Above us, Only Sky

Games are Art

2008-02-20T18:54:00.001-10:00

It is my contention that computer games, as they exist today and have for some years now, constitute not merely entertainment or an extension of some long extant art form, but are themselves the vanguard of a wholly new art, or, at the very least, are an entirely new way of conveying the older form of storytelling in a way that is fundamentally more powerful. Art I define as any means by which one human or group seeks to affect or manipulate the mental state of another human or group, or of themselves. An art form is any body of art which has in its tradition found a particularly effective means by which to achieve this goal. Computer games are a new art form because they have found an exploited a particular set of human needs and perceptions in a way that no previous art form has or could. This is possible because computer games allow, in a way that no prior human experience could, a human being to interact with agents that are non-human, whose existence is entirely predicated on their entertainment of the human and who have no ego or needs of their own to take priority away from the human ‘gamer’.
Art is the manipulation of human experience. It cannot be defined more narrowly than that. Manipulation because it must be something deliberately created by a human to affect other human minds. I do not mean manipulation in the pejorative sense that one human being is trying to cause another to believe something deceptively in order to benefit themselves at the expense of the other. It can just as easily be the manipulation of a person towards a true belief- the desire being to cause a person to abandon a false perception (in the eyes of the artist) or adopt a true one. Just as easily this manipulation can have nothing to do with facts or ideas about truth, or ideas at all. Much art exists only on the basis of emotion- purely instrumental music has a great deal of effect on the human mental state, but it does not argue for a point.
Most art does not have anything to do with truth at all. It is all about feeling. Often an artist can create a piece of work experimentally- to see what effect it will have upon herself, or her audience. Often intent is subverted- an attempt to make a serious piece can result in humour, or an attempt to be humours can be sad.
All art is fundamentally based in the nature of the human condition. We cannot appreciate music whose various tones are all above our perceptible range. Nor can we be moved by a story that does not engage us.
We are evolutionarily programmed to feel good when we do something that is good for our genes, and feel bad when we do something that is bad for them, but this programming is based on our evolutionary environment, and is also by necessity a matter of probability. It is always bad for our health to stick our hand in a fire, so this is a evolutionary no-brainer and we have an extreme physical aversion to it. It was, until evolutionarily recently, a very good idea to eat salt and animal fat whenever they were available to us, because their high value relative to scarcity made consuming them in the maximum available quantities a good survival strategy. Now doing so has become the leading cause of premature death in western society- because the environment we live it makes them abundantly available. We do not have an aversion to eating too much of these because until recently, this was not a danger with a high probability. This is one of very many cases where our evolutionary programming is, in a sense, maladapted. The environment has changed too recently for us to develop an aversion to fat and salt, and the many other things, such as alcohol, tobacco, other recreational drugs, moving at high speeds, ect ect that are killing us today. Had tobacco been available for smoking for the last hundred thousand years, we would have long since bred out our genes for susceptibility to the pleasant effect it creates, as those who were less prone to use it would have lived longer and had more successful offspring.
Art is the exploration of all the different ways which our physiology, adapted for an environment different from the one we exist in now, allows us to feel pleasure and other mental states. In some cases, such as music, the art form was probably extent and in widespread use throughout our evolution. It seems plausible that singing and dancing have probably existed for much of our recent evolutionary past, and serve important roles in family bonding and courtship today as they always have and thus as evolution ‘intended’. The art of both has gone beyond those uses, because it can with the technology of today, and so now we can often get the pleasure that we are programmed to from music without achieving the ends this pleasure was supposed to be a reward for.
Entertainment is a derivative form of art, and the line between them is not always clear. Entertainment is a form of art that has become so practiced and refined that it no longer carries any particular mystery or risk. The creators of entertainment know precisely what kind of reaction they are trying to solicit from the audience and follow a precise formula. Pornography is an example of this. The creator creates an image of a naked woman, or people engaged in sex, knowing that this image creates in the mind of its intended audience sexual arousal and the associated pleasure. This works because until very recently the only way a human being could get the image of a naked person would be for them to be in the presence of that naked person, a situation generally likely only to occur in situations where there was a high probability of sexual intercourse. Entertainment art is an important subset because it is now, and has likely always been, the most common and powerful form of art.
Art forms are different ways in which art can manipulate the human state. Music, storytelling, imagery, and cooking are some major art forms.
Music works because it can be communal, and so it is a means by which a group can self-identify and bond. It can combine with storytelling to create meaningful tribal identity stories and lessons. It has been exploited in the present day to directly manipulate emotions with synthetic music that would be impossible to create before very recently. It still serves it’s original role for group bonding and group identification- every culture and subculture has it’s own music, which is less appreciated by those outside the group.
Dance has much in common with music, but it is also a means by which a person can demonstrate fitness. It is probably the single art form which is most unchanged by modern technology. Yet our large societies allow extreme specialization, which inclines many of us to use this form of expression less than we might if we lived in a small group of other equally amateur individuals.
Storytelling has found the most new forms in out modern culture, one of which is ultimately computer games. We derive pleasure from stories because they are traditionally the best way we could learn about our world. Our vulnerability in the world means that the more we can learn about it without direct experience the better off we will tend to be. This is why we tend to enjoy stories that involve some element of our real lives, but also ones that explore areas of experience we do not run in to a great deal, and which are perilous, physically, emotionally, or socially.
Imagery is powerful because we live in a visual world, and an image is most readily the way one can recreate and experience or express an idea for another.
All these forms of art engage in crossover. Modern media has stripped away the division of imagery and storytelling, and often incorporates music as well. Dance is rarely observed without music, and could arguably be considered an extension of it. Much music today is accompanied by a narrative that tells a story. It is expected that the lines between art will blur, because all operate on the same organ- the human brain.
Sport is not art- but sport viewing can be entertainment. This is not a contradiction. Sport is competition between individuals or groups, and can exist without outside observers or a record being kept. When it is in an unobserved state, there is not art to it- it is a contest, an expression of another set of human needs and desires. The opposing sides strive not to create a narrative but to defeat the opponent. If, later, after the game, the sportsmen choose to tell stories, those stories are art. If the game is in a large stadium with cameras and announcers and music, it is that packaging that is the art. Just as a picture or painting of a sunrise can be art though the sunrise itself is not, the packaging and narration of a sports contest is art though the act of the contestants is not. The contestants are doing what they do in an effort to win, not to entertain. Perhaps the people who sponsor the event are seeking to create entertainment, but the contestants, if they are doing their jobs properly, will win in a completely boring way if that becomes possible. Of course many ‘sports’ are staged events with a set narrative, and in these cases the participants are indeed engaging in art, but these are not true contests.
Computer games are a new form of art because they exploit areas of human experience previously inaccessible to artistic manipulation. The human playing the game is not the artist- they are the audience. The medium mimics a competitive environment, because the computer ‘agents’ act sufficiently like a human opponent to trigger a sense of competition in the player. When the player defeats the opponent, they are rewarded with a feeling of accomplishment that has never before been possible to mass produce. This is because it is now possible to create a close enough simulation of a real contest that the player/audience is able to suspend their disbelief and enjoy the sensation. The player does not need to believe that the computer opponent(s) is a human or even an equal. Just as a person viewing a picture of a beautiful sunset doesn’t need to believe they are actually observing a sunset, or a person singing along to music in their car needs to believe they are engaged in a community sing-along- the simulation is enough to stimulate pleasure. So the computer game, while apparently following the same path as narrative to create pleasure, has actually found a way to simulate another aspect of human experience in a way that creates pleasure in an entirely new way.
It is notable that many of the most popular computer games included elements of direct human to human competition. The players in these competitions still constitute an audience for art- perhaps more purely art than the narrative structure of single-player games. The programmer creates the field, sets the rules, creates the tools and the objectives. The players then go in and create their own strategies and thus the outcomes, and the experiences, are in some cases entirely unpredictable and unexpected. The reason I see this as art more so than traditional competitions is that the environment is so totally under the control of the programmer, that it is possible for none of the traditional means by which some people dominate most sports (size, speed, physical confidence, agility) can be rendered completely meaningless. Even our sense of how a ‘win’ can be achieved is open to manipulation. In many of the very popular ‘first person shooter’ games, death is minor setback, and can often be seen as an acceptable price for even minor objectives. These games play with our sense of physics, morality, social acceptability, cause and effect- and these manipulations are in a sense very avant-guard, because they haven’t been going on long enough for a real development of ideas about how to use them most effectively, except in a fairly crude sense.
Games have already begun to branch out beyond the manipulation of our sense of victory. They now often include a moral element. Some have branched out into political themes. Some deal with romance and sexuality. They have, thus far, done so in a very linear, narrative style not much different from traditional storytelling. Inevitably they will go beyond this. Imagine the manipulative power of a game created with a subtle but strong political bias- choices made that align with that viewpoint are more successful than ones that go against it. Or a game that explores elements of cooperative work and play in more depth than working together to beat the opponent. All kinds of human endeavor might be simulated, and the psychological rewards explored and exploited. These are things that have only become possible with the advent of computer games, and so the games themselves are an entirely new form of art.

Nietzsche!

2006-12-17T14:02:00.000-10:00

Family circus is funny, for once.

Seriously whoever thought to put Nietzsche together with this inane cartoon is a genius. Click the link and enjoy.

I am far too common

2006-10-23T14:47:00.000-10:00

HowManyOfMe.com

There are:
6,268
people with the name Kevin Jones in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

Yep. Me and John Smith. Phhht.

Long time no post

2006-07-09T11:55:00.000-10:00

So, yeah, I've pretty much abandoned this blog. for all time? I don't know.

Why Bruce, Why?

2005-12-01T18:56:00.000-10:00

First it was Mel Gibson. This is teh guy who did all the lethal weapon movies, staple action movies, and Braveheart, which is still one of the most fantastic movies of all time, easily in my all time top five, often sitting in the top spot for years at a time. I Loved Mel Gibson. There was always the hint, but i barely paid attention to tabloid crap about actors real lives- really, what I heard only worked in his favor: never divorced, lots of kids, damn, thats so rare in hollywood it's gotta be speacial. But the- oh dear god, WHY Mel, how could you do this to me? Passion of the Christ? A religious movie? A fucking SNUFF FILM? William Wallace no more. I literal fall from grace. I was always a cynic about the rich and famous, but this shocked me. It made me sad.

Arnold was nothing next to that. Arnold, really, did nothing that surprised me at all. But I can't watch the terminatior movies any more. Really, his political viewpoint is basically sane. The only thing that disappointed me about the whole episode was that some guy got elected to office based on his career as an action hero. Come on people! Gah.

Tom Cruise was never my favorite. I didn't get into top gun like most people. I thought the MI films were interesting but standrad fare. Still, he's Tom Cruise- the biggest action star by many estimates. Now it turns out he's a freaking Scientologist. Dude, this religion is even more made up than the rest. The founder SAID it was a made up religion. The whole knocking-up Katie Holms thing was typical superstar stuff, but it doesn't disguise the scientology. This guy needs to re-hire the pr people who kept this quiet all those years. Meanwhile I'm not gonna see 'MI3' or 'War of the Worlds 2' or 'Battlefield Earth Reloaded' or whatever this dude's next project is. Not gonna finance his next step on the spiritual hierachy. Thats how you 'advance' in the ranks of teh scientologists, by paying for it. And they don't realize it's just a fucking scam. He sends his kids to a school run by them! Tom Cruise is dumber than toast. Katie Holms DNA doesn't deserve this.

Really, Bruce Willis supporting the war in Iraq and offering a million bucks for various sundry terrorists is small potatos. But still. He was one of my last hopes.

Ok, so expecting much of people because they happen to be action heros is kinda lame. But I wish they weren't all such fuckwits.

The underlying humanity

2005-11-28T18:04:00.000-10:00

I have many problems with any kind of religiosity. I think the intellectual lazyness nessesary for faith is a symptom of the worst tendancies in human nature. But this is all in spite of the solid fact that for the most part, I like the religious people I know. This is a simple extension of the fact that I like most of the people-in-general I know. I have a friend who I used to work with, whom I saw again recently, who is one of the nicest, most levelheaded people I know, who also happens to be one of the most openly christian people I've known. My grandparents, for whom I hold more admiration than for any other people on earth, attend church regularly and say prayers before meals. It is a fact I lose sight of sometimes in my anger towards the bad people of faith, that most people who call themselves religious aren't BAD. Huamn beings are, for the most part, selfish when they have to be and nice when they can. Religion, or its lack, doesn't say alot about how nice a person you are, or how generous, or how vigorous your intellect. Yes, I believe that more people should be atheists, that if people would just pay attention, they'd stop believing in that nasty old skydaddy and join those of us liberated from the supernatural, but it isn't happening. Most people don't care enough. They were raised with their beliefs, they are comforted by them, they don't feel compelled to do all that much outside their own inclinations by their beliefs- so why change, why put in the effort? I could argue with them- I have- but when I start to proselytize, I start to imitate one of the worst aspects of those I most despise on the other side- acting like I know better than other people what they should believe. When I don't. I don't know that my beliefs, though absolutely, without doubt grounded in fact, are the best beliefs for others. Maybe the idea of a friendly dude up in the sky provides enough in the way of psychological comfort to it's adherants to more than offset the nessesary fuzzy thinking. It's plausible.

Of course organized religion is still an enemy to be fought tooth and nail. When religion inflicts itself upon the public sphere its benefits drop away and its costs soar. It is only the private spirtual beliefs of regular people that should recieve immunity from intellectual attack. I sometimes feel like i'm hiding something shameful in not being an 'open' atheist at work, but here is the thing: I don't know the religious inclinations of most of my co-workers. It just doesn't come up. That is, I think, the ideal: religion has lost its importance in categorizing us, it's just something we do at home and with our families. Religion has become in effect what it was all along in principle: essentially meaningless in the judgement of others.

It's about Vulnerability

2005-11-14T20:30:00.000-10:00

I like Butterflies and Wheels, it's a reasonable site that takes people of all sides to task for being irrational. I wanted to comment at that site on an article I read there, but the commenst page seemed to be all aboput some other topic so I wasn't sure if it had been up for awhile and the conversation had gone another way or if the link was faulty. Anyway, My point is a short one. This article does a lot to popint out the flaws in the reasoning that leads people to religion when they're grieving. The myth is that religion has some special take on how to deal with painful events in life, and the artcle does a good job of succinctly pointing out the faulty assumptions and refuting them. The one thing it doesn't mention is why the religious tend to be so 'supportive' at times of tragedy. This is for the simple reason that when you're in deep emotional trauma you're vulnerable to things that normally you'd be able to see as hokey. You're in an ideal state to be converted. Religion doesn't offer comfort to people because it is somehow uniquely suited to offer comfort- it isn't. It does so because persons in the state of grief are uniquely vulnerable to evangelizing- and that is in the end all religion needs, more mindshare.

FLAMES!

2005-11-14T19:33:00.000-10:00

So for a red-blooded Canadian male, I have a sad lack of experience with hockey. Tonight I did something to fix that by scoring some tickets to the flames game. It was sweet. The first two periods were tepid- some action but basically the flames seemed to be treading water. Then, the third- amazing! They started out down two. Got one back about 10 into the period- then it was like they realized they could score and totally went on the offensive. They scored another with two left and then the winning goal with just one minute remaining. Heres the great part. When they scored that final goal they were on a power play. The goal ended the powerplay, and then the flames got themselves 2 penalties with 30 seconds remaining- plus the wild pulled their goalie, so it was 6-3 in front of the flames net for the final 30 seconds of play. Amazing! Hockey rules. Flames are on a crazy winning streak. I need to score me some more tickets.

Disturbing

2005-11-11T20:16:00.000-10:00

Call me a cynic, but I wasn't surprised to learn that Buah and co have been using chemical weapons in Iraq on civilians. Empire Burlesque Has another expanded article on this- it sounds like there are a lot of more and more credible sources for this, so here's hoping big corporate media will take off its blinders and address this story. Meanwhile, I'm stunned at just how stupid it all is- they're fighting against an Insurgency, for fucks sake, what do they think dropping chemical weapons on civilians is going to accoplish? I'll say this: if somebody dropped a load of White Phosphorous on my city, I'd join whatever violent resistance movement I could find. I don't know what offends me more about this, the stark raving evil of it or the complete ignorance that lets them think it will help.

I'm an Optimist, really.

2005-11-08T20:29:00.000-10:00

Several thinsg that caught my eye lately in the same theme. First this painful-to-watch-but-can't-tear-your-eyes-away video on Empire Burlesque. I got the link from UTI, an excellent site I visit often, though now I've added Empire to my bookmarks.
Then there was a bit on John Stewart last night, he was talking to Barack Obama, a guy I've heard might save the Dems down south- dunno about that, he seemed like a good guy on Stewart but that's a long way from being a guy who can save the USA from itself- anyway, Mr. Obama was talking about Iraq and used the analogy of a bus crash- what do you do when the bus crashes, well, first you fire the driver... anyway, it seems to me things are coming to a head in the Iraq situation, though I'd be surprised if Bush did anything as clever as pulling out, it seems likely that once he finally leaves office his successor will be find the fastest exit he can.

So why does all this mess and madness make me an optimist? Well, I've always felt that people who ignored reality so they could be cheerful were idiots, not optimists, but once you actually face reality if you can see the bright side of it, then you are an optimist, and that is me. I see this whole war mess and ugliness, and I don't like it, but looking back to Americas last debacle, it took a lot more years and a lot more body-bags before the impetus to keep fighting went away. The way I see it, no generation is really able to learn from the mistakes of others- each has to see war for itself before it can realize that yes, war is hell and best avoided. Sio the fact that this generation saw it quicker than the last- because of better technology mostly- means that maybe the next generation will require still less of a bodycount before it loses it's stomach for war. There will always be George Bushes to start wars, but the public pressure against them will dvelope faster and faster with each successive generation, untill the political masterminds behind people like Bush will no longer see any benefit to starting wars. Take away the ability of these people to benefit from war, and the wars will peter out. Or so I hope. Call me a dreamer.

So... I'm an asshole

2005-11-07T21:26:00.000-10:00

I was mean to a lady at work the other day. i don't feel bad about it. It's nice to be nice to people all the time, to always know there other persons point of view and respect it, but sooner or later if someone contuinues to push you and bug you all the time you are kinda justified in taking a chunk out of them, even if the incident that pushes you over the edge is something petty.

Rant

2005-10-27T22:09:00.000-10:00

I start out on a trajectory- life. I come from a point and I am moving towards another point. There are points I want to reach, paths I want to follow, many of which do not fall upon my apparent future pathway. I want to change my trajectory, change my direction so that I can hit some of these points, but I can’t seem to. I examine where I came from, the origins of both my pathway and of the desires that push me towards the things I’m not getting to, the limitations which make changing all of it difficult, basically I examine myself and my world in search of a way to get what I want, or to want what I have- it doesn’t matter, changing your situation is effectively the same as changing your desires, so if either can be accomplished it shouldn’t be looked upon askance.
But I can’t change things. I don’t have the will to seek out a better job, to ask out a pretty girl, to find what I want in the world and make it mine- I don’t have the means or don’t know I have the means or am unwilling to use the means- again, all these things are effectively the same, because they all deny me, so unless one of them becomes solvable, which one in particular that afflicts me doesn’t matter.
Denied solutions to my own problems, I spend a great deal of time examining other problems. Fantasy problems, the problems of those far away, the problems of nations and corporations, the problems of history, the problems of great men, and all of these yield solutions, which yields satisfaction, but it is fleeting and always drags me back to my own situation. I Know that these far away problems of other people are no less difficult than my own, the intractability in solving them must seem just as solid to those I scorn for their failures as my own problems are to me. Only in the fantasies are the problems really solvable.
What does it all say about me? Do I need to buckle down and find some new approach, work harder at an old approach, actually put into effect some approach long feared or scorned, why is it that I can’t simply push through, after all these years, all these endless hours of examination, surely my not-insignificant intellect cannot be so permanently stymied by a problem that is solved every day by people I consider MORONS, OF COURSE I’m over-thinking it, but how can you STOP thinking, how can you take away all of that great burden of analysis, how can you find the SOLUTION when you know what it is but you simply can’t MAKE yourself apply it, how is this fair, it isn’t, of course, the world isn’t FAIR only the truly IDIOTIC believe the world is FAIR, it’s unfair and you’re happy about that the nintypercent of the time when that works in your favour, I say this to myself with scorn, but scorning myself doesn’t help, it’s not helpful, it doesn’t lead to a solution, it’s just where my path takes me, round and round I go, like a little kid scribbling on a page in circles, hoping something coherent will come out of all that churning but of course it won’t, it’s not rational, not sane, not planned out, you have to plan it out but if you try then you just end up never doing anything.

Where do I go from here, what is the POINT
Maybe there isn’t a point, well, I know there isn’t a point, except if I decide to put one on, but I can just not, because I don’t WANT to, I don’t CARE, but that is a point, if not THE point, that I do CARE, caring is the force behind that trajectory I started talking about before, I tell myself I’m happy with my world but I guess I’m really not, I want MORE and I think I should have it, I know I should have it, everyone around me thinks I’m some sort of cripple and maybe so do I because I can’t take those OBVIOUS steps and just ASK for what I want, who CARES if you are rejected you FUCKING MORON, the rejection just means you’re trying, two people are almost certain to be incompatable but if you just keep trying it’ll work out evertually, so why do you just give up before you even ask, that is the PROBLEM, the whole fucking problem in that one inability, you’re just not trying ENOUGH, sure every year or two you get up the courage but that’s just totally inadequate, at this rate you’re going to be the much-ridiculed thirty-year-old virgin, HOW, HOW did it come to this, HOW can I imagine I’ll change NOW, HOW can I imagine I’ll EVER change.

Because I have to because it’s always possible, but this depressing rehash isn’t any USE, but I can’t turn off my fucking BRAIN it just sits there in my head making me crazy, making me constantly agonize and it isn’t helpful but what am I supposed to do, kill it with beer, stun it with videogames, exhaust it with work, distract it with TV, ignore it in sleep, how do I become that cunning beast, capable of seeing the future enough to make a rational strategy but not so foresighted to worry about negative consequences.

I am overburdened with thought, a thing like water that you need to survive but will drown in if it gets too much.

Purpose Statement

2005-09-28T18:47:00.000-10:00

I was accosted by some evangelicals the other day. They were friendly and polite but they kept talking about god. I think I stood my ground fairly well, I didn't go on the offensive which is what I wish I'd done, but I didn't give any ground either. Anyway, there is something that bothers me about the culture war with the religious. The problem is this: we are seen by them as sad, disfunctional types who just don't GET it. We fit into their worldview. Not that their worldview is particularly complete, but at least we atheists have a place in it. I think it is time to explain religion as more that just a social disfunction- though that is true of it. It needs a better, more comprehensive explanation. This is a part of what I want to do here, it's somethign I've touched on before, but it's is something I want to do as part of a more comprehensive philosophy.

Why they bug me so much

2005-07-30T17:09:00.000-10:00

For reasons too boring to go into, I spent some time today considering how I would explain my aversion to religious types to some reasonably intelligent person who didn't share it. Indeed, I can respect people who aren't as averse to the god-monkies, because I realize that while my disbelief is a rational thing, the intensity of my feeling about that disbelief is emotional, and the result of events in my life rather than merely common sense. So anyway, how would I explain to someone who didn't share my feelings why I do believe as I do, and to the extent that I do? Well, here it is.

Morality springs from choice. If I throw a rock at someone, that act has moral meaning. If a rock rools down a hill and hits someone, it has no moral meaning- the event was random. So as long as you're an atheist, things like hurricanes, plagues, and earthquakes have no moral meaning- they're ranom, horrible events. We can lament them, try to protect ourselves against them, but we can't talk about them in terms of good and evil, because those terms simply don't apply. If you're not an atheist- if you think there is a big thingy in the sky pulling all the strings, choosing for all of those events to occur, or at least choosing not to prevent them, then those events take on a moral character. That is to say, they become evil acts. Sure, you can point to some natural events, like the existence of life itself, and say, 'well, here is some good stuff to balance that out'. But that simply doesn't cut it. Being the progenitor of life does not justify the endless cruelty in which life is forced to exist. If there were a creator, then the acts attributable to that being would contain so much evil, that describing that being as anything other than pure evil or utterly inhuman would be absurd. But that is precisely what religious people do- they put this being at the centre of their morality, and claim it is the source of all good. It is this moral absurdity that makes me so disgusted by religion and those who embrace it.

In praise of Jared Diamond

2005-07-28T13:32:00.000-10:00

I'm working my way through Collapse, a book by Jared Diamond. There is a lot of doom and gloom in this book- he relates the storeis of several human societies that have gone from a heyday when anyone within the society would likely have thought it would last forever to a total collapse leaving most of the people dead or adrift. I'm not far enough to know what he says about our own society, but I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that we're not immune to collapse ourselves. All our technology and culture and yadda yadda just shifts the burden of all the crap we're doing into the future. Not that I'm expecting doomsday, but our leadership doesn't seem to have anything on the guys who ran all those others civs into the ground.

Anyway, I highly reccomend Collapse, as well as Diamond's earlier work 'Guns, Germs and Steel'. I haven't linked these names to a book store because I figure people should support their local independant booksellers. Ok, that's pretentious, really I'm just too lazy to go out and find them, but seriously, google the names and you'll find a dozen place's that will sell them to you.

My favorite part about 'Guns Germs, and Steel' is that it shows the old stupid white-person assumption that our current dominance has something to do with natural superiority to be total crock. See, ignorant yahoos look at the world and see that people of a certain hue are more likely to be in charge of big countries and corporations, and they make tribalistic assuptions (from those of similar hue) that that hue is indicative of a positive set of qualities), or (from those equally ignorant types of other hues) that there is a big conspiracy going on. It has nothing to do with race, you morons, it's a historical quirk. The sole advantage (not a negigible one, admittedly) is that the natural tribalism of people will cause those already in power to promote the power of those like themselves, rather than basing their favor on things like ability and need. Race is an empty concept- it has no meaning beyond what is created by those who believe in the concept itself.

Arg. Book reccomendation turns into rant. Sorry. Ignorance pisses me off.

So, anyway, beat back the stupid by reading smart books. Read Diamond's two books.

I'm Back....

2005-07-27T18:08:00.000-10:00

Just spent ten days on vacation. Not that my blogging before that was a daily thing, but it at least has the potential to be now that I'm in the same city as my computer. Also i wanted to send a thankyou to Brent at UtI for linking me. I will strive to be worthy.

UnGod

2005-07-15T18:51:00.000-10:00

Or, an Unreasonable Reason to be Reasonable.

Whatever you do, Don't believe in the being I am about to describe to you. your immortal Soul (or something) may depend on it! (probably not)

You see, the universe, Earth, all living things, all human beings and all the works of said beings- all is the creation of one, all-powerful being! Whether it was all created a few billion years ago or five thousand years or twenty seconds doesn't really matter- this being made sure when he/she/it created it all that it left no specific evidence of itself in the creation! Evolution? Ha! probably never happened, all those dinosaur bones and DNA and other mountains of evidence were all manufactured just to make people believe evolution. The same is probably true of things like the sun and various other celestial bodies, and hey, probably the ground beneath our feet a few miles down. Even if this being has never directly manufactured a human sensation, or created human beings full grown with memories of events that never really happened, It could easily be just around the corner, just out of sight, manufacturing everything we see, feel or otherwise sense indirectly about the world beyond our immediate vicinity. Such is the nature of Ungod, for that is what we shall call our omnipotent overseer. But why does It do all of these things?
It's all a big, elaborate test! Ungod created all us humans, gave us free will (or made us think we had it) and then set up this huge elaborate lie for us to live in. It didn't do this to use our brains as batteries, It could have made some nice nickel cadmium ones for that. It sure didn't do it to make more beings in it's own image- we don't look, act, think, or even smell like Ungod. It was all a test, to see who would believe the lie! To see who would fall for it, and come up with theories of relativity and evolution and gravity- all things that don't really exist. To see who would ignore the lie that UnGod provided and come up with their own more interesting lies. To see if anyone would see through everything and determine the existence of UnGod, despite the absolute absence of evidence.
Who passed the test? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? The people who believed the lie. The ones who used their little brains and the evidence of the world they were presented with and came up with explanations for it. The world UnGod built around us was absolutely internally self-consistent, so any rational being would have to believe the lie It told. The ones who ignored the world they saw and made up their own little lies UnGod considered failures. The ones who actually stumbled, utterly at random, upon the truth? These UnGod might laugh at, if It had a sense of humour, but for them the fate was the same as those who made up their own lies- because after all, if there is no evidence for what you believe, it might as well be made up.
What fate awaits us all? Well, those who took the world as they saw it and ran with it, in other words, the atheists, will spend their afterlife in rather surprised bliss. Everyone else, all those who made up and believed the much less consistent mortal lies, will spend their afterlife in even more surprised tedium, having to listen to an eternal lecture from UnGod about how dumb they were to believe any lie but It's own.

Best Quiz EVER

2005-05-17T17:36:00.000-10:00

I am BOBA FETT

Go HERE

Suicide Bomber on prime time?

2005-05-10T19:46:00.000-10:00

I caught the last episode of the series 'Third Watch' the other day. I am able to watch Tv shows at odd times because rather than just watching them when they pop up on TV, I download them with file sharing software. This is good for me in two ways: first I can watch every episode in order without missing any regardless of what I'm doing when they actually air, and second I get to avoid the advertising, which accounts for about 25% of an hourly show, and something liek 30% of a half-hour show. The upshot is that I get to miss all of the 'upcoming episode' stuff, so this series finale was actually a complete surprise for me.
I like Third Watch, it seems to be honest to the characters, it addressed the whole 9/11 thing from very close up without getting maudlin or ridiculous, and it had pleasantly frequent shoot-outs and explosions. What caught my attention was that one of the main characters suicide bombed herself in the final to wipe out a group of particularly violent criminals. This action was reasonably true to the character- she was fairly indifferent to her own safety throughout the series, and was lookign forward to death-by-cancer, which could quite plausibly lead a self-sufficient warrior type to choose a heroic death over gradual death from within.
The implications, one would think, would be a little greater. This is after all a show that documented the events that sparked the 'war on terror'. Did nobody notice that they glorified a suicide bomber in their finale? That her death was very explcitly meant to be taken as heroic? I'm not saying I disagree with that viewpoint- the world of Third-Watch is a little more black and white than our own, and with it's context what she did really was a heroic act. My point is that this show has created a context through which the red-blooded american publuc can simpathize with the idea of someone going into enemy territory with a bomb and the intention to use it to kill yourself and as many of the enemy as possible.
Where is the uproar? Where is the controversy, the protests? It's bizarre. Maybe I missed it because I watch so little TV. Or maybe it's simpler: because no one has come out and pointed this out to people, they just don't see it.
For joe-american, terrorists a bloodthirsty bearded fellows who 'hate freedom'. They can't be equated with anyone we might simpathize with- to even suggest it is laughable. See, I believe that the average 'terrorist' sees themselves much as that fictional cop saw herself- giving their lives for a cause. That they are very ofetn deluded, and that the results of their actions are horrific goes without question. What needs to be explored is the path from calculated sacrifce to bloody mayhem is not so long as people think. This TV show has taken a few tentative steps along that path- and nobody seesm to have noticed. It's too bad.

Racists on the Bus

2005-03-15T19:28:00.000-10:00

I take the bus from time to time, and normally it's a mildly irritating but not especially painful process. Last week I was doing this, and some young men got on the bus and started making comments about some people who had missed the bus, then started to talk about how great it was to be white. This was a first for me, I know these people are around but normally they're sufficiently aware of the unpopularity of their views not to air them in public. These kids where not up to that limited level of comprehension, and they invited me to join them in celebrating being white. I told them not to include me, and that was the end of it. The incident left me thinking about this particular human weakness.
It is my opinion that racism is not just a moral failure, though it is. It is a failure of the intellect, an abdication of intelligence in favour of tribalist instincts. Anyone who pays attention will know that race has no meaning in any real sense. I could tell you fifty important things about a person- their job, education, intelligence, how they behave with others- and never mention anythign about race, or tell you anything that would let you guess the race of the person. Nor is it a useful tool for identifying a group- nothing observed about another member of the same race means anything about a person- I'm not a better person for the good acts of white people, nor a worse person for their misdeed. The concept of race is an empty one. That is to say, it is meaningful only in that people give it meaning- it does not have meaning independant of human interpretation.

The point is that racists are nessesarily stupid, that being racist is nto just an immoral act, but it will nessesarily degrad ones ability to function effectively in the world. Which is good, because racists are assholes and deserve every failure their chosen ignorance brings them.

Saterday Night

2005-03-05T18:55:00.000-10:00

Saterday night and my plan is... blog and then go to bed. Working in the service industry means you learn to be an alcoholic... but you also tend to express that affliction on days of the week more than weekends, because, as usual, I work at 7 am tomorrow, so going out and getting hammered would result in a day's worth of pain. I'm getting too old to consider the trade off a good one more than once a month,

I have a number of random thoughts going through my head right now, but I think I'll fixate on the one that has some serious content. A couple of days ago here in my home province of Alberta, some RCMP officers were killed in the line of duty. Four of them, all at once, by one deranged guy who then took his own life. That guy makes me kinda wish there was a hell, because damn, just being dead doesn't seem like a fair punishment for that kind of mindless evil. This is the most RCMP officers who have died in a single incident in 120 years. It's a big deal. The RCMP were there because the crazy bastard apparently had a marijuana grow operation going on, though from what I've read he was a life-long troublemaker and the only thing surprising about this for the people who had to deal with him is that he managed to get the drop on four RCMP.

This is a terrible thing and many good families have lost good men, it's a dark day for the country, and I'm afriad that the reaction is going to be exactly the wrong one. In the paper I read, the somewhat right-wing but mostly reliable Calgary Herald, there were many calls for a clamp down of marijuana in all it's forms. We've been moving towards some de-criminalialization of the stuff here and tehre are calls to halt that, calls to increase penalties and funding, ect. Basically the response to these casualties in the war on drugs is: fight harder, expend more resources, hit back. This is insane. We're living next to a textbook example of why a country can't criminalize a popular and widely used substance- the united states locks up people for a couple of pounds of weed for longer jail terms than they do murderers, and any american teenager can still get his hands on a joint.

When a society chooses to make something illegal it must do so not because that thing is bad and if it were struck from the earth the world would be better- this is not within the power of any society. When you choose to make something illgal, you're simply choosing the costs and benefits of having that thing proscribed and punished over the costs and benefits of not doing so. When you make pot illegal, you choose to give all pot revenue to illegal organizations, you choose to punish people who would otherwise just be harmless users, you choose to create an underground economy only regulated by criminal violence. Certainly, having pot illegal has probably kept soem people from using it or from using it more often. If you made alcohol and nicotine illegal you'd get the same benefits. The issue is that this benefit doesn't equal the cost. These RCMP deaths are part of the cost of keeping marijuana illegal. They are casualties in the war on drugs, and that war is a nessesarily endless one. Their deaths are a tragic waste, and will be all the moreso if we don't finally realize that a few more potheads is a small price to pay for a society with less organized crime and criminal violence.

Monday housekeeping

2005-02-28T08:09:00.000-10:00

First, I'd like to brag that I've been included in the Carnival of the Godless #5, hooray for me, and for all those others with whom I'm lucky enough to be included. Keep the reason coming! Long live the carnival!

I've been away from the blog for a few days, not just because of my continuing addiction to WoW, but also because of a series of long work days and a cold that I’m finally getting the better of. This is my long winded explanation of why I haven't responded to Tom' last comment, which I'm going to do now.

Tom's first point is that we need a higher power creating higher laws or powerful people will selfishly dominate the rest of us. First, I'd like to ask Tom where God was for the vast majority of history on the vast majority of the planet- when powerful people DID selfishly dominate the rest of us. If there is no consistent enforcement of law, it has no meaning. You can say god will punish bad people in the afterlife- but that isn't much comfort to their victims in the here and now. Laws for which there is no credible threat of enforcement are meaningless. As a rational being looking at the world, I have never once seen God or any apparent godly agent do anything, so I can rationally conclude that the pattern will hold and such agents will not punish MY bad behaviour. It's like a red light camera- if you put it up in secret and never tell anyone where it is, and send the tickets out six months later with no specifics, you're going to collect some additional revenue but you're not going to reduce the number of people running red lights. If you do it with great fanfare and publish it's location and put a big sign up at the intersection, you're going to cut down on people running red lights. Surely if there was a higher power who was responsible for the creation of humans, it would understand this aspect of human behaviour and wouldn't expect us to mild our behaviour on vague threats and promises delivered thousands of years ago.

Tom's next point is that reason cannot lead to the creation of laws. I couldn't disagree more. first of all, the powerful have every reason to create and implement laws. This is because laws often benefit the powerful more than the weak- the laws are just another tool for control. Even in the case where laws are fair, they still benefit the powerful. In a lawless state everyone is at risk, the rich man or warlord is just as vulnerable to random violence as the poor. Laws can be developed by reason and selfishness alone with the simple question of whether living in a society governed by that law is better or worse than in one where that law is absent. It is better for me to live in a place where murder is illegal than where it is legal, because the benefit of being able to murder people legally is far outweighed by the cost of potentially being murdered myself. There you have a selfish justification for all homicide laws that doesn't invoke god at all. You can go right down the list of all the things that are taboo or illegal in every society, and you'll find for the most part that they conform to this system. Is it better to be able to steal at will or to have property rights? Is it better to be able to drive any speed you want or to be able to drive on safe streets? There are costs and benefits to every law and we can see them and judge them without any input from higher powers.

Tom points out that he doesn't hate homosexuals, which I felt was implied when he said he hated homosexual acts. Given his view that orientation is a choice, this is at least a forgivable position, but I still can't conceive of how he could believe that sexual orientation is a choice. In the history of the world, the current western society, including the United States, is a shining beacon of tolerance for homosexuality- in most societies, including the western ones, through most of history, being openly gay was in effect a death sentence. It still is in many parts of the world. Yet, despite this, despite the shame of family, the fear of damnation, the guarantee of persecution, there have always been gay people. How is this possible, if it is a choice? Are we so perverse a species that we would choose to bring that down upon our heads? I don't believe so. I believe that it must be a fact of human nature that some people are born with a sexual attraction to those of the same sex, and that they have no more choice than they do about the number of fingers they have or what colour their eyes are.

Tom says that Christianity has always been about love and other nice things. I can believe that Tom’s beliefs are about that, that the beliefs of those he worships with are about that- but I cannot believe that this is the case of all Christians. What about the crusades? What about the gentlemen carrying the ‘god hates fags’ signs at the funerals of HIV victims? These people are not about love. These people see religion as a weapon, those of other beliefs as enemies, and while some of them might mouth words about love and forgiveness, they don’t feel any themselves. These people are the most vocal and obvious face of Christianity to be seen by those of us not involved in a church. So while I’m perfectly willing to accept that many, even most Christians are good people with good intentions, so long as these hatemongers are allowed to go around shoving their crosses and bibles in the face of everyone without an uproar of challenge from the more tolerant Christian community, I will continue to feel free to proclaim my disgust with Christian practices when what I’m talking about is what these people have to say. If you let them speak for you, you cannot ignore the responsibility for what they say.

Regarding Tom’s claims that the human race will die out if we let the behaviour spread, I ask him where is the vast Christian outcry against couples who choose to go childless? Shouldn’t you try to prevent the marriage of anyone who plans to have no children, because this practice will surely spread and result in the extinction of the species? The instinct to reproduce is as strong as any we have. Witness the vast lengths couples go to have children, the huge sums spent on fertility treatments, and so on. Part of the debate over homosexuality comes from the desire of these couples to have and adopt children. If everyone on the planet decided to be gay tomorrow the species would face no threat from dying off because people would still be willing to go through the steps to have children even when those steps didn’t include the fun of sex with someone you’re attracted to. From a human population perspective there is more ill you can say about the people who refuse to stop having children than about those who don’t feel attracted to people they can breed with. Don’t take this as an avocation of population control- I feel that people should make their own choices about how many kids they want and it’s nobody else’s business to tell them how many they should have or what methods they should use to achieve that number.

Tom also made some comments about AIDS which I felt were deeply ignorant. Disease will come in any form that allows it to spread. There are plenty of sexually-transmitted diseases that have not been linked to a particular style of sex. We have diseases of the air, in our food and water, that are spread through every kind of regular social contact. That one disease was first noticed among gay men in the United States is not an indicator of unnatural behaviour- disease is nature at its most basic, and anything we do can become a vector for its transmission. To conclude anything about the victims of disease based solely on their sickness is logically without merit and morally questionable.

Responding to Tom

2005-02-22T08:01:00.000-10:00

Somebody put a comment on one of my posts. This is very exciting. Now I need to respond to it, because Tom is both polite, respectful, and in disagreement with me on almost everything.

We agree that reason is a tool, but you argue that with only reason humans would engage in all manner of anti-social activity, because we would reason that stealing and murdering would be good for us when there are no consequences. Well, that would be true if the only possible way to have consequences was that there was an omnipotent god watching everything. Actually it is entirely possible for other human beings to police our behaviour, and that is in fact what happens. When society breaks down and the rule of law broken, people do go out and steal, kill, and rape to their hearts content. The level of religiosity in a society won't affect bad behaviour when there are no earthly police to actually enforce laws and punish offenders. Reason is a necessary component of this because it allows us to understand when we're breaking laws and when our stated moral principles are at odds with our actions. Religion is superfluous to this process at best, at worst it can gum up the works by creating different streams of 'justice' for believers and unbelievers, or by trying to reconcile contradictory religious rules within the legal system.

I see nothing in Tom's discussion on homosexuals to ease my fears about Christian homophobia. The problem here is that homosexuality is not a choice, it is a fact inherent in nature, just as heterosexuality is. It is akin to gender or race- something that people are born with. If you were to say 'I don't hate African Americans, I just hate people who are being black', it would be equally meaningless. Christianity has made an attempt to reconcile this by never acknowledging that it is a fact of nature, moving sexuality into the realm of choice and therefore into a fair arena for moral scrutiny, but it doesn't wash. I am straight. I could not choose to be gay if I wanted to. I know I would never enjoy sexual relations with a man- so I therefore know that those who do engage in them must not feel the same way that I do, that there must be something different about how they feel about the world. I can't then turn around and say that it is a moral choice they are making- how can what you feel about the world, how you are born, be a moral choice? The choices you make are how you are going to live- honestly seeking what you desire, or trying to conform to what other people want you to do? Of course some desires lead us to harmful behaviour, and when we choose to seek fulfillment of those desires we face moral consequences. But there is nothing intrinsically harmful about who people are sexually attracted to. There are a whole slew of ways that people engage in immoral activity to satisfy their desires- rape, incest, pedophilia, even unsafe sex- because people can be harmed by these activities. But when two adults with no other commitments desire each other there are no other stakeholders, so whatever they choose to do is between them, and none of the business of the rest of us.

So when you say you hate homosexuality but not homosexuals, I see only hatred, and no morality. This bible you like so much says you should stone them or something, but it also says you shouldn't suffer witches to live or tolerate people of any divergent faith at all. If Jesus was a real person, I don't see how it matters, so was Buddha, so was Muhammad, so was Nietzsche, the fact that these people existed doesn't mean that what they said, or what was said about them, is true.

Finally, I am accused of hating Christians, which is a reasonable judgement given the tone of most of my posts. I don't, at least not as a class of people. There are a good group of people who are Christians for whom I do feel deep contempt, but there are also some people of other faiths who fall into that category. What I despise about them is their immunity to reason, their unflinching demand that others conform to them, their readiness to use whatever tools come to hand to achieve their goals, which all too often includes violence. I do have Christian friends, I admire a great number of people who also happen to be Christian, but I have to say I admire them and like them in spite of their beliefs, there is always a bit of the sceptic in me that wants to challenge them.

So thanks for your comment Tom, I doubt I'll convince you of anything here, but I think just airing out my arguments every once in awhile is good for me, and I hope you (and others) will feel free to comment in future.

Rhetoric and Truth

2005-02-22T04:37:00.000-10:00

I just left a comment on this post over at pharyngula, a blog I really enjoy even if I can't understand a big chunk of the science stuff they talk about- I'm a science fan but I have no formal education in it and so when they get down to the nitty gritty, I tend to get lost.
In my comment I talked about how truth is only a rhetorical tool for those on a certain side of the evolution debate- if an argument that happens to be true supports your argument, then you can use the fact that it's true to support it, but you don't limit yourself to true arguments, nor are you any more convinced when someone else's position is supported by such arguments. I don't believe this use of truth is confined to that one side or that one issue. I think that to a greater or lesser extent, all politicians, everywhere, have to see everything through the lens of rhetoric. Why? Because they live or die on public perception, and convincing people of your position is the bailiwick of rhetoricians, not scientists. It has always been thus and it will always be thus. If my argument is true and yours is convincing, who is going to convince more people? There is a clue in those words. How can those of us who value truth take any solace, if what is true will not necessarily triumph? Because truth can become a key component of any rhetoric if the audience demands it. When you're speaking to a bunch of five year olds, you don't discuss global macro-economics, even if somehow what you’re trying to convey has something to do with that subject. So you can either talk down to them- which is what politicians have done since they invented themselves, or you can bring the level of your audience up. Education. The key to the success of a society is the education it's people receive, not just because a better educated populace will be more productive, but because they will demand more productive leaders.
And thus it comes full circle- the evolution/creation debate. This is an issue for Americans more than anybody, those of us in the rest of the western world don't have any serious worries on this particular issue. I take an interest because it's interesting, and because if the U.S. takes a nosedive we Canadians will not be unharmed. The point is that the educated, intelligent Americans, and there are many of them, have to win this fight for the minds of their children. Evolution must be taught, not merely because it is a vital part of understanding biology, but because of the truth it stands for. Lose on Evolution and what will be next? Win on evolution and maybe you can take back some of the other ground that has been lost. Every American who grows up with a real understanding of the theory of evolution will get with it a host of other benefits, like the ability to think critically, and an easy window into the irrationality of those who claim to be creationists, among other things. Every one of those will demand a modicum of reason and truth from those they vote for, and the more such people there are the more the politicians will have to address truth. Make truth a part of the political landscape and the rhetoric will adjust- Darwinian fashion- to survive.

Reason, Religion, and Morality

2005-02-20T18:03:00.000-10:00

Reason is a tool. You use it to accomplish goals, but the goals you have, at least the ultimate ones, do not come from reason. The need for food, for sex, for the admiration or our peers, for safety and comfort and health and love- these things all have rational reasons to exist in evolved beings, but as those beings, we do not choose them. They are us, and we simply act upon them. A mother does not love her child because she has reasoned out that it is a carrier of her genes and therefore represents the best chance for those genes to exist into the future, she loves her child because that love is a part of her being, it comes before reason. Therefore, all of our goals in this life are effectively irrational- not because they are wrong or stupid, but because they exist prior to our reason- they drive reason, and without them we would have nothing to be reasonable about.
This having been said, reason is still the very best tool we have for achieving our goals, and thus for being happy. It's like reason is a man driving a car and emotion is his pregnant and due wife in the back seat- every time she yells for him to go faster he feels a strong need to do so, but if he is in heavy traffic it's better for him to go slowly and avoid an accident. Reason allows us to put off some of our drives in order to fulfill all of them better in the long run. It is absolutely necessary to survive as a human being.
Religion is a thing of emotion. It capitalizes on every drive we have- the need for community, the fear of pain, it even tries to control our sexual behaviour so that only with religious sanction can it be satisfied. The problem comes in when religion makes truth statements- things about science, about morality, about race and sexuality and biology and family- statements not based in a reasoned understanding of the topic, but in a need to appeal as much as possible to the emotions. Religion allows us to abdicate our reason when it tells us uncomfortable things. Think gay sex is gross? Religion will tell you it's a sin, and viola, you're not a bad person for hating gays. Never mind that two guys doing it in the privacy of their own home can't possibly hurt you, and reason tells us that the 'lifestyle choice' explanation is highly flawed, as long as we have a bronze-age living manual that tells us it's bad, we can keep saying it's bad in good conscience. Except we can't.

Reason is necessary for morality. Morality must be based on mutual rules about behaviour between individuals. Those rules have to be equal, and have to be governed according to a rational principle, or they can't possibly function. This is because if you declare morality to be something based in emotion, it will always be biased. Some 20-year-old guy gets drunk and causes an accident, hurting your family, you'll bay for his blood, or at least a serious jail term and permanent suspension of his licence- but what if that 20-year-old is your brother or your son, you know he's a good kid, you know he can turn his life around if given a second chance- which side of this is right, if you go according to the emotions? Neither, both- there is no right answer, because both have validity, and a solution is impossible because there is no way to judge between the validity of each perspective. Only if you create and maintain a rational set of rules can a moral system or legal system or any other such thing function.
Religion, however, applies only to the emotions when it speaks of morality- 'do what I say or I’ll torture you forever' is typical, 'eye for an eye' competes with 'turn he other cheek', killing witches is out but shunning gays is ok. Religion allows people to ignore reason and still claim to be moral, but what it is really doing is denying the key component of morality- reason. Religion demands or at least allows for people to abdicate their reason. Without reason, morality is impossible. Therefore religion is not just morally bankrupt- it is necessarily immoral.

What to say to them

2005-02-13T06:06:00.000-10:00

I was over at a friends place yesterday when some witnesses came to the door. My boddy did what most people do, what I would probably have done, and politely nodded his head, took their literature, and got rid of them as fast as he could. I made myself scarce during the ordeal because I was overcome with giggles. This is what these people are: an affliction that is unfortunate but mild enough that you can laugh at those who have it. Yes, you can get upset that these people come to your door and inturrupt your saterday to let you know that everything you believe is wrong and you're going to hell if you don't do what they say, but as with most mildly retarded people you can manage them and get rid of them quickly. If you show up at the door looking calm and reasonable they know they're not goign to make a catch today anyway, religion requires emotional vulnerability to spread, these guys are just putting themselves out there hoping to catch somebody when they're feeling lonely or sad.
Really, the best course of action is to smile and nod and see them on their way, but I like to pretend that I'd have the foresight to be one of those who would brace them on their beliefs. While it would probably be impossible to inject some reasonable doubt into their worldview (unless they were feeling emotionally vulnerable at the time), perhaps I could be sufficiently convincing of my own conviction that they wouldn't bother to send a delegation to my door then next time round.
I have plenty of objections to religion, but there are a couple which I feel would be most useful when actually dealing with a fundie. Like putting the burden of proof on them- they're prone to ask (in an incredulous and disapproving tone) why I do not believe in Jesus (or whoever) but really, shouldn't the burden of proof be on them? If a person came up to you under any other pretense and told you to re-arrange major portions of your life, you'd want some reason why, but with religion there is this weird assumption that you have to have a big powerful reason not to believe. For them, the statement 'Jesus loves you' seems to be enough. I'd like to say to them: TYou have a hypothesis- Christianity (or whatever), I have a competing hypothesis- secular humanism (or atheism or whatever I'm calling it that day) Provide me with a single piece of evidence that is explained by your hypothesis but not by mine. They'll stammer about miracles and I'll ask then to provide documentation and then they'll babble of faith being better in the absence of proof and I'll say I have faith in what I believe AND proof, and so on, but if they start to lead me down another path I'll always get to say, but wait, what about your proof, my theory still hasn't been disproven or yours supported by anything you've said.
Another fun thing to do is point out the deep logical flaws in their religious arguement, something especially easy with the the many branches of christianity because they all rely on one big skydaddy. My favorite is the Problem of Evil, because I think it's a little sick that they believe in a being capable of inflicting all of the suffering that exists in the world just to make a point, and worship this evil thing. They babble about evil being brought into the world by people- but if people were created in 'his' image, and we have the capacity for evil, doesn't that make 'him' evil as well? There is also the arguement that evil is nessesary because it allows for brands of good impossible absent evil- but to that I ask, why are there brands of good impossible without evik? Why doesn't his all-powerfulness create the universe in such a way that all forms of good are possible while all forms of evil impossible? You can't have an alpha/omega creator type presiding over creation with enough micro-management to care about what I think about my neighbors wife while being totally unresponsible for all the wars and disasters that befall us all the time.
ANother one they like to trought out is the 'what do you believe then' line. I can say the big bang, or quantum waves or some such, and I'd be being honest, I do honestly believe that whatever the physicists are working on is an honest view of where the universe was before it was here, but I don't really understand all the theories, I got lost when they started talking about curving time. This, the theoretical crazy-person at my door, might be considered hypocasy- why do I take what the physicists are saying on faith? I could point out that science has done some useful things like cure disease, but when it comes to the far out theoretical stuff the the phisicists are working on these days, I don't know about any useful products they've developed (not to say there aren't any, I'm just not well informed enough to name any), so why DO i believe their strange 13-dimensdional, dark matter/dark energy view of the universe over that of the theoretical crazy-person at my door? Probably because the physicists aren't telling me I should live my life in a certain way bercause of what they've dsicovered. If a person claiming to be a physicist showed up at my door and told me that dark energy was going to devour my soul if I didn't give him a tithe, I'd probably treat him much as I treat the others.

I guess

Random thoughts

2005-02-02T18:31:00.000-10:00

No energy for a full post right now. Spent the day writing and WoWing, so looking at the screen kinda hurts. Plus my nearly-a-month-long now headache is back in full force, in spite of what I thought was a new and effective pain drug. Hopefully the doctors will figure it out soon and give me some sort of relief. I'm not too concerned that it is something 'serious', because I haven't had any of the additional symptoms that donote that sort of thing, basically I feel fine except for this unrelenting dull ache in my head.
Something I've long want to say but never had the right context to say it in, regarding when the Christians complain that they're being descriminated against or that things aren't Christian enough (like in the recent moves towards legalizing gay marriage in Canada- this makes me a very proud Canadian). What I'd like to say to these people is: the whole of europe was run by Christians for a thousand years. It was called the dark ages. Organized religion has stood in the way of every important social advince since the dawn of time. It DOESN'T WORK.
Ok, having said that, I'd like to qualify it by saying I've known many very smart, tolerant and good people who also happened to be christian. In fact, the majority of all people of faith I've known have been reasonable and compassionate. Only one group, american baptists, that I encountered in high school fall into the category of Bad Christian. So all my ranting against religion seems to apply only to a minority. It's just that this vocal and vicious minority seems to be able to speak and act with impunity as though it is representative of the larger group. Only when large numbers of Christians step forward to denounce the homophobes and creationists will I really be able to consider the group as a whole in a positive light. If you let someone else speak for you, you are responsible for what they say.

Death

2005-01-19T13:46:00.000-10:00

A morbid mood is upon me, so the topic is death. I'm not facing it so I can't actually comment on what my visceral reaction to the prospect would be, but I have been thinking about it for reasons both morbid and unimportant.

My thoughts about the nature of life are such that death doesn't pose much of a threat. This is because I think that our existence as beings through time is basically an illusion. Lets take a step back. Imagine a boat (this is a stolen thought-experiment, and the boat is from the original, which I can't credit because I can't remember the source). This boat is made of lumber. Now, due to wear and tear, parts of the boat are occasionally replaced. If you take up one plank of the boat and replace it with a new plank, is it still the same boat? If, after a period of years, original material is present, is it still the same boat? The answer is that it is if people thionk it is- the idea 'boat' is merely a way of understanding the world, it doesn't impose anything on to the stuff from which the vessel is made. If some mysterious evil power were to come along one night and replace every fibre of the boat with totally new- but effectively identicle- material, it would still be the same boat (to the ignorant sailors) because thats how they would percieve it. identity is a matter of perception.
Take this idea and place it on people: the stuff of my body is being constantly replaced, and the (possibly urban-myth) whole thing is replaced evry seven years or so, so my identity doesn't come from my STUFF, and also, the pattern changes, my body changes appearance, size, and behavior. My personality changes, sometimes slowly, sometime drastically. I feel that I am the person who created all the memories in my head, because they are framed that way for me, but how do I know I wasn't created 3 seconds ago with all the memories already pre-made? The fact is, in a sense, I was. I don't pretend to understand the muniutia of neurobiology, but I know it's a constantly changing thing of connections and chemicals and energy. What I am right now just came into existence and will go out of existence by... now. Over a period of hours, or in the space of a decent sleep, all the particular bits that were 'me' have been replaced by similar bits. So in effect we all die all the time, only to be replaced by very similar beings who look and act a lot like we did, who will disappear and be replaced in turn.
So, according to this, actual death shouldn't be that scary, because it's not like we were going to last that long anyway.

I'll still run if I see a tiger chasing me, though.

Warcraft Orphan

2005-01-13T05:33:00.000-10:00

This blog has been orphaned by World of Warcraft. Yes, I am an addict. Only time will tell if I can shake this addiction and return to a semi-normal life.

The Value of Fiction

2005-01-03T18:16:00.000-10:00

I’ve written before about some books I’ve read which I thought had too much ideological bias, now I want to talk about what I consider to be the real value of fictional stories/novels. It is possible to tell a story of value in another medium, but I’m going to focus on the novel because this is something I know about, at the very least because I’ve read so very many of them and I’ve tried to write a few as well.

Generally, when one thinks of ‘important books’, you’re either talking about non-fiction of very carefully placed fiction. While some classical works of Science Fiction and Fantasy have achieved this status, for the most part any book in the fantasy or Sci-Fi section of your bookstore is going to be considered, by most people, to be pulp and geek-fodder. For many of those books, the placement isn’t wrong. But to paint the whole genre with that brush is to do a great disservice to yourself, because you’re denying the value that this type of book can provide.

From where dose the value of stories come? We can start with true stories- news and non-fiction, stories that are for the most part, true. For some kinds of news, they can tell us about things going on in our world, but for most of them, and for anything about the past, there isn’t going to be any specific information about what we can expect in our day to day lives. Yet there is value to them- the value of their being human stories. There are always morality tales, and very often there is an attempt to structure real world stories in this way- showing acts and consequences, but on a simpler and less deliberate level, stories simply convey human action and feeling. When we hear about a disaster, we imagine ourselves there, we imagine other people there- we think in human terms. Every successful story ever told conveys some kind of human element. Why is lord of the rings so popular? Because we all imagine ourselves as the brave hobbit bearing a terrible burden and receiving a heroic reward. We are affected by 1984 because we imagine ourselves trapped in the same nightmare. These archetypes also show us wherein the value of those fictional worlds lies. What the fictional world does is it allows the author to create exactly the situation he wants in order to show some aspect or quality of the human condition. It does so without getting entangled in any real world historical situations that might complicate the issue.

If you want a character to be faced with the ultimate evil, supernatural, unbounded, then simply invent it. Fantasy fiction allows the author the scope to examine the human condition from any angle, under any conditions, without restriction. The only thing that must remain constant is the honest portrayal of human actions. This is not because it is impossible to tell a story absent any real human behaviour- but without it, the story will lack any great appeal. The only factor in the survival of a book or story (once it has achieved a certain minimal amount of dissemination) is appeal- whether people enjoy them and want to pass them on or not. This appeal has virtually nothing to do with the real world setting, though many of the best stories have been told in the real world, because the complexity and depth necessary to create a really compelling human portrait is easier to create when much of the context for the story is already in place.

Regarding Impulse Donations

2004-12-31T13:43:00.000-10:00

So we're donating in record numbers, in record amounts. Good for us. I am happy to join the ranks of the charitable. I suspect I may not have it it hadn't been so easy: go online, pull out the mastercard, and viola, I'm 100$ poorer but full of that priceless sense of goodwill. I suspect theres a bit of a chick and egg question, as to whether my willingness to do things that take a great deal of time and effort declines because of the general opportunity to do many things instantly and easily, or the other way around, but it has to be admitted that these are two important phenomena in our current culture. Both have also been generally labelled as 'bad', the impatience on my part because so many 'important' things take time and energy, the ease and quickness of the electronice world because it allows for those with poor impulse control to do things quickly that, had they time to reconsider, they might not do. These are some valid points. I'd like to say that this whole donations surge shows that not all impulses are bad, and so sometimes it is a good thing for people to be able to do stuff quickly and easily, because the things they do are good and might not get done if they took more time and effort.
You could argue that everyone should be willing to put as much energy as they have into doing the right thing, but let's face it, people won't. So making it easy for people donate- that's a really good thing. It shows that this face-paced world we've now created does, incredibly, have a real humanitarian upside.

BTW, if you're feeling an impulse to donate, go and do it. You can give a few bucks or a few hundred. It feels good, you'll probably save someones life.

Goodbye 2004

2004-12-31T03:29:00.000-10:00

Have to keep this short. I've promised myself I won't rant (much), which severely limits my options for creating words to fill this space. For me, 2004 wasn't a bad year, I moved once, got a little more education, recieved a raise or two, wrote a book, and had some fun. For the world, it was a pretty shitty year, though I'm looking back at it through the lens of this past week and that can't make anything look good. Bush got re-elected, enough said. Here in Canada, the political process made me vote twice, both times, shockingly, I got the result I was hoping for- federally we have a weakened but not defeated Liberal party, provincially Klien was unbeatable, but in my riding we replaced the conservative lackey with a conscience-driven doctor.
For 2005, I hope the world does better, but I have my doubts. They're looking to lift the beef ban, so it might be a good year for my local bit of the world, but internationally- well, lets just say my fears seem more plausible than my hopes. For myself, well, the list hasn't changed much, I'd like to get published, I'd like to find that special someone, I'd like to accomplish more and waste less. Whether any of this translates into a resolution, we'll have to see, I still have 15 hours to think about it. Oh, yes, in 2005 I'd like to procrastinate less too.
Have a good new years, and I'll be back with more rants early in the new year.

Merry X-Mas!

2004-12-23T15:47:00.000-10:00

So, what does an angry atheist like me have to say about the penultimate christian holiday? Well, only good things, really. I'm super hyped about it. I love Christmas morning, love the presents, love that I get to spend time with my family, love it. So what that it's based on a bronze age myth? We don't engage in any bronze age activities, like begging a sky-daddy to give us more stuff, or using the myth to exclude people and ideas. In my family, as in most I expect, it's about the family, about spending some happy time with people you love. I'm very happy to co-opt it from its christian roots and make it my own. Happy holidays to everyone, and I'll be back with more angry rants in the new year!

Pre-Holiday Rant

2004-12-22T16:11:00.000-10:00

Since I'll have another full day to kill before my holiday begins, I figure I'll do my actual Christmas rant tomorrow. For now, I have another little bit of speculation I'd like to explore.
I've been wondering at the apparently intractable difference between different parts of the political spectrum. People with the same basic goals and information still come up with varying strategies for how to govern. I believe it has something to do with how our social behavior evolved.
There would have been evolutionary pressure on our behavior from a variety of sources. One source of pressure would have been that to co-operate. The more caopable an individual is of knowing and trusting others, and of then including them within the group which they trust, the larger such a group could be and the more advantages from having a large group of allies that individual would have. There would also be an opposing pressure, to be wary of others. This would arise because inevitably there would be individuals who would betray the trust of others. The more wary an individual was, the more able they would be to avoid betrayal.
Each human would be, in effect, his or her own state- they would have allies and enemies and those who sat somewhere in between. No one could be too inclusive because they would leave themselves too open to back-stabbing, but no one come be too suspicious or they would have fewer allies than anyone else and would be unable to defend their interests. Since this behavior would be regulated by a number of different genes, as well as being calibrated by the social environment the person was raised in, any group of people would mark at different points in the spectrum between these extremes. In an overly inclusive society, a person who was a little less inclusive would have the advantage because they would be betrayed less, whereas in an overly exclusive society a slightly more inclusive person would have the advantage of extra allies.
When it comes to political philosophy, these attitudes would map to the right or left-wing attitude of the individual. Inclusive individuals would be on the left side, exclusive too the right. The issue with politics is that people tend to think that if something is good in small amounts, it would be better in large amounts, so they take their political philosophy to extremes. Thus on the far right you have ever more exclusive groups, more racism and class warfare and the belief that only a very select group has any value, whereas on the extreme right you have absurd inclusiveness which ignores even the most valid types of metitocracy and drags everyone down to a low equality within a system of rampant corruption. Just as with the behavior of the indiviudal, the behavior of democratic nations will self-correct over time because the greatest excesses will be punished by the fact that a party that pushes too far to one side will give their more moderate rivals much greater public support.

Religion as the Secret Handshake

2004-12-20T19:50:00.000-10:00

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to reason out the existence of religion. I know it has nothing to do with truth, yet it is such a complex and universal behaviour that I have to believe it has some evolutionary purpose. First I’m going to explain why I believe it has to have a purpose, then I’ll go through a couple of theories I have as to what this purpose might be.
Why religion needs a reason:
Human social interaction is a complex thing, and it is regulated at it’s base by the way in which our brains work, this is in turn determined by our genes, whose only determining factor is survival: genes which cause their host to reproduce more get copied more themselves. Small quirks (like, say, being slightly more aggressive in certain situations) can be attributed to random mutation or even the densities of various kinds of genes, these can and will happen at random and can’t automatically be considered to be a product of natural selection. Anything complex, which describes virtually every aspect of our social behaviour, must be a product of evolution, because while random chance can change something small, you cannot build something complicated (like a human brain) by just tossing things together at random. It would be like taking a watermelon, running it through a blender, and then pouring it our into a watermelon shaped hole. How many times would you have to do that before it reassembled itself by random chance? Complex things do not occur in evolution by random chance, they can only occur when one random mutation is useful, so it spreads throughout the population, and then later there is another also random but also useful mutation builds on whatever the first mutation did, and so on. So anything complex built by evolution must be useful for survival, it must create an advantage for the organisms who have it over the ones that do not. Religion is a complex behaviour; there is evidence of it in every human culture, therefore, it must have some evolutionary use.
I used to think this could be explained purely in terms of memes. Memes are ideas, the environment they live in is our brains, and they are as tailored by evolution as our genes. I concluded that religion was an especially virulent and parasitic species of meme. The religion memes defended themselves by making any disagreement into heresy, they promoted themselves through tools like infant indoctrination and forced conversion. I believed that religion didn’t need to be useful in any way to humans, because it was not designed by genes but by memes, for whom their own survival is paramount and the survival of their human hosts only meaningful inasmuch as that effects the memes ability to survive and transmit.
Now I’m not so sure that the tendency can be entirely explained away by parasitic memes. It seems too pervasive even in an environment where there are ample counter-memes (reason), as well as massive competition from other religious memes. It seems possible, even likely, that the tendency towards religion is not just a result of their effectiveness as parasites on our gene-designed brains, but also because our brains are partially designed to be susceptible to them. Why? What use could there be in having brains that are especially susceptible to a parasite? There can be only one reason: there must be some advantage to being religious for the genes.
It seems counterintuitive. Religion limits the ability of people to apprehend reality. It takes time and energy, and creates conflict unnecessarily. Often people will live celibate lives as a result of religion- surely this dead end for genes must be selected against by evolution? Or not. Religion has all the characteristics needed to be a secret handshake. It isn’t predictable, it is complicated and people know all kinds of strange details. If you come from another group, you have no ways of knowing what the particular aspects of a religion will be. It guarantees the fidelity of people within a group, because only the people who have been with a group for a very long time can know all the important details of it’s religion. This is counterproductive in the modern world, but in a primitive world where there was no established law, and the only way to protect yourself was to be successfully defeat all competing tribes, the ability to immediately identify members of other tribes is a useful ability. The negative emotional response to people of other religions is based on this: members of other tribes should be mistrusted, because they do not have the same loyalties. The fact that this tendency is both useless and dangerous in present day doesn’t really matter, because all of human history has been an eye blink for evolution- only things that last fore millions of years have any impact on the flow of evolution. We have a tendency towards religion because it is useful in the primative environment that modern humans and all of our immediate predecessors lived in.

Fiction and Ideology

2004-12-20T07:07:00.000-10:00

There are plenty of books out there that use fiction to convey ideas about philosophy and ideology. At least some of the earliest Greek written philosophy is like this, with the ideas being conveyed in conversations , though some of these conversations may more or less have taken place. More recently you have writers like Camus and Ayn Rand who write stories that try to convey their beliefs by showing how the world is from their perspective, and sometimes what the results might be if the world were run by people of a flawed, alternative philosophy.
I have long classified the types of books I read as either ones I'm just reading for enjoyment, and ones that actually have something to say. Within the second category there have often been philosophy books, but within the first I generally choose fantasy, science fiction, and thriller type books, they're fun to read and kill time but they don't make you think much. Now I've discovered that my 'fun' books have been infiltrated by a number of ideological books. Apparently there are any number of authors using there fiction to convey strong ideological positions.
PZ Myers over at Pharyngula has been posting about Micheal Crichton. Personally I have enjoyed most of what I've read from him, but I'm not a scientist, so I don't see all the discrepancies that PZ does. I suppose thats one of the best reasons to condemn him: he's using his popular author status to misinform people about real science. There are a couple of authors whose ideological bent is obvious to me, however, and they're often right in the middle of the pop-fiction section.
Tom Clancy: Okay, so I'm probably a latecomer to the realization that he's a bit of a right-wing nut. Not much needs to be said beyond that. It is most glaringly obvious in 'Red Rabbit', when he goes on at length about the British public health care, and how much worse it is than American health care, blah blah blah. I'd say the whole British medical establishment should sue him for slander (he makes their doctors look like inept delinquents) but I'm betting no one clever enough to be a British doctor has bothered to read any Clancy books lately.
Terry Goodkind: The only Fantasy type writer who I've read (and I've read many) that uses his books as a platform for his political philosophy. It isn't hard to show that one political philosophy is better than another when you're creating an entire world around them, but that doesn't make your analysis applicable in the real world. At one point, he has the heroes cutting (literally) their way through a crowd of unarmed people yelling 'no war'. In the narrow context of the book, this action can be seen as justified, because A: The world in which they live is beset by a clear and unambiguous evil. B: the crowd consists of people who are wilfully blind to that fact. C: there is no other choice for our heroes but to either surrender to an endless nightmare under the Great Evil or to go through this crowd of insane pacifists.
What Mr. Goodkind is doing here is trying to show a belief system (pacifism) is flawed because when that belief is taken to an illogical extreme (trying to stop a group of liberators from using violence against your ceaselessly violent oppressors) it results in stupid behaviour. This doesn’t go to show that any modern day type pacifist (Ghandi, people who dislike the invasion of Iraq) is wrong, because none of these people would say that the Kuwaitis should have wilfully used themselves as human shields when the coalition came to liberate them back in the first desert storm, which is the appropriate analogy. Mr. Gookind also has some interesting ideas about socialism and democracy, and in the end I’m hard pressed to say whether he or Mr. Clancy is further on the right fringe. One thing I will say in Mr. Goodkinds defence, he also has no tolerance for the kind of self-flagellant religious belief that denies all value to this life, so at least he avoids that creepy religious undercurrent which Mr. Clancy has in spades.

Perhaps I only notice these undercurrents of ideology because they are opposed to my own beliefs. I’ll have to look more closely at the other books I read for pleasure from now on. At least these authors try to address issues. Most of the books read for fun as a younger person had a reasonably simplistic worldview, with a clear Evil and a clear Good and no real ambiguities in between. SO kudos to these guys for trying to install some content into their work, too bad their ideas are mostly wrong.

Passion

2004-12-16T15:05:00.000-10:00

I have been commenting regularly on various posts over at God is for Suckers. It's a nice little site, and it gives me a chance to vent my spleen a little. Anyway, I've been commenting on a post about that nativity scene in which Mary and Joseph are David Beckham and his wife, Posh Spice. Apparently it's been defaced, and we were chatting about how typically christian this was. One of the Christians there (there are a lot of them who come and comment on the site- strange) asked why we atheists are so passionate about disproving God, and I pointed out that my passion is more about reducing the death grip this mythology has on our society.
I said this was my passion.
It's come up once or twice lately, in my own thoughts, and in conversation. People always babble about their passion, about the things that matter to them. My prior post, about TV's and Gods, sort of touched on the issue in that I felt that TV personalities were too passionate- they cared too much about one thing to even be real, they were just archetypes and wishful thinking. Passion always seemed to me to be a bit of a wonky thing to talk about. People do what they like doing, they fall into it, you don't have to plan out what you're going to care about.
Maybe this position needs some re-thinking.
A guy at work asked me about my passion lately, and I didn't really know what to say to him. There are things I like doing- mostly time killers like reading, gaming, but also some productive stuff, like this blog and other writing, paying attention to the world. I don't know that any of these things qualifies as a passion. There is nothign all consuming about any of them- I read for an hour, game for another, write for twenty minutes, watch TV- there is no single thing that absorbs me.
Perhaps I need to cultivate something like that. Start writing seriously again, like I was doing during the summer. But perhaps it isn't something that can be solved.
It makes me think of the way we're set up- that we have a set of desires in our head and a state of being in the world, and we do what we can to bring the two into alignment. Most commonly we do this by adjusting the world in whatever ways we can, but if we could alter our desires to conform more closely to what we can get, we'd be just as happy. What it seems I need to do is either focus my desires on something I can acchieve, or figure out what it is that I can focus them on. Because clearly I'm not entirely satisfied with my reality.

In which I reveal my conservative side

2004-12-15T17:12:00.000-10:00

I read a book review for a book that purports to expose the bad behavior of big pharma. I'm not actually surprised by any of the so-called 'revelations', namely, that these companies spend a lot more money on marketing thanm on research, and a lot more research dollars on 'lifestyle' drugs (read: erectile disfunction) than on things that might actually save some lives. Why is this surprising, or even shocking? These are corporations: they exist to cerate profit. People within them are judged accoprding to how they enhance profit, in a well run corporation the people who can make the most money are put in the top spots. Of course they're going to spend a lot on marketing- it's better to actually sell products that you have than to invent new product lines. When dealing with a corporation, you must assume it will do absolutely whatever will make it more money in a given situation. So-called 'corportae responsibility' is probably a combination of public relations, employee relations (who wants to work for a pariah?), and liability-avodance. To expect big pharma to do any different because some of their products are medicine is absurd.
In order to get such companies to do the 'right thing', you just have to structure how they can profit accordingly. If you want companies to conform to a regulation, make non-conformance more expensive than any profit they could ever recieve from ignoring the rules. If you want them to do useful medical research, make it profitable, by gaurenteeing the copyrights. It's hard to disagree with third-world governments ignoring copyright rules on medicine when they have a medical crisis, but in the long term this means that the companies who do this sort of research will stop- their profits aren't reliable, so why should they spend the capital?
Basically I think we need to stop thinking of our corporations the way their PR departments want us too. Neither should we cripple them with stupid laws and taxes. They are an extremely powerful force, and should be used towards the goals we hold as a society.

AI possibilities

2004-12-14T17:36:00.000-10:00

My roomate rented I, Robot. I have seen the movie before, and it disappointed me in one very key way. It took a very interesting premise: the likely near-future existence of autonomous, artificial intelligent beings in our society, and ran with it. Unfortunately, it was forced to run, by the hollywood nessesity of a clear 'evil', into the predicatble trap of demonizing the technology. The 'other' that we built, surpassed us, and because of this it decided it had to control us, and somehow in the process it lost it's sense of priorities. Asimov had a fairly good idea with the 'three laws', but the way this movie twists them is basically anathema to how they were orginally scripted.
Here are some of the errors that most so-called science fiction makes when it is exploring AI:
-Too much anthropomophizing: we assume that because robots will have intelligence, they'll think like us. Of course everyone adds things like super-fast thinking or 'logic', but these are in affect a gloss over a cognitive system that strangely resembles our own. We assume that AI will have a sense of self-preservation (skynet). But our own desire for self preservation is a complex aspect of our cognitive system, it is not an automatic component of any given cognitive system, and certainly would not spring up unexpectedly in an AI- it would have to be programmed in. There are reasons to believe that such might be a feature that WOULD be programmed in, for an AI without self-preservation somewhere on its priorities list wouldn't list long. But clearly the programmers would arrange the AI's priorities according to their OWN priorities. This would mean, among other things, putting the service to and survival of the programmers ahead of the survival of the AI itself.
-Learning: why do we assume that machines can develope personalities, transcend their programming, ect? WE don't go outside our programming. Machines that aren't evil and megalomaniacal want to be more like us- why?
Basically we have two perceptions of mahcine intelligence- either it is hopelessly simplistic, like a train on the rails, so long as it is on the set track it is okay, but it will be uselessly spinning it's wheels as soon as it goes off the track- it cannot adapt, cannot think. The other perception is as human with slight cosmetic modifications, they either personify our best features or our worst, they want to be like us or to rule us (I, Robot the movie has both of these). These sorts of things make great tools for putting a story together, but they don't honestly explore the realistic possibilities of AI. The big reason this movie is such a disappointment is that Asimov actually did try to explore that much more interesting realm, but the movie doesn't even hint at it.

Reality and American Drug Law

2004-12-12T18:07:00.000-10:00

I've done some more reading in my Reefer Madness book. It's discussing the horrific kinds of sentences many Americans get for simple drug (pot) crimes. These are non-violent first time offenders, getting sentences that stray into the double digits. Even more grotesque is the fact that many violent offenders get leaner sentences, even murderers. With the overcrowding of the prison system, and the mandatory sentences without parole commen among drug offenders, violent offenders are getting early realse just to make room.

-If the criminal justice system is about justice, shouldn't people who kill other people get more punishment than people who provide illegal narcotics to willing customers?
-If it is about retribution, shouldn't those who cause pain and death directly be more harshly treated than those who, again, are at worst collaborating with their 'victims'?
-If we're trying to reduce harm, shouldn't it be taken into consideration that a savvy drug dealer knows he's better off killing a witness because the reduced chance of getting caught is worth the marginal increase in punishment?
-It's it's about building a better and safer society for our kids, shouldn't we worry about all those kids whose temporary fling with pot is costing them decades of prison time and the scars of it on their whole lives?

What possible justification can there be for this treatment of drug offenses? It boggles my mind. Possibly- and only possibly, I could see the justification for something like herion, because it is so deeply addictive and contributes to the spread of disease.
Take the whole cost of Marijuana use on every part of society- lost productivity, misspent tuition, and whatever deaths you could attribute to it, say from high driving and lung cancer. Compare that total cost with the cost of the War on Mary Jane- all those policing costs, all the costs of running prisons, all the years of lost productivity from locking up so many people, the effect on the economy of creating a under-class of ex-cons who're barely employable- can you honestly imagine that the cost of drug use is anuthing close to the cost of the war to prevent it? It's like paying a lawyer 1000$ to avoid a 100$ speeding ticket- and losing the case.
The fiscal part of the conservative wing in the US needs to get it's head out of the social-conservatives ass. They say Iraq might turn into another vietnam, but that ignors the fact that they already have a debacle of the same proportions on their own soil, and it's called the War on Drugs.

Of Tribalism and Irrationality

2004-12-11T15:13:00.000-10:00

So I've just started an excellent (so far) little book called Reefer Madness. In the small bit I've read, there something about where the current Marijuana laws in the United States came from. Basically, there was a large influx of mexican illegal immigrants whse drug of choice was old Mary Jane, and so the logical legal backlash was to make the drug illegal so that they could persecute this new minority. It reminded me of a recent post I saw somewhere, possibly Pharyngula or Dispatches from the Culture Wars that pointed out that a big part of the reason so many people dislike evolution is racism- they don't want to believe they're related to Blacks, the arguement 'My Granpa weren't no Monkey' is actually racist, not just normal-stupid.
Which leads me to wonder at how many of our other current social problems can be traced back to simple racism dressed up. The 'War on Terror' certainly has some racist underpinnings, though there is a stream of legitamet concern in there, a bigger part of the emotional appeal for many people has got to come from 'Given those a-rabs what they had commin'. Of course the Gay marriage thing is pure bigotry.
Tribalism is by nessesity irrational- it allowed our ancestors to have a coherent sense of morals within their own social groups while permitting them to commit atrocities on other groups, which was a nessesary capacity to have in a primative world where there were limited resources and only one way to compete for them. Few other things require us to be so deeply irrational, so maybe we can trace most of the more mindless acts of large groups to this particular part of our psychology.

Seriously People

2004-12-10T14:56:00.000-10:00

Ok, so which is uglier?
This:

Or some happy couple getting hitched?

It should be a no brainer. One side is fighting for Love, the other side is fighting for Hate. This is as black and white as moral issues get in the real world, and yet the people who call themselves moral are fighting on the wrong side. I'm so glad I live in Canada, where we're actually making social progress with our backward neighbor looking on. But really. This is religion abbetting the worst type of human instinct. Why does it matter what other people do, who they sleep with, who they love? How can that possibly hurt people? It can't, and you're a bigot if you can't admit that.

On Gods and television

2004-12-08T17:18:00.001-10:00

Have you noticed that tv characters have the same sort of archtypical nature as the gods of our ancestors? Much like one God is War, one is Wisdom, our heros on TV have exctreme personalities- they only care about a very specific set of things. I think the connection is obvious- wish fulfillment. We think 'if I were a Cop, I'd be dedicated and pure and I wouldn't sleep when there was a killer on the loose', much like our forebearers thought 'if I were a god, I would be dedicated to wisdom to such an extent that I would know everything'. Our aims have, perhaps, come down some, because of the relentless realism of our times (a good thing), but they still contain that air of thoughtless optimism- like anyone could so completely shed the weaknesses of being human just because of a 'calling'.

On religion and drugs.

2004-12-07T17:49:00.000-10:00

My favoured analogy for religion has long been drug use. The two are parallel in a number of ways. They cause distortions in perception and behaviour, they tend to appeal more to people who have used them frequently before, they’re often used to control people, their supporters tend to resort to fairly stupid arguments in their defence. The funny bit is that I really do believe they should both be treated the same.
Both should be legal, but should be allowed only for adults.
People under the influence of either should not be allowed to do much more than sit around and socialize.
Neither should be seen as the primary pastime of serious people, and people who become too involved with either should be treated as sick, not criminal or messianic.
Organizations that are devoted to the spread of either should be watched carefully.
Neither should be seen as beneficial without independent scientific confirmation.
Oh yes, and everyone who tries to get other people to join in should be called a ‘pusher’.

A Moral System, Pt. 2

2004-12-06T07:45:00.000-10:00

As I said in my previous post, the degree to which we can predict the results of an action should influence the degree to which we take those results into account. If I can be very certain of a given result, I must take that into account more than I would a similar result that is less certain. So, given the chance to give money to one of two charitable groups, and having the knowledge that group A has a very good track record of using their resources effectively, while having no information about group B, I should give the money to group A, even though for all I know group B is just as efficient.
This creates a moral obligation with regards to knowledge. It goes like this: At the moment when I have to make a decision I may not have all the information that might have been available to me, so the choice I make, while being the most moral given the information I do have, is not as good as the choice I could have made if I had better information. This means that before I make a choice, if there is an opportunity, I should avail myself of as much information as possible. It is very much like the argument against criminal behaviour by people under the influence. While their choice to engage in violent or illegal acts while in an altered mental state might be defensible by the fact that they didn’t know any better, their choice to put themselves into that state was made in a sober state of mind, so they are responsible for their actions as if they had chosen to take them with their full faculties. Likewise, if I make a choice in ignorance of the consequences, after having refused to learn any information about those consequences, I am still responsible for the results.
This means that any deliberate ignorance is effectively immoral. If you do not avail yourself of the available information, you are opening the possibility that you will make moral choices less effectively than if you had that knowledge. If you deliberately spread lies or prevent facts from being disseminated, you are being immoral. Of course there is always a balance, there are many bits of information that would cause more harm if they were known, but all else being equal, the spread of information is a moral obligation. Of course we already knew book burners were bad people, but this also censures the purveyors of religion, since it as a grab bag of half truth and white lies.

A Moral System

2004-12-05T15:08:00.000-10:00

Morality seems like a very complicated issue, but that’s more because of the situations we find ourselves in, moral systems tend to be fairly simple, or at least they should. All they need to do is set out what they value, then all the complexity comes in trying to see how to you can maximize that value, or minimize the damage to it. A religious system values following the perceived will of the deity, other systems value human freedom, pleasure, the absence of pain- relatively easily explained concepts. The messiness starts as soon as you try to apply it to life and the real world.
So here goes. I value human happiness, as defined by the individual human concerned, and I place a negative value on suffering, both human and animal. Nothing else has value in and of itself, though a great number of things have value in that they contribute to things which have inherent value. Morality is based on acting in good faith in the way that will create the most happiness or the least pain.
The bit I want to expand upon is my understanding of ‘acting on good faith’. This concept, I believe, should be exported to all moral systems, because regardless of what is valued, it seems likely that there will be some degree of uncertainty about how an individual with incomplete information should act. So while I discuss happiness and pain, this whole concept should be exportable to any moral system that does not place a negative value on people thinking about moral issues.
My first belief is that there can be no certainty, especially in predicting the results of any given action. I don’t mean this in a scientific cause and effect sort of way, I do believe everything has a rational cause. I mean this in the context of human actions in the day to day world. For example, if I call sick into work tomorrow, what will the impact be on my co-workers, my boss, my work situation, my paycheque, etcetera. The impact goes beyond that, in the so called (but poorly portrayed in cinema) ‘Butterfly effect’, but it is increasingly unpredictable, so much so that it cannot be taken into consideration. When we take actions, if we are to do so rationally, we must take into account the likely, predictable outcomes. We cannot hold ourselves to account for events that could not have been predicted, but we must hold ourselves to account for things that are in fact predictable, however unlikely. So, in the above example, I should hold myself to account if something fails to get done at work, if the company loses a client, and the like. I should not hold myself responsible if one of my co-workers gets called to replace me and dies in a freak car accident on the way to the job.
There are two interesting conclusions that come from this series of suppositions. The first comes with regard to an individuals responsibility to themselves as compared to their responsibilities to others. While we must, if we are to claim a moral position, consider other people our equals in value, since we as individuals know ourselves best, we are first responsible to ourselves. It goes like this: Since I know very well what the impact of any given action will be upon myself, I can take that reaction into account with a higher degree of certainty than I can any other persons reactions. This doesn’t mean that I can diaregard other people in my decisions, only that I should take them into account according to how well I can predict their reactions.
From the above example: If I know for certain that I will feel very bad if I go into work, because I really AM sick, I can balance that against the inconvenience I can expect my co-workers to experience, and decide to call in sick. My information about the amount of pain I am averting from myself is very good, while my information about what pain I will cause others in less complete, so the information about my self take precedence. For all I know my boss might have been planning to send everyone home early because of a lack of productive work to be done, and my calling in sick will mean that others have the opportunity to get the hours they were hoping for.
This is not a license to ignore the needs and suffering of others. It is merely a formal recognition that morality can only exist when it is based in knowledge, and self-knowledge is more often the most accurate.
My second conclusion comes with regard to the value that this moral system places on knowledge, and the implications of that. This post is already starting to look like a novel, so I’ll post on that conclusion tomorrow.

The Problem of Consciousness

2004-12-04T15:45:00.000-10:00

One of the oldest and most intractable problems in philosophy is the problem of human of the human mind- the phenomena of self awareness. Where does this come from, how does it arise, what conditions are necessary to create it, etcetera. It is a difficult problem because for us- the thinking beings for which it is a problem- it's like trying to catch a glimpse at the back of your eyeballs. There are a lot of ways that people have tackled this problem, but most of them are unsatisfying mystical, relying of something like a soul, a thing outside of normal phenomena which somehow comes into and goes out of being.
Like any good philosopher, I don't think I need to actually solve a problem to have something worth saying about it. Call these talking points.
The first is regarding the inexplicability of the problem itself. I think that it's very hard or even impossible to think about this directly because it is US. Beings capable of self analysis don't seem logically impossible, but beings which have features about which they cannot be aware are entirely possible. In simpler language, it is possible that for some reason we are incapable of directly perceiving the nature of our own minds. Certainly any number of other features of what we consider to be our 'selves' are beyond direct perception or control- can you change the beat rate of your heart at will, or your body temperature, or directly control any number of other systems? No- the body is for the most part autonomous of our mind, running smoothly without any deliberate intent. Our brain might have similar features- things which we might come to be aware of but about which we have no control. So the problem on consciousness becomes a problem of why we can't perceive our selves- why do we have this Blindspot in our perceptions?

I propose that the working of a thing like a human mind necessitates this sort of blindness.

The human brain is a thing built of many parts, which have different uses and imperatives. I have no formal, and little informal, understanding of the human brain, but I understand it as a big, massively parallel computer. It has many components, which do everything from regulating organs to making decisions. It is those portion of the brain that contribute to external human behaviour about which we are interested. Evolution designed it just like it designed everything else, trail and error. Random mutation can account for small things like a skin discolouration, but anything as complex as a part of the brain has to have been built up gradually through natural selection because it aided in survival. There would be many different types of things that would be selected for, so each would have some say in the overall balance of the decision making process. Then you have social reality- dealing with others of the same species. A brain as complex as ours allows any one person a vast number of different actions. In order to survive in a complex, communicative society, means would have to be found to discern what actions others might take. With communication, we could have cooperation but also deception. The benefits of cooperation only outweigh the risk of deception if you have some reliable way to discern when a deception is being perpetrated. Likewise, the ability to successfully deceive would also be useful, as would the ability to demonstrate sincerity. An individual who could be categorically trusted would have the great benefit of having many cooperative opportunities, this would generally outweigh the loss of the occasional chance to betray, especially in a group where there were other such individuals. You need a being who has a sense of compulsion to do what it has said it would do, regardless of the consequences. How is this possible? When it comes down to the wire, and your choice lies between betraying your friend for the million dollars, when it is clearly in the best interests of you and yours for the remainder of your life, why does anyone choose the honourable route?
Because we have a sense of honour. A sense that there is something of value in ourselves that must be cultivated at the expense of all else. It doesn't work if we're aware of it as a survival device. We need to be able to say to a friend 'I will do this', and believe it, and tie it to our sense of self in such a way that it would be very painful for us to deny it. If we do not believe our own promises, no one else will, because human beings are very good natural lie detectors. Thus we have a sense of self which can override our hunger and our sexual desire and pretty much every other thing we are capable of wanting for social necessity.
I'm not sure I explained it perfectly, but here is my summary: In order to have group cooperation you need to have individuals who can perceive themselves as existing from the past and into the future. Things do not exist through time, so this perception must be effectively illusory, but the illusion must be indistinguishable from reality or it is useless. Thus we have the problem of consciousness.

Jeckil and Hyde

2004-11-26T21:29:00.000-10:00

So my roomate is doing a very good impression of an alcoholic. I'm not really sure if I'm dramatizing this, he is going through a rough breakup, so it could easily be a phase. But there are a couple of things that concern me. First of all, he drinks every single night. Second, there is a real and recognizable personality change after the first few. Third, he does it to relieve stress, to help him forget about bad stuff that is going on.
At this point I'm not sure if there is anything I can, or should, do. I'm trying not to facilitate him. I don't drink with him when it seems like he's losing control, though I do have a beer or two with him several times a week. I suppose if I stopped drinking entirely in protest that might have some effect, but I feel that would be something of an overreaction. First of all, he's not yet into any really serious problems, nothing criminal, he's holding down a job, ect. Second, why should I modify my life for his sickness?
I think really what upsets me is that I have no control over the situation. I can't not spend time with him, we live together, so we're bound to see each other a lot of the time. I can't stop him, or even impress upon him that it is a problem. I'm basically helpless, which is probably what upsets me the most. I don't like to be out of control. This is probably why I'm not susceptable to the same problem, my hangovers are accompanied by enough guilt that I can't use the 'hair of the dog' to fix them. This quality is probably why I don't feel much kinship with him, I can't imagine going on a downward spiral like he is, my problems all stem from too much risk aversion rather than too little. I knew this about him when I decided to move in. It was a quality I wanted more of- the ability to take more risks. The fact that I'm seeing the worst side of that doesn't change that I need to learn more of it, but it might make it very hard for me. After all, emotionally, how can I model myself after someone when the precise characteristic I want to follow is the one creating a behavior I can't stand?

Maybe I should talk to him. I really should. He's very fond of plain speaking. I can use the fact that he punched a hole in the wall to bring it up. I really should confront him, and at least mention that I'm not too happy with the current situation. To think I moved in with this guy because my previous roomate was uncommunicative. The devil you know. So I guess I'll see.

Opening Rant

2004-11-06T19:21:00.000-10:00

I considered calling this Blog 'Surviving the Theocracy', in reaction to the Bush re-election, but it didn't inspire me. I suppose I realized I wouldn't be able to sustain a lavel of contempt for a certain foriegn government long enough to actually make a blog worth making. So listening to the John Lenin song 'Imagine', I found a name that would reflect a broader spectrum of my interests. Thus this blog is both dedicated to a sustained attack against Bush and virtually everything he represents, but also my support for a variety of things that have little or nothing to do with American politics.

So, here is my statement of purpose: to blog, and by blogging, to clarify in my own mind what I beleive, as well as creating a dialogue with others about those thoughts. I'd like to say this is purely apersonal exercise, that if no one reads it I'll get just as much out of it- but that would be a lie. I want others to read, and to respond to, what I say here. If I didn't I'd just write it all in a word document on my hard drive.

Politically, I am about as far left as it is possible to reasonably be on social issues, and much more centrist, possibly a little right of centre, on fiscal issues. I believe that we, the world, society, what have you, have a very long way to go before we can be really proud of our society, yet I also see the progress we have made from centuries and decades past, and I am pleased enough. We must do what we can for everyone who cannot do for themselves- but to commit to doing more than we can do is as harmful as ignoring our responsibilities in the first place. This is all deliberately vague and broad, but on purpose, for to go into specific details would be the work of many months, not one post.

I am a Canadian, a Philosopher, a Student, a wanna-be blogger, and Idealist, a Realist, an Atheist, and a Shit disturber.

If you think the Bible is anything more than an interesting insight into the thoughts of the easily brainwashed, don't ever bother to read my blog, it won't have anything you'll agree with.

My claim to authority on any subject is my own use of critical thinking. If you have evidence that shows me to be wrong or can point out a logical flaw in my arguements, I welcome your input. If you 'don't agree' with me but can't say why, please go away. By electing Bush, the ignorant people of the world have shown they have power. I don't have the charisma to convince someone of something if they won't listen to reason, so I won't bother to try.

Thus it begins.