue to score 100% for as long as we judge her, and in this way her score will be predictable and therefore stagnant. However, we can hardly say that the student's homework and grade as a whole are stagnant, since she continues to accumulate new points and produce new work.

Similarly, I say that heaven would be static only insofar as its residents and contents would not deviate from a particular type of perfection; but their behavior could easily be a process or performance, or at least analogous to such. In simplistic terms, if perfection in heaven could be gauged as a percentage of points achieved out of points possible, the points could rise (or hey, they could fall too) without becoming imperfect so long as the total points possible matches them. It could be like a series of games in which one continually succeeds.


It is also important to note that, every time we talk about "perfection," we must qualify ourselves by answering the question, "Perfect according to what criteria?" Would it not be possible to have a constantly changing criteria set for perfection? And could there not easily be criteria which require change of some sort, as perhaps to run a perfect marathon requires that one change one's location and move one's limbs?

Fallibility

Quantum mechanics tells us that the universe operates in very, very unusual ways. It is natural to want to dismiss some of the interpretations of QM (such as that natural laws are inherently probabilistic) as problems with our understanding, not as genuine features of reality. This is essentially a knee-jerk reaction to the oddness of QM and how it does not "mesh" with our everyday understanding of the world. However, science also informs us that we are the products of many years of evolution--and this evolution process equipped us to deal with one thing, and one thing only: survival. Our senses and reasoning faculties were not "designed" to help us humans apprehend truths about the world; rather, they were selected to enable humans qua systems to manipulate information in such a way that the systems preserve and replicate themselves. Luckily, knowing the truth--or approximating it--proved beneficial to the survival of these systems (these information processing patterns).

In simpler terms, more proto-humans who were able to correctly judge that there really is a savage tiger hiding in the grass over there successfully passed on their genes than those who hallucinated constantly. Or than those who had no knowledge whatsoever, who were not able to act on their knowledge, who had faulty reasoning processes, whatever.

Thus evolution tells us.

Unfortunately, to say "there really is a tiger over there" and leave it at that drastically oversimplifies the state of human existence. Because really, we don't know that there is or is not a tiger over there. All we know is that some collection of sights, sounds, scents, or inferences has caused us to believe that something over there can cause damage to us if we do not act accordingly. (Assume it's a hungry tiger and that we are defenseless in a savanna.) We may think to ourselves "There is a tiger," and we may believe "There is a tiger," and there is probably even a sense in which it is true that there is a tiger. But what we call a tiger is a convenient abstraction--a shorthand tag which bundles together a collection of concepts, memories, and/or feelings. So too, presumably, with our notion of existence--we have a certain understanding of what it means for something "to be" and "to be there." and we predicate this notion upon the abstraction "tiger."

[Edit as of 04-05-2009: I should mention that yes, Kant (and other philosophers) claim that existence is not a predicate. I do recognize that it's a contested notion and I disagree with the mainstream opinion; but I shan't defend it now.]

"Well, what of it?" I hear you say. "You're not telling us anything that the pioneering philosophers of the 17th-18th century didn't when they first speculated about our psychological workings; and you're barely even consistent with today's psychological theories."

Fair enough. But, if we can suppose that the tenets of natural selection are true, then we should firmly keep in mind that our knowledge...

....Something...

This post is dissolving into incoherency. And as usual I don't have the patience to fix it. I shouldn't even post it. But whatever.

Maybe I'll Actually Finish Reading This One

Axioms is an online book (a draft of a book, rather) by Robert G. Brown about human knowledge and the human condition. Brown is a physicist, not a philosopher, and he writes here for the lay-audience, so his manner of discussing philosophical concepts may not be as sophisticated as one might hope: e.g., he marks a distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge without using the terms a priori or a posteriori, and moreover does not write about them as one well-acquainted with the philosophical literature. Nonetheless, so far I am finding the content very relevant to my life and current thoughts, and I thought I should mention it here. He writes humorously and engagingly, making it easier to stay interested than so many other dry texts I've encountered.

Maybe, then, I'll actually get through more of this book instead of just recommending it and then losing interest, as I did with Motion Mountain in an earlier post.

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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