I think I accidentally made myself a Marxist.
Okay, that's actually a bit misleading. I was already a Marxist and (hold on to your hat, conservatives) so is everyone else. You see, Marxism is mostly a method of historical analysis based on resource distribution. It basically states that the interactions of people and societies are based primarily on wealth and identifies population based on their access to resources. It's pretty much population ecology with humans and is more Darwinian that Social Darwinism is, because it understands that the behavior of species is more complicated than "might makes right" aristocracy. Even the most staunch conservative is a Marxist if they use the term "class" to describe an economy. But like I said, calling myself a Marxist is a bit misleading.
What I actually meant is that I think Capitalism is fundamentally flawed.
Don't get me wrong, large scale Communism basically was a failure. It was horrendously inefficient, totalitarian and overall fairly shit. But Capitalism isn't much better. It's horrible at fair resource distribution, imperialistic, conversely totalitarian and overall also pretty shit. But, because the US won the Cold War, the great war of ideologies, we assumed that Capitalism fundamentally worked. Of course, this assumption does not necessarily have to be true. The Cold War left the US an empty shell of what it was before: an avaricious, hollowed out shell of a Military-Industrial complex stricken pseudo-empire. It was like knife fight: the looser dies on the street, the winner dies in the ambulance.
When I read the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, I was actually very much intrigued by how Athens paralleled the US, and how they decayed over the course of constant war. The Peloponnesian War for Athens and the World Wars and the Cold War for the US only reinforced the sense of entitlement to everyone's resources. Quoth Athens in the Melian Debate "For of the Gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will," and likewise the famed spokesman for Neo-Liberalism, Gordon Gekko: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A."
Now, I know I am making a bold claim about Imperialism in the US. After all, empires need emperors, right? They have flags and conquest and stuff. I am not the sort to employ ad hominem, and so I will explain my reasoning. Capitalism cannot work in a closed system because it requires growth, and it is a law of nature that things decay in a closed system. I'll give you an example: a bank distributes $100 to five people, and because it's a dick (and to keep the math simple) it charges 20% interest, which means each of the 5 people need to give back $1 interest in addition to the $20 loan. Now each person converts $5 into goods (production) and they sell it to each other for $15 apiece, each person making a handy $10 profit. The bank, pleased at these excellent returns, calls in the loans. To its dismay, the 5 people can only cough up $15, not the expected $21, and so the bank forecloses on the $5 goods. The bank liquefies its assets and has $100 while the five people are penniless. No one has any profit, because the bank expected $105 worth of returns in a closed system of $100. You can't create something out of nothing. There are further complications when you remember that entropy will take a cut of anything you produce and so $1 of the $5 goods cannot be liquefied. This means that the bank gave out $100 worth of loans expecting a $105 worth of returns, but actually only got $95. The bank played against the House and forgot the most important rule: the House always wins.
Still you insist America can't be an empire, because we have a parchment with scribbles on it saying we aren't. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what empire consists of. Empire is the creation of an open economic system from a closed one through colonial resource extraction. In the colonies, it is assumed that there is no demand for the resources in the area in which they are extracted (for Athens: no demand for tributary wealth by the Delian colleagues, Rome: no demand for arable land or loot by Barbarians, Vikings: no demand for land and treasure by the Christians, Spain: no demand for labor by Amerindians, Britain: no demand for mineral wealth by Africans, America: no demand for petrochemicals by pretty much everyone who has it). Of course, it is not just America who benefits from empire. Its satraps too, also known as NATO, benefit from this imperialism by giving tribute of their economies and metadata. America actually stands out among these empires that it has found an effective way to pilfer its own citizens too, presuming that there is no demand for privacy on their part and thus collecting all information to use as it pleases.
Of course, in this day and age, Empire is delusional. Like the bank above, we're trying to play against the House, and as we globalize even more we are learning that it is indeed a small world after all. If you're feeling claustrophobic right now, good. At this point there are only three directions to grow: reducing the House's cut by increasing efficiency through science and technology (it's working but not fast enough), expand into frontier (places that actually have zero demand), which we're doing but again, it's not going to cut it, and lastly stick our heads in the tar sands and continue to create artificial growth through imperialism, which is what we are insisting on. I can't blame them, honestly. This is how civilization has been working for the past 8,000 years, and it's just now reaching its limiting factors.
Or, perhaps it is time to put away Capitalism for now. After all, I'm sure humans have found good options for closed system economies before, right?
Yeah, no. Fuck that.
Sincere Regards
Michael Coffey
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
On Brothers and Secrets
... Epistemology
*Angry screaming*
Oh, Christ. Okay, stop, stop it! I know this can be a contentious topic, because it basically either credits or discredits every other pursuit that humans have, but it is kind of an important one so shut up and listen. It is pretty much the most fundamental branch of philosophy. For those of you who don't believe me, I have a transcript of the first philosophical debate in the world:
Philosopher: "Things exist"
Skeptic: "How do you know?"
...
Philosopher: *Clubs skeptic's head in* "No further questions."
You see, one of the major problems with any part in philosophy is that it's kind of based on the assumption that we actually are capable of understanding things. Of course, this is an annoying question to answer, because any conclusions we make are made within the confines of our own knowledge. The reason I have always stressed the importance of axioms and definitions of words is that these define our logic and meaning respectively. But at the same time both these are entirely arbitrary decisions, and are actually quite meaningless when you get right down to it
For example, take the infamous Orwellian spookitude, 2+2=5. When I read 1984, this particular doublethought struck me. The mind, after all, takes the path of least resistance, especially under duress and so it seemed much more plausible to me that when Winston was convinced that 2+2=5, it was not his observation of reality that changed so that a pair of pairs actually appeared as a pair and a half of pairs, but rather the four letters "five" the phoneme "faɪv" and the squiggly line 5 was the visual, audible and numerical representation of a pair of pairs. That is not to say that you couldn't convince someone that 2+2=5 in the sense that it was meant, but it would take a lot more work. Honestly, it would have been easier for O'Brein to give Winston the ol' lobotomy spike and called it a day.
My reasoning for this is as such: pattern recognition is one of the primary functions of the brain. It has literally been doing this ever since we developed photosensitive cells, back in our younger days as a proto-chordate. For hundreds of millions of years we have been honing our ability to instinctively recognize ++++ is as many pluses as ++ and ++. It's actually hard to explain, it's that innate. Then, this upstart of a prefrontal cortex with its fancy symbolic reasoning and linguistic representation comes waltzing in and declares that they've got it all wrong, that actually 2+2=5 and since 2+2 is ++ and ++, then 5, which is defined as +++++ is also ++ and ++. Of course, our old pattern recognition is having none of this whipper-snapper's bullshit and promptly tells him that his definition of 5 is wrong and that the actual definition of five is ++++, as per pattern recognition rules. Then the symbolic reasoning says oh and changes it's ledger while the pattern recognition grumbled that back in its day, visual aides were all they had and they were grateful. When you get right down to it, nothing has changed: ++ and ++ is still ++++, but that is defined by the logical phrase 2+2=5, rather than 2+2=4.
Of course, if you're anything like my high school English teacher you would probably be yelling something along the lines of "But Big Brother is just that good! He can change you innately using mind tricks alone!" And if this is so, just like in my English class, both of of us don't actually care about the points we are trying to make. I don't care about a depiction of an implausibly efficient totalitarian society, and you don't care about the limitations of the psychological mutability of the human brain. However, this blog isn't about 1984, now is it?
Nevertheless, people fail to accept that our mental capacity is physically limited by our chunky pink salsa. It's actually kind of disturbing how much people buy into the cultural epidemic of delusional positivism, positivity fueled-latent-omnipotent-telekinetic-wizard magic, and the idea that humans can know everything, do everything and change everything if you just try hard enough.
For those of you who do by chance believe that here's an experiment for you to try out: do a back flip to the moon. Go on, I'll wait (don't forget, pics or it didn't happen).
...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you didn't do it. If I was being a real dick, I could say that it's your own fault that you couldn't do it. Under the axiom of human exceptionalism, a human is intrinsically capable of everything, disregarding the limitations of anything, be it psychological limitation, economic inflexibility or the laws of physics, and if you can't well then you're probably not a real person anyway, so fuck you.
I won't consider the No True Scotsman fallacy in this argument, because the main point its that it's fundamentally flawed. Humans are limited. I know that because everything is limited. For those of you who've forgotten, let's review the laws of thermodynamics
1: The house always wins
2: The house always wins
3: Hit or stand, chief?
Sincere Regards, Michael Coffey
(PS: it turns out the Bible of all things already covered this point. Talk about not listening the first time...)
*Angry screaming*
Oh, Christ. Okay, stop, stop it! I know this can be a contentious topic, because it basically either credits or discredits every other pursuit that humans have, but it is kind of an important one so shut up and listen. It is pretty much the most fundamental branch of philosophy. For those of you who don't believe me, I have a transcript of the first philosophical debate in the world:
Philosopher: "Things exist"
Skeptic: "How do you know?"
...
Philosopher: *Clubs skeptic's head in* "No further questions."
You see, one of the major problems with any part in philosophy is that it's kind of based on the assumption that we actually are capable of understanding things. Of course, this is an annoying question to answer, because any conclusions we make are made within the confines of our own knowledge. The reason I have always stressed the importance of axioms and definitions of words is that these define our logic and meaning respectively. But at the same time both these are entirely arbitrary decisions, and are actually quite meaningless when you get right down to it
For example, take the infamous Orwellian spookitude, 2+2=5. When I read 1984, this particular doublethought struck me. The mind, after all, takes the path of least resistance, especially under duress and so it seemed much more plausible to me that when Winston was convinced that 2+2=5, it was not his observation of reality that changed so that a pair of pairs actually appeared as a pair and a half of pairs, but rather the four letters "five" the phoneme "faɪv" and the squiggly line 5 was the visual, audible and numerical representation of a pair of pairs. That is not to say that you couldn't convince someone that 2+2=5 in the sense that it was meant, but it would take a lot more work. Honestly, it would have been easier for O'Brein to give Winston the ol' lobotomy spike and called it a day.
My reasoning for this is as such: pattern recognition is one of the primary functions of the brain. It has literally been doing this ever since we developed photosensitive cells, back in our younger days as a proto-chordate. For hundreds of millions of years we have been honing our ability to instinctively recognize ++++ is as many pluses as ++ and ++. It's actually hard to explain, it's that innate. Then, this upstart of a prefrontal cortex with its fancy symbolic reasoning and linguistic representation comes waltzing in and declares that they've got it all wrong, that actually 2+2=5 and since 2+2 is ++ and ++, then 5, which is defined as +++++ is also ++ and ++. Of course, our old pattern recognition is having none of this whipper-snapper's bullshit and promptly tells him that his definition of 5 is wrong and that the actual definition of five is ++++, as per pattern recognition rules. Then the symbolic reasoning says oh and changes it's ledger while the pattern recognition grumbled that back in its day, visual aides were all they had and they were grateful. When you get right down to it, nothing has changed: ++ and ++ is still ++++, but that is defined by the logical phrase 2+2=5, rather than 2+2=4.
Of course, if you're anything like my high school English teacher you would probably be yelling something along the lines of "But Big Brother is just that good! He can change you innately using mind tricks alone!" And if this is so, just like in my English class, both of of us don't actually care about the points we are trying to make. I don't care about a depiction of an implausibly efficient totalitarian society, and you don't care about the limitations of the psychological mutability of the human brain. However, this blog isn't about 1984, now is it?
Nevertheless, people fail to accept that our mental capacity is physically limited by our chunky pink salsa. It's actually kind of disturbing how much people buy into the cultural epidemic of delusional positivism, positivity fueled-latent-omnipotent-telekinetic-wizard magic, and the idea that humans can know everything, do everything and change everything if you just try hard enough.
For those of you who do by chance believe that here's an experiment for you to try out: do a back flip to the moon. Go on, I'll wait (don't forget, pics or it didn't happen).
...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you didn't do it. If I was being a real dick, I could say that it's your own fault that you couldn't do it. Under the axiom of human exceptionalism, a human is intrinsically capable of everything, disregarding the limitations of anything, be it psychological limitation, economic inflexibility or the laws of physics, and if you can't well then you're probably not a real person anyway, so fuck you.
I won't consider the No True Scotsman fallacy in this argument, because the main point its that it's fundamentally flawed. Humans are limited. I know that because everything is limited. For those of you who've forgotten, let's review the laws of thermodynamics
1: The house always wins
2: The house always wins
3: Hit or stand, chief?
Sincere Regards, Michael Coffey
(PS: it turns out the Bible of all things already covered this point. Talk about not listening the first time...)
Thursday, November 21, 2013
On Beauty and Shit
Hello once again, dear readers. I apologize for my extended absence, I'm still getting a hang of the whole "regular updates" thing, but I should be back on track now, so fear not!
Anyway enough about me. Let's talk about Beauty.
The other day, I was talking with my friend about the philosophical branch of aesthetics, the black sheep of the Ivory Tower, and I came to realize that while he was content to talk down at it, I realized that I myself was in no position to actually judge, chiefly because I had no idea what aesthetics was actually about. It turns out what I thought, that it was the study of beauty, artistic merit and taste, was in fact correct, but my research spurred me to think about it more heavily.
Now, for the record, I have no idea what the fuck "beauty" actually means. Like "to be" it's just a sort of random generality of something in particular, something that everybody understands so inherently that most people never get around to actually considering what it means. Now, I absolutely these sorts of intuitive understandings of things, because everyone has a slightly different interpretation of what it even means and as such they cause any sort of rational discussion to devolve into a shouting match of who's definition is right and usually ends with somebody getting stabbed, which is no way to win a philosophy debate. Definitions are basically axioms which, in order to be effective exist independently of any personal or cultural bias, sieved down to the most basic understanding. As such, keywords from which logical arguments are likely to be constructed have to be agreed upon before anything else, and if this doesn't happen, then the debate is entirely pointless; (in addition, moving the goalposts of the definition while making an argument is an underhanded stratagem only used by feeble minded fuckwads, for whom the only fitting rebuttal is a shiv in the solar plexus). Because of this, we must define Beauty before we go any further.
For as much as I don't like Plato, I feel like he had a pretty good idea of what beauty is. While he never specifically defines it to my knowledge, he characterizes it in the Symposium as a state of being which is pleasurable to an observer. Of course, "pleasure" too is a bad word, because, as the Epicureans learned while facing their critics, pleasure is usually associated with some sort of physical and sensory excitement, and then out come the anti-hedonism guns and then nothing can get done because we are awash in negative connotations. No, that won't do at all. Well then, let's define beauty as a state of being which brings a sense of satisfaction to the observer. I think that if we get any more bare bones than that, then the word starts loosing meaning entirely, so we'll leave it at that.
"AHA!" exclaim the critics who I presume are lurking about somewhere "But that as well is not a good definition! Do you mean to say that beauty can only be found in things which are satisfying? Well what about Dada, whatever the fuck this is, and all the other shitty art which is pretentious and stupid? Can't things be objectively beautiful without an observer? I've got my Art degree and Rothko said blah blah blah bullshit bullshit." To whom I say, yes, fuck that, no, don't care, Rothko was an asshole.
I'll elaborate on this. Suppose you are a connoisseur of high art and liked to go to gallery openings and eat cheese, drink wine and complain with your fellow art patrons about the appalling nature of the plebs. You spend several thousand dollars to go to the latest work of an up and coming young artist. You and your snub nosed compatriots are soon giddy with anticipation as the work of art which you all invested a great deal of physical, intellectual and social capital to see as the artist comes and spends two hours explaining how his work is a commentary on social inequality and the decadence of the upper crust. With the irony flying leagues above your heads, as it often does, you applaud him on his learned and passionate speech and the curtain is finally drawn. Before you now is a stick figure, drawn in feces, lovingly excreted and smeared across a canvas by the artist, hand woven by an elderly Bengali woman. Even for a stick figure, it's crude: the lines are shaky, the circle was hasty and left open and there is no more detail than a basic humanoid shape. The stench is still pungent and horrible, though the dung has long since cooled. If you look closely enough, you can even spot an undigested bean string (no doubt organic and locally grown). The entire room is silent. Then, suddenly from one part of the crowd you hear a quiet "it's beautiful." Everyone breaks into applause. "Brilliant, brilliant," one man shouts. "What an artist," another woman cries. Everyone is in an uproar; the artist is flushed with joyful pride, everyone sing's the pieces praises and you even overhear talk of someone commissioning the boy. You finally leave that night happy knowing that you have experienced something beautiful in what was, in every sense of the word, a very shitty drawing.
So now, I bet you expect me to give some sort of commentary on how deluded everyone in that story was, and how they didn't actually experience beauty, they just thought they did. Well, I'm not going to. The fact of the matter is that there was beauty in that shitty drawing. Sure, the characters of the story were all hypocritical imbeciles. Sure, their pleasure was probably derived entirely from a mix of the drunkenness, the confirmation bias which told them that anything this difficult to access must be good, the satisfaction that they understood the meaning of an entirely incomprehensible work, and the group mentality which only served to reinforce all the prior things, (by the way, if your art requires a lengthy exposition to be understood, you have fundamentally failed as an artist). There was beauty in the drawing, but that beauty was entirely contextual. There was no beauty in the shit-stained bolt of cloth, but rather the beauty was experiencing the shit-stained bolt of cloth. Likewise, in Dada, the beauty was the catharsis in the artists and the savvy audience when they denied art as an institution. The creepy pole sex ballet thing is beautiful in two entirely different ways: the first is the smug satisfaction experienced by the live audience, the other is the joy in the face of ridiculous stupidity experienced by everyone else. There are some things, like the shit-scrawl above, which can only be beautiful in the context in which they occur, and there are other things, like this horrifying scourge of humanity, which is only beautiful outside of it's given circumstances (I am certain that the people caught up in the infernato would not appreciate the colors and shapes nearly as much as we can). As such, does not exist within the context of the beautiful object, but within the context of the observer.
So then, can we ever find an objective form of Beauty? Short answer: no. Long answer: no, but there is a limited spectrum of what is beautiful. The ability of an observer to experience satisfaction is limited in what is satisfying to him, how it's satisfying to him and how much it's satisfying to him. The human experience, though inconceivably vast and detailed, is still fundamentally limited. I'll explore this further next time.
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
(P.S. Some people *choughJohnKeatscough* posit that beauty is truth, truth beauty. I am well versed in the truth regarding the nature of sebaceous cyst removal, but the last thing I would call it is beautiful. Link for the incredulous: WARNING NSFL)
Anyway enough about me. Let's talk about Beauty.
The other day, I was talking with my friend about the philosophical branch of aesthetics, the black sheep of the Ivory Tower, and I came to realize that while he was content to talk down at it, I realized that I myself was in no position to actually judge, chiefly because I had no idea what aesthetics was actually about. It turns out what I thought, that it was the study of beauty, artistic merit and taste, was in fact correct, but my research spurred me to think about it more heavily.
Now, for the record, I have no idea what the fuck "beauty" actually means. Like "to be" it's just a sort of random generality of something in particular, something that everybody understands so inherently that most people never get around to actually considering what it means. Now, I absolutely these sorts of intuitive understandings of things, because everyone has a slightly different interpretation of what it even means and as such they cause any sort of rational discussion to devolve into a shouting match of who's definition is right and usually ends with somebody getting stabbed, which is no way to win a philosophy debate. Definitions are basically axioms which, in order to be effective exist independently of any personal or cultural bias, sieved down to the most basic understanding. As such, keywords from which logical arguments are likely to be constructed have to be agreed upon before anything else, and if this doesn't happen, then the debate is entirely pointless; (in addition, moving the goalposts of the definition while making an argument is an underhanded stratagem only used by feeble minded fuckwads, for whom the only fitting rebuttal is a shiv in the solar plexus). Because of this, we must define Beauty before we go any further.
For as much as I don't like Plato, I feel like he had a pretty good idea of what beauty is. While he never specifically defines it to my knowledge, he characterizes it in the Symposium as a state of being which is pleasurable to an observer. Of course, "pleasure" too is a bad word, because, as the Epicureans learned while facing their critics, pleasure is usually associated with some sort of physical and sensory excitement, and then out come the anti-hedonism guns and then nothing can get done because we are awash in negative connotations. No, that won't do at all. Well then, let's define beauty as a state of being which brings a sense of satisfaction to the observer. I think that if we get any more bare bones than that, then the word starts loosing meaning entirely, so we'll leave it at that.
"AHA!" exclaim the critics who I presume are lurking about somewhere "But that as well is not a good definition! Do you mean to say that beauty can only be found in things which are satisfying? Well what about Dada, whatever the fuck this is, and all the other shitty art which is pretentious and stupid? Can't things be objectively beautiful without an observer? I've got my Art degree and Rothko said blah blah blah bullshit bullshit." To whom I say, yes, fuck that, no, don't care, Rothko was an asshole.
I'll elaborate on this. Suppose you are a connoisseur of high art and liked to go to gallery openings and eat cheese, drink wine and complain with your fellow art patrons about the appalling nature of the plebs. You spend several thousand dollars to go to the latest work of an up and coming young artist. You and your snub nosed compatriots are soon giddy with anticipation as the work of art which you all invested a great deal of physical, intellectual and social capital to see as the artist comes and spends two hours explaining how his work is a commentary on social inequality and the decadence of the upper crust. With the irony flying leagues above your heads, as it often does, you applaud him on his learned and passionate speech and the curtain is finally drawn. Before you now is a stick figure, drawn in feces, lovingly excreted and smeared across a canvas by the artist, hand woven by an elderly Bengali woman. Even for a stick figure, it's crude: the lines are shaky, the circle was hasty and left open and there is no more detail than a basic humanoid shape. The stench is still pungent and horrible, though the dung has long since cooled. If you look closely enough, you can even spot an undigested bean string (no doubt organic and locally grown). The entire room is silent. Then, suddenly from one part of the crowd you hear a quiet "it's beautiful." Everyone breaks into applause. "Brilliant, brilliant," one man shouts. "What an artist," another woman cries. Everyone is in an uproar; the artist is flushed with joyful pride, everyone sing's the pieces praises and you even overhear talk of someone commissioning the boy. You finally leave that night happy knowing that you have experienced something beautiful in what was, in every sense of the word, a very shitty drawing.
So now, I bet you expect me to give some sort of commentary on how deluded everyone in that story was, and how they didn't actually experience beauty, they just thought they did. Well, I'm not going to. The fact of the matter is that there was beauty in that shitty drawing. Sure, the characters of the story were all hypocritical imbeciles. Sure, their pleasure was probably derived entirely from a mix of the drunkenness, the confirmation bias which told them that anything this difficult to access must be good, the satisfaction that they understood the meaning of an entirely incomprehensible work, and the group mentality which only served to reinforce all the prior things, (by the way, if your art requires a lengthy exposition to be understood, you have fundamentally failed as an artist). There was beauty in the drawing, but that beauty was entirely contextual. There was no beauty in the shit-stained bolt of cloth, but rather the beauty was experiencing the shit-stained bolt of cloth. Likewise, in Dada, the beauty was the catharsis in the artists and the savvy audience when they denied art as an institution. The creepy pole sex ballet thing is beautiful in two entirely different ways: the first is the smug satisfaction experienced by the live audience, the other is the joy in the face of ridiculous stupidity experienced by everyone else. There are some things, like the shit-scrawl above, which can only be beautiful in the context in which they occur, and there are other things, like this horrifying scourge of humanity, which is only beautiful outside of it's given circumstances (I am certain that the people caught up in the infernato would not appreciate the colors and shapes nearly as much as we can). As such, does not exist within the context of the beautiful object, but within the context of the observer.
So then, can we ever find an objective form of Beauty? Short answer: no. Long answer: no, but there is a limited spectrum of what is beautiful. The ability of an observer to experience satisfaction is limited in what is satisfying to him, how it's satisfying to him and how much it's satisfying to him. The human experience, though inconceivably vast and detailed, is still fundamentally limited. I'll explore this further next time.
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
(P.S. Some people *choughJohnKeatscough* posit that beauty is truth, truth beauty. I am well versed in the truth regarding the nature of sebaceous cyst removal, but the last thing I would call it is beautiful. Link for the incredulous: WARNING NSFL)
Thursday, November 14, 2013
On Laziness and Inspiration
Dearest Readers and everyone else,
So tolls the bell of midnight, and no blog post to be found. I believe that this may be something of a reoccurring theme in this blog; as you are all well aware that I have business outside the writing of this blog, such as the rest of my life. While I did promise that there would be regular updates, so too was there the implicit escape clause that if I was entirely without any inspiration through the entire day, usually when my attention is taxed too heavily to properly digest ideas, the post would be postponed until I either had enough free time to properly meditate on its subject, or the next post is due, making it irrelevant anyway. Maintaining a strict schedule, while a priority, is a lesser one than writing content I would actually want to call my own. When I spit out a halfhearted paragraph on something that I haven't given the slightest bit of thought to, I figure that it is discretion that is the better part of valor, rather than bloody minded stubbornness.
Such is my pathetic and feeble attempts to ward off what is no doubt the boiling fury in your hearts. I may as well accept my fate and await the throngs of ingniferous physiognomies demanding an orderly and consistent schedule of the philosophical ramblings of a college freshman. I can only hope they will be merciful.
Sincere regards,
Michael Coffey
So tolls the bell of midnight, and no blog post to be found. I believe that this may be something of a reoccurring theme in this blog; as you are all well aware that I have business outside the writing of this blog, such as the rest of my life. While I did promise that there would be regular updates, so too was there the implicit escape clause that if I was entirely without any inspiration through the entire day, usually when my attention is taxed too heavily to properly digest ideas, the post would be postponed until I either had enough free time to properly meditate on its subject, or the next post is due, making it irrelevant anyway. Maintaining a strict schedule, while a priority, is a lesser one than writing content I would actually want to call my own. When I spit out a halfhearted paragraph on something that I haven't given the slightest bit of thought to, I figure that it is discretion that is the better part of valor, rather than bloody minded stubbornness.
Such is my pathetic and feeble attempts to ward off what is no doubt the boiling fury in your hearts. I may as well accept my fate and await the throngs of ingniferous physiognomies demanding an orderly and consistent schedule of the philosophical ramblings of a college freshman. I can only hope they will be merciful.
Sincere regards,
Michael Coffey
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
On Gods and Goats
So, at this time, I'm going to move away from ethics and start examining human creativity. While I could examine in detail the consequences of my ethical and political theories, my academic integrity would force me to actually do research and cite evidence, which I don't want because that would be a whole lot of work for me to do in an already busy schedule, and presumably you don't want that, because if I start providing evidence for things which you don't know, you would have to take it upon yourself to skeptically examine my source's credibility and before you know it we're stuck in fact and bias land, and nobody wants that, right?
Right. So, creativity. I will not make a general statement about how creativity is what separates man from beast or any nonsense like that because 1. Those statements are never turn out to be as accurate as we hope and 2. man is distinguished from beast for having a collection of traits which happened to propel us to exceptional technological advancement in a set of given circumstances. Hell, there were less than 2,000 of us at one point in prehistory: a single tiny plague could have made homo sapiens just another footnote in biological history.
Luckily for us, this did not happen. Some would say that it was ordained by God even, that humans were meant to be fruitful and multiply. That this was our DESTINY! *thunder clap.* To whom I say: no. While the fact that humans survived a crazy population bottleneck and then grew to become the most dispersed and adaptable macroorganism on the planet, having an r-type population growth despite demonstrating K-type behavior is ridiculously unlikely, it is still far more likely than beings of cosmic, reality warping power taking an interest in some puny tribe of pseudo-monkeys on a pale blue dot in fuckall-nowhere, Milky Way, which itself can't be that important since it's 14 billion light years away from the center of the universe in which the Milky Way is only one of billions of galaxies (and all that's just the puny tribe of pseudo-monkeys can observe from their pale blue dot in fuckall-nowhere). The entire thing smells distinctly of wishful thinking. I'm not saying that there aren't beings of cosmic, reality-warping power, but the idea that the 3- 4 lbs. of wobbly pink porridge we keep in our heads can either accurately comprehend them, or understand their motivations is absurd, especially considering that I can't even understand differential equations, let alone a being that literally is differential equations, goes sideways in time and eats zucchini for breakfast.
So then, why do gods fascinate us so? Why is it that I can make these claims and still walk into the the chapel naught a hundred yards to my right and be struck with transcendental awe? Well, I think it has mostly to do with humanity's desire for understanding and control. I think over time, as humanity was becoming aware of things, not just perceiving them but understanding them, we became aware of our ignorance. Our collective first thought after this transcendent event was probably something along the lines of: "Well this is bullshit. Somebody's got to know what the fuck is going on." I've noticed time and time again that everybody, religious or skeptical, wants to know why? There is a never ending desire for somebody to explain this bullshit. Of course, we have a good method for physical phenomena, at least. Hell, back in the day, flinging lightning around and causing a plague or two were the only requirements for being a god. Hell, that's easy. I'm using lightning to power my magical wizard box right now, and if I were so inspired, I probably could make half a dozen plagues in my bathtub. Of course, we don't consider those things to be particularly godly now. Plagues are caused by germs and lightning is caused bymagic physics. There is no need for gods here. Nevertheless, I'm not really up to date on what it is gods do these days... I think it has something to do with divine providence, fondly regarding their creation and helping football teams score touchdowns. The point remains the same though, whether it's lightning or the transcendence, gods are basically placeholders for human ignorance. They are here to know the things that humans don't, which leaves us comfortable that at least somebody knows what suppose to happen.
Of course, the second reason humans are so interested in gods is that knowledge is power. The second thing humanity collectively thought is "Whoever knows what's going on, I bet he'll change it if I give him a goat." When humans are confronted with an environment that is unsuitable to them, it is in their nature to fix it so that it is. That's why we have tools and clothes and that sort of thing. But when things are entirely out of our control, like the weather, those placeholders that we just put up would be mighty useful if they were real. And I mean, if you did sacrifice a goat to the gods who might possibly exist, what do you have to lose, (except for the goat, obviously)? It's Pascal's wager, but with goats. And of course everyone forgets that Thunderus, goat-eating god of weather, is a placeholder for human's ignorance of meteorological patterns and chaos theory and all that jazz (not that they knew what they were ignorant of, just that they were ignorant) as soon as they do the mental arithmetic that Thunderus would be much more useful if he did exist. Of course, as time went on Thunderus stopped wanting goats, and wanted the tasty souls of the righteous, which was much more convenient, because it gave a concrete reason to be moral. You may not give a shit about the random guy who's skull you caved in, but Thunderus does, and that makes him sad. You don't want to make Thunderus sad do you? Even after he rained on your crops just for you? Bam. Two birds with one stone.
It should be noted that all of this shaky logic is entirely subconscious. A lot of philosophy is describing the intuitions we already had, and religion is no different. The human mind is too clever by a half, it knows cause and effect, and so if it sees effect without cause, it puts one there. Case in point, the "first mover" argument in the origin of existence: God is the cause for everything else. In this argument, Cause (mighty be his placehold), not God, is the true power and God can be shoehorned into Cause's mighty slippers (mighty be their metaphor) because His powers are vaguely defined enough that there's no way to prove He's not Cause (mighty be his placehold).
So what am I saying? That there are no gods? Well, yes and no. What I'm saying is that it is entirely possible that there are beings of cosmic power so great and far reaching that we are only aware of them in the way that fish are aware of water, but even with that power it is no reason to worship them, because what is the point of worshiping things anyway? I am also saying that the powerful, if easily manipulated, anthropocentric beings which we commonly define as gods are fiction, placeholders for human ignorance and proxies for phantasmic control over aspects of our lives which we so desperately cannot tame. Yet.
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
Right. So, creativity. I will not make a general statement about how creativity is what separates man from beast or any nonsense like that because 1. Those statements are never turn out to be as accurate as we hope and 2. man is distinguished from beast for having a collection of traits which happened to propel us to exceptional technological advancement in a set of given circumstances. Hell, there were less than 2,000 of us at one point in prehistory: a single tiny plague could have made homo sapiens just another footnote in biological history.
Luckily for us, this did not happen. Some would say that it was ordained by God even, that humans were meant to be fruitful and multiply. That this was our DESTINY! *thunder clap.* To whom I say: no. While the fact that humans survived a crazy population bottleneck and then grew to become the most dispersed and adaptable macroorganism on the planet, having an r-type population growth despite demonstrating K-type behavior is ridiculously unlikely, it is still far more likely than beings of cosmic, reality warping power taking an interest in some puny tribe of pseudo-monkeys on a pale blue dot in fuckall-nowhere, Milky Way, which itself can't be that important since it's 14 billion light years away from the center of the universe in which the Milky Way is only one of billions of galaxies (and all that's just the puny tribe of pseudo-monkeys can observe from their pale blue dot in fuckall-nowhere). The entire thing smells distinctly of wishful thinking. I'm not saying that there aren't beings of cosmic, reality-warping power, but the idea that the 3- 4 lbs. of wobbly pink porridge we keep in our heads can either accurately comprehend them, or understand their motivations is absurd, especially considering that I can't even understand differential equations, let alone a being that literally is differential equations, goes sideways in time and eats zucchini for breakfast.
So then, why do gods fascinate us so? Why is it that I can make these claims and still walk into the the chapel naught a hundred yards to my right and be struck with transcendental awe? Well, I think it has mostly to do with humanity's desire for understanding and control. I think over time, as humanity was becoming aware of things, not just perceiving them but understanding them, we became aware of our ignorance. Our collective first thought after this transcendent event was probably something along the lines of: "Well this is bullshit. Somebody's got to know what the fuck is going on." I've noticed time and time again that everybody, religious or skeptical, wants to know why? There is a never ending desire for somebody to explain this bullshit. Of course, we have a good method for physical phenomena, at least. Hell, back in the day, flinging lightning around and causing a plague or two were the only requirements for being a god. Hell, that's easy. I'm using lightning to power my magical wizard box right now, and if I were so inspired, I probably could make half a dozen plagues in my bathtub. Of course, we don't consider those things to be particularly godly now. Plagues are caused by germs and lightning is caused by
Of course, the second reason humans are so interested in gods is that knowledge is power. The second thing humanity collectively thought is "Whoever knows what's going on, I bet he'll change it if I give him a goat." When humans are confronted with an environment that is unsuitable to them, it is in their nature to fix it so that it is. That's why we have tools and clothes and that sort of thing. But when things are entirely out of our control, like the weather, those placeholders that we just put up would be mighty useful if they were real. And I mean, if you did sacrifice a goat to the gods who might possibly exist, what do you have to lose, (except for the goat, obviously)? It's Pascal's wager, but with goats. And of course everyone forgets that Thunderus, goat-eating god of weather, is a placeholder for human's ignorance of meteorological patterns and chaos theory and all that jazz (not that they knew what they were ignorant of, just that they were ignorant) as soon as they do the mental arithmetic that Thunderus would be much more useful if he did exist. Of course, as time went on Thunderus stopped wanting goats, and wanted the tasty souls of the righteous, which was much more convenient, because it gave a concrete reason to be moral. You may not give a shit about the random guy who's skull you caved in, but Thunderus does, and that makes him sad. You don't want to make Thunderus sad do you? Even after he rained on your crops just for you? Bam. Two birds with one stone.
It should be noted that all of this shaky logic is entirely subconscious. A lot of philosophy is describing the intuitions we already had, and religion is no different. The human mind is too clever by a half, it knows cause and effect, and so if it sees effect without cause, it puts one there. Case in point, the "first mover" argument in the origin of existence: God is the cause for everything else. In this argument, Cause (mighty be his placehold), not God, is the true power and God can be shoehorned into Cause's mighty slippers (mighty be their metaphor) because His powers are vaguely defined enough that there's no way to prove He's not Cause (mighty be his placehold).
So what am I saying? That there are no gods? Well, yes and no. What I'm saying is that it is entirely possible that there are beings of cosmic power so great and far reaching that we are only aware of them in the way that fish are aware of water, but even with that power it is no reason to worship them, because what is the point of worshiping things anyway? I am also saying that the powerful, if easily manipulated, anthropocentric beings which we commonly define as gods are fiction, placeholders for human ignorance and proxies for phantasmic control over aspects of our lives which we so desperately cannot tame. Yet.
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
Thursday, November 7, 2013
On Tribes and Politics
Okay, so last week I raised a lot of questions about moral philosophy and how it can draw on math and science and that sort of thing. Before we start, I'm going to clear up a few things, make some axioms all that jazz. So we'll get started right away.
First I want to clarify that I am drawing on ideas in math and science for moral philosophy. I honestly think that ethics is way too fuzzy, context based and subjective to be readily quantized (the metrical unit of the Hitler notwithstanding). Later on when I start using mathematical jargon, I mean it more figuratively.
Now here's the major axiom which most greatly affects my reasoning: the physical human brain shapes and limits the perceptions of behaviors of human consciousness in logical and observable ways, because consciousness either arises due to activity in the brain, or because a soul (soul: n, consciousness independent of physical reality) uses the brain as a vehicle for physical manifestation. Epidemiologists can hoot and holler like a bunch of baboons about how this could be wrong, but I will ignore that because I am straight up admitting that I have no rational basis for declaring this. That is why it is called an axiom. Deal with it.
Now that we have all that sorted out, let's get into the meat of the question: why is ethics basically always bullshit? It's either wishy-washy and ill defined, or well defined but entirely off the rails of what it was trying to achieve *coughcatigoricalimperativecough.* I think before we can start trying to figure out what ethics should be we should observe how it arose. Now, consider the following: all human culture, no matter how isolated, has some moral structure. Having morals, even if they're kind of stupid, is a universal of human existence. Likewise, we have observed other animals, especially social animals, behaving in ways that humans would consider moral, such as familial altruism and pack/herd/troupe fidelity, (for those keeping score at home, I would ignore eusocial animals like ants and bees, who behave as a superorganism rather than a community of individuals, which results in widely different patterns of behavior). This is especially so in close relatives of humans, such as ape and monkey species. From these two facts, we can conclude that human ethics is intuitive, not inventive, that is, based on instinct, not reason (broadly speaking of course, specific cultural mores are very much based on reason, if not intelligent reason). If ethics was inventive and based on reason, then we would not see ethical behavior in non-human species and likewise there would be an uneven distribution of ethical behavior as a social state of being, based primarily on the access that a culture had to the inventor of ethics.
Now I know some are readying up your typing fingers, about to blast me with detailed responses about how humans obviously can't be intuitively ethical, because look at all the horrible things people do and so obviously you're stupid and wrong and we all hate you. To you all, I say: shut the fuck up, I'm not done yet. Humans are intuitively ethical only to people with whom they have an empathetic connection. You see, humans only have a limited capacity to have a close and nuanced understanding of other people, anywhere from 50 to 300 people. The concept is explained quite succinctly here, (for those incredulous of getting scientific information from a comedy website, here's the Wikipedia article with all them nifty citations I've heard so much about). Now, we can presume that in pre-agricultural times, tribal sizes were probably congruent with Dunbar's number, and that these tribes are the maximal natural unit of human organization. As we can observe with similarly sized communities even today, disputes of justice are generally resolved alegally, and invoking law to settle domestic matters is generally considered a dick move. (except in outstanding situations, such as abusive relationships. I suspect that in pre-legal societies, abusers were dealt with via a highly-mobile pointed rock).
Of course, we don't live in a tribal society anymore (and in fact, even our social "tribes" have become increasingly decentralized because of suburbanism and globalization. Thanks Obama!). This is is largely due to the Agricultural Revolution, which is perhaps the biggest mixed blessing in the entirety of biological history. You see, after the Agricultural Revolution, the tribe translated more or less directly to the village and farming villages went about their lives more or less business as usual. However, due to various reasons that I don't have time to talk about today (specialization of artisanship, land economies, ect), necessities of village security and wealth caused villages to form confederations of mutual protection and trade. As power tends to consolidate, the villages gradually became less independent and turned into cities with a recentralized government. Rinse and repeat this same sort of thing till the 21st century and here we are with our nifty super-national coalitions like the EU and NATO.
Now, those of you paying attention may have noticed a problem, since humans were already at maximum empathetic capacities with villages. This is where rational ethics comes in. You see, empathetic ethics are kind of a mixed bag: on one hand it's excellent for resolving internal disputes, because you understand that the other person is a 3 dimensional human being like yourself. On the other, anyone outside of the tribe is basically a free target for murder as soon as they start to get annoying. I mean, why would you feel bad? It's not like they're a real person like you are (it is interesting to note that many ethnic designations are derived from the culture's word for the people, not really clarifying what everyone else is supposed to be if they're not people). Even worse, if you're constantly living with people who you can't intuitively recognize as being more or less the same as you, it starts to confuse matters quite a bit, making people more individualistic as they begin to question exactly how human people in their own tribe actually are. Aeschylus' Oriestia trilogy deals with the fallout of this confusion (spoiler alert: it involves a lot of murder).
Of course, this is where law comes in. Law, fundamentally, is a rational replication of intuitive ethics. Law, in theory, codifies moral behavior in a political unit. Because we can't comprehend it entirely like we can tribal ethics, it is written down, as writing is humanity's memory proxy. It provides a way to negotiate disputes via a justice system (though the justice system's effectiveness varies wildly) and punishes misbehavior (as shame and guilt do intuitively).
Now laws have some pretty major problems. First off, they only replicate ethics well if they are written for the benefit of everyone in the society, rather than the individuals who are writing them, (which is to say, laws never replicate ethics well). In addition, laws are pretty slow to change. As societies get bigger, the sort of violent confusion that i mentioned two paragraphs ago starts to get more common and usually codification of the reorganization of society comes after major periods of violence. Examples of this can be found in the Oriestia (yes I know its fictional, but the shift from households to city states in Greece did occur fairly recently before it was written), The Twelve Tables of Rome, the Magna Carta, the US Constitution, and The Treaty of Rome (I apologize for being Eurocentric, but it's the area of the world I'm most familiar with).
Now, for those of you who have completely lost track of what we were supposed to be talking about in all the political theory, I am going to circle back to ethics now. Basically, from an ethical standpoint, the legal system sucks ass. It honestly is entirely useless, because 1. Laws are composed by people who are biologically stuck in a "my tribe comes first" mindset (see: partisan politics, corporate corruption) 2. No matter how well composed they are, people physically cannot internalize law. Everyone, whether they're writing the law or not still only care for others as much as Dunbar's number will allow them. For example, I am sure that the computer that I am writing on right now was created using highly illegal and morally reprehensible wage slavery. I know for a fact that some sorry bastard in the Congo was forced at gunpoint to mine the cobalt in this computer and another sorry bastard in China is working 18 hours a day in toxic conditions put that same cobalt in my hard drive. I am also certain that if that Congolese guy got shot right now, or that Chinese guy died of cancer right there at his seat, I wouldn't care. Not intellectually, mind. I find such practices to be abhorrent, but at the same time, I would be more emotionally affected if one of my dogs died than if both of them did. Also, at the end of the day, even though I find that their working conditions are unacceptable, I am still using the fruits of their miserable labor.
This is our major problem: not that we don't understand that ethics are fundamentally about optimizing human happiness (which itself is too complex to quantize) regardless of the size of society, nor that we don't understand that the best way to do this is to have a strong empathetic connection with our fellow man which would allow us to intuitively be altruistic, loving and trustworthy, but rather it is that our stupid monkey brains are about 8000 years obsolete and are overclocked on a daily basis just to not be a huge dick to the guy who's making your coffee SO GODDAMN SLOWLY (seriously, how could he not realize that you're running late for a very important class for very understandable reasons? If only he'd understand, he'd surely go out of the way to make sure he got your order exactly as you wanted it).
Of course, if present trends continue (which they rarely ever do, by the way), we could actually legitimately fix this problem, thanks to trans-humanism and the Singularity. Now of course, it'll be a lucky fucking break if we do, because I honestly have to say that the Singularity will start out looking something like this, at least at first, because humanity has always proven to be best at ruining things for everyone.
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
(PS: Holy shit that took a hugely different direction than I was expecting.)
First I want to clarify that I am drawing on ideas in math and science for moral philosophy. I honestly think that ethics is way too fuzzy, context based and subjective to be readily quantized (the metrical unit of the Hitler notwithstanding). Later on when I start using mathematical jargon, I mean it more figuratively.
Now here's the major axiom which most greatly affects my reasoning: the physical human brain shapes and limits the perceptions of behaviors of human consciousness in logical and observable ways, because consciousness either arises due to activity in the brain, or because a soul (soul: n, consciousness independent of physical reality) uses the brain as a vehicle for physical manifestation. Epidemiologists can hoot and holler like a bunch of baboons about how this could be wrong, but I will ignore that because I am straight up admitting that I have no rational basis for declaring this. That is why it is called an axiom. Deal with it.
Now that we have all that sorted out, let's get into the meat of the question: why is ethics basically always bullshit? It's either wishy-washy and ill defined, or well defined but entirely off the rails of what it was trying to achieve *coughcatigoricalimperativecough.* I think before we can start trying to figure out what ethics should be we should observe how it arose. Now, consider the following: all human culture, no matter how isolated, has some moral structure. Having morals, even if they're kind of stupid, is a universal of human existence. Likewise, we have observed other animals, especially social animals, behaving in ways that humans would consider moral, such as familial altruism and pack/herd/troupe fidelity, (for those keeping score at home, I would ignore eusocial animals like ants and bees, who behave as a superorganism rather than a community of individuals, which results in widely different patterns of behavior). This is especially so in close relatives of humans, such as ape and monkey species. From these two facts, we can conclude that human ethics is intuitive, not inventive, that is, based on instinct, not reason (broadly speaking of course, specific cultural mores are very much based on reason, if not intelligent reason). If ethics was inventive and based on reason, then we would not see ethical behavior in non-human species and likewise there would be an uneven distribution of ethical behavior as a social state of being, based primarily on the access that a culture had to the inventor of ethics.
Now I know some are readying up your typing fingers, about to blast me with detailed responses about how humans obviously can't be intuitively ethical, because look at all the horrible things people do and so obviously you're stupid and wrong and we all hate you. To you all, I say: shut the fuck up, I'm not done yet. Humans are intuitively ethical only to people with whom they have an empathetic connection. You see, humans only have a limited capacity to have a close and nuanced understanding of other people, anywhere from 50 to 300 people. The concept is explained quite succinctly here, (for those incredulous of getting scientific information from a comedy website, here's the Wikipedia article with all them nifty citations I've heard so much about). Now, we can presume that in pre-agricultural times, tribal sizes were probably congruent with Dunbar's number, and that these tribes are the maximal natural unit of human organization. As we can observe with similarly sized communities even today, disputes of justice are generally resolved alegally, and invoking law to settle domestic matters is generally considered a dick move. (except in outstanding situations, such as abusive relationships. I suspect that in pre-legal societies, abusers were dealt with via a highly-mobile pointed rock).
Of course, we don't live in a tribal society anymore (and in fact, even our social "tribes" have become increasingly decentralized because of suburbanism and globalization. Thanks Obama!). This is is largely due to the Agricultural Revolution, which is perhaps the biggest mixed blessing in the entirety of biological history. You see, after the Agricultural Revolution, the tribe translated more or less directly to the village and farming villages went about their lives more or less business as usual. However, due to various reasons that I don't have time to talk about today (specialization of artisanship, land economies, ect), necessities of village security and wealth caused villages to form confederations of mutual protection and trade. As power tends to consolidate, the villages gradually became less independent and turned into cities with a recentralized government. Rinse and repeat this same sort of thing till the 21st century and here we are with our nifty super-national coalitions like the EU and NATO.
Now, those of you paying attention may have noticed a problem, since humans were already at maximum empathetic capacities with villages. This is where rational ethics comes in. You see, empathetic ethics are kind of a mixed bag: on one hand it's excellent for resolving internal disputes, because you understand that the other person is a 3 dimensional human being like yourself. On the other, anyone outside of the tribe is basically a free target for murder as soon as they start to get annoying. I mean, why would you feel bad? It's not like they're a real person like you are (it is interesting to note that many ethnic designations are derived from the culture's word for the people, not really clarifying what everyone else is supposed to be if they're not people). Even worse, if you're constantly living with people who you can't intuitively recognize as being more or less the same as you, it starts to confuse matters quite a bit, making people more individualistic as they begin to question exactly how human people in their own tribe actually are. Aeschylus' Oriestia trilogy deals with the fallout of this confusion (spoiler alert: it involves a lot of murder).
Of course, this is where law comes in. Law, fundamentally, is a rational replication of intuitive ethics. Law, in theory, codifies moral behavior in a political unit. Because we can't comprehend it entirely like we can tribal ethics, it is written down, as writing is humanity's memory proxy. It provides a way to negotiate disputes via a justice system (though the justice system's effectiveness varies wildly) and punishes misbehavior (as shame and guilt do intuitively).
Now laws have some pretty major problems. First off, they only replicate ethics well if they are written for the benefit of everyone in the society, rather than the individuals who are writing them, (which is to say, laws never replicate ethics well). In addition, laws are pretty slow to change. As societies get bigger, the sort of violent confusion that i mentioned two paragraphs ago starts to get more common and usually codification of the reorganization of society comes after major periods of violence. Examples of this can be found in the Oriestia (yes I know its fictional, but the shift from households to city states in Greece did occur fairly recently before it was written), The Twelve Tables of Rome, the Magna Carta, the US Constitution, and The Treaty of Rome (I apologize for being Eurocentric, but it's the area of the world I'm most familiar with).
Now, for those of you who have completely lost track of what we were supposed to be talking about in all the political theory, I am going to circle back to ethics now. Basically, from an ethical standpoint, the legal system sucks ass. It honestly is entirely useless, because 1. Laws are composed by people who are biologically stuck in a "my tribe comes first" mindset (see: partisan politics, corporate corruption) 2. No matter how well composed they are, people physically cannot internalize law. Everyone, whether they're writing the law or not still only care for others as much as Dunbar's number will allow them. For example, I am sure that the computer that I am writing on right now was created using highly illegal and morally reprehensible wage slavery. I know for a fact that some sorry bastard in the Congo was forced at gunpoint to mine the cobalt in this computer and another sorry bastard in China is working 18 hours a day in toxic conditions put that same cobalt in my hard drive. I am also certain that if that Congolese guy got shot right now, or that Chinese guy died of cancer right there at his seat, I wouldn't care. Not intellectually, mind. I find such practices to be abhorrent, but at the same time, I would be more emotionally affected if one of my dogs died than if both of them did. Also, at the end of the day, even though I find that their working conditions are unacceptable, I am still using the fruits of their miserable labor.
This is our major problem: not that we don't understand that ethics are fundamentally about optimizing human happiness (which itself is too complex to quantize) regardless of the size of society, nor that we don't understand that the best way to do this is to have a strong empathetic connection with our fellow man which would allow us to intuitively be altruistic, loving and trustworthy, but rather it is that our stupid monkey brains are about 8000 years obsolete and are overclocked on a daily basis just to not be a huge dick to the guy who's making your coffee SO GODDAMN SLOWLY (seriously, how could he not realize that you're running late for a very important class for very understandable reasons? If only he'd understand, he'd surely go out of the way to make sure he got your order exactly as you wanted it).
Of course, if present trends continue (which they rarely ever do, by the way), we could actually legitimately fix this problem, thanks to trans-humanism and the Singularity. Now of course, it'll be a lucky fucking break if we do, because I honestly have to say that the Singularity will start out looking something like this, at least at first, because humanity has always proven to be best at ruining things for everyone.
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
(PS: Holy shit that took a hugely different direction than I was expecting.)
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
On Math and Morality
So as many of you may have noticed, I am ridiculously fond of philosophy. Like, read philosophical texts in my free time for fun into philosophy. The shit is like fucking candy in that I am perfectly willing to consume it until I am sick in a transcendental stupor of brain-fuck. As such, it infuriates me to no end that I must confront my most hated of academic foes: Math.
Now, for everyone who isn't aware, math is philosophy. I'm going to get this right out of the way: math is literally philosophy. It's numerical logic, and you know what logic is? That's right, motherfucking philosophy. Deal with it.
Incidentally, science is philosophy too. When I try and explain this to STEM people, they get all worked up about how "philosophy is useless Ivory Tower drivel" and in that regard, I don't blame them. If you're forced to wade through all of the preceding garbage of Platonic Ideals and Catagorical Imperatives, as students of philosophy often do, you get so caught up in the history and literature of philosophy that they actually fail to philosophize (for those of you keeping score, this is why I don't consider having an intimate understanding primary texts as absolutely necessary for understanding philosophy, but more on that another time). However, when you get right down to it, philosophy is about broadening the understanding of the human experience. Science does this (quite effectively I might add) through the methodical application of skeptical empiricism, and thoroughly sifted through math (usually statistics, more on that in a moment). Like all philosophers, scientists act under certain axioms, specifically that 1. Sense is ultimately truthful, if often confounded 2. If the causes of an action are the same, the effects of the action will, on average be the same too (not always exactly the same though because QUANTUM) and 3. Humans are capable of using axiom 1. and logic to confirm axiom 2. applies in various physical circumstances. Hence, scientists are philosophers: natural philosophers (or physicists, before Science stole the term) who use a logical method of applying their axioms to further their understanding of the human condition. QED
Now, I am not going to try and debunk these axioms, because they're fucking axioms, they're supposed to exist a priori. I hate people who go around saying "DUR HUR YOU CAN'T SAY YOU 'KNOW' SOMETHING BECAUSE WHAT IF ALL YOUR SENSES ARE LYING TO YOU? HURP A DURP PLATONIC CAVE, PHENOMENOLOGY, SCIENCE IS WRONG." (I have been working on my impression of continental philosophers). My answer to them is this: Okay. Whatever. You're not wrong, but you're debunking axioms, which any idiot can do. In the context of their axioms (I know all you continentals out there are big on context), science has been doing a bang up job while you've been sitting around in a circle jacking off to Kant and doing fuck all.
Right, so there was a point to that. My point is that insofar as we can perceive it, the human experience is grounded in logical principles. They're not simple logical principles, obviously, and it especially doesn't help that science is, as we say in the philosophic circles, slow as tits. However, because of this, we are able to use principles of math to further our understanding of the human experience. But before you prepare your anus for some hardcore Newtonian determinism, don't, because the math I'm referring to is statistics.
Yes, statistics, the red-headed stepchild of math. So many people overlook it because most of the time it takes more patience than brains and insofar as math can be glamorous, it is the most homely of them all. This is complete bullshit because it's the most relevant of all math. If you recall Science Axiom 2, quantum kind of fucks over any sort of absolute determinism, because as far as we can tell, it's absolutely random. Sucks for calculus, because you know what deals great with randomness: that's right, stat.
What I would consider statistic's best law is the Law of Large Numbers which is able to take the jumbled fucking mess of randomness and constructing nice little probabilities with only a fuckton of events and a satanic ritual (Probably. I wasn't paying much attention in AP Stat at the time). As such, we can predict the result of certain things even without knowing all the variables of the cause (which is nice, seeing as how we're up to 11 dimensions now and we can only directly observe 3 of them. Fucking quantum).
So by now I am guessing you're all getting real fucking tired of this math bullshit and are wondering when the morality shit's going to come in. Well, kindly remove the bees from your bonnet and listen: Utilitarianism. What sort of images does that evoke? Poor Mr. Blackpool? Adorable British orphans? This SMBC comic? Ron Paul? All terrible things, yes but I would argue that it's not the method of Utilitarianism that's wrong (for those of you new to this, it is basically using logical principles to increase the overall happiness of a given population, with variable results), but rather the models. The historical models of Utilitarianism operated something like this: Axiom 1. Wealth = Happiness (Wrong, also this isn't an axiom, it's an assumption. More on that later.) Axiom 2. The best method of fair distribution is by using the mean: the SMBC comic explains very neatly why this is a fucking idiotic idea.
So what is a good idea, then? Well why don't we start with replacing trying to get a high mean with a high median while also trying to bolster the mode so that it's not a tidy little bell chart but skewed so far right it wants every household to have 12 kids, a minigun and a plaque of the Ten Commandments. Then, we'll base our judgements not on simple quantifiers like wealth or number of hats, but on a complicated matrix of criteria that have systematically show to optimize human happiness. What the flying fuck does that even mean? Its... complicated, so I'm going to save that for Thursday.
Sincere Regards,
Michael Coffey
(P.S. Some of the more savvy may have noted that the scientific axioms leave little in the way for free will, relying instead on either absolute determinism or probable determinism to explain human action. Some may even find this to be upsetting, but I have found something which may help you here. I'll cover this on Thursday too)
Thursday, October 31, 2013
On Games and Axioms
So, it's Halloween, a time when children and college students alike dress up in costumes for reasons that nobody could really tell you. It is a night which is extremely frightening for some reason; perhaps the collective imagination of western culture owes someone money, and they collect at the end of the month? It could also be fear of those damn solicitors insisting that you take small morsels of candy. Yes, I see you have candy, yes, I understand that I may take some if I want, you don't have to bloody tell me all the time! (I may be annoyed by them a bit disproportionately, I just really don't like solicitors is all).
Anyway, in honor of this spooky day, (Christ, I hate that word, even ironically), I will be writing about the most HORRIBLE AND FRIGHTENING TERROR OF THEM ALL: EXISTENTIAL DREAD OOOOOOOH (wibbly-wobbly ghost sounds).
Interestingly, I don't have much problem with the "dread" part of existential dread. I mean, "life is devoid of any higher purpose." Okay. "Anything you do is ultimately futile." Well, sure, I could have told you that. "There is no afterlife, you and everyone you know and love are doomed to utter oblivion." Well, that kind of sucks, but I suppose it's just as well because you won't exist to experience your lack of existence. Nothing terribly horrifying here.
"Now spend 70+ years existing."
Oh, right, there's that.
I was reflecting on what I do with my time over the course of a week and the break down is something like this:
Week: 168 hours
Actually, come to think of it, neither are studying or classes, strictly speaking. Fuck.
Okay, so that's more like 52% of my life doing technically unnecessary things. This is getting really irritating.
So step one of getting over existential dread is your basic meaning axiom: the logical first step on which you base the value of literally everything you do. Choose wisely, kiddies. Now a lot of people behave based on what I like to call "the Games," which are terrible axioms. The top three seem to be the following: "Whoever Has the Most Money When They Die Wins!" Game, which is really stupid because of the whole cessation of existence post mortem thing. Likewise, the "Whoever Lives the Longest Wins!" Game and the "Whoever Had the Greatest Impact on History Wins!" Game are equally futile because at the end of the day, you'll still be fucking dead. And for those of you who think that technology will remove the death problem entirely, you're fooling yourselves, because the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has already got everyone in checkmate. I swear to you that entropy is more patient than you. It's got till the end of bloody time, at which point the universe will stop existing and, by transitive property, so will you.
So, with the Games out of the way, we have pretty much eliminated the vast majority of motivation behind human endeavors. Really, there's not much left besides cultivating personal excellence and virtue and enjoying life as it comes to you. What a real stickler that is...
Of course, this ultimately leads back to a whole slew of questions: What is excellent? What is virtuous? How do I become those things?
Well, that is for you to figure out individually. How? Well, think of the people you admire. The ones who weren't playing the Games I mean. Look at people like Jesus, the Buddha, Socrates, Yakov Neyman the Hot Dog Guy, et al. and all the other people (with religious types like the first two, I tend to look at their more humanistic stuff. God does his thing and I do mine, which is fine, but even the most pious is still human, ultimately... I guess you could make the argument with Jesus- fuck, never mind). Find what qualities you admire in those sorts and strive to those qualities. Look everywhere. If there's some quality in Harry Potter or Tolkien or whatever then those work too (if it's from Twilight, strive for psychiatric assistance). Eventually, after years of thought and meditation, you'll have a clear picture of the sort of person you want to be. From there you strive to be that person as much as you can (while not beating yourself up when you falter, happens to everyone) and die content in the knowledge that through yourself you made the world a better place (I am guessing that your conclusion has something about making the world a better place. Have something about making the world a better place).
Now, with all that sorted out. Go out and enjoy your life!
Wait fuck I don't know how to do that, either.
This is where I'm really tripping up, which is weird, because you would think that I ought to know how to do that. But when I look at my life right now, between basic surviving, fulfilling my dues to society, cultivating excellence, and all that noise, I entirely forgot what I actually like to do. I sure as hell know that deciding that there's nothing to do on Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook, closing all those tabs and then immediately opening them up again out of sheer habit in an endless cycle until it's time for dinner is not only incredibly boring, it's downright stupid. It's like flipping through TV channels, playing the same chord on a piano, hitting my head on a wall, a pointless waste of time! There are so many things I could be doing! I could be learning to play an instrument! I could be writing the multitudes of stories I constantly plan! I could be serenading fair Spanish maidens beneath their chamber window- well maybe not that one. I must find some way to optimize active enjoyment and passive relaxation, because this is just fucking idiotic.
Don't look at me! I don't know how to do that; we're on the same page now.
If anyone knows how to do that, let me know. Seriously, it's getting annoying.
Sincere regards, Michael Coffey
Anyway, in honor of this spooky day, (Christ, I hate that word, even ironically), I will be writing about the most HORRIBLE AND FRIGHTENING TERROR OF THEM ALL: EXISTENTIAL DREAD OOOOOOOH (wibbly-wobbly ghost sounds).
Interestingly, I don't have much problem with the "dread" part of existential dread. I mean, "life is devoid of any higher purpose." Okay. "Anything you do is ultimately futile." Well, sure, I could have told you that. "There is no afterlife, you and everyone you know and love are doomed to utter oblivion." Well, that kind of sucks, but I suppose it's just as well because you won't exist to experience your lack of existence. Nothing terribly horrifying here.
"Now spend 70+ years existing."
Oh, right, there's that.
I was reflecting on what I do with my time over the course of a week and the break down is something like this:
Week: 168 hours
- Sleep: (56)
- Classes: (14.5)
- Studying (7.5)
- Meals (21)
- Bugger-all (69)
Actually, come to think of it, neither are studying or classes, strictly speaking. Fuck.
Okay, so that's more like 52% of my life doing technically unnecessary things. This is getting really irritating.
So step one of getting over existential dread is your basic meaning axiom: the logical first step on which you base the value of literally everything you do. Choose wisely, kiddies. Now a lot of people behave based on what I like to call "the Games," which are terrible axioms. The top three seem to be the following: "Whoever Has the Most Money When They Die Wins!" Game, which is really stupid because of the whole cessation of existence post mortem thing. Likewise, the "Whoever Lives the Longest Wins!" Game and the "Whoever Had the Greatest Impact on History Wins!" Game are equally futile because at the end of the day, you'll still be fucking dead. And for those of you who think that technology will remove the death problem entirely, you're fooling yourselves, because the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has already got everyone in checkmate. I swear to you that entropy is more patient than you. It's got till the end of bloody time, at which point the universe will stop existing and, by transitive property, so will you.
So, with the Games out of the way, we have pretty much eliminated the vast majority of motivation behind human endeavors. Really, there's not much left besides cultivating personal excellence and virtue and enjoying life as it comes to you. What a real stickler that is...
Of course, this ultimately leads back to a whole slew of questions: What is excellent? What is virtuous? How do I become those things?
Well, that is for you to figure out individually. How? Well, think of the people you admire. The ones who weren't playing the Games I mean. Look at people like Jesus, the Buddha, Socrates, Yakov Neyman the Hot Dog Guy, et al. and all the other people (with religious types like the first two, I tend to look at their more humanistic stuff. God does his thing and I do mine, which is fine, but even the most pious is still human, ultimately... I guess you could make the argument with Jesus- fuck, never mind). Find what qualities you admire in those sorts and strive to those qualities. Look everywhere. If there's some quality in Harry Potter or Tolkien or whatever then those work too (if it's from Twilight, strive for psychiatric assistance). Eventually, after years of thought and meditation, you'll have a clear picture of the sort of person you want to be. From there you strive to be that person as much as you can (while not beating yourself up when you falter, happens to everyone) and die content in the knowledge that through yourself you made the world a better place (I am guessing that your conclusion has something about making the world a better place. Have something about making the world a better place).
Now, with all that sorted out. Go out and enjoy your life!
Wait fuck I don't know how to do that, either.
This is where I'm really tripping up, which is weird, because you would think that I ought to know how to do that. But when I look at my life right now, between basic surviving, fulfilling my dues to society, cultivating excellence, and all that noise, I entirely forgot what I actually like to do. I sure as hell know that deciding that there's nothing to do on Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook, closing all those tabs and then immediately opening them up again out of sheer habit in an endless cycle until it's time for dinner is not only incredibly boring, it's downright stupid. It's like flipping through TV channels, playing the same chord on a piano, hitting my head on a wall, a pointless waste of time! There are so many things I could be doing! I could be learning to play an instrument! I could be writing the multitudes of stories I constantly plan! I could be serenading fair Spanish maidens beneath their chamber window- well maybe not that one. I must find some way to optimize active enjoyment and passive relaxation, because this is just fucking idiotic.
Don't look at me! I don't know how to do that; we're on the same page now.
If anyone knows how to do that, let me know. Seriously, it's getting annoying.
Sincere regards, Michael Coffey
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
On Rhinos and Grammar
Now, if you're reading this, I bet you're asking yourself "why am I reading this?" If you weren't you are now. You're now thinking of a rhinoceros. The more you try to think of something else, there it is. It may be one you've seen at the zoo, or in a National Geographic, or somewhere on the internet. It could be a real one, a cartoon one, or even a fuzzy plush one.
God dammit, this is stupid. What was I even talking about?
Oh right, the purpose of the blog.
Well, I suppose I am writing this mostly to transcribe various miscellaneous thoughts that I have. I am sure that many of you know that instead of thinking about things that most people think about (Sports? Politics? Boobs? I am literally just drawing stuff out of my ass here), I tend to think about inane academic things that aren't even allowed in the Ivory Tower because they're so entirely pondiferous and stupid.
Apparently pondiferous isn't a word, by the way. I don't see why not; it's a conjoining of pondere and ferre: "to carry things of great weight, to be reflected upon."
Yeah, see it's things like that. Why would I need to reflect upon the etymology of words that are so fake that they have tiny, squiggly red lines under them? Because that's just how I roll.
Speaking of which, the idea of words being "real" is stupid anyway. When I say "pondiferous" you know exactly what I mean. It has a sensible etymology in a suitably serious language. While it is not common in the English vernacular to be sure, it carries more meaning than other words, as the very fact that it's fake gives it the additional meaning of "seemingly intelligent but in fact meaningless." Its fakeness is so poignant that it is like a meaningfulness double reach around, as its fakeness contributes to the very meaning of the word. It is seemingly intelligent and literally means that something is really serious and weighty and requires a lot of thought, but its contextual meaning in the language which it simultaneously is and is not a part of gives it the additional meaning because of the irony of its false nature. I can understand why it isn't a word now, because it's not being a word somehow makes it more powerful in its meaning. What the fuck, English?
Still, it's better than the word "to be," (Yes, I know that "to be" is two words. That's because English can't do an infinitive without a preposition. The "to" doesn't actually exist despite it being RIGHT FUCKING THERE. Fucking analytic languages.) Anyway, putting aside the fact that "to be" is nearly always an irregular verb, at least in the Indo-European Language family, which is so fucking stupid because it's literally the most common verb ever, "to be" is a real word, but unlike the fake word "pondiferous," WE HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE WHAT THE SHIT IT EVEN MEANS. Go to the dictionary: "to be" is defined as "to exist" and "to exist" is defined as "to be." WELL GEE, THANKS A LOT, YOU WORTHLESS CLOD OF A BOOK, THAT'S REAL FUCKING HELPFUL. To be fair, "to exist" is also defined as "having objective reality." I guess that makes sense.
Wait, no it doesn't. What about the infinitive preposition "to?" I just said at the beginning at the last paragraph that it doesn't actually exist. But it obviously does, because without it, I have to say "be" and order the reader around like a fucking asshole, because in English, an unconjugated verb is an imperative! Who the fuck came up with this nonsense? It's like a bunch of people just made it up as they went along with absolutely no regard for sensible metaphysics, grammar and common courtesy.
Which is exactly what happened.
Fuck this shit.
Sincere Regards, Michael Coffey
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