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)

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

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 by magic 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

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.)

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)