What would I say? I would say two words, “Non Sequitur.” And God would say, “Right answer! I’ve deliberately withheld from man the evidence sufficient to conclude that I exist. This was my test to separate men with the courage to reject unsupported beliefs from those that would believe nearly anything on the basis of nothing. Come and be seated at my right side.”
I’d turn as if to take my rightful place, but that would only be a feint. Instead I’d grab his beard with my right hand and pop him hard with my left fist. I’d say, “You son-of-a-bitch, that’s for allowing my father to suffer so terribly before he died. Why would you think I’d want to sit by the side of an almighty God that allows innocent people to suffer?” And he’d struggle back to his feet saying, “Right again, that was my second test. It was to see if you would sit at the right hand of a deity that’s a son-of-a-bitch.” But hearing this, I’d just be after him again. It would be a mess.
I agree with what Polemarchus said on another tread, God is what we call everything we don’t understand, or anything we find that is mysterious so attribute to the idea of God. While I would agree with this, there is something in me that sees and seeks “God†in the world I live. Henri Nouwen called this “the God in me seeing, the God in the world.†While what I call God might really just be hope for something greater then this substandard world.
If God is not the grand total of all that is good, then God is not perfect, and if God is not perfect he should not ask for perfection from us. We live in a world were evil exists. I find it difficult to believe that if God had the power to control this world he would allow evil. The only reason for evil is if it’s a tool to teach. But there are some things that just seem cruel, like disable people (an idea came to me just as I was about to post this, maybe its because this is what will happen a lot more if we start playing with people’s DNA? Just a thought). Why allow this? This is why I feel God is very powerful a life form, but not one which is 100% perfect. I some times think that God will look for forgiveness from us, as we will look for forgiveness and comfort from Him. But I’m assuming that God is a real thing and not just an imaginary friend that helps me makes sense of the world.
I have only one problem with the notion that God doesn’t exist. It raises issues about the believed right to life. As long as you don’t commit a morally evil act you have a right to life under most modern understandings of religion. If we remove God and the idea of an afterlife, all we are left with is this life. Then our only right to life is given by what humanity’s sets as the standard of acceptable behaviour if we don’t wish to forfeit our life. This has the possibility of cheapening the value of life, (yet maybe we currently of rate it, like we did all those Internet stocks).
The Standard for life could be something like as follows: A life is of obvious value when it’s either keeping the status-quo or producing something of worth. This could be commodities (food, computer programs, art), or if the life has an emotional value to another person. Meaning if other people like family members love you or you have lovers, you are bringing meaning to that other person’s life.
While I know the death penalty exists still in some countries, it’s not the standard. Could it be possible to get to the point where if a person is causing more harm then good, he forfeits his right to life because of all the suffering he has created. Like the whole 3 strikes and you’re out, or in this case, killed. Could we get to a point where we love harmony more then life? So if a person is going around causing others extreme problems, to solve the problem we just kill that person. Because if you look at it this way, all these troublemakers are going to die eventually, and if they’re going to die anyway and there’s no afterlife for me to be held accountable in, why not stop all the suffering caused, by just killing them now? As Spock would but it, “The needs of the many out way the needs of the few.â€
As without God, our rights simply become the rights the strong wish to impose. Welcome to the wonderful world of Might Makes Right unabridged!
Yes, it would indeed be wonderful if there were a benevolent, just, wise, and almighty God. Well no, not the jealous and vengeful God of the Christians; I’m talking about a truly benevolent God. A Supreme Being composed of titanic heapings of goodness, power and wisdom would have constructed a world in which children don’t suffer from the likes of Leukemia. He’d take it upon himself to warn us when a volcanic eruption or an earthquake was imminent.
What would you think of me if I knew a cure for a disease you were dying of, yet I withheld it from you? What if I knew that the school your children were attending was going to collapse today in an earthquake (as happened so recently in Italy), yet I chose to say nothing? Would you praise me for my wisdom and goodness? In fact, you know that if it were in my power I’d do all these things for you. This, despite the fact that I’m far less benevolent than you or I would imagine a benevolent god to be.
Yes, it would be grand to have a benevolent God in the heavens busy dispatching armies of guardian angels to watch over us. We do occasionally hear claims that God has averted some disaster by whispering a last-minute warning into someone’s ear. But if that’s true, then it’s all the worse for God. For why is he so capricious that he would let some airliners crash yet protect others? Does he suffer from an attention deficit disorder? This would only imply that we have an all powerful, yet incompetent God.
In this world airliners crash because a tiny part is defective. Ferryboats sink because someone has forgotten to close a hatch. People die in head-on automobile collisions on their way to work as a volunteer in a home for the aged. But if we are determined to believe in a Supreme Being, we’ve no choice but to admit that he/she/it is either uncaring or incompetent, or both. Neither quality prompts me to readily burst forth with a “Gloria in Excelsis Deo.”
If a Supreme Being is running this world, how could we escape the conclusion that any afterlife will only be more of the same? If this world is the handiwork of some god, then what we have now is an example of the sort of things this particular god is pleased to create. If the Taliban had gained control of neighboring Pakistan, do you think they would have modeled Karachi on Las Vegas, complete with gambling casinos and feathered showgirls? Isn’t it far more likely that the Taliban would have simply created another fundamentalist Islamic State in Pakistan? If there is a God, then this world is the best example of the sort of things he likes to build. If there is random suffering here, we should expect there to be random suffering in an afterworld. If there is injustice here, there will be injustice there.
Even the cheapest Chinese-made microwave oven comes with an instruction manual. Yet as complex as we are, humans arrive in this world with no instruction manual at all. If there is a God, he should have included a complete, non-contradictory and unambiguous set of moral instructions for us to follow. It has been the traditional Western recommendation that we take the Christian Bible as our user manual. However, the Old and the New Testaments give us a no more complete, non-contradictory, and unambiguous set of guiding principles than we’d have by replacing the Old Testament with an issue of Mad Magazine, and the New testament with a Superman comic. A god capable of creating something as complex as a human would scarcely issue such a nutty and convoluted user manual as the Bible.
God or no God, we arrived without the manual. Men have had to write their own user manual. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. It further appears that the best manual we could produce will never be complete, entirely non-contradictory and perfectly unambiguous. Shakespeare has Julius Caesar say:
“Men…are masters of their own fates: The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves…”
Polemarchus could do much better than our current God. I vote for a new God because the current one is less competent than his own creation. Either that or he has just been on vacation.
I agree with everything you’ve said. To me the idea of God, is Hope for something better.
There is no God.
There is a God, but he’s a bit flaky and should never be counted on.
The only reason I still hold out hope for a God, is because of the Primary Cause argument. Everything in life points out the fact that for every effect there is a cause. I just hope the primary cause is God.
While I know this argument can be easily countered with: The Universe has always existed and the Big Bang is a black hole that has gone critical and exploded out all the matter it sucked in. Life is just a process of the universe being sucked in and blown out of a black hole for all eternity. A bit like a heart beating.
If there is no God and we look at existence from the big picture, our life is no better then a rock’s. The only difference is we can think and feel. Like us the rock came from nothing and will go back to nothing. It played its part in the chain of matter, like we do. A rock by its nature is a rock, a human by its nature is a human. I see no difference, other then our nature included a consciousness.
Just as a side note on Christianity, its very selfish about what it thinks “life†is. Not everything that lives has “life.†A cow or sheep lives, but we don’t expect to see it in the afterlife. I find this very selfish. I know I’m always talking about eastern thought. But I believe they have a more all-embracing approach to loving life in all its many forms, not just what we might call a sentient life. To them, Life by its living nature is something special and should be cherished. (mmm, I’m starting to sound like a god damn hippie, I’m off to hug some trees )
Quite correct, but our having consciousness is rather spectacular! The brain is composed of roughly 100 billion neurons (the same as the number of stars in our galaxy). A pebble might be composed of as many atoms but this fact alone doesn’t bestow consciousness on pebbles. We appear to have consciousness because our 100 billion neurons exist in a complex interactive feedback system. The biologist, E.O. Wilson wrote:
“A star is simpler than an ant.”
Now, when one considers how much more complex humans are than ants, there is a great cause to think that the human mind is something rather spectacular. I’ve written before in this forum how I used to gaze at the stars in wonder, but that I now reserve that wonder for looking in the mirror. The British philosopher, Frank Ramsey, said in 1925:
"I don’t feel in the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities that impress me far more than size does. "
I couldn’t agree more.
Qzxtvbzr wrote:
Hi Qzxtvbzr. Blaise Pascal was a wonderful man in many respects, but his acceptance of this wager (which actually pre-dated him) was a bit hasty.
The problem with Pascal’s wager is that it assumes too much. The whole point of making the wager is that we have no reason to believe that a god exists. But if we know so little about a god that we don’t even know he exists, then how can we possibly know that he would want us to worship him? It would be equally possible that a god would punish superstition. He might loathe the thought of us worshiping him. Again, if we know so little about a god that we have to make a wager, then we know too little about him to make the wager.
I agree, Consciousness is undeniably a very powerful natural gift. Unlike most animals that only react to their environments, humanity to a large extent can shape the one’s we wish to live in. But the same Consciousness that can build wonders can also cause its own downfall.
To me Consciousness is the ability to choose our own nature. Our parents set up the basic rules that we are going to start our lives with. Then education, which is the shaping and directing of a Consciousness, to ends that our society and the individual Consciousness will find mutually beneficial. The more knowledge we have, the greater are ability to reshape ourselves and become what we would sooner be and throw off our original shape. If we don’t search and learn for new knowledge we will never become the person we truly would want to be. With hindsight we can look back at our past and say, “Wow, I was such a fool for doing that or thinking that, but luckily I have found knowledge that shows me the proper way to be.†With more knowledge it’s possible to make more discerning decisions and become more Conscious of myself and the world I live in.
Consciousness is the ability to be aware of ourselves in an environment, and also what other interactions exist in that environment. (Note: I say, “in an environmentâ€, because I believe if we don’t have anything to stimulate one of our five senses, we don’t have any way of knowing that we exist. It’s through space / time interactions and our memory, we learn of our own consciousness by trial and error, and recognising the cause and effects, which must come through our senses and are then stored in our memory for later comparisons. As access to our memories is like a sense, though all it is, is a recording of an earlier sensory input which we can playback when we wish. I’m also unable to think of any thought that is not influenced by one of my five senses, this to me suggests that I must have at least one sense to be truly conscious.) But to me Consciousness is also tied to our Intelligence and our ability to understand what influences what, in our environment. Meaning it’s possible that a person with a very low Intelligence will have a Consciousness that is less Conscious then a person with a greater Intelligence.
I would say all animals have a consciousness that is just like ours, but they lack the Intelligence and the ability to recognize complex patterns, and also essential but slight differences. If these animals had better memories I think over time they would become self-aware. I’m almost sure (but can’t remember where I read it) that Dolphins can tell the difference between their own reflection and other Dolphins, this is one of the basic self-awareness tests. We can train most animals to react in a predictable way to a predefined signal. Like teaching a dog to sit on command. But we don’t yet have a way to express abstract ideas with other animals, and it’s these abstract ideas that are the real proof of self-awareness.
I’ve written before in this forum how I used to gaze at the stars in wonder, but that I now reserve that wonder for looking in the mirror.
Have you lost your ‘wonder’ for the stars because to a large extent you understand them? But when you examine yourself in the mirror, you’re left puzzled because you don’t fully understand what you have found? Are we really self-aware? We know what we do and can learn from experiences. But we don’t know how we do it! I believe we are still evolving to self-awareness, both through biological abilities and by adding to the pool of knowledge and wisdom.
Our Conscious mind is almost like a playpen for our sub-conscious. A place away from the monotonous tasks it must administer too on a daily basis to keep our body running smoothly. Where in the seclusion of a quieten place it can pick and choose what problems it feels must be solved to try and adapt to its current environment.
What if? Like the way the Conscious mind can’t directly see how it influences its own sub-conscious mind, our life is a mirror of this. Meaning, I live in the “relative†seclusion of the body to get away from the problems of the bodiless mind. Aldo this is just the restating of an old eastern thought. This would mean there’s no “afterlife†so to speak, only life existing in different forms.
But like I said before, if there is no afterlife for me to look at the life I lived and call it my own. So in other words, from nothing to nothing, with no memory before or after. Then even with my Consciousness I’m still only as important as the rock to the chain. While I might affect the chain more, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Polemarchus, I am elated at your sincere appreciation of human happiness, for few are ever concerned with anything more than their own happiness, and the happiness of others so that it gets returned to them yet again. But I tread cautiously through all such intuitive answers, for I don’t think anything is as simple as intuition makes appear - otherwise what would be the use of reason? I think you would agree with the following example (if not correct me): Before we evolved there was nature and all it’s creatures, plants, earth, water, and air. All things were in harmony between their life and death. Whether a deer died because it tripped and fell down a canyon, or if it was eaten by a lion, or if it was killed through disease; it live and died for the harmony of the earth and it’s recycling of matter. The death of one is the bettermeant of another, the bettermeant of another is the death of the next. Hey, I just made that up, sounds good Anyway, benevolence enters the picture only relative to the mind of humans. A religion called Jainism promotes life without hurting anything else better than any other religion in the world. Their philosophy has led only to this
“The only way to not kill a living thing is to die”.
Polemarchus, we learn from pain and suffering - I believe suffering is what makes us better and is the chief impedus behind why we progress continually. Otherwise, you should be punching God not for making your father suffer, but for making ‘suffering’ part of all living things in reality. Is it any wonder that some say life is only the ability to suffer.
Polemarchus, I am sorry for the pain you experienced through watching your father suffer before his death - but a disease (if that’s what he died from) is but a living thing striving to preserve itself by gaining bettermeant which unfortunately meant the death of your father. Nietzsche may have been right (although I don’t think he was) when he said:
“The essence of life is exploitation”
If you have ever experienced something wonderful because of pain (suffering), if you have ever realized something because of pain (suffering), if you have ever been incited to do something that you knew you wanted to do, had to do, and it made you feel alive; like you were God himself because of pain (suffering) - then you have grasped the essence of pain (suffering) and will come to terms not just with your own pain and suffering but with everyone elses as well.
The Western philosophy says if you are a good person death is worth it.
But to answer your question ill tell you that you cant because there is only 2 modes, Life and Death. After life comes Death, possibly after death comes life. nature is verry dualistic. But Your indivdual life is not the same persona that your energy will form in the next phase. Why? because the only thing that is required. Think of it like a leaf on a tree. in winter the leaf falls and dies but soon is replaced by another leaf who betters the Tree. Who Mankind betters i do not know.
Hi Pax,
Astronomical objects are certainly fascinating. But a mind contemplates a star, a star doesn’t contemplate a mind. A star is, a stone is, but a mind is conscious, and a human mind is conscious of its consciousness. A star doesn’t matter to itself. And again, as Frank Ramsey said, a star cannot love or offer sympathy. It’s not that the stars aren’t amazing, it’s that humans are so much more amazing.
A mind contains roughly 100 trillion (10^14) synaptic connections, and across each connection there can be as many as ten different weighted responses. The British astrophysicist Martin Rees has written, “Stars are gravitationally bound fusion reactors.” Complex biological objects are made from simpler astronomical objects. In a debate about consciousness, Marvin Minsky remarked:
"In the old days, to say that a person is like a machine was like suggesting that a person is like a paper clip. Naturally it was insulting to be called any such simple thing. Today, the concept of machine no longer implies triviality. The genetic machines inside our cells contain billions of units of DNA that embody the accumulated experience of a billion years of evolutionary search. Those are systems we can respect; they are more complex than anything that anyone has ever understood. We need not lose our self-respect when someone describes us as machines; we should consider it wonderful that what we are and what we do depends upon a billion parts.
As for more traditional views, I find it demeaning to be told that all the things that I can do depend on some structureless spirit or soul…I feel the same discomfort when being told that virtues depend on the grace of some god, instead of on structures that grew from the honest work of searching, learning, and remembering. I think those tables should be turned; one ought to feel insulted when accused of being not a machine."
Man is a failure in comparison to his gods. He’ll never measure up to his dreams for himself (in Sartre’s words, “…man never coincides with himself”). Success only prompt us to raise higher the goal posts by which we measure our worth. Stanislaw Lec asked:
“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?”
We are not fallen angels, we are pond-scum risen. We did not descend from a God; we ascended from the primal condensation of hydrogen and deuterium, from stellar furnaces, supernova explosions and the primeval swamps. Evolution is never direct or certain. We might never become more than cannibals with good table manners. But I think the answer to Stanislaw Lec’s question is “yes.” I think that every joy experienced and every kindness extended, no matter how small, further elevates us from the swamp. As Minsky said in the quote above, what we are depends on a billion things.
Magius wrote,
Hey Magius,
You’ve reminded me that when I came to this mountain I asked the other engineers if I might replace the mousetraps in the hut with the kind that catches the mice alive. After the laughter subsided a bit I was told a story. Once another engineer caught a mouse alive. It was during winter and he let the mouse run free across the snow. Now, the weather here in the winter can be brutal with temperatures to minus 30 degrees C and winds gusting upwards of 100km/hr. So, this guy closed the door and watched the little mouse run across the snow. It ran less than ten meters before it stopped dead, frozen in its tracks. A raven picked up the mouse a few hours later.
I don’t go around hitting my thumb with a hammer on purpose, but I do make something of a habit out of toying with discomfort. That is, I go out of my way not to feel like a pampered papoose. I wonder if others do the same? For example, winter or summer, I often finish my shower in cold water. I push myself in the gym unto exhaustion and occasionally go without food until I’m light-headed. Religious ascetics in the past wore “hair shirts” made of coarse cloth as a penance for their sins, whereas I figuratively don the “hair shirt” because it makes me feel a bit more alive. A warm shower feels like heaven and a simple bowl of soup tastes as good as a meal in a fine restaurant after one has trudged across a mountain in a fierce snowstorm. Epicurus wrote in his, Letter to Menoeceus:
"…they have the sweetest enjoyment of luxury who stand least in need of it…
But ’tis a different thing altogether when pain is beyond ones control. I use small doses of pain to sweeten my pleasures, but for so many others pain only brings interminable suffering. Such suffering fosters despair rather than enlightenment. This suffering diminishes our humanity, and as such, I despise it.
Indeed, it is very tempting to believe that. But I ask you this, is that the truth?
After all, up until the 19th century they all believed Euclid’s fifth postulate to be universally true…
Suffering is part of being human, being truly human. This doesn’t mean you should start cutting your fingers off, one by one, and dance on fire. Suffering usually brings enlightenment, but that only after bringing despair.
I didn’t quite make my point clear in the last post.
What I wanted to ask you was: Do you wonder at your Conciseness because it’s unknowable? An enigma that will forever remain unsolved, as unsolvable problems can be intoxicating for a while. To a creature like ourselves that has evolved because it can see real but abstract relationships between objects, yet when we examine the human mind we only find phantoms. I would say Conciseness is to be aware of our own and others ever changing nature, all things change, but not all have the sense (as in our case sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, and memory [we can remember what it was like before we changed]) required to experience this change. It’s impossible to be more then what we’re “feedâ€, I mean from our senses. Like the computer processing term, put junk in and you’ll get junk out. We are the same. We can filter, organize, and label data, but if the data is crap, then no amount of hard work will ever transform this into something of value.
We are the chaotic disorder in the material world. The sun will shine, and the rock will stay hard for its allotted time. But humanity is fickle and somewhat unpredictable. We follow general patterns, but there are no specific rules, other then the one’s our physical body must abide by to exist. To me it’s not my Conciseness that I’m amazed at but these unseen Rules that must exist before we can exist. To put it another way, it’s the order in the universe that amazes me, not our conciseness as it’s just one of the many side affects of the Rules. I’m not saying these Rules come from a divinely created universe, but we are a creature that understands cause and effect, so for something not to have a cause is like trying to understand infinity. There’s no reason not to say that the universe has always existed, and on the scale of infinity big bangs are quite common occurrences.
But the real question about our Conciseness comes from evolution: Could we de-evolve just as quickly as we evolved? Evolution is said to be humanity’s ability to adapt because our environment changes. Are we just adapting to our environment without a long-term plan? I believe so. We are no more then a reaction to some external stimuli. We cannot help or stop our adaptation, without creating a protective cocoon around ourselves that is unchanging, static. Do we flatter ourselves by saying we evolve, are we really advancing? Or just changing, like all things in any other chemical reaction, yet we are “lucky†(and I use this word very loosely) that we can see and comprehend this change? If it weren’t for the rock we’d have nothing to stand on, and if it wasn’t for the sun we wouldn’t have used photosynthesis to produce food. Our conciseness is only one small part of the very large picture. But I suppose because we have the ability to say I, by that very nature we get very self centred. (I don’t mean selfish, just our mental centre is our self).
A question I’ve been pondering a lot these days is: If I created complex rules for how all matter interacted with other matter and these rules where built into a device called a “universe.†If I filled said universe full of random matter and gave the whole thing a good shake. Then placing it down and standing back to watch all the random matter start to interact and form things based off my rules from the chaos. Kind of like shaking a snow globe and watching the snow come to rest on the miniature house. Or how when you bake you need to sieve the disordered flour so it’s just right for the cake. Would my universe end up looking like the one we live in now?
That is a Moral statement and would mean nothing to the people unaware of Morality in a swamp. To them it might even look like madness. An example: If the kindness was giving the swamp people food and you did this for everybody in their village they would soon stop hunting and just come to you for their food. If this went on long enough they would eventually lose there keen hunting edge and when you stopped giving them free food they would be at a loss for a time while they adapted back to there hunting ways.
Kindness, is to do an act of some type that we are not directly responsible to carry out. Why does this self-sacrificing elevate us? Kindness only works short term, after that you start to breed dependency as the example above demonstrates. Most people are generous enough to help their friends once or twice, but if that friend doesn’t make an effort to help themselves, patience will soon wear thin. I think this kindness is due to evolution. Everybody at some time or another has problems that they are unable to resolve without help. This short-term kindness can help the group as you don’t needlessly waist a human resource, which over the long term has a positive effect on the group. But long-term kindness only weakens the group, as the person is just a drain on other resources. This dependency goes against the law of survival of the fittest. It all comes back to our postings on “What is Morality is it just something trivial†If morality is not of divine origin then if practiced to a large extent it will create laziness in immoral people. For large problems like world hunger only education and population control will work in the long run. This is how nature has always kept the books in balance, Death! Heartless in moral terms, yet pragmatic and we live in a pragmatic universe. Also I feel the same about greed, or it might be best expressed as avarice; as in the long term this will damage the group.
I hope you don’t think I’m heartless. But I believe real kindness enables people to help themselves, not to become, dependent on others.
Hi H2O,
A postulate is only a postulate. We accept it because it’s useful, not because it’s been proven to be true. Different postulates produce different geometries. Euclid’s 5th postulate is entirely consistent within Euclidean Space. Non-Euclidean geometry hasn’t invalidated Euclidean Geometry. All the various geometries are true (and sometimes useful) within the bounds of their assumptions.
I’m comfortable in my belief that a Christian God is only a medieval superstition. But I cannot tell you with 100% certainty that there is no Christian God. Neither can I tell you with 100% certainty that a meteorite won’t crash through the ceiling and kill me within the next minute. I live my life and make my plans as though no meteorite will strike me and as if there is no God. Given the evidence available to me both of these assumptions are entirely reasonable.
Heracleitus wrote, “The beast has to be driven to the pasture with blows.†Is this how it is for us? Is what is best in man brought out by the sting of the lash? The Judaeo-Christian world is but a vale-of-tears where pain is welcomed as spiritually uplifting. Christianity is a veritable theme park of suffering: the stain of original sin, the cross we must all bear, the scourging, the crown of thorns…
If suffering is a conduit to enlightenment it should be interesting to consider our state of mind whilst we suffer. Do you experience the poetry of the universe through your toothache? In his Enemies of Hope, Raymond Tallis writes:
â€In toothache, I am as remote as possible from being a lens on the universe; I am a place of toothache…To be in severe pain is to be rolled in the brazier of anti-meaning.â€
I don’t reach out to connect with the cosmos while I’m in pain; instead I contract into a little ball of suffering. My entire universe shrinks to the dimensions of my suffering.
I sat next to my physician brother-in-law at a big family dinner this past Christmas Eve. As dessert was coming out an old fellow hobbled over to ask my brother-in-law for advice concerning his acute spinal stenosis. We all became quiet and stared down at our plates as this old man loudly pleaded for relief from his pain. What drove this man to ignore normal propriety and to risk embarrassment by announcing his personal problems in the middle of our Christmas cake and coffee? Didn’t he realize that he was as welcome as a skunk at a garden party? No, I think his pain had driven him to despair. His world had contracted to the dimensions of his lower vertebrae. There was no room in his world for the joy of Christmas, for the enjoyment of the fine meal, or for the pleasure of the company of others. The pain in his back had absorbed his entire being. Tallis would say that this poor man had been rolled in the brazier of anti-meaning. To misquote Dr. Samuel Johnson, pain has a wonderful ability to focus one’s mind, but the focus is concentrated exclusively on the source of our pain. When we suffer “it’s all about us.†Emerson wrote:
â€Sorrow makes us all children again.â€
I’ll occasionally comment about the fine weather to someone only to have them say, “Yes, but we’ll pay for it later.†Must we really pay for our pleasures with our suffering? Some folks are afraid to enjoy their life because they imagine that as soon as their life is going well a tragedy is bound to occur. This reminds me of a groom on his wedding night constantly looking over his shoulder, for fear that his father-in-law will appear with a baseball bat. It reminds me of prison inmates afraid to venture out of their cells long after their jailers have unlocked the doors and fled. But life does not punish those who enjoy it, nor must we earn our joy by our suffering. Spinoza wrote:
â€Nothing forbids our pleasure except a savage and bad superstition.â€
I heard an old Vermont farmer tell a story about the time he was driving home along the back-roads when he suddenly saw a large young man run screaming across a field towards his truck. The farmer said that his first reaction was fear; he felt the impulse to step on the gas. But then the farmer thought he heard the guy say the word “cow.†The farmer pulled over. When the guy reached the truck he yelled, “Our cow’s just calved!†The farmer took his hand, congratulated him, and listened to the guy tell him all about the birth of his first calf. The farmer said he probably never had seen someone so happy. As the farmer drove away he figured it out; “Sorrow can be borne alone, but joy has to be shared.†The British philosopher, Roger Scruton, has said:
â€A truly solitary laugh is not a laugh at all, but a snarl of isolation.â€
Likewise, Pierre Corneille wrote in his, Notes par Rochefoucauld:
“Le bonheur semble fait pour etre partage.”
“Happiness seems made to be shared.”
When I have a migraine headache I only want to be alone, but when a Hermit Thrush sings in the evening I instinctively reach for my wife’s arm. Sartre wrote:
“An emotion is a transformation of the world.â€
We transform our world through both our sorrow and our joy. Sorrow shrinks our world to the dimensions of our suffering and is most often expressed by whelps of pain and sobs of grief. Joy expands our world and is best expressed by laughter and poetry. The Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, went so far as to say:
Hi Pax,
Your post certainly provided grist for the mill. When asked how long it took to write his speeches, the American president, Theodore Roosevelt supposedly said, “For a half-hour speech it takes me two days, for a five minute speech it takes a week, but for a two hour speech I could begin right away." I hope this helps explain why it’s taken me so long to reply to your excellent post. It takes some time to compress my diffuse thoughts into a sufficiently dense package.
Most animals appear to possess with some measure of consciousness, but a salient feature of humans is that we’re conscious of our consciousness. Of all that exists the only thing I can know from the inside is myself. Thomas Nagel might say that the only thing that I can know “what it is like to be,” is me. But when David Hume went looking for his Self he famously remarked:
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.â€
But, I do know what it’s like to be me. I know my capabilities and my limitations, my virtues and my vices. Yet when I declare that I am this, I’m actually making a tautological statement of the form of A=A, where “I am” is equivalent to “this.”
To answer your question Pax, yes, I am astonished at my consciousness. I’m astonished that I can reflect upon my Being yet know so little about the nature of my Being. But astonishment is tempered in another respect by the fact that any being capable of wondering about itself has to be something. No non-being wonders at its Being. I didn’t have to be me, but in order to catch myself in wonderment, I first had to be someone living somewhere; so why not me living here? Not only could the Stork have dropped me down any chimney here on earth, it could have dropped me down any chimney anywhere in this or any other universe. Alien beings are probably asking themselves at this moment why they had to be who they are. They could just as easily have been me sitting here as they could have been who they are living halfway across this or any other universe. They had to exist in order to ask why they exist, but the specific situation of their Being is entirely contingent.
I disagree, Pax. Sensory data has no value until we give it value. Data isn’t junk until our junk-filter says its junk. Sunsets are neither ugly nor beautiful until someone happens along to assign a value to it.
Consider that by weight, the human body is comprised of 65% Oxygen, 18% Carbon, 10% Hydrogen, 3% Nitrogen, 1.5% Calcium, 1% Phosphorous, and 1.5% trace elements. But these same elements can be found in any farmyard manure pile! If it’s true that no amount of organization could transform crap into something of value, then how is it that DNA transforms the same elements found in a pile of crap into a living human being? The fact is that unless we give our lives value we would otherwise have no more value than a pile of manure. Man isn’t content to merely exist as a contingent being; man declares that his contingent existence is meaningful. Man is a pile of crap that’s been temporarily transformed into a precious life. When we lose our life we lose both everything and nothing.
A rule is an implication, such as “If x, then y.†Implications are purely mental constructs; they don’t exist “out there†any more than a dent exists “out there†waiting to appear in a beer can. But doesn’t this imply that no rule exists outside of a conscious mind?
The folks a the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico think about just such things. They’re responsible for popularizing the concept of Complexity; the spontaneous self-organization that arises in complex systems. But if complex things (such as humans) arose from simple beginnings, then the attempt to know the state of the world in the beginning might not necessarily lead us to a better understanding of the world as it is. The American astronomer, Craig J. Hogan, says of beginnings:
“…the beginning of time is actually a lot less interesting than what came after. The evidence we have already suggests that the universe began with almost no information, and all the complex structure within it has developed since the beginning, on its own, without external influences. If this is true, finding the beginning of time and even its detailed structure will not help us much to understand the interesting things that have happened within the universe since then.”
We’ve a fairly good understanding of how single neurons function, but we’ve yet to discover how a hundred billion interactive neurons create a human consciousness. Still, the blueprint imprinted in our DNA does a fantastic job at cranking out conscious minds by the billions. Few parents worry that their healthy baby will grow up to be a Zombie. If you reproduce a healthy brain a new consciousness will almost surely appear in it. As Marvin Minsky has said, “Minds are simply what brains do.†There’s no doubt that minds are made of molecules, the question is; must a mind be made of organic molecules? Once upon a time airplanes were made exclusively of wood and cloth. Wouldn’t it have been silly if we’d acquired the notion that only things made of wood and cloth could fly? Minds, made of whatever, are vast systems in which the process of thinking can itself alter the feedback paths between the neurons. Consciousness could someday be built from Silicon or Gallium-Arsenide as it is now made of Carbon based tissue. In theory, consciousness might even be constructed from Tinker-Toys (well, at least in informational theory). But I think it is important to consider that once we’ve succeeded in building an non-organic consciousness, we shouldn’t be surprised when it begins to ask philosophical questions about its world. Minds might be what brains do, but philosophy, no less, might be what self-reflexive minds do!
Indeed, Darwin never supposed there was a master plan other than the simple truth that what adapts best and replicates most successfully in its environment will tend to have an edge on its competition.
Imagine how lucky you and I were that each one of our many millions of ancestors were able to survive long enough to reproduce? But anthropically speaking, it wasn’t luck, but a virtual necessity that everyone of my millions of ancestors were successful in reproduction.
Again, if there were no sun we’d either not be here to remark upon the fact, else we’d have evolved in the coldness and darkness of space. If the later were true, we’d thank our “lucky stars†that in universe filled with stars none was close enough kill us by its gentle warmth. Neither was the protective ozone layer in the earth’s upper atmosphere a stroke of luck on our part. If there were no ozone layer then either the sun’s ultraviolet radiation would have suppressed life from evolving here altogether, else life would have evolved despite the lack of an ozone layer. The Anthropic Principle is quite a useful tool to have in our philosophical toolbox!
I fully agree with you that indiscriminate handouts tend to diminish our incentive to stand on our own feet. But my concept of kindness has less to do with handouts than it has to do with cooperation, and a mutual concern for our well-being.
I’ve been reading Brainchildren by Daniel Dennett over the holiday. There’s a fascinating chapter near the end of this book titled, “Information, Technology, and the Virtues of Ignorance.†Dennett writes that one-thing philosophers in ethics agree on, is that “ought†implies “can.†When our ancestors lived in small isolated bands of relatively ignorant humans it was easier to be an ethical person. If while walking down by the river you heard cries for help from a person drowning, there was then (as there is now) no question of what you ought to do. If someone was hungry and you had plenty to eat, then it was very likely incumbent upon you to share your food with that tribe member. But what of a starving person living in another small band some thousand kilometers away? Ought you to help that person as well? No, says Dennett; even if you had the knowledge of this other person’s distress, you still didn’t have the means to help. Contrast that with today’s situation where nearly all of us in living in wealthy countries have both the knowledge and the means to help people on the opposite side of the globe. Now, instead of occasionally hearing one voice cry for help, we are deluged each day with thousands of voices crying for help. Dennett says that the more information we have about the plight of others, and the more means we have to help them, the less excuse we have to ignore their cries for help. In this modern version of the Victorian idea of Noblesse oblige, our newfound information and power simply increases our moral responsibility.
But we haven’t yet thought that far, have we? The property taxes imposed upon me by my local “tribe†help pay for football helmets for the kids in my hometown. It’s also morally incumbent upon me to provide the kids in town with team warm-up jackets so they might be fashionably warm when they show up to play football. Yet no one demands that I give money to save the life of a child in the Sudan by providing him with clean drinking water. I’m quite certain that if I should stand up on town-meeting day to suggest that my tax dollars that now pay for football uniforms ought instead to go to treat children’s diarrhea in Africa, the town would doubtless think me crazy (Hmm…perhaps I should?). Morally, we act as though we still lived in small isolated bands of people, even though the banana I had for breakfast came from South America, even though I vacation in Europe, and even though this letter could be read on every continent within a few seconds after I click on “Submit.â€
I don’t think you are heartless, Pax, I simply think we’re talking about different sorts of kindness. For example, I’d never advocate airlifting mountains of food to Africa on a regular basis. If we artificially increased the resources of an otherwise desolate region without simultaneously imposing some measure of population control on the people, then more than likely we’d only be setting the region up for a devastating boom and bust cycle. I rarely give money, for example, to street people because I don’t think the problem with street people in wealthy countries has to do with their not having enough money in their pocket. I refuse to purchase my clear conscience by helping to insure these unfortunate people continue to freeze on the streets. When we take it upon ourselves to help a neighbor we can’t just pitch a quarter in their cup and walk away. We have to get involved; we have to think through the ramifications of our actions. But ethical theories usually look better on paper than they work in practice. The problems can be so complex that the best intentions further hobbled by insufficient time or insufficient resources would fail to improve a given situation. It’s a messy business at best. As Dennet says:
â€The brute fact that we are all finite and forgetful and have to rush to judgement is standardly regarded, not implausibly, as a real but irrelevant bit of friction in the machinery whose blueprint we are describing. It is as if there might be two disciplines – ethic proper, which undertakes the task of calculating the principles of what one ought to do under all circumstances – and the less interesting, “merely practical†discipline of Moral First Aid, or What To Do Until the Doctor of Philosophy Arrives, which tells you, in rough-and-ready terms, how to make decisions under time pressure. My suspicion is that traditional theories of ethics all either depend on or founder on the very sorts of friction that are ignored by the standard idealization.â€
That, in our days. But before being proven to be true, was there one really doubting it? I mean, they all believed it was obvious and it couldn’t be otherwise.
Yes, you don’t reach out to connect with the cosmos while you’re in pain. The entire universe shrinks to the dimensions of your suffering, but only to show you your real dimensions, relative to the universe. Only then you will see The Truth, not the reality, because reality is delusive (even when being high, what you perceive is reality). And knowing The Truth is enlightenment, as far as I can tell.
And elightenment comes only after suffering, not while suffering. Suffering is just a way.
I know some psychologists who would argue that we can’t make accurate judgements about our own dispositions, as we need to see ourselves in away we find acceptable. An example might be, I could be cruel to somebody, but then say to myself I’m not being cruel, but am trying to help them. That way turning what is mean into something of benefit, as I need to see myself as a kind person.
Yes, but that’s because it can’t. Like Hume said, I am = This. While for the rock it has only its existent in the physical, and does not live on another level. When I hear Hume say that equation I feel he’s actually leaving out an equally importance part. For me the equation reads as follows:
Body + Consciousness = This or Me
If you take away either the Body or the Consciousness, my idea of Me will change. If the Consciousness is removed then I’m unable to do self-examination. If you take away my Body, then who I am no longer has any power in a physical world, and ceases to feel the effects from one. So either way I can no longer understand myself in the same way. To paraphrase Descartes, “Even if what I experience through my senses are a lie, the fact that I think about them must therefore mean I am.†But if Descartes had no senses to lie to him, he would have nothing to think about, as what could he possibly be left with to think about?
“This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.†(Plato, Theaetetus, sec.155) Socrates, Aristotle, Bacon, Montaigne, Whitehead, Schopenhauer all said something very similar. There is nothing that we call knowledge that did not have its birth in the perception of the natural world. It’s because there is order in the world we see that allows us to find things that are of value. [i](I’ll say more on this in a fuller way later in this posting)[i]
I agree that it’s our filters that make things junk or not. But our filters are a product of life experiences, which calibrates them. What we perceive affects the sensory organ used to perceive it. Meaning when I hear a noise with my ear, my eardrum vibrates like the air vibrated to carry the noise to me. If the noise is loud it can vibrate my ear so much causing it to be damaged, these types of noise are unpleasant to hear, because of the damage and pain the vibration of the noise is causing to my ear. While another type of noise might gently vibrate my ear and the ear finds this pleasant and soothing (like the way if someone gently rubs their hand along your arm it’s enjoyable). But a single noise to the mind can become boring very fast, so you need to arrange these noises in interesting patters a.k.a. musical songs. That way you have noises that the ear and the brain can both enjoy on different levels. The same is true for the eye, as bright lights will cause them pain because they’re becoming damaged. Like the way sounds vibrate the ear, if you look at colours from opposite ends of the visible light spectrum and are side by side on a page. When you look at one then the other in quick succession for a couple of seconds it starts to tire the eyes. This is because the iris is going to its max, and minimum focal lengths. This is actually giving your eye mussels a workout! Looking at certain colour combinations can have the same affect as the hand caressing you arm, but on your eyes.
Physical factors set aside, how we understand what we perceive, is also affected by emotional attachments to an event. Taking the example again of “someone gently rubbing their hand along your arm,†to almost all people this is a pleasurable experience. But to someone who this was a precursor to rape, it would send them into blind terror, as they know what is about to follow. I’ve unfortunately read many cases were men and women are unable to have normal relationships because of an abusive childhood experience.
But all this said, I still wonder, at the wonder a beautiful sunset instils in me.
I cannot agree with you here because you even say it yourself, “the same things that make a human body make a pile of manure.†If it’s not the materials that makes the difference, it has to be how the materials are arranged! Arrangement implies order and order requires rules to be followed.
It is precisely because if x, then y that Newton founded all his principles. I can’t find the quote but to paraphrase what Schopenhauer said, “You cannot know something unless you derive it from experience. All theory comes from examination of natural experiences.†This is the reason if you try to explain love in words you will fail miserably unless the other person has experienced what it is like to be in love. Or try to tell somebody what salt tastes like. I’d say it’s close to impossible to explain experiences in words alone, analogies are always more vivid and meaningful. But analogy is just substituting one experiences likeness for an others.
AI is a hobby that I really enjoy. I believe within my lifetime that a computer will be able to really understand the meaning of words and simple experiences. I don’t think they will be able to feel emotions, but will solve logical problems with ease as they self modify to adapt to the ordered data they’re fed viva their input senses. As soon as I finish off my theory on how time is just state change / movement. I plan to program an AI that will learn to adapt to its environment through experiences and remembering them for future use.
Yes, that’s my point exactly. It’s not human Consciousness that is special but anything that exhibits Consciousness! Humans are just one of possibly many other sentient forms of life in this universe, that are capable of exploring self-examining contemplations. The fact that life in its variety of forms can almost, by brute force, bring itself into existence leaves me in constant awe and wonderment. But it’s only because there are Rules to the way the universe works that makes this possible. And it’s this order in the universe, that I bow my head to.
That’s a good point, Pax. It prompts me to ask if you are who (or what) you think you are, or do you think you might be something quite different than what you think you are? If you’ve read Hoffstader’s Godel, Escher, Bach, you might remember this passage:
" One of the most severe of all problems of evidence interpretation is that of trying to interpret all the confusing signals from the outside as to who one is. In this case, the potential for intra-level and inter-level conflict is tremendous. The psychic mechanisms have to deal simultaneously with the individual’s internal need for self-esteem and the constant flow of evidence from the outside affecting the self-image. The result is that information flows in a complex swirl between different levels of the personality; as it goes round and round, parts of it get magnified, reduced, negated, or otherwise distorted, and then those parts in turn get further subjected to the same sort of swirl, over and over again-all of this in an attempt to reconcile what is, with what we wish were.
The upshot is that the total picture of “who I am” is integrated in some enormously complex way inside the entire mental structure, and contains in each one of us a large number of unresolved, possibly unresolvable inconsistencies. These undoubtedly provide much of the dynamic tension which is so much a part of being human. Out of this tension between the inside and outside notions of who we are come the drives towards various goals that make each of us unique. Thus, ironically, something which we all have in common - the fact of being self-reflecting conscious beings - leads to the rich diversity in the ways we have of internalizing evidence about all sorts of things, and in the end winds up being one of the major forces in creating distinct individuals."
Our conscious self is only the tip of the iceberg. Roughly 16 million bits of information are passed each second to our unconscious minds by our senses, yet only 16 bps of information can be processed by our conscious mind (a ratio of a million to one!). Thought of in this way, the unconscious mind is an impressive filter. It decides which 16 bits we should be conscious of and which 15,999,984 bits should be discarded. The unconscious is quite good at certain things: filtering, regulating (heart rate, body temperature, respiration, reflex actions, etc.) and memory functions, for example. The conscious mind, on the other hand, is handed those tasks which our unconscious mind does least well (planning, problem solving, mathematics, philosophy, etc.). In other words, the unconscious mind does the “no brainer” stuff, while all the messy stuff is dumped on the consciousness.
Imagine what it might be like to be conscious of your normally unconscious mind. It might be something like standing inside an old mechanical telephone switching matrix. From among the many signals pouring in, a signal might arrive from a body sensor indicating an elevation in temperature. The appropriate relays would immediately clack to direct the sweat pores located on the skin to open. Let’s say input AP628392 switches on output MF478104. Useful? Of course. Interesting? Not really. Well, I suppose if a thermostat had consciousness it might be interested in striking up a conversation with my unconscious mind.
My becoming conscious of my unconcious wouldn’t improve my understanding of what it means to be me any more than if I were to become conscious of the cells replicating in my liver. I am primarily what the rest of my brain doesn’t want to deal with: the messy decisions, the doubts, the uncertainty…
Raymond Tallis says that we are no more present in our toes or in our mouth than we are present in our clothes. In his book, On the Edge of Certainty, p.157, he continues:
“I might fail to recognize my foot from a photograph but, unless I was seriously brain damaged, I would always recognize my face. Moreover, if I were to point to my face in a photograph I would most likely say, ‘That’s me’ whereas if I pointed to my photographed foot, I might well say, ‘That’s mine’…I cannot as clearly see the distances between you and your body as I can experience the distances between me and my body, or between me and a particular part of my body…I do not as readily separate you from the physical appearance of your body as I separate myself from…my body…In short, we are and we are not our bodies.”
True enough, if I feel a pain there’s no question in my mind whose pain it is. Whatever pain I feel must belong to me.
I agree.
When I ask if rules exist apart from minds I’m not denying the physical world. I’m simply saying that the world does not make rules. And if the world doesn’t make rules it can’t very well follow them. Of course, humans make rules, but why should the physical world have to obey human rules? Think of the chickens that have discovered the “rule” that every morning a man will come to feed them. Only one morning the man comes not with food, but with an ax. The rule existed in the minds of the chickens, not in the man.
Pax, I’m equally fascinated by the prospect of AI, though I think we could build a form of intelligence that’s anything but artificial. “Artificial” consciousness could be as genuine as ours. I think that someday men will discuss metaphysics with their non-biological children.
Good stuff, Pax. Reading from a recent entry in my own journal:
"The way the morning sunlight illuminates the rime coated trees on this mountain is deeply meaningful to me. I know the orange light is only an artifact of the low angle of the morning sun. I know that rime ice is only frozen fog. I know, I know…but still I say:
'Verweile doch, du bist so schoen!
And if we are not immediately damned,
the stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
But it is open to us to regret each minute as it passes."
Goethe
Hehe, this reminds me of something I said to a friend not so long ago. “I have an IQ of about 90, but I’m sure my subconscious’s is about 240!â€
I agree with you about the messy decisions. At times when I think consciously about things, the answers just seem to pop out of nowhere into my consciousness, its like all thinking happens at a subconscious level. When reading books about psychology, I’m always fascinated at the idea that most of what I choose to do, and the real motivation for doing it will remain a mystery. I’m always left perplexed and unsure of myself, when I then have to make decisions of consequence. But then almost paradoxically I put my trust in, my subconscious, as it must only want the best for me… I hope?
I agree with you that the physical world of reality doesn’t have to follow any rules, but yet we are capable of deriving general theories from it. All the rules we follow in Physics exist today only in our “perfect†Mathematical world, which is independent from the physical world. But we try to model in maths through calibration of equations to observations made of the phenomenon that seem to be consistent in the physical world. Your argument, it could be seen as trying to refute gravity or other seemingly consistent rules. The way I look at the physical world and its simulation through maths is as follows in a simple example:
We see what at first looks like a simple interaction between a force and an object. Gravity is pulling the ball to the ground. So the rule is, all objects unless supported will fall to the ground, because of the force of gravity. Then somebody drops a feather, but this doesn’t fall to the ground directly but seems to move from side to side in the air while falling. The rule now has to be updated to take account of this new observation. The weight of an object has an effect when the object is falling. Then in another experiment were both objects are the same weight but different shapes. They learn an object shape also has to be added to the equation, because as the object moves through the viscosity of air it has an effect on the falling motion.
It can be seen from this example what we call laws are only partial rules, as at each new discovery we must refine what we previously believed was a complete rule. Science of the physical world is a process of discovery. We might make the rules up, but we base them off acts of experience. We should also not get complacent and think that we know it all, as rules are always liable to change. It’s very lightly that we’ll have to completely scrap old rules as we find more complete equations. While the way we calculate could changed the general idea of what we are trying to calculate is the same. Rules may change, but the idea being expressed will most of the time remain similar. Of course when we are at the forefront of scientific discovery everything is liable to change. Thinks like Quantum Theory or String Theory in a hundred years time will probably look quite different from they way it does today.
You said, “I know the orange light is only an artifact of the low angle of the morning sun. I know that rime ice is only frozen fog. I know, I know.†How do you know it’s the sun? Or the ice could be a figment of your imagination. I don’t want to be pedantic, but there must be some laws to the universes existence. Everyday as long as I can remember the sun has always dawned and set and I believe this will continue to happen for a long time to come. While I agree with you that we don’t really know the true rules, there does seem to be enough consistency to believe that things aren’t just randomly happening. I’m also not saying that the Universe is conscious that its following rules, like a computer it could be following instructions without knowing what it is actually doing. But I do fully believe that we are capable of figuring out how parts of the universe work, and also being sure that this knowledge will be consistent in other similar environments.
I feel as long as you have a healthy amount of scepticism, over the long run you will learn quite a lot of, what could be consider fact. To deny this possibility, to me, is to reject what we are, and not have faith in ones own abilities. While I might toy with the idea to learn from it, it’s something I would never believe. They say the wise man knows he knows nothing. But I think, the wiser man knows not to think what he does know, is just empty foolishness.
Anyway, benevolence enters the picture only relative to the mind of humans. A religion called Jainism promotes life without hurting anything else better than any other religion in the world. Their philosophy has led only to this