The Obscurity of God and the Nightmare Box

Original Posting

It’s something that goes beyond life-after-death. What’s in the box is proof that what we call life isn’t.

Our world is a dream. Infinitely fake. A nightmare.

One look, Rand says, and your life—your preening and struggle and worry—it’s all pointless.

The grandson crawling with cockroaches, the antiques dealer, Cassandra with no eyelashes wandering off naked.

All your problems and love affairs.

They’re an illusion. “What you see inside the box,” Rand says, “is a glimpse of the real reality.”

-Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk

Let me start with a statement that I shall make no effort to argue for or defend. If you disagree with this statement, there is no need to even bother coming up with a rebuttal, you can simply disagree and move along. The statement is, as you read this right now, being furiously debated all across the internet as it is.

Humanity, as a species, has no good evidence to support the belief that God exists.

Now, this is not necessarily evidence against his existence. If God is, as many theists believe, omnipotent and omniscient, then it would not be difficult for him to avoid providing us with evidence of his existence. Unlike natural forces like gravity or natural occurrences such as combustion, God would be capable of resisting observation and obscuring himself. Indeed, if you agree with my above statement, and also happen to be a theist, I do not see how you can avoid the conclusion that God is obscuring Himself.

God, if there is a god, is a reclusive god.

Now, you may object that God has not really been silent, but in fact has revealed himself to us at various times and in various ways, most notably through prophets and holy texts. Even if one accepts a particular sacred text as the word of God, the fact remains that it should not be very difficult for him to give each and every one of us a personal chat wherein he explains himself as best as the truths of his nature can be simplified for human language, the fact remains that it is not necessary for modern humans to rely on 2000 year old records if God is indeed omnipotent. In other words, it is possible for him to give each of us our own personal revelation, but instead we are expected to rely on the records of revelations he gave to long dead prophets and teachers.

Even if he does speak to us, he is only whispering. For what reason would God whisper, if that is indeed what he is doing? Or for what reason would God be silent, if in fact humanity has never received any kind of revelation? Disregarding the atheistic answer, which is perfectly valid but does not make for a very interesting discussion, the most likely explanation is that it is God's will that he not be clearly known or clearly grasped.

Which leads me wondering why God would not want to be clearly known or clearly grasped. What is it that God gains or avoids by keeping us in the dark about his existence? If God is obscuring himself, to what end is he doing it?*

God, in most traditional conceptions, has desires, but never needs. Humanity has needs, though. I have a suspicion that the obscurity of God is best understood as being for the sake of humanity instead of being for the sake of God. To flesh out my suspicion as to why God must obscure himself, I turn to a subplot of a book I really happen to like.

In Chuck Palahniuk's 2005 novel Haunted, one of the stories concerns a device called The Nightmare Box. The box ticks, and while it is ticking it is just an antique oddity. Then it stops ticking. When it stops ticking, a person can lean their weight against the box, move their left eye to a lens, hold onto two handles, and press a button. After that, your life no longer matters. You give up college, you give up your career, you take out your jewelry, you no longer care if cockroaches crawl through your clothes, and you no longer see the need to keep your long, pretty eyelashes. You give up on life. It is no longer worth the effort.

Why?

Because the Nightmare Box shows you a glimpse of real life. It shows you that there is a more real life, and it shows you that this life you are living in right now is an illusion. None of your struggles, goals, dreams, or fears have any real significance, they are all just a part of a make-believe world. They are fiction. So you just give up. You stop bothering to make anything of your life because, well, why try to build a life here in the world of illusions when there's a real world out there somewhere?

Now, this is fiction, and this is human motivation filtered through the mind of one particular author. You can decide for yourself; if you knew, not believed, that there was a real heaven out there and that our world and our existence was artificial and unreal, could you continue living as though life mattered? Could you continue valuing your education, your career, your home, your appearance, your art, or anything else that you believe makes your life worth living if you found out that your whole existence was the equivalent of a video game or a novel? Entirely fictional.

Maybe you could. Maybe you could not. That requires introspection to determine.

Even if you could continue living your life, though, it would never be the same. It is one thing to simply come to the conclusion that life is an illusion; one can cope with that by remembering that this would also make us an illusion, therefore the world is still real to us. It is another thing entirely to come to the conclusion that life is an illusion, but also have something real to compare your illusory life to. The world would begin resembling a cartoon, it would no longer create the sense of weight and significance necessary for us to continue seriously living our lives. Even if you could continue living your life, everyday would be a struggle to stave off a nihilistic infection of the spirit.

What does this have to do with the obscurity of God?

Go read your Bible, and you will find a description of a God who oftentimes simply appears to be a human writ large. He is an almost relatable figure, although He is often offensive to our modern sensibilities. Nonetheless, in the Bible, God cares about the things that human beings tend to care about. He provides a code of laws, he gets involved in warfare, he gets involved with politics, he is jealous, he seeks glory, he has an opinion on good sex as opposed to bad sex. This is a God who is very concerned with what we concern ourselves with.

Now ask yourself if this sounds right? Are we not told that God is beyond humanity? Transcendent? Almost incomprehensible to us?

Imagine if you met that incomprehensible God. That God who is so far removed from what we care about, that he would make our entire lives seem insignificant by his presence. There is the first real entity you have ever encountered, and he simply is not concerned about the petty problems and your petty values that you concern yourself with. There He is: a Nightmare Box for the whole world.

Why do I say that he would be a Nightmare Box for the world? Because after being in His presence, it would be impossible for you to continue caring about anything in your life. How can you submit taxes after having an encounter with God, with all his apathy toward taxes. How can you form a relationship with another person, they are bound to seem like a shadow or a parody of a personality after having encountered God. How can you keep working your mundane job, knowing that it will not get you any closer to that extraordinary real world?

You may here object that I have fallen into utter speculation. After all, how do I know that God will not care about taxes? And how do I know that God's personality would be so deep as to make all other personalities appear shallow as a puddle? And how do I know that you would not be able to keep working because your only concern would be to grow nearer to that real world?

To this I would simply say that the search for meaning and the search for significance and value is one of humanity's most basic drives. To encounter something (someone?) who is literally more real than our world would cause our hearts to pour out. In our lives, as I believe I have discussed previously, we are responsible for creating our own meaning and our own value. In the presence of God, there would be no need for such an act of the will. The sense of meaning would be drawn out of us as soon as we see how fictional our world seems in comparison to Him. We may not all love Him, but it would be impossible to deny his significance. Although, I must admit that it is possible that he would be concerned with taxes, I suppose I just really hope that he is not.

And then what would happen?

I think humanity would screech to a halt. With such certain knowledge of God, all we would ever be concerned with would be God. We would all become like monks, devoting our lives to this entity, because nothing else would seem to be worth our time. Everything earthly would feel like trudging, we would feel like we were just playing a role or playing make-believe. Nothing would be able to create a sense of importance or significance in us. Once you encounter something that matters as much as God does, it would be impossible to feel that anything else matters.

Our earthly life would wilt.

So, if God is obscuring himself, I think that it is because he wishes to preserve this human world. He is obscure, so that by remaining mysterious he keeps us able to regard our own world as being worth living for.


*It should be noted that I am here making the very unwarranted assumption that God must be acting toward some end. This is an anthropomorphism. We believe that humans act toward some end, which causes us to impose that human trait upon God. My other presupposition is that, if God is working toward a goal, that goal is something that human beings would find valuable. It is possible that God's true end would simply be baffling to us because we would never think it worth seeking.

On the Romantic Impulse

Original Posting

There is an impulse that drives us to want to be seen by another person. To have another person look at us and have a definition of us in their minds. We want to exist in their eyes, we want to have our presence acknowledged. More so, we wish to be significant, we want to find someone who will regard us as a significant part of the universe. Why do we want this? I suspect that it has something to do with what I talked about in my last Sunday Bullshit: all value is created by people. True, we can value ourselves, but we also want to be valued by another. We want someone outside of ourselves to say that we are important.

We want another person to step in and say, “yes, I value you. Yes, you are important. Yes, you are significant.”

“Yes, I love you.”

This impulse, the impulse to find someone who will value you, is one of the single most powerful motivators for the human character. This is often expressed sexually, but even apart from all sexuality I think that the impulse can exist. It is related to, but distinct from, the desire for sex.

How do we make sense of the world except through value? We, each of us, creates his or her own subjective world by taking our perception of the world as is, and then coloring it with our preferences and values. If our subjective world contains nothing that we find worth pursuing, nothing that we enriching, we find ourselves in a state of boredom and ennui. We, therefore have a desire to find something that we can pour ourselves into. Something that we can value, something that can occupy our mind, and drag us out of our complacency. This is the desire to love. The desire to value.

By and large it is quite difficult to find oneself valued meaningfully. This seems to be because we fall into one or two conditions: we either value very few people in such a way or we value many people in such a way. To be valued by one who is capable of valuing many, it does not seem a great matter to be loved by them. This is often the case with a group of friends, where it is difficult to feel any friendship to be particularly weighty if one is surrounded by many friendships. In the case of people who value very few people, it is difficult for most people to find a way to occupy such an elite position. This is usually the case when we talk about exclusive, romantic love: it is a matter of occupying a very elite spot in someone's life, of being valued in a very unique way.

Once in this state, we become full of jealousy and insecurity, because we dread the thought of losing such a position in a person's life, or worse, having our position reversed and becoming an object of loathing for them.

In order to get through life, it is necessary to hold only one-dimensional summary perspectives of most people in our minds; imagine if you had to view everyone you meet as a full and complete human being, it would be far too taxing. We have a limited number of people that can become real to us, a limited number of people that we can perceive as being complex, multi-layered characters. If you view someone in this deeper way, you have already begun to value them; likewise if you are viewed by someone in the way, you have already begun to be valued by them ('value' in this case being distinct from love).

There comes a point at which we wish to know a person more deeply. Not just their positive traits, either, no we want real flesh here. We want to know flaws as well as qualities. We flesh them out, we develop a perspective of them, and we allow a version of them to exist, writ large, in our subjective world. We begin putting stock in their opinion, because only by saying that their opinion is an important matter can we say that their opinion of us is likewise an important matter. We put stock in them. We build them up. We make them important.

And all we can hope is that, upon making them so important, they will turn and regard us as important as well. That we will be able to enter into a state of mutual valuing. The state of love.

It becomes tempting to lie at this point. We grow fearful that, upon being seen, we will be discarded as unsuitable. There is no satisfaction to be found if we give into this impulse, however, as it will invalidate whatever perspective they have of us, as we would know that it is an artificial creation rather than our genuine character. The only way to experience the full satisfaction of having another person value you so deeply is by allowing yourself to be exposed before them. This, in turn, leads to a certain dread and anxiety, as one is offering oneself to the other for judgment and fearing that one will not be adequate. Taking a shortcut and using falsehood, though, will make it impossible to achieve the full experience.

Upon entering the state of love, the state of mutual significance, one gets a feeling of rightness. A feeling of flourishing. One feels that their life, their subjective world, has been blessed, been made richer. This is why romance is often held to be intoxicating, one's outlook on the world is altered. The Other becomes a reference point for evaluating the world. And once the Other becomes so large to you, it becomes terrifying to even imagine leaving that state of love.

This is why some will go to such drastic lengths to remain in that state, and why it is difficult to exit the state and simply move onto another. In order to experience the richness and satisfaction of such a state, one must spend some time building up the Other's importance and significance. Simply leaving and moving onto another makes our own value judgments appear cheap. For this reason, for the sake of preserving the legitimacy of our own will and values, we will often go to extreme lengths to be with the one we have already built up in our subjective world.

So, there we have it, for week two, my account of how people come to value each other and forge a strong connection. That is my account of romantic love: a matter of people coming to make each other important in their own subjective world, of coming to regard another person as being worthy of being a reference point in our own evaluations of the world and life.

No doubt, the blog itself surely failed to be romantic.

In Response to the Absurd

Original Posting

http://www.scribd.com/doc/10375640/The-Absurd-Thomas-Nagel

Nagel's Account of the Absurd

[The sense of absurdity] is supplied, I shall argue, by the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.

All human beings put effort toward living their lives. This is inescapable. As a living human being, all you can do all day long for the entirety of your life is live your life. However you choose to live it, the fact remains that that is where your efforts are devoted. At the same time, as a human being, you are capable of looking at your life from another point of view; you are capable of allowing your perspective to step back to survey your own life from an outside view. Upon doing so, you find that all the motivations driving you and all of the justifications for your actions can seem arbitrary, you can see that all of the things that you consider good for their own sake could just as well be seen as not good or as unimportant. Upon seeing your life from this perspective, however, nothing really changes, you are still living the same life you were living before you stepped back.

This, according to Nagel, is where the absurd comes from. The fact that we can see how much of our lives is arbitrary, but that we continue to live that life just as seriously as we did before we saw ourselves that way, causes us to feel that our life is in some way absurd. In some way a pretension. That the seriousness and difficulty of our life is not congruent with the fact that we suspect all of our goods are arbitrary or at least open to doubt.

He proceeds to argue that there is no good and no cause that we cannot doubt, and consequently, it is not that the world has failed to supply us with meaning, but that we ourselves are capable of doubting anything we might find meaningful. The absurd comes not from the world, for there is no possible world in which we might not doubt, but rather comes from ourselves.

Upon taking this step back, to look at our lives from the outside, we still must continue with our seriousness, despite knowing that our seriousness can be doubted and without having satisfied these doubts. This leads us to regarding our lives and our seriousness with a certain irony. We are sustained by our very natures to continue living our lives, even as reason and justification are called into doubt.

A Need for Facts; a Confirmation of Doubt

Our sense of the absurd is, for Nagel, bound up in our awareness of how arbitrary, specific, and idiosyncratic all of our goals and desires are. It's our awareness that what we are pursuing could be different. It is the fact that we can doubt our our goals, and really any goal, that causes us to feel the absurd.

This, it seems to me, is related to our need to believe in facts, especially among philosophical types. What I mean by the need to believe in facts is our need to believe that the propositions we hold as true are true or false independent of our perception of them. We have a need to believe that we are merely conforming to the facts of the universe, because admitting that some statement is true only because we have agreed to believe it is true lends that statement a certain invalidity.

This invalidity, I believe, comes from the fact that facts are facts no matter what humanity (whose mind is in constant flux) believes about them. If some statement is held as a belief, but is not also a fact, it appears invalid in comparison to beliefs which are held and are also facts. Anything that is dependent upon humanity is also dependent upon our fatigue, our hunger, our shifting moods, our shifting circumstances, our changing minds, etc., in comparison to unchanging fact, we find these to be invalid.

More deeply, though, is the simpler problem that any statement dependent upon humanity can also be rejected by humanity. Facts can be rejected by a human, as well, but in that case we say that the human is not living in reality. In other words, we tend to side with facts over human whim. In a situation without facts, however, all we have is human whim. All humans being equal at least insofar as they are all equally human, our most deeply cherished value or goal can be written off as insignificant by another person, and we would be utterly incapable of proving them wrong.

Nagel's “stepping back” involves the doubting of all of our goals and all of those things that we live for. What does this mean, other than simply seeing that we have no good reason for believing that our values are factually valuable? When we doubt our values, isn't that just us acknowledging that we haven't got facts to prove how valuable our values are?

And when we notice how arbitrary, specific, and idiosyncratic our values are, isn't that just us realizing that all of our value judgments taste like the beliefs that spring forth from our biases? In other words, realizing that we want what we want because of our natures rather than because of their natures?

A Restating of the Absurd

It would seem that the sense of the absurd comes not merely from knowing that our values can be doubted and then still striving to pursue them, but rather from coming to the conclusion that our doubts are correct. The sense of the absurd comes from knowing that nothing that we pursue is factually worth pursuing, and then pursuing it all the same.

When talking about the absurd, we frequently associate it with death, or with the extinction of our species, or with our insignificance in the universe (the “bad arguments” that Nagel starts his essay with). These are all situations where the importance of anything human is called into question. Then we mention these scenarios because that is how we are expressing the question: “why does anything human matter?”

For, that is what we are really coming to face, that upon finding no factual basis for our values, we have only a human basis for our values. All of our ends of justification, all of our good-for-their-own-sakes are only good because we will them. It is all very human.

Is something human worth pursuing?

Must We Continue Pursuing?

Until we die, we must continue pursuing something. There is simply no way not to. If we continue living our lives, then we are continuing to pursue all the guiding values and principles that govern that life. If we decide that suicide is the best course of action, then we must still pursue the principle that an absurd life or a human life is not worth living (another value judgment). If we try to transcend all pursuits, that in itself is pursuing. One may try to avoid all pursuits by merely sitting in a chair and doing nothing, in essence imitating the dead while sustaining his biological processes, but as soon as he shifts to get comfortable or eats to stave off hunger or even resolves not to shift or eat, he will again be pursuing.

It is inevitable, we must continue pursuing so long as we exist.

If we stop here, we are in a deeply absurd position. The question is anything human worth pursuing remains unanswered, all we know is that we have to pursue human values. In other words, life may not be worth living, but we still have to live it. How absurd it would feel to pour yourself into your life's pursuits without knowing why, only knowing that you must. This seems to be the prime flaw in Nagel's essay, he is content to let the issue stop here and simply recommend taking this absurdity as something that adds a little irony to life.

I would like to hope that we can do a little better than that.

Escaping the Absurd: Accepting an Absence of Facts

There is a way to escape the absurdity of life, and it consists of two steps. The first is to work through our need for facts and accept that value is not rooted in fact.

There is no factual basis for ending a chain of justification at any point, as that would mean that something is factually valuable for its own sake, and if that were true we would have no sense of the absurd.

Why then do we stop at that point? It is because of our nature, as Nagel says, citing Hume. I would like to state it a bit differently, though. All chains of justification come to an end because we come to something that we will for itself. And, it could not be different. No value exists in the universe, things are only valuable to someone or something.

Upon understanding that all value only exists to someone or something, we see that doubting a value is senseless. One only doubts statements that have a truth value, any statement that cannot be true or false cannot be meaningfully doubted. So, when one takes the step back and sees how arbitrary all of ones goals are, one can simply remember that they are valuable because he wants them.

The facts are not there. It is up to you to decide if you can still love something without it being factually valuable. Of course, if you say that something can only be valuable if it is factually valuable, you are in that very statement making a non-factual value judgment. Clinging to the need for a factual value means clinging to an absurd existence.

As an aside, it seems to me that we as a species have largely accepted the propositions necessary for this step (we largely have given up trying to find value outside of ourselves). Whether or not we have come to be okay with that, I am not sure.

Escaping the Absurd: It's All Human

However, working through our need for facts and recognizing that all value is human is not enough to stave off the absurd? After all, in all the despairing “bad arguments” that Nagel gives as examples, the person arguing seems acutely aware that all values are human. Isn't that why he binds the absurd up with human insignificance?

Nagel argues that there is no world in which we would not find the absurd, because it is our ability to doubt that brings it about. That is not really true, though, is it? If it were possible for a thing to be factually intrinsically valuable, well, where would the absurd have gotten to? Where would our doubt be if we could grasp that there was some good that was truly valuable apart from human will?

And so, breaking away from our need for facts only makes up half of the escape from the absurd. It causes us to stop requiring what is not there. The second half of the escape comes from accepting that human reasons are good enough. That wanting something is a good enough reason for calling it good.

“Good enough reason” is another human judgment, another matter of human will, for we are the ones who decide whether or not a reason is good enough. It is not a fact that human will is sufficient. Perhaps, you say, human will is simply too insignificant to care about. You may, of course, say that. However, it is your human will that is declaring human will insignificant. Since reality is void of value, human will is all that we have to create value, but you can commit yourself to nihilism by devaluing value itself.

You will inevitably lead a life that contradicts that nihilism until you die, however.

This calls for a value judgment. I am not one who believes that one must have the corresponding emotions to make a value judgment, it is simply an act of the will. So if you say “human value is enough,” then it is enough. If you say “human value is not enough,” then it will not be enough. To escape the feeling of the absurd, though, your emotions must eventually come to correspond with your value judgment. The first step toward that state, however, is making the initial value judgment.

Why Escape the Absurd?

There is really only one reason to escape the absurd, and that is because you want to. If you do not want to, do not find it to be a bother, or perhaps even find it delightful, then leave it be. Both steps of escaping the absurd are changes you make to yourself, one consists of making peace with facts, the other consists of making a value judgment. You are under no obligation to do either of these things.

All I can hope to have shown here is that one can escape the absurd without denying any facts or retreating into fantasy. That one can accept facts as facts and still escape the absurd. If I have shown that, then this blog was a success.

Post-Escape

We need not live as Nagel suggests, doubting our goals, pursuing them all the same, and then living with a sense of irony about our lives. Nor do we need to resort to tragic heroics like Camus suggests, trying to defy the universe (I am here using Nagel's account of Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus is still on my reading list). Instead, we can simply recognize that doubting the value of a thing is senseless, and that the only judge of a thing's value is how much we want it. Any sense of the absurd is unnecessary, and we need not retreat from reality to attain an escape from the absurd.

After this escape from the absurd, there are two things that change for us, which I believe will have a practical and spiritual benefit for us.

First, any sense of the absurd that remains becomes a clue for us. When we start to feel a sense of the absurd in our lives, it may indicate that we are pursuing something that we do not really want. For those of us with a fickle will, we may be acutely aware of a certain absurdity throughout our entire lives, even after performing the escape and taking this perspective, due to constantly finding ourselves pursuing objects even when we are not actively wanting them. For those of us with a steady will, I imagine a sense of the absurd would make only very rare appearances in their lives upon adopting this perspective. This has the practical benefit of letting us use any feelings of absurdity as a call for introspection.

Most importantly, however, is that with this understanding of values, we understand that there is no need to pursue what one does not will. Upon understanding that we are responsible for all value in our lives, we are free to create our own values, looking at what we love and pursuing only for the sake of love instead of pursuing due to a perceived fact of the universe. Once we accept that all value is human, and we decide that human value is enough, we are free to create our own system of values.

Belief vs. Knowledge

Original Posting

In the course of certain debates, someone will probably bring up that once one has evidence, a belief becomes "knowledge." This often occurs (at least in my experience) when one debater tries to show how all or nearly all beliefs contain faith; by claiming that evidence changes the nature of a belief, you argue that you can attack faith-based claims without also undermining your own beliefs.

Fair enough, clearly a belief held with evidence is not the same as a belief held without evidence.

I do take one issue with this, though, which is that evidence is not just a matter of true and false or on and off. It simply isn't the way evidence works; you can't look at a premise, ask if it has evidence in its favor, and then receive a yes or no answer. Evidence comes in shades. Beliefs are not a matter of evidence vs. non-evidence, they are a matter of more evidence vs. less evidence.

Hell, nearly every belief must be accounted at least a modicum of doubt for the simple fact that what we perceive to be reality may, in fact, be an illusion.

So, I propose that beliefs should not be held to be either knowledge or faith, but rather every belief should be held as some ratio between the two. A belief supported by a great deal of empirical evidence should be held as consisting of mostly knowledge with a minimum of faith (the faith mostly consisting of having faith that you are not, in fact, insane, that reality is not an illusion, and that whatever logical presuppositions you had to assume in the course of forming a believe were correct). A belief that has very little empirical evidence should be held as consisting mostly of faith with a minimum of knowledge, or perhaps even no knowledge at all (it seems impossible for a belief to consist of complete knowledge, but it seems quite possible for a belief to consist of complete faith).

Trying on Worldviews

Original Posting

How much of our philosophizing in a matter of reason and how much is it a matter of feeling and emotion?

I got to thinking about my own worldview and how it's developed over the years, through several different shades of Christianity to my present agnosticism. Not to mention how I've tried on different approaches to ethics. I've noticed that there is, certainly, an element of reason when considering my worldview. I want the worldview to be consistent, and for that I test it with my reason to make sure that I'm not using any special pleading to squeeze in a belief I happen to like. Still, my predominant approach to these matters has to do with feeling and emotion; can I make myself love this philosophy? Can I reconcile myself to it in a way that keeps me from too much despair?

Now I wonder, does this indicate weakness on my part (as I've often believed) or is this just how humans do philosophy? Probably both, after all why not believe that the way humans do philosophy is weak?

Now, depending on the kind of philosophy, our reliance on emotion shifts, our emotional charge for a topic seems to me to be directly related to how much it affects how we view ourselves and our place in the world.

That's not to say that I (or anyone else) base my worldview strictly on emotion. If we care enough to think about things, we probably care enough to try to believe true things unless we've made a committed effort at some point to disregard the truth. However, what I'm describing is something like reconciliation. Once your mind sees the evidence going a certain direction, it seems that there is a period where the rest of you has to try it on. Your emotion and your will have to try to find a way to fit into the new belief you've found.

This is what I mean by "trying on worldviews." We don't adopt them strictly by reason, we have to find things that our whole being can commit to. This occasionally takes the form of someone constantly trying new beliefs and philosophies to see what fits comfortably.

This, of course, means that we aren't operating according to strict reason and evidence. It also means we're still human (you can decide if that's a positive or a negative). But I wonder what the exact proportions are. How much of our philosophizing is about examining evidence and following argument, and how much of it is about finding something we can live with?

On Happiness

Original Posting

Everyone spends their life trying to avoid pain and pursue happiness. The perfect world would be a world full of many diverse pleasures, and pain (not just in a physical sense, but as everything that hinders our life of pleasure) does not exist or is at least brought down to its most most minimal point.

Is this true?

Is this really what we want?

Is this really the world that our common nature craves?

I don't think it is. I don't think that we want a world without pain. Not just because the existence of pain gives us an appreciation of pleasure, but because we were grown in a world with pain and suffering. It's what we crawled out of, it shaped our nature. To deny it would be to deny a fundamental aspect of life itself.

Life is happiness; life is also suffering.

Look at our art. When we are creative, what do we create? Do we create idealistic worlds of peace, harmony, and joy? No. We claim to want them, but we spend no time creating them. No, everything we create with a narrative (with the possible exclusion of bubblegum pop) always includes pain and suffering somewhere.

We grew up in it, we crave it.

I'm not saying we're all masochists or that we all want to sit around torturing ourselves. What I am saying is that any conception of a good life or a good world without suffering is a concept that doesn't understand human nature. It's listening to humanity's mouth rather than its actions.

We desire pleasure, fun, and joy; but deep down we wouldn't be happy without pain, suffering, and a little anguish.

So, if you are altruistically inclined, by all means work to make the world a more pleasurable place. Try to remove the pain in the world. But you better hope the pain isn't completely removable, otherwise you might go too far and fuck up the world.

A Rambling Bullshit That I Could not Have Not Written

So there I am, sitting at my laptop, clicking the Stumble! button for my StumbleUpon app, happily neglecting to provide anyone anything of value, when I came across this article. It's about free will in the face of determinism, or rather it's about us being a part of the universe, following the rules of the universe, and therefore leaving no room for free will.

Up to this point, I am mostly in agreement. The idea of free will as "could I have done differently than I did," seems to be debunked by our knowledge of determinism and the fact that we too are a part of the chain of cause and effect.

The article seems to be using the fact that the body can be made to act in certain ways by stimulating certain parts of the brain, to highlight the fact that we are just machines. By "machines," he seems to mean that we are organisms that respond in deterministic ways to stimuli. He argues that the illusion of free will arises from the fact that we deal with a large number of competing stimuli and have a large number of possible output (all determined, though, of course), all this variety gives us the illusion that we have free will.

However, I think the article fails to play up the fact that we are still making choices. We are faced with options, and we are only actually capable of choosing the option that we do in fact choose (due to determinism), however it is still the result of the values, preferences, internal chemistry, psychology, environmental factors, and any other relevant factors competing internally to make up our character.

Our will is by no means undetermined, but it is still no less ours. Our decisions may not be capable of being anything other than they are, but there is something that can be called "me" that is a part of that chain of causation. My will is the cause of my actions, even though my will is itself the effect of earlier causes.

Perhaps I just resent the idea that we are merely machines, but I think what I truly take issue with is the often unstated, but seemingly presumed, idea that determinism removes will. It does not, my will is still very much existent, it simply is not free, my will is itself the result of a multitude of competing influences.

And besides, what would free will be anyway? Would you call randomness freedom? No, you think of free will as being the freedom to want what you want. It's classically thought of as "the ability to do otherwise," but I don't think that's really what most people think about when they conceive of free will. They conceive of it as the ability to have desires. Determinism doesn't take that away, it merely explains that the desires are themselves the result of causes.

This is nothing shocking, we've always known that people raised one way will will differently from people raised another. And this is just a simplistic example of determinism.

The article has the professor being interviewed saying, "I still seem to decide what films I go to see, I don't feel it's predestined, though it must be determined somewhere in my brain." To which I respond, that he did decide what films he went to see, and it was determined in his brain somewhere, because he is his brain.

Alternately, maybe I've completely misrepresented the current view of determinism in modern neuroscience and have therefore attacked a strawman that only exists in my head. It doesn't matter, I couldn't have done otherwise.

Life Has an Expiration Date

Original Posting

If there is no afterlife, then there is a termination to your life. There is a point at which you will no longer exist. You will see nothing, you will feel nothing, you will know nothing. Positivity and negativity give way to absolute neutrality. All these facts about death are meaningless to dead men, because they can't know them or be moved to feeling by them. The fact of death can only affect those still alive.

The fact of death creates an opportunity cost for everything we do; because the fact that life will one day end means that we don't have infinity moments. Every moment we spend on an activity (or inactivity) is a moment that can't be spent doing anything else. The time you spend reading this blog is gone forever, there might be a million better things you could do, but you didn't do them, you did this instead. For a few moments, reading this blog was your greatest priority, because for a few moments that's where your focus was.

The only way we stay sane is by taking life one day at a time, maybe with long term goals, but mostly with our focus on the things we have in front of us. That's why we don't feel the loss when we spend thirty minutes watching an old rerun, or the loss of waiting on someone else, or the loss you feel after spending sixteen hours on the internet with nothing to show for it. Because we know that we've got another day coming, and it feels like we'll never run out of those days.

But you will.

Does this change anything? Maybe, maybe not. After all, once you're dead, you can't feel regret. You'll only regret wasting your life while you're still alive, once you're dead it can't matter to you anymore.

But everyone spends a little time wondering what the entirety of their life will look like. What kind of a man will you be, what will you spend your life doing, what will you value in life? And the potentially horrifying thing is that you have limited moments to put into defining yourself. Do you want to be a fiction writer? Are you prepared to give up the moments that you could otherwise use to become a historian? Or give up the moments needed to be a programmer? Did you know that there are people who have dedicated their life to being the best at Street Fighter 2? Really consider that: they have a life, and they have chosen to live their life for Street Fighter 2.

And why shouldn't they?

How we spend our time defines us as a person. You won't regret it at the end, because you'll be dead, it's all a question of what you want to be while you're actively defining yourself. Because there aren't infinite do-overs, and you can't be everything, you have only so many moments with which to create your character.

And you never feel this, because you take everything one day at a time. And wasting your life doesn't hurt so long as you piss it away one day at a time.

This is your life. Every moment defines you as a person. So make every moment count... or don't. Like I said, it doesn't matter, it's all the same once you're dead. It's all a question of what you want to be while you're still alive.

Facts, Preference, and Intellectuals

Original Posting

We all have our given talent in life; for some people it's charisma, for some people it's physical strength, and for some it's intelligence. These talents tend to color our approach to the world, and can become pretty powerful biases. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Similarly, if all you have is charisma, every problem is about persuasion. If all you have is strength, every problem needs to be punched. And if all you have is intelligence, every problem is about facts and education.

What I'm driving at, is that we tend to see all the problems of the world through the lens of our dominate trait. That's why feminists blame men for war and potheads think weed will bring about world peace; those are the traits they define themselves by. People who identify as intellectuals tend to fall into the same bias, they think that all (or at least most) of the world's problems can be solved through education. They think that problems only occur because people don't have all the facts, if they really understood reality, then there would be no need for disagreement or conflict.

This is bullshit.

For the simple fact that we don't live life according to facts, we live life according to preference. People don't get degrees and then get jobs because it's a fact that they must, they do it because they prefer employment to non-employment. They are guided by the facts, but the facts are there to show the means to their ends, which are determined by their preferences.

Even if the intellectual understands this, there is a tendency to resist it. Because this undermines the value of knowledge. So some among them continue to believe that the answer to society's ills is more facts, more knowledge. That's why you'll hear people suggest that racism can be defeated by education; as though racists only exist because they don't have all the facts. Or why you'll hear that the tobacco industry can be defeated by educating people about the dangers of smoking, as though smokers are not already bombarded with information about the dangers of smoking.

What makes preference so dangerous is that the only way one man can obtain power over another man's preferences is through charisma or force, not logic. If a man prefers vanilla to chocolate, you can try to make chocolate seem more appealing with smooth talk, or you can beat his face in until he agrees to act as though chocolate is better, but you can't prove to him that chocolate is more desirable since desire is based upon his preferences to begin with*.

If our values aren't backed up by the facts, how can we say that people who disagree with us are wrong? And if we can't do that, what good is the intellectual? We can't have a Philosopher King without an objective, factual good for him to grasp.




*you can prove that more people prefer chocolate to vanilla (this is an example, I don't know if it is true), but not that chocolate is inherently better to vanilla.

Creating Meaning in the Search

Original Posting

I just finished watching a film I like a few hours ago, and throughout the film I remember constantly asking myself: "what does this mean? How does this reveal the character's worldview. How does this reflect how he sees the world?" And after asking the question, I would try to provide an answer, "this reflects his inherent egotism, and this shows how he feels his masculinity is threatened, and this is a result of his class consciousness." My explanation always felt like it was a bit of a stretch, like it was something you would not think of if you were not watching a movie.

Because when you are consuming fiction, you expect everything to be significant. The idea that something was just inserted arbitrarily seems like lazy viewing (or lazy reading), so we want to find out the significance of every line and every scene.

It then occurred to me, that since we're expecting to find all kinds of significance and meaning in the work we're viewing/reading, we begin creating significance for the events. You feel like an idiot if you can't find the significance in a scene, because that means that the scene was lost on you. If you've got an ego to protect (as I do), then the idea that there is no deeper meaning in what you're watching becomes hard to swallow. So you have to make something. You have to fit the scenes together and find the pattern that was placed there by the director or the author.

And most of the time, this seems appropriate. The human mind derives pleasure from finding patterns, and movies are made by human minds and with the goal of pleasuring other human minds being a goal. But then, I have to wonder, how difficult would it be to write something with no greater significance in mind? If you made it sound as though there were important insights to uncover in the text, then people would go searching for subtext, symbolism, meaning, and philosophy where there is none.

And they won't be content, so they'll make some up. They'll create all the depth for you.

And as I write this, I realize, that books and movies that take advantage of this would be the most effective books. It allows the reader/viewer to take whatever they care about and project it onto the art. That way a single story can be about gender studies to a feminist, economic imbalance to a communist, the importance of faith to a theist, and so on. It does not comment, it just provides a vessel for people to dump their own preoccupations.

Is this desirable? Well, it provides wonderful opportunities for mental masturbation. It would make it difficult for an artist to effect social change, but if the work is successful enough, then the critics will provide the interpretations necessary to turn it into social commentary. Besides, coming to a conclusion is always more fun than having a conclusion thrust upon you; needless vagueness and obscurity ensures that people can interpret you a way that tickles their confirmation bias. That leads to more popularity and more money.

Next time you're talking about the significance and depth of a work, perhaps you should stop and wonder if you're discovering the significance, or creating it. Then, just keep right on ahead, because there is no reason that should get in the way of the fun.

P.S. The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs from South Park says this same thing in a funnier way. Or maybe I just created that interpretation because I didn't want to believe I was just watching a cartoon about Sarah Jessica Parker's appearance.